Talking Books and Biamuta

• In Nigeria alone, there are over 10,000,000 out of school children (13.2 million according to the UNICEF as of 2019) and has worsened as an effect of covid. 
• The cost of setting up infrastructure to take care of this is often more than the government can bear. 
• There's also a lack of quality teachers to fill up this widening gap. 
• This apparent lack of quality makes sending children to school unappealing to the parents.
• Though technology is always helpful to solve this, the fact that most of the rural communities have various local languages as the language of their immediate environment makes normal conventional technology fairly unsuitable for providing a solution that reaches the grassroots. 

Our solution suite consists of the Mavis Talking Books and our online web app we call Biamuta (meaning "come and learn" in Igbo - a Nigerian language).

The Mavis Talking Books consists simply of a digital pen and a specially printed book. The pen has an infrared camera that detects the optical indexes printed on the book behind the pictures and text. Tap the pen on pictures or writings on the book and the pen gives out pre-recorded audio based on the lesson being taught and in the language already recorded. This makes learning very simple, engaging and effective. 

The fact that the content on the pen is programmed to be in the language of the immediate environment of the learner makes learning easier. 

Learners can share the pen and book and that encourages collaboration and makes for increased learning outcome.

The pen uses very low power and can be charged with small solar devices.

For those with access to mobile devices and the internet, we have reached alpha testing phase with our online web app - Biamuta - where we use a lot of games and interactive lessons to help the learners along side the Talking books. Here we can track their learning, generate progress reports and provide actionable data to organizations seeking to find information about how the learners are progressing. 

We are mainly targeting children of school age (Approximately 4 - 13 years of age) in rural areas in Nigeria and other countries in Africa.  Older children that haven't had the opportunity to receive quality education, illiterate adults and the likes can be secondary beneficiaries. 

At the moment, most of these children live in places that are far away from the public schools. These schools most times don't even have quality teachers to help them. The parents don't have the disposable income to send their children to private schools, and that's if there are any in the vicinity.  The available teachers usually use English as the language of instruction - a language that is already foreign to them and the communication barrier makes learning near impossible. 

A lot of these families move around a lot and so educational stability if tied to the walls of a classroom is unattainable for the child. 

Our solution puts education back in the hands of the parents, guardians, facilitators and the community. Our tools eliminates the need of physical structures for learning to occur. It also eliminates the language barrier to learning and does this in a way that is fun and engaging for the learners. The fact that they have a "teacher" in the pen that never gets tired of them means they can learn at their own pace as well. 

Being in the capital of Nigeria, we have access already to a number of these underserved communities around us (and in some instances, just 30 minutes drive from our company headquarters). We have done pilots and tested implementation in some of these places already. We also have access to educated people versed in the different languages to work with to digitize our content into these languages. Unfortunately, the insecurity issues in Nigeria have also made a lot of people find themselves in Internally Displaced Persons' camps round the city and around the country. 

We have a passion for education and technology so we love to visit some of these areas where our tools are being used and have discussions on site with the facilitators to help them better help the learners. 

The fact that we are the programmers of the content as well makes it possible for us to make changes to our product based on input from the field. We have had to change the design of our pictures to suit different communities, and additional health and Agricultural content to our materials based on the communities we are going to. We are currently in talks with one of our solution partners currently doing a pilot test in one of the states of the country and we discovered that the children need material help them understand their self worth - beyond the basic education we give them. We are working with her to develop and digitize this content to make it available to every other learner we have the opportunity to impact.  

Modularization and customization are key elements of our design structure that makes it possible for us to serve the need of a very diverse populace in Nigeria and other African countries. 

We are applying to solve because we believe that here, we can get the proper guidance on how to better engage local communities so that they are ready to cooperate with us to deliver this solution.

Sometimes knowing how to prioritize what to develop is not always easy when there are seeming needs all over. We would need guidance on this. 

We also know that with Solve, we can have access to more stake holders that make for a more wholistic solution to people in underserved communities. Bringing education for example without feeding programs or without community empowerment programs makes sustainability a bit difficult so connections that foster collaborations will be so helpful. 

We intend to completely develop our online platform and some technical guidance as to improvements we can make with our current structure is something we need. 

We want to do more deployments of our existing solution so funds to do some more deployment would greatly help our cause. 

Finally we know that Solve will provide us the technical expertise to navigate conducting proper monitoring and evaluation techniques that will function well in rural areas. Our main challenge here is that if you bring a solution to a rural community, telling the community that some of the beneficiaries won't participate actively because they're part of the control has been something we've struggled with. We believe that working with Solve will help us navigate this. 

We use the local language or the language of the immediate environment to teach the children. 

With our solution suite, we are leveraging online as well as offline technologies to help learners in underserved locations with quality education.  

We also use a collaboration methodology that helps the learners learn together and at the same time, go at their own individual paces.

In the next year, we hope to provide quality education for up to 10,000 children in semi urban and urban areas in Nigeria. We have our talking book technology for reaching people in rural areas in the language they understand working with local and international organizations. We are also developing our online data-lite web app to reach out to people in semi urban and urban areas with quality education in a way that the children enjoy. 

In the next 5 years, we hope to expand this number to 1,000,000 children across the continent of Africa. Giving them access to education like this in their communities also eventually opens up the community to more investments in terms of health, agriculture, and infrastructure amongst others. 

We track our progress by the number of children using our talking books in different areas across the country. Though some of them are private, we concentrate on areas that are easily verifiable ie local and international NGOs, Internally Displaced Persons Camps around Nigeria and others that are using our current talking books. 

For the web app, we intend to have a dashboard where organizations can log into and see the number of users and their learning progress so far with the ability to interact with learners whose guardians are open to such exposure for the children under their care. 

Our theory of Change is to ensure School Aged children have improved literacy and numeracy socio-emotional skills.  

Using the local language or the language of their immediate environment, the children learn better and are more confident about what they are learning. We were able to get a group of children using our tools for 2 hours a day for just about 2 months to cover the grade 1 curriculum for English in a pilot test and achieved over 50% learning gains. An NGO, used our products for an IDP camp in Abuja Nigeria and were able to get significant improvement in the children in under 2 months as well because of the language of instruction being the language of their immediate environment. 

Learning in groups and helping themselves get better improves their socio-emotional skills. 

Taking the education to where the children are makes the parents appreciate the value of education and ends up in an uptake of children eventually going to school. After a US Embassy funded project for a couple of years in an out of school settlement in Abuja Nigeria, 23% of the children got enrolled in schools nearby with their parents paying their school fees having seen the value of education. 

The parents and guardians are also better able to understand the learning material, supervise their children's learning and be more involved which makes for a healthier family and community in general.  

Our solution suite is based on the Optical Indexes (OID) running on an embedded system for the offline solution and Javascript (React.js) and Firebase (so we can leverage on some of machine learning and data analytics ) for the online solution.

It is important to us that diversity is represented in our work space. Our core team consists of to male and two female and due to the fact that we can work with people all over the country, we work with people based on their merit and as such, have people of different genders, ethnic groups and religion.

Our products and services have basic costs attached to them. For rural communities, we get funding from the government and from organizations. For the urban communities, we sell directly to the clients and will be charging a subscription fee on the online solution. 

We plan to raise money using the following means: 

• Donations and grants from partnering organizations 
• Direct sales of our products and services to clients 
• Working with the government to provide education for rural communities 

We have gotten grants from International Organizations like the DFID, IRC and local NGOs. 

We also get funding from the government seeking to provide education to underserved communities around the country. 

We make sales to local clients seeking to buy the talking book for schools, children, etc.