Mavis Talking Books

Mavis Education Model leverages technology to deliver learner-centered, small group-paced,  quality education to all learners irrespective of their literacy level

1. Problem: Shortage of quality teachers who can provide quality personalized/differentiated learning – especially in underserved communities:

According to the 2015 UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report, 3.4 million new primary school teachers are needed to be recruited by 2030. Sub-Saharan Africa, accounts for 67% of this number. Nigeria alone needs nearly 400,000.

Top-quality teachers are often not attracted to teach in the rural communities where the need is greatest for many reasons, among which are poor remunerations and incentives. Most of these teachers are not able to teach in the mother tongues of the children. Lack of adequate learning materials in both English and the local languages poses additional challenges to the teachers and pupils. All these lead to very poor learning outcomes

2. The Solution

Our solution focuses on using our Mavis Talking Books™ and our Mavis Education Model to provide a high quality, learner-centred education for all, irrespective of their literacy level.  The Talking Book consist of a digital pen and a specially printed book. When the pen touches anywhere on the book, the pen reads out the corresponding audio, including interactive games, quizzes, multi-language translations, etc. We program the quality content, developed by experts, into the Talking Book format in a language that the user understands. We started with Basic Education to lay a solid foundation.

Our Mavis Education Model enables children in a classroom to learn in small groups of not more than 5 each, using the Talking Books, under the supervision of a trained facilitator. In a small group, an audio splitter is connected to the audio port of the Mavis digital Pen. Each child in the group connects his/her earpiece to the audio splitter and they all share one Mavis Talking Book. The children learn on their own, as the pen serves as an intelligent and tireless instructor to them. Teachers serves as facilitators, overseeing many small groups. A small group reinforces positive peer pressure where there is collaboration and high degree of participation. Each group can learn at its own pace. They can also learn a different subject. Multi-grade classrooms are also supported. The results are highly improved performances. Average test results before and after the using Talking Books are about 30% and 82.5% respectively.

3. How our solution will change the world: Our solution consists of a low power, interactive, portable, non-Internet dependent device, that works with ordinary, specially printed paper. It runs for 10 hours of continuous use. It is like a versatile, tireless, non-discriminatory, high quality teacher that can operate anywhere, anytime. It can be used by individuals or in a group/classroom. It will help to solve the problem of shortage of high quality teachers. People who are not literate can easily use it to learn on their own. It will reduce the burden on teachers and make personalized learning more practicable, at a low cost.

Mavis Talking Books consist of Mavis digital Pen and specially printed, interactive audio-visual books (Mavis Books), designed to provide high quality learning of various subjects (English, Maths, Science, etc.) in a language the learner understands. This innovative, offline technology used in our Mavis Education Model empowers average teachers to deliver higher quality learning by serving as an “assistant expert teacher” embedded in the classroom with them. The Talking Books can also be used to give quality learning to out-of-school children and children in conflict areas without the need to build classrooms. Non-literate people can use the solution to learn.

Mavis Talking Books are versatile and provide learners with engaging, interactive lessons, stories, comprehension exercises, games, quizzes, songs, rhymes and other exciting content. The Mavis Pen uses very low power (2.5Watts) and can be charged either from the mains or by simple solar and inverter kits which are useful in rural settings without adequate power supply. Internet service in most Sub-Sahara African countries are unreliable and expensive. Our technology is Internet independent and so learning goes on unhindered. The simplicity also makes it easy for children to use in the absence of teachers.

Our goal in the next 12 months is to improve learning outcomes for over 200,000 in-school and out-of-school children (including children in conflict areas) across Africa using our Mavis Talking Book™ technology and Mavis Education Model™.

Our vision in the next three to five years is to scale our solution to impact the lives of about one million children across Africa using our solution. Access to quality education helps provide economic opportunities to children by priming them for better job opportunities in the future and helping them improve their livelihoods, reach their full potential and contribute to a peaceful and economically viable society. We will help unburden teachers in the classroom and provide a structure for better teacher remuneration using our model.

We will let potential beneficiaries know about our solution through pre-deployment engagement exercises on the benefits of the Mavis Education Model with parents/caregivers of children in the target communities.  We will also work with other stakeholders such as NGOs, community leaders, local and state Governments and the various education ministries/parastatals in the state to ensure their buy-in. The solution will be provided for free in the first year to encourage adoption and retention. Subsequently, a small fee of about $7/child/month will be charged after the grant cycle ends to sustain the project.

UKaid (DFID):

Literacy & Numeracy project using the Mavis Education Model deployed in over 117 low cost private schools in Lagos under the Developing Effective Private Education in Nigeria Challenge Fund project to reach over 6,000 children (Grade 1 – 3).

Also deployed in public primary schools in Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa and Zamfara states under the Teacher Development Programme.

US Embassy in Abuja: Literacy & Numeracy project to reach over 400 out-of-school children in Abuja.

Nigerian Military:  Bought a large quantity of the Mavis Talking Books for learning local languages and distributed to their formations across Nigeria.

We plan to be serving about 200,000 in-school and out-of-school children (aged 5 – 17) in the next 12 months and about 500,000 in the next 3 years across Africa. We expect to see improvements of over 50% in literacy and numeracy test scores based on experience from our previous deployments in Abuja, Borno and other states. We also plan to have trained over 2,000 teachers on the Mavis Education Model to help improve learning outcomes in schools and community learning centres across the continent

Our team consists of 16 full time staff with over 35 years’ combined experience in developing and implementing projects in the technology and education space, plus over 20 contract staff. Our expertise includes private and public-sector project implementation, education content development, software development, monitoring & evaluation.

Our CEO, Samuel Ucheaga, supervised the rollout of the first GSM Switch installed in Nigeria while at M-Tel as the General Manager, Technical Operations. He was the Project Manager for the UKaid funded deployment of the Mavis Education Model to 117 low cost private schools in Lagos reaching over 6,000 children.

Currently, we generate revenue from sale of the Mavis Talking Books (directly and through our reseller network) to schools, families, corporate bodies, government bodies, etc. We also get donor funding to help expand the reach of our solutions to underserved communities. Our plan is to also generate recurrent revenue through school fees paid in our Mavis Academy chain of low-cost primary schools. Some of these schools will be fully owned by us, while others will be franchises (where we share revenue with the franchisee). Others will be in partnership with the government to help provide quality basic education at reduced costs.

Future plans to ensure sustainability and to help increase profitability include:

• Preparing ready-to-go packages for government bodies that want to purchase our products to support out-of-school children (especially those in conflict areas)
• Developing and selling special versions of the Talking Books to address the high school market.
• Developing and selling specialized Talking Books that will target various sectors such as health, agriculture, technical and vocational education, professional courses, etc.
• Structuring Mavis Academy Scholarship Programs that will enable individuals, philanthropists, donors, corporate bodies to give full or part scholarships to children in our schools (especially the girl child).

We believe Solve can help us get access to quality software developers that can help us build a testing app. The app will help us spot pain points in various topics in our Talking Books and help simplify them in future editions. The app will also have an integrity feature that automatically takes pictures of those taking the test to avoid cheating. We believe this will also be valuable to various donor-funded education programs globally.

Testing App with embedded Integrity Checker: Our solution is mainly for learning. Working with software experts from MIT to build a robust cloud-based testing app will help us monitor the learning progress of each child and improve on future Mavis Books. The app will also take intermittent pictures of those taking the test (automatically) to help prevent cheating, which is a big problem here in Sub-Sahara African schools and education systems. The MIT team’s expertise will be helpful in guiding our team in building a scalable solution that can be used by various education intervention projects globally.