Afrigather “Go away Fb and face your guide!”
Virtually each Nigerian has heard this punny reprimand not less than as soon as from a trainer or mum or dad. Time spent chatting on social messaging apps has historically been deemed a frivolous waste of time, however as social commerce has gained reputation, persons are starting to see the potential of those platforms as viable enterprise platforms.
Now that notion is about to unfold even additional within the nation as a result of an academic chatbot, FoundaMate, has launched in Nigeria. FoondaMate is a South African ed-tech startup giving college students entry to on-line studying assets in a number of languages by way of low-data immediate messaging functions like Whatsapp and Fb. It has now launched in Nigeria with a local WhatsApp number. Because of this, Nigerian college students can entry localised studying supplies, resembling junior and senior WAEC examination papers from earlier years.
The FoondaMate bot is on each WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger however the Whatsapp bot is extra well-liked as a result of the latter requires a Fb account to enroll whereas Whatsapp simply requires a telephone quantity.
The origin story
Tao Boyle and Dacod Magagula launched the API-based answer virtually two years in the past to handle the inequities within the South African instructional system. Magagula acquired his early training in a public faculty with a notoriously subpar curriculum and little to no entry to precise or digital studying assets. This gave him firsthand expertise with the issue he’s attempting to handle. Boyle, his co-founder, attended a non-public faculty and had a totally totally different instructional expertise resulting from her extra prosperous background.
She did, nonetheless, spend the vast majority of her college years working for an organisation that aimed to textbooks to low-income communities. That is the place their paths cross: a shared perception that everybody deserves a high quality training and a ardour to make sure that kids from low-income households should not denied it—therefore their work at Foondamate.
In contrast to most ed-tech options on the continent, FoondaMate shouldn’t be a standalone platform, it’s a chatbot on well-liked immediate messaging apps—Fb and WhatsApp. College students can chat with the bot to get help with their homework or apply for exams with out leaving the messaging app. It’s the excellent match for individuals who can’t afford entry to the broader web.
Adopting the robotic
Since its launch, over 500,000 college students in South Africa and over 30 different nations like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Angola have used the South African AI robotic to do their homework, examine, and study new issues. After elevating $2 million in a seed round, FoondaMate accelerated its efforts to localize its content material in order that, along with standardized examine guides, college students from different nations can entry supplies like examination apply questions which might be distinctive to their areas.
FoondaMate launched in Nigeria for a similar cause it did in South Africa—to be an ideal equaliser within the nation’s instructional system, the place is a large berth between the wealthy and the poor Within the nation. In Nigeria, greater than 83 million individuals dwell below ₦137,430 ($381.75) per 12 months and are solely in a position to afford government-funded public faculties the place faculty charges value little or nothing. The federal government, at totally different ranges, has catered to the wants of those establishments moderately poorly.
Academics are underpaid and underqualified; libraries are bereft of books, and little to no digital infrastructure exists to assist the educational of scholars. Furthermore, mother and father are unable to personally present important studying supplies resembling textbooks and dictionaries for his or her wards. Neither can they afford the information bundles required to do private analysis to get assist with their homework and additional unbiased examine to organize for varsity exams and nationwide exams such because the Junior Faculty Certificates Examination and West African Senior Faculty Certificates Examinations—necessities to advance studying to senior secondary faculty and tertiary training respectively.
On the time of this publication, the FoondaMate bot can solely present previous questions for the West African Senior School Certificate Examinations, however the firm says that it’s engaged on increasing its repository to incorporate as many exams for various ranges as potential.
The way it works
The FoondaMate chatbot works the identical method as chatting with a buddy. You simply must message the specialised Whatsapp quantity or Fb ID to start a dialog. When you ship FoondaMate messages asking a query, it is going to fetch and summarise related info from the web and ship it as a response.
For instance, a person can ask questions like “what’s photosynthesis?” and get the reply within the chat. When getting ready for particular exams, the person can request previous examination papers, resembling “WAEC biology 2013”. The bot will reply within the chat with a pdf file of the requested previous examination which the person can obtain or share with others.
It can be a examine buddy for mathematical topics, as college students can ship equations as a message to the FoondaMate chatbot, asking for the answer. The chatbot then searches the online and replies with a doc exhibiting a step-by-step answer to the mathematical drawback. Not solely can college students lookup previous questions, examine guides, and studying supplies for exhausting topics, however they’ll additionally lookup the that means of inauspicious phrases they encounter. All this occurs throughout the chat—college students don’t have to depart Whatsapp throughout their research.
Life in Nigeria up to now
The bot has been dwell for about 3 weeks and it has already registered over 4,000 customers on the Whatsapp platform. When requested about FoondaMate’s expectations within the nation, Boyle, FoondaMate’s feminine co-founder, says, “Nigeria is a big and younger market, so there may be nice potential for serving to individuals transfer from the place they’re to that subsequent step, no matter that subsequent step is for them. With the ability to assist any individual get to that subsequent step is one thing that we actually care about and one thing that we’re excitedly trying ahead to doing within the nation.”
FoondaMate is especially excited concerning the suggestions they’ve been getting from Nigerian customers.“Nigerian college students don’t maintain again. They inform you precisely what they suppose as quickly as they see it. At first, we thought it could be tough to get suggestions, but it surely’s been fully the other,” Boyle mentioned. “College students enroll and on the identical day they electronic mail us telling us how a lot they love the product and recommending different issues they want to see on the platform.”
The enterprise is taking all of the suggestions it’s receiving into consideration and can use it to proceed revising the answer to satisfy the wants of Nigerian college students at their varied instructional ranges.
