HaHu Scripts

We are solving learning poverty. Learning poverty has reached a shocking 90% in Sub Saharan Africa and 70% for low and middle income countries, globally. This means, in the case of Sub Saharan Africa, 9 out of 10, of all 10 year olds are unable to read and understand a simple written text. https://www.unicef.org/media/122921/file/StateofLearningPoverty2022.pdf

Due to this, African Union has decided to make 2024, the year where Education is in focus, for the first time in it's history. 

In addition in 2023, the number of children who couldn't attend school due to conflict rose by 6 million to a total 250 million. This has lead the Director General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay to announce that "Education is in a state of Emergency". https://x.com/AAzoulay/status/...

Out literacy tool, HaHu Scripts, is timely and essential. We address Learning Poverty and illiteracy, by building a scalable an innovative and effective gamified learning system that is adopted to diverse linguistic culture. In addition to providing basic literacy, HaHu Scripts, preserves linguistic and artistic culture, it advances morality and critical thinking and it promotes understanding across people and linguistic barriers. A seed to sustainable peace and conflict resolution.

HaHu Scripts has two main sections: literacy section and literary culture and content section. Our system currently works for two East African Languages, Amharic and Tigrigna, and we aim to add more languages.   

The literacy Section focuses on teaching the fundamentals of literacy through a gamified approach. The game transforms complex scripts into simpler forms, making it intuitive and enjoyable for users to practice. Users see the script and hear the corresponding sounds, enabling them to practice writing and reading simultaneously.

Once users have mastered writing and associating the script with its sound, they engage in activities where they manipulate the script to form words. For each set of scripts, they must recognize the word's correct pronunciation and match it with the corresponding script on flashcards. 

The Literary Culture & Content Section is dedicated to integrating local culture, art, and community into our educational tool. Through collaboration with linguistic communities, we curate and regularly release interactive vocabulary books, traditional songs, proverbs, idioms, and stories that encapsulate the essence of the culture. 

Drawing from diverse cultures' timeless fables and moral stories, we aim to impart lessons on positive societal engagement. By integrating these narratives into our platform, users are encouraged to reflect on their values and develop critical and moral thinking, enhancing their ability to effectively comprehend and extract information from written texts. 

We invite you to experience our vision firsthand through this link - let us know what you think. 

We target East Africans, specifically communities in the Amhara and Tigray regions of Northern Ethiopia. These areas are heavily impacted by the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia. Children have missed school for 3 consecutive years. School infrastructure has been partially or totally destroyed according to reports https://brokenchalk.org/the-ed…

When children are absent from school, they miss out on more than just academic lessons in reading, writing, and mathematics. They also miss crucial social education, where they learn that asking questions and embracing mistakes are integral to functioning within society. Our product is designed to address this gap by teaching children to read and write in their native language, empowering them to extract information from texts, encouraging them to become active, positive members of their society, and ensuring they have a deep understanding of their cultural heritage, all to equip them to build a better future.

Our solution, which is easily distributed via smartphones and tablets (also PCs in the near future), will make literacy available for at least 20 million people in Ethiopia who have access to the internet. https://datareportal.com/repor...

Our goal is to create a resilient literacy solution with its rich content library that continues to be accessible, even offline, when formal schooling is disrupted by conflict and natural disasters. 

Although Swiss by nationality, our CEO, Nigist Goytom, grew up in Ethiopia in a family with a mixed heritage of Amhara and Tigrigna. 

She has lived through two conflicts, and she knows that to prevent the next one, we must ensure that today's children have a better education so they can be tomorrow's leaders. 

She first started this journey with the idea of teaching her children how to read and write, using songs and stories from the culture. Advice from a friend made her design the platform and publish it on App stores, which got this amazing response. 

The latest conflict made her focus on adding the Tigrigna culture, in to the first system. This act showed people what they have in common, amidst a civil war. You can read more about the responses at this link. 

For more user reviews, see comment section on play store.

Nigist saw how her family, friends and community had been affected by those conflicts, but she also saw, as we see today, that we have a solution. It will not make a difference in a year or two, but it will make a significant impact in 10-20 years when today's children will become our future leaders, proud of their past and culture and know how to ask the right questions.

Beside Nigist our team consists of people from different conflict areas who dream about a better future for everyone (Eg, our Late co-founder Or Feldman Salem, who is from Israel). 

Our pilot HaHu Scripts, has more than 29K downloads and >3K active devices. 

Download Territory Breakdown 

50% Ethiopia.

25% Europe and USA

15% Middle East 

We're seeking individuals across various domains to join our team and assist in implementing front-end and back-end design enhancements crucial for our scalability. 

Specifically, we require engineers adept in AI-based solutions to help develop a robust content collection system. 

Additionally, we're looking for educators from diverse global locales who are fluent in various languages and well-versed in their respective cultures and moral narratives. Their insights will enable us to tailor our system to accommodate every cultural and linguistic nuance. 

Legal and financial experts are also sought to support our administrative operations.

As a small yet ambitious collective, we aim to empower children and individuals worldwide, offering them a deeper connection to their heritage while fostering critical and moral thinking skills.

Numerous language learning tools, applications, and platforms cater to individuals acquiring a new language. However, our tool targets fluent or advanced speakers who lack access to formal schooling and tutoring in their native tongue. 

It mainly benefits children in conflict zones, those affected by natural disasters, and immigrants/ex-pats who find themselves outside their original community. 

Consider the USA, where one in four families has at least one immigrant parent. That means that their child may be able to speak another language other than English but not necessarily know how to read and write that language. 

Our solution enables children to remain connected to their original cultural environment, teaches them their mother language reading and writing, and provides opportunities to learn about their heritage and history. Additionally, it fosters critical thinking skills and promotes universal moral values that have historically contributed to the development of our global community. These children will bridge traditions and future aspirations, and knowing their roots will help them shape our global human society's future for the better.

Our platform operates on the premise that we can nurture children's development across multiple dimensions. The logical framework guiding our work can be examined through various perspectives, all converging to empower children to become engaged and constructive members of their society

1. Access to Education: The platform aims to increase literacy rates and educational access among communities worldwide by allowing children to learn how to read and write in their mother language, regardless of their geographic location or access to formal schooling. Our platform creates a world of educational equity.

2. Preservation of Culture and Heritage: Through the inclusion of historical and cultural content, the platform seeks to preserve and promote the rich heritage of diverse communities. By learning about their history and heritage, children develop a stronger sense of identity and belonging, fostering pride in their cultural background. The children will be able later to be a bridge between their culture and other cultures. 

3. Critical Thinking Skills: The platform prompts critical thinking through interactive learning activities, encouraging children to analyze information, think creatively, and solve problems independently. These skills are essential for success in academics and professionally and empower children to navigate challenges confidently.

4. Moral Development: By integrating moral values and ethical principles into the curriculum, the platform aims to cultivate empathy, compassion, and a sense of responsibility towards others. Children learn to make ethical decisions and contribute positively to their communities, fostering a more inclusive and harmonious society.

5. Empowerment and Leadership: Ultimately, the platform aims to empower children to become active change agents in their communities and beyond. By equipping them with literacy skills, cultural awareness, critical thinking abilities, and strong moral foundations, the platform seeks to nurture the next generation, who will shape a brighter and more equitable future.

Overall, the expected changes in the future of these children include improved educational outcomes, strengthened cultural identity, enhanced critical thinking abilities, heightened moral awareness, and increased empowerment to effect positive change in their communities and the world at large.

Our main goal is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. 

We achieve this by enhancing literacy and literary skills. The key indicator of our success will be a reduced Learning poverty rate. 

For example, Today, the numbers have reached 90% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 70% in low and middle-income countries globally. This means, in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, 9 out of 10, of all 10-year-olds are unable to read and understand a simple written text. 

https://www.unicef.org/media/122921/file/StateofLearningPoverty2022.pdf

We will track this indicator through two primary methods. First, within our system, we can monitor students' average progress and assess their reading and writing levels. Second, we will utilize public information distributed by the UN, AU (African Union), Unicef and other organizations regarding each region's educational status.

Our solution is powered by a robust combination of technologies designed to offer a comprehensive learning experience. 

At its core, our platform utilizes cutting-edge technologies such as APP development, Flutter for seamless user interface design, and AWS for secure and scalable cloud infrastructure. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve, the problem of content production for our platform.

Beyond technology, our platform integrates elements of literary culture, including poetry, tales, proverbs, and idioms, to enrich the learning journey with cultural depth and linguistic diversity. 

Artistic expression is also integral in our project. Using AI-generated digital art that accompanies stories, mean we can subsidise local artist to illustrate and market their artistic skill on our platform. Making AI support and nurture local & indigenous art instead of harming it.

We also incorporate musical art, into our content library, encompassing songs, lullabies, and traditional cultural music to engage users on a multi-sensory level.

We prioritize the power of storytelling, curating narratives that stimulate critical thinking, convey moral lessons, and celebrate local wisdom. This holistic approach equips users with essential literacy skills, fosters cultural appreciation, creativity, and moral development, and, ultimately, empowers them to emerge as proactive and constructive contributors to society.

Full time: Nigist Goytom 

Full time: Or Feldman Salem 

Part time: Annette Schmid

Part time: Li Bo

Part time: Xian Jian 

Since 2020 (Idea to prototype launch).

Company incorporated in April 2021.

We are a company, build and managed by two mothers. We understand the difficulties and barriers we face as women and mothers. This gives us a unique opportunity to relate, understand and sympathies with other minorities and groups who do not share the common general experience. 

Our company, Ha Hu AG and our product, HaHu Script is a testament to how much we value diversity, minorities and culture. 

The problem of Learning Poverty has provided us with a unique set of problems as well as opportunities!

Expat, immigrant, and refugee families located in Europe and the United States share the same problem as those in Ethiopia and Sub Saharan Africa. They both lack access to formal literary education in their native languages. Language schools and tutors are very hard to find and when available, they are expensive. 

This has given us a unique opportunity to cross-subsidise and finance one demographic by the other! 

To demonstrate, we currently have a Freemium business model, where users upgrade if they do not want to play all 238 scripts one by one. Through this model, we earned >2.6K$ from just 4K downloads on iOS, where almost all downloads are exclusively from Europe and America. 

Meanwhile, our Android downloads (>25K) mainly from Ethiopia, had little to no earnings. This is an important insight we can utilize to make well informed design decisions for our planned scale up and financial milestones.

Our plan for achieving financial sustainability revolves around optimizing our platform's scalability and expanding into larger linguistic demographics. 

Our pilot, HaHu Scripts, available in app stores, has demonstrated promising growth without any marketing efforts, serving as a proof of concept. Additionally, our data from iOS users indicates a high conversion rate among our paying demographic in Europe and the United States, with an impressive 8% conversion rate and earnings of $2.6K from 4K total downloads.

To ensure long-term profitability, we recognize the need to refine and make our system easily scalable. Once the system is scalable, it will enable us to extend our tool to encompass more significant linguistic demographics, such as Arabic and other languages that utilize the same syllabic writing system as Amharic and Tigrigna (known as the Abugida system). By tapping into these markets, we anticipate exponential growth in our user base and market reach, guaranteeing profitability.

The success of our pilot HaHu Scripts, coupled with our high conversion rate among paying users, reaffirms the soundness of our approach. As we move forward, we restate our unwavering commitment to executing our plan for scalability and expansion, with full confidence in its potential to ensure our financial sustainability.