Miya Academy

Professional orientation after school still plagues most of Sub-Saharan communities which turns to frustrate the youths after school. So many students end up unemployed and get into other activities like crimes etc. This is due to a couple of issues amongst:

• Low teacher to student ratio especially in the remote areas;

• Poor parental guidance (parents don't assist in children follow-up after school);

• The lack of progressive data (cumulative evaluation results);

• Custom education to help them be of need in their communities;

• Custom and frequent assessments with relevant corrections.

This situation was made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic and will likely go even worse by the years.

Miya academy is a smart digital learning assistant that will work without internet to provide:

• Custom educational content.

• Relevant assessments with corrections.

• Custom professional orientation based on the learner's cumulative scores and their geography (country and educational system).

The service is dynamic and can very well integrate with the national educational system (plus other custom content per geography) of the learner offering gentle integration.

It is equally multiuser to accommodate the large African family sizes.

We are focus on the various stakeholders of education:

• Students now revise their class lessons and additional custom content and evaluations anytime anywhere 

• Parents now follow-up their children by giving the self-paced and self-assessed assessments; they can equally know what their children will be in the future based on their progressive statistics and better budget for their studies on time.

• Teachers and schools now have accessible educational content with assessments and corrections, easing their workload and their students' ability to cover the syllables on time.

All of this without the internet connection.

In all, we will permit the stakeholders in education to be better equipped to permit the students to have a better learning experience.

Miya Academy is made up of a team of educationists with lots of experience in dealing in the diverse fields of education.

Cho Nkarimbi: Head of project; seasoned software developer with over 5 years of experience in software development and after school teaching.

Gemuh Hans: Head of curriculum; Teacher by profession and passion with over 5 years in designing curriculum for diverse activities.

Lummeya Zoum: Career expert; with over 4 years of practice with lots of achievements amongst students.

Ayeah Mark Yonghabi: Head of marketing; economist and marketer with over 3 years of practice in the field.

The team has been working hard on the solution and we have built a working  solution.

We are in need of technical support (educational administrators) and marketing to grow our network and outreach into other regions that can be in need of our solution.

We will also need financial support to scale our solution to other regions where it could be needed.

Our service is able to adapt to the national curriculum of the user (thus customizing their learning experience): providing content, evaluating the learner with the necessary corrections, and also keeping track of their evolution for a better career match based on their skills and their geography. All  without internet connection.

It is equally multi-user making up for the large African family sizes; so one app for a whole family.

We are in beta testing and many users (students, parents and teachers) are loving our solution as they use it daily for education which is online with our vision: providing quality education to all.

In the next year we are going to the market with our target being introducing more subjects from the curriculum on our service, especially the technical subjects and other custom content that will help the learner solve problems in their communities after school.

In the upcoming years (2nd to 5th) we are looking forward to expanding to the neighboring countries (customizing their content too) as we are having presence (beta testing) in many regions in Africa at the moment.

We focus on the total number of users, the number of active users and the data they produce from the service.

Currently we have over 1000 users and over 50% are active users.

We are able to track the activer users by their current assessments data. This data is generated when the user uses the service offline and once they go online it backs up their data on our online service.

We expect our solution to blend with the educational system of the learner to provide a better learning experience.

Students should be able to learn independently and self-paced.

Parents will be able to relate with the education of their children with minimum effort through visual charts.

Teachers and schools will have additional ease to consume educational material to help them cover their program on time.

Miya academy is a digital service with website: https://miya.academy. It runs on:

• Mobile app on play store (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=miya%20academy&c=apps&hl=en&gl=US) for Android;

• A windows desktop PC version;

• A web app too for those on PC and iOS at the moment. We are currently building the iOS version so that we can serve users on all platforms irrespective of the operating system they are using.

Our service works without the internet and assesses and processes the big data produced by the user upon assessments (machine learning) to provide professional experience to the learner even without internet connection.

We look forward to using virtual and extended reality to increase the learning experience.

The product works and is able to handle multi-educational systems and multi-users all at one. It is being used in the beta test in Rwanda, Cameroon and Ghana, representing 3 distinct regions with different educational systems and it provides the custom educational experience as can be tested via the link: https://youtu.be/oP57ENOWgtQ 

Miya Academy focuses on customizing the learner's learning experience based on their geography and their potentials (cumulative assessment results).

Every new educational system (country) is headed by educationists of the country with experience in education, we usually encourage women to take up the lead administration role as we know they are the ones in the country and will best understand their society and back in the houses, they are the ones who interact with the children after school so their voices should be heard at the top level of decision making in our organization.

In Rwanda, Miya Academy Rwanda is headed by a woman: Mrs Nyinawumuntu Jeannette, same in Nigeria: Dr Mrs Onyebuchi Grace.

We encourage diversity from gender to cultural, but we focus on the passion for education as the underlying base for hiring.

Miya Academy provides educational content and assessments with corrections and custom profession orientation, all without internet connection. This permits a wonderful self-paced learning experience.

The business model is a B2C, we charge $2 per year per subject so that once paid the learner has access to the paid content and the associated assessments all without internet connection for the whole year.

On Average a student takes about 5 subjects, making them spend just $10 for that academic year when using Miya Academy: education without borders.

Miya academy charges for the service we offer at $2 per subject per year after giving 3 months for testing the service.

At this cost we will break even with the economies of scale. For 10000 students taking 5 subjects on average should permit the service break even for the year for the particular country.

We forecast being able to achieve this in our first countries in the next w years that is if we grow at the current rate.

Up to date, we have financed the service from our own pockets to bootstrap the idea into a working product. Till date we have spent over $ 30,000 in the past 2 years in building and maintaining our prototypes and reaching out to other markets too.

We have equally participated in a couple of competitions and we were first at the recent kmerTech edTech competition (a European union sponsored initiative) and we received € 12,000 to scale our service and are all ready for the upcoming year.