Zenafri Ltd

A child’s early years are the foundation for his or her future development, providing a strong base for lifelong learning and learning abilities, including cognitive and social development. Well-established research continues to emphasize the importance of early childhood education as an essential building block of a child’s future success.

Unfortunately, early education faces a number of challenges in Africa. 

In Nigeria for example, some of these challenges include
-Few early education schools especially in rural areas leave over 10 million children underserved/disadvantaged.
-Available learning content is tailored to western learning and is in English( or french) making early education difficult for these children as that is not the language spoken at home. Also, it’s rather expensive

Our platform Koyamu aims to mitigate this challenge and bridge learning gaps for these underserved children by providing free/affordable on-demand, tailored learning to African children whenever they may be thereby transforming any space whatsoever into a viable learning space. 

Our beneficiaries are African children aged 2-7.

Koyamu is an Early Education Learning Platform and radio show for African children teaching basic literacy, numeracy, and social skills through traditional storytelling.
The goal is to use mother-tongue learning and digital technology to teach children basic fundamental skills required for further learning.

The accompanying radio show (utilizing the same content) educates children in rural areas without access to devices/ internet. They can learn basic literacy and numeracy skills in their own language in any space.

Koyamu provides tailored learning using a variety of learning mediums including video, audio, ebooks, interactive activities and games, and more. 

That way content is recommended to the beneficiaries based on the medium they learn best with.

Koyamu was initially created in response to the COVID 19 Pandemic as children needed alternative learning methods.
https://drive.google.com/file/...

We ensure that we work with a variety of stakeholders while developing our solutions to ensure that they meet their impact goals. For Koyamu, this includes working with children in the target demographic at the early stages of development. We partnered with 3 schools to continuously test and receive feedback from children who would be using these products

For our local/mother tongue content, we have also strived for authenticity by ensuring that our voice actors are native speakers of these languages from the same communities/regions where we would be broadcasting this content.
This means that both the languages and accents are correct and does not pose any further learning hurdles for the children.

Our theory of change is simple but is evolving as we build and get more data

OVERALL GOAL: Improve Literacy Learning Outcomes amongst Young African Children aged 2-7

ACTIVITIES: 

- Research and pre-project Surveys
- Content Creation ( Writing, Voiceovers, Art, Animation, Programming .. etc)

- Content Iteration and Changes from Usage data 

- Distribution ( Web Publishing and radio Broadcast)

OUTPUTS

-Individual Completed Content ( Videos, books, audio, interactive content )
-Published Content

OUTCOMES
20-50% Improvement in Learning Outcomes ( Speed and Content) compared to existing situation

We are currently at level 2 using Nesta's Standards of Evidence.

While we believe in our project and its impact, we have so far only collected evidence of change primarily within our beneficiaries as part of early testing with partner schools. In addition, we have conducted pre-project surveys and plan to conduct post-project surveys as well to measure the impact on target communities ( particularly for the radio show).

On the website/platform, we gather the data we receive from users about the preferred type of content that they are engaging with and this helps us adapt to creating more content that the users actually want.

As mentioned earlier, Koyamu is a hybrid project utilizing both high-tech and low-tech solutions

HIGH-TECH SOLUTION
Koyamu is an online multimedia learning platform created for African children. It provides a mix of interactive educational content including
mini games, educational videos, interactive books, and audio files.
LOW TECH SOLUTION
Koyamu(Radio Show) utilizes the audio content on the koyamu platform to reach children in remote areas with essential early education literacy content

For the web platform, our major indicators are gathered  from the analytics we built into the platform to measure various data related to our impact

- Number of monthly site visits

- Number of Registrations

- Ratio of Registrations to purchases/subscriptions ( actual users)

- Views and Downloads of individual pieces of content

- Feedback Mechanism ( Comments from users and support emails)

For Our Radio Show

We will be tracking the number of listeners within the age group.
This is extrapolated from the listening population as provided by the community radio station partners.)

For more accurate figures we will also be conducting

-Pre-Project Community Surveys as well as
-Post-Project Community Surveys.

From these we will gather data such as
-what percentage of the listening population is actually in our target age group

- Test if learning has actually occurred by asking simple literacy and numeracy questions from children in the targercommunity both before and after the intervention compared with children who have not engaged with the project ( control group)

Koyamu is an Early Education Learning Platform and radio show for African children providing fundamental literacy, numeracy, and social skills through traditional storytelling,mother-tongue learning, and digital technology.

Koyamu already exists and is in continuous development. In order to continue to improve it, we are integrating stronger evidence into our theory of change. 

The process of completing this application has already been very helpful in giving us some clarity. We are a small but agile team and are always willing to learn and adapt. As mentioned we will now focus on conducting surveys as well as improving the Analytics on our website. In addition by the end of this program, we intend to improve to Level 3 in our Standards by organizing studies with a control group as well as a test group.

.

The biggest research questions that the Fellows could help us answer would be 

1- Would developing and integrating a customized recommendation system for each child actually help children learn better? OR do we stick to a generic buffet of content and allow beneficiaries to pick what they like?

2- Are there other potential distribution mediums that we could explore with our existing content that could increase our impact at lower costs?

Deliverables
1- We would love our biggest deliverable to be that with the help of the Fellows we convert our existing marketplace model ( where users buy certain content) to a subscription-based model that is sustainable while also giving the best value to our users.

2- Increase our onsite content to 200 unique items ( 4 times what we currently have)

3- Integrate an interactive fun quiz after each piece of content to ensure learning actually takes place.

4- Expand our presence into 2 new countries (Ghana and Kenya) and also translate our audio content to Swahili

The Successful Outcome of this program will allow us to impact over 1 Million African Children with essential early education content. It will also allow us to establish a sustainable and profitable business model while continuing to make an impact. Our focus for the next 5 years is to grow from being primarily grant-funded and personally funded to being sustainable and a leader in Education Technology resources for Africa's young children and being part of this LEAP project will help kickstart that goal.