Breevie

A United Nations report showed that over 264 million children do not go to school and that one in six children are not in formal school settings. This is primarily because of poverty, where many children are forced to drop out of schools or not attend schools at all due to poverty. This was further exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, where more students were forced to drop out of learning institutions, and the lack of access to technologies to continue learning put a halt in their education and dreams. The sad reality is that many may never go back to their schools. 

The result is that few young people are afforded the space, time, or resources to learn and grow. However, even those that we’re able to return to school still have to deal with poor learning conditions, poor quality of education being offered and poor follow-up mechanisms preventing them from reaching their educational potential.

The result is that a generation grows up illiterate and ill-equipped to face the modern world, further continuing the cycle of poverty.

Our solution is a change in thought. With the widespread nature of smartphones, about 83.96% of people have smartphones, we thought what if we could make them more relevant to education. 

We will create a system that;

• Registers student attendance in classes through the use of their devices’ fingerprint authentication capabilities. This will have the advantage of easily logging data and will be very cheap to implement. 

• Logs student data, processes it and translates it into a format that is understandable and actionable by a learner, educators, and policymakers, i.e., is student performance affected by when a subject is taught, etc.

• Allows for educators to easily create courses. Educators teach on similar topics every year, with very few deviations between them. It, therefore, makes sense for them to record themselves teaching the topics, add relevant learning materials and sort them into a format that learners can follow and understand and share with their learners. This will save them lots of time in the future and free up some of their time. This is also convenient for learners who can easily go back to a topic and easily revise.

• Has the ability to make courses public or private. In private mode, only specified individuals will be able to access the resource, while making it public will allow everyone using our system to view the resource. This means that even children from poor backgrounds will be able to access educators and resources from high-end institutions, greatly improving the quality of education they receive.

• Allows educators and learning institutions to easily digitize and backup their learning material. Much educational content is lost every day by not being digitally stored and backed up, this includes revision papers and notes that would have been of value if they had been digitally stored.

• Allows for easy finding of resources. By digitizing resources, learners will save time looking for relevant information. Learners normally have to comb through numerous books and journals to find information relevant to what they are looking for, by digitizing a school's resources, this will be significantly reduced.

• Allows easy sharing of educational resources. Every year, educators educate on similar subjects, subjects that require similar learning material that the educator had previously shared with his/her previous class. The process of duplicating the resources has both time and cost implications, which are most times unnecessary. Our solution allows for quick and easy sharing of resources.

• Allows educators to earn from their content. We will be able to monetize educators’ content and then redistribute the earnings to the educators. Allowing educators, who are at most times underpaid, to earn extra from their work.

• Facilitates offline saving of resources. Our system will have the ability for learners to locally save the resources on their devices. This allows learners to continue studying even without the availability of an internet connection.

• Allows for individual assessments and customized learning. Our system will allow educators to create tests that will be used to assess a learner's progress and thereby through machine learning customize his/ her learning per their strengths and weaknesses.

• Allows for the creation of peer-to-peer discussion forums to discuss topics that participants are interested in.

• Facilitates online classes for individuals not in school.

Our solution is targeted at individuals of the school-going age, educators, and learning institutions, mostly in poor communities. However, these individuals need to have some proximity to a device such as a phone or a computer, etc. According to a recent study, about 83.96% of individuals have a smartphone, so we assume most people are in proximity to a device.

Our solution allows for individuals to have access to good quality education and quality school follow-up mechanisms without the high-cost implications that are normally associated with good quality education. This makes it accessible to every child despite their social standing, which is not normally the case.

This will also allow for students to learn at their pace, which we believe will motivate more students to stay in school. Our solution also caters to individuals who for one reason or the other cannot continue attending school to continue learning.

Here are some sad facts from my country, Kenya, according to the Kijabe children education fund;

• Kenya’s population is 43 million people.  The unemployment rate is estimated to be 40% and the poverty rate is 50%.

• 1.5 million school-aged kids in Kenya do not attend any school at all due to poverty. 

• One of two Kenyan girls will never attend school.

• Nine in ten children from poor households will fail to complete 8th grade.

• Kenyan public education is rife with inadequate facilities, insufficient and often poorly trained teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and poor results.

• One in three Kenyan 6th graders cannot read or write.

• Nairobi has a population of 3 million, half of whom live in slum conditions.   

• In Kibera, the largest slum in the world, there are no public schools and there are over 100,000 orphaned children. 43% of the girls and 29% of the boys attend no school at all.   

• In Mathare Valley, another slum, there are two public schools for 70,000 students.

• The average lifespan in the slums is 30 years old.

• Children who are not engaged in school through the 8th grade are quickly consumed by a culture of gangs, drugs, and criminal activity for boys, and a world of rape, exploitation, prostitution resulting in early, unwanted pregnancy for girls.

Despite these tragic statistics, for Kenya’s children, education is their only hope of escaping from poverty. 

Our team has been fortunate that we have all been able to reach the university. Despite this, we have childhood friends who dropped out of school due to the lack of school fees, friends who got pregnant and are currently underage mothers as a result of dropping out of school, and friends who are in crime and drug abuse as a means of coping with poverty. This has allowed us to sympathize and understand the disadvantages that accrue from being poor and not in school, and as such place us in a state where we can best address their challenges.

• Help in access to distribution channels for our solution, i.e., to access remote areas.

• Help in sourcing good, relevant talent.

• Assistance in perfecting our business model to ensure a good market fit for our solution.

• Financial assistance to help cover our set-up cost.

• Help in meeting regulatory matters in the education sector.

• Help in refining our marketing strategy to allow for product quick  market uptake of our solution 

Our solution provides a different way to look at the education crisis in the world. Instead of investing more funds to improve the capacities and number of our schools, the number of teachers, and the quality of education being provided, our solution seeks to make full use of the resources currently available by delegating the heavy lifting in educating to technology. This will make it accessible to everyone despite their financial status.

We expect our solution to revolutionize the education system by offering a new way to look at education and catalyze the transition of the school from its traditional form to a form adapted to modern times.

• To help at least 10 institutions completely digitize their resources by the end of the first year.

• To have completed the development of the system within at least 5 months from starting.

• To have engaged at least 20 learning institutions in implementing the technology and have facilitated its adaptation by the end of the first year.

• To have at least 100 instructors uploading content regularly to the platform by the end of the first year.

• To have at least 1 million students on our platform from low-income households by the end of the second year.

• To have reached at least 50 learning institutions by the end of the second year.

• To have facilitated the graduation of at least 1,000,000 students who were learning out of school by the end of the fifth year.

• To have facilitated the adaptation of our system in at least 10 countries by the fifth year.

• To have significantly reduced the number of school dropouts due to school fees arrears and not being able to keep up with the pace of learning offered at school.

We plan to achieve this by implementing sound business practices by marketing our solution to the right people, responding appropriately to genuine criticism, and investing in adding value to the less fortunate, being the core of our solution.

Community impact success indicators

• Reducing poverty

• Good quality education

• Gender equality and inclusivity

• Decent work and economic growth

• Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

• Reduced Inequality

Customer impact indicators

• Average user retention rate.

• User satisfaction.

• Average user use time

• Monthly traffic to our system

• The number of new users per month.

• Number of courses published per month

Company’s financial success indicators

• Revenue growth.

• Revenue per client.

• Profit margin.

• Operational cash flow

There is a general need in the world to make good quality education and good quality learner monitoring accessible to all individuals of school-going age. This is however not possible due to the very varied states that learners are in economically and socially.

 According to U.N, 264 million children are denied access to education, with an estimated 617 million of them unable to reach minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. The common pattern is that these individuals are from poor backgrounds or are in an environment where there is a crisis, e.g., war or famine.

This is a problem because the individuals who do not have access to good quality education grow up illiterate and ill-equipped to face the modern world. These individuals thereby cannot produce much value to the marketplace, and the result is that they end up poor and in deplorable states.

If we are successful in implementing our solution, we will bring about the following impacts;

Short-term 

• Giving educators and institutes an easy way to back up, share and refer to their resources.

• Giving institutions an easy student follow-up mechanism that they can implement.

• Giving an option to students who cannot attend physical classes to study outside of school.

Long-term 

• Reduction in school dropout rates

• Standardization of the quality of education

• Changing the view of the community toward education

• Students graduate without needing to physically attend class.

• Reduction in poverty levels and an increase in the quality of life of people in poverty.

• Reducing pressure on educators.

For us to achieve our goal, education regulators need to consider learning away from the school as a viable alternative to on-campus learning.

The rewards for such a change include reduced pressure on educators, reduced number of student dropouts, reduced government spending on education, and reduced levels of illiteracy in communities.

Our technology will be powered by several technologies;

• We will use machine learning to understand the needs of an individual user and thereby push content that is most relevant to that user.

• We shall use big data and behavioral technology to analyze and recognize patterns in the data that we have, and thereby give actionable solutions.

• Audiovisual Media will also be used to create courses and content.

• Our peer-to-peer connecting functionality will behave like a social network.

• We shall use geospatial technology to geo-fence perimeters where students are signing class attendance to avoid those not present in class from signing.

•  We shall also use imaging and sensor technology to convert resources into digital formats.

• All devices with our software and mobile application will be connected using the internet of things to share information between them.

To incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusivity into our organization, we shall;

• Get Employee Feedback on how various policies affect them, and as such make appropriate changes.

• Diversify our hiring practices to not inadvertently discriminate against a group.

• Create a company culture that embraces differences.

• Promote the best individuals to leadership roles best on merit that are already established metrics.

• Encourage Collaboration between individuals.

• Integrate strategic training programs into our business to address diversity and acceptability in the work environment.

• Communicate goals clearly and measure progress from predefined metrics.

• Hire the best individuals on already established metrics.

• Provide equal opportunities to learn and grow in the company 

• Invest in advertising different company openings through different media to avoid the communication not disseminating to any group of individuals.

Value proposition

The education that most people from poor backgrounds can afford is at most times rife with inadequate facilities, insufficient and often poorly trained teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and poor results

Our solution conveniently solves these challenges without the cost implications normally associated with resolving these issues.

Our solution;

• Registers student attendance in classes through the use of their devices’ fingerprint authentication capabilities. 

• Logs student data, processes it and translates it into a format that is understandable and actionable.

• Allows for educators to easily create courses.

• Allows educators and learning institutions to easily digitize and backup their learning material. 

• Allows for easy finding of resources. 

• Allows easy sharing of educational resources.

• Allows educators to earn from their content. 

• Facilitates offline saving of resources. 

• Allows for individual assessments and customized learning.

• Allows for the creation of peer-to-peer discussion forums.

• Facilitates online classes for individuals not in school.

These benefits address the needs of most learners, educators, and educational institutes.

Current alternatives to the problem;

For accessing educational resources;

• YouTube

• Paid sites like brilliant

For recording attendance and student information;

• Biometric fingerprint scanners

• Sheets of papers

• Paid online attendance services like clockify.me

Why are other solutions inadequate;

On YouTube and paid learning sites, there are many ‘experts’ with no way to evaluate their credentials or truthfulness. Also, it is difficult to follow through on a topic because the videos are not in any structured way, i.e., How it would be taught in a school. Furthermore, paid learning sites are priced above normal users.

Fingerprint scanners and online attendance services are expensive and limited in the scope of data they take. They also cannot associate the data they take with other student statistics.

Recording attendance and school performance on sheets of paper are cumbersome and information easily gets lost or damaged. It is also not easy to follow up on the information since they require lots of papers to record, which is cumbersome to go through.

Target market

Our target customers are individuals in the school gouging age, educators and learning institutions, mostly from relatively poor communities. They at least need to be in some proximity to a device that can connect to the internet.

Competitive advantage

Our solution addresses the issue of learning sites being pricey by being free to use. Our solution also addresses the issue of credibility of information shared by our content creators being educators and having the name of the institutes they teach behind them. It also addresses the issue of taking student metrics being expensive and being separate from other relevant student metrics.

Cost structure

Our key costs in implementing the solution are; 

• Developers 

• Server upkeep

• Office space

• Equipment and supplies

• Licenses and permits

• Advertising and marketing

• Market research

• Permits and licenses

• Incorporation fees

• Logo design

Key metrics

Community impact success indicators

• Reducing poverty

• Good quality education

• Gender equality and inclusivity

• Decent work and economic growth

• Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

• Reduced Inequality

Customer impact indicators

• Average user retention rate.

• User satisfaction.

• Average user use time

• Monthly traffic to our system

• The number of new users per month.

• Number of courses published per month

Company’s financial success indicators

• Revenue growth.

• Revenue per client.

• Profit margin.

• Operational cash flow

Revenue model

Our revenue model is a combination of advertising and a monthly subscription service that gives users an ad-free interphase of the app.

Our main source of revenue will be in-app non-invasive advertising. Additionally, we will earn money from our monthly subscription that offers ad-free use of our application, for those that can afford to cover the cost.

 This will keep the barrier to entry as low as possible while allowing us to be financially sustainable as soon as possible. Meanwhile, before we start getting revenue, we shall rely on grants and donations to cover our startup setup costs.

We have recently presented the solution to The Technical University of Kenya, in Kenya, who were convinced with our vision and how we will implement the vision and offered to be early adopters of our solution. This has confirmed the viability of our financial model and at large show that we will be able to easily achieve financial sustainability.