Silabu

Today, a tiny fraction of African youths can learn academic subjects or new skills from exceptional teachers, experts, and top schools with prices as high as $32,000 per year per student ($32,000 is annual fee to attend prestigious schools in Tanzania). Yet, at the same time, there is a shortage of enough outstanding teachers, experts, and top schools to address the learning needs of Africa's 700M youth. The gap in quality education due to the high price of learning and the deficit of experts has led to a mismatch between skills and employment, leading 60% of youths to be unemployed in Africa. Besides, one-fifth of children on the continent complete primary school without acquiring basic reading skills.

We want to make peer-to-peer learning the default way for Africa's 700M youths to learn new skills from their peers. Peer-to-peer learning makes teachers and experts less needed in Africa and resolves the shortage of experts in Africa. Besides, expanding high-impact tutoring to reach all students in poverty in Africa will be easier if the learning costs are lower. Like Uber Pool, one way proven to lower learning costs is to group students learning similar courses to share the cost of hiring a single tutor. As a result, students save on average 69.15% on group classes compared to 1-1 classes making group tutoring Africa's most affordable way of learning. Moreover, by getting students into learning groups, we better utilise a few top tutors and schools we already have in Africa.

Silabu is the first new skill-learning social marketplace app that lets
Africa's 700M youths learn new skills from their peers online, attend
live online group classes from the top 1% tutors/schools with the fee
being 90% lower than brick-and-mortar schools, and can request 1-1 help
from exceptional tutors on-demand in 40 seconds. For example, Silabu
lets learners set up a learning group with a clear learning goal for
free in 30 seconds, and we suggest like-minded students with who they
can learn together. The learners can then report what they achieve each
day until they have achieved their learning goal.

We envision blending concepts that are proven winners from peer-to-peer
learning, group tutoring, and one-to-one tutoring as a better way to
learn, reduce learning costs, and overcome the shortage of exceptional
teachers in Africa.

700M youth in Africa need to be educated in the next 2 decades in academics and new skills. Naturally, students prefer learning from their peers before asking for tutors' help or watching a recorded lesson. Unfortunately, competing products do not encourage peer-to-peer learning, which is the natural way people like to learn. By talking to our users, we find that nearly 8 in 10 users in most situations prefer learning from each other before seeking further help when they cannot grasp complex concepts. As none of these start-ups meet these needs in Africa, students use other tools specifically not designed for educational applications, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, for peer-to-peer learning. So, Silabu takes concepts that are proven winners from the peer-to-peer learning community and puts them in a package so that even my little sister can learn new skills (like how to write a few lines of codes!) from her peers and reports what she achieves each day until she has succeeded at her learning goal.

We have developed a scalable mobile app based on this proven concept to lower costs and foster students' engagement while improving students' learning outcomes. We provide infrastructure for top tutors/schools in Africa to start their online schools to teach students in groups at the push of a button! There's a natural link between how top tutors/schools physically teach students in class and the features of the Silabu app, which provides tutors/schools with a level of control that mimics their power over their face-to-face classes.

Finally, the purchases on these edTech mobile apps/webs rely on user intent - customers typically search for a product and select one of the top results, so they are built for search, not discovery. As a result, sales are more about SEO and less about finding new or best classes, content, and tutors/schools. Instead, Silabu believes in user discovery and uses AI algorithms to select the best classes/tutors daily and distribute them globally to students based on their learning needs (offering personalised learning experience).

As secondary school students in Tanzania, we have personally experienced the pain of our school's shortage of exceptional teachers. Only private and few public schools had excellent teachers. So, we had to be friends with students from other schools with outstanding teachers. We learned subjects like mathematics and physics from these students without support from the teachers. Learning from our peers helped us indirectly learn from the best teachers away from our school at zero cost, and the best educational practices spread quickly to other schools. We performed three times better in the national exams than students who did prefer learning from like-minded students from schools with the best teachers (e.g, Salvatory was among the top five best students in social Sciences Subjects (Maths, Economics, and Geography) in Tanzania high school national examinations in 2012 (https://bit.ly/3RJ7u96) and later a valedictorian at university https://bit.ly/3B3gkYv)). Students who taught us performed four times better than other students who did not teach others. Other 700M African youths face the same challenge of shortage of exceptional teachers or experts to guide them in their academic subjects and new skills. 

 Our team spent more than two years at Silabu talking to our users (students, teachers, parents, and schools) to understand their learning or teaching needs. That has helped us capture our user's needs and psychology and helped us exceptionally design and build the Silabu mobile app that mimics our users' real-life learning and teaching experiences. As a result, nearly 8 in 10 users we have spoken to preferred learning from each other before asking for help from an expert/tutor. Thus, we have built a mobile app that people want. Our team also has domain expertise in the education industry in Africa (Salvatory has worked as a lecturer in the education industry for the past six years at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, tutor of data science at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and tutor of actuarial science at the University of Southampton). Salvatory has also applied peer-to-peer learning concepts to run practical tutoring sessions in different universities he has tutored/lectured. For example, he found out that splitting students into small groups and asking them to solve problem sheets reduces the need for the teacher by 90% as students only meet a teacher in case of complex questions and increase students engagement and understanding of the problem sheets.

 Finally, as a team, we have experience in education systems from different countries such as German, Kenya, Cuba, Australia, South Korea, the UK, and Tanzania, where our team has studied or taught. The ideas about these countries' education systems helped us have a holistic view as we designed and developed the Silabu app.

Our metrics for the year 2023

-Sessions Taught 1-on-1: 91,298
-Sessions Taught Live Group Classes: 178,798
-Classes created in the App by students and Top Tutors: 8057
-Classes created for peer-to-peer learning: 5010
-Paid classes created: 3047
-Paid classes with students: 932
-New Tutoring Jobs created: 1,456

Finding the best engineers or top talents engineers in Africa is hard as competition with giants it's high, am looking forward to leverage on expertise from MIT who can spend time with the product development team and engineering team so we can improve our existing mobile app and build a product which can make students fall in love with learning.

Kidato school (YC and venture-funded) is doing a good job with low-cost home-schooling in Kenya (Africa). uLesson (venture funded & currently based in west Africa) offers students recorded video lessons for academic subjects and past exams. uLesson is taking an extraordinarily difficult approach that can't scale easily to other countries given different education curriculums across Africa (and globally). Even within a country, the syllabus tends to change often. Also, uLesson encourages passive learning that excludes peer-to-peer learning.

Naturally, students prefer learning from their peers before asking for tutors' help or watching a recorded lesson. Unfortunately, competing products do not encourage peer-to-peer learning, which is the natural way people like to learn. By talking to our users, we find that nearly 8 in 10 users in most situations prefer learning from each other before seeking further help when they cannot grasp complex concepts. As none of these start-ups meet these needs in Africa, students use other tools specifically not designed for educational applications, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, for peer-to-peer learning. So, Silabu takes concepts that are proven winners from the peer-to-peer learning community and puts them in a package so that even my little sister can learn new skills (like how to write a few lines of codes!) from her peers and reports what she achieves each day until she has succeeded at her learning goal.

Kidato's model of grouping students together to lower the learning cost has a promising future potential. However, they have not developed an easy-to-use infrastructure for top tutors/schools to replicate their model. So, we have developed a scalable mobile app based on this proven concept to lower costs and foster students' engagement while improving students' learning outcomes. We provide infrastructure for top tutors/schools in Africa to start their online schools to teach students in groups at the push of a button! There's a natural link between how top tutors/schools physically teach students in class and the features of the Silabu app, which provides tutors/schools with a level of control that mimics their power over their face-to-face classes.

As secondary school students in Tanzania, we have personally experienced the pain of our school's shortage of exceptional teachers. Only private and few public schools had excellent teachers. So, we had to be friends with students from other schools with outstanding teachers. We learned subjects like mathematics and physics from these students without support from the teachers. Learning from our peers helped us indirectly learn from the best teachers away from our school at zero cost, and the best educational practices spread quickly to other schools. We performed three times better in the national exams than students who did prefer learning from like-minded students from schools with the best teachers (e.g, Salvatory was among the top five best students in social Sciences Subjects (Maths, Economics, and Geography) in Tanzania high school national examinations in 2012 (https://bit.ly/3RJ7u96) and later a valedictorian at university https://bit.ly/3B3gkYv)). Students who taught us performed four times better than other students who did not teach others. Other 700M African youths face the same challenge of shortage of exceptional teachers or experts to guide them in their academic subjects and new skills.

  Our team spent more than two years at Silabu talking to our users (students, teachers, parents, and schools) to understand their learning or teaching needs. That has helped us capture our user's needs and psychology and helped us exceptionally design and build the Silabu mobile app that mimics our users' real-life learning and teaching experiences. As a result, nearly 8 in 10 users we have spoken to preferred learning from each other before asking for help from an expert/tutor. Thus, we have built a mobile app that people want.

Our impact goals for our edtech app revolve around facilitating transformative learning experiences that empower individuals and communities. We aim to achieve the following:

Increased Access to Quality Education: We strive to break down barriers to education by providing accessible and affordable learning opportunities to individuals regardless of their geographical location or socioeconomic background.

Enhanced Learning Outcomes: Our goal is to improve learning outcomes by fostering peer-to-peer learning, group collaboration, and one-on-one tutoring experiences. We aim to see measurable improvements in students' academic performance, critical thinking skills, and confidence levels.

Closing the Education Gap: We are committed to addressing disparities in education by catering to diverse learning needs and styles. Our platform aims to bridge the gap between traditional classroom learning and individualized, interactive learning experiences.

Community Engagement and Empowerment: We aim to build a supportive learning community where students can engage with peers, mentors, and educators to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects. By fostering a sense of belonging and inclusivity, we empower learners to take ownership of their education journey.

To measure our progress towards these impact goals, we are tracking the following indicators:

User Engagement: We monitor user engagement metrics such as active users, session duration, and frequency of interactions to assess the level of engagement with our platform

Learning Outcomes: We collect data on student performance, including grades, test scores, and assessments, to evaluate the effectiveness of our learning methods and interventions.

Feedback and Satisfaction: We gather feedback from users, educators, and administrators to understand their experiences, needs, and areas for improvement. High levels of user satisfaction and positive testimonials indicate the value and impact of our solution.

Reach and Accessibility: We track the number of users accessing our platform, particularly in underserved communities, to measure the extent of our reach and impact on increasing access to education.

Community Participation: We assess the level of community engagement and collaboration through metrics such as forum activity, group interactions, and participation in collaborative projects.

By continuously monitoring these indicators and adapting our strategies based on insights gained, we aim to drive meaningful and sustainable impact in the field of education.

EdTech mobile apps/webs rely on user intent - customers typically search for a product and select one of the top results, so they are built for search, not discovery. As a result, sales are more about SEO and less about finding new or best classes, content, and tutors/schools. Instead, Silabu believes in user discovery and uses AI algorithms to select the best classes/tutors daily and distribute them globally to students based on their learning needs (offering personalised learning experience).

10 people full time

4 years

Everyone has to contribute to our key and north star metrics, treat each other well, listen to each other, and every contribution is counted, measured and implemented. 

-We are selling tutoring packages for around $60 to students per month, exams package preparation for $23 to students per month.
-Peer to peer classes in the app are free
-Group classes created by top tutors charge students between $5 to $25
-We have started offer our solution to schools, institutions and they pay around $1200 per year.

-Get more customers who buy our product/service is number one way for us to become financially stable.
-We have been able to get grants from MasterCard Foundation 2023
-We have been able to get grant from Vodacom Tanzania 2022
-We have been able to get grant from develoPPPVentures 2024
-We have one investor Acumen, who invested in our company $300,000 in 2022