Kapurika Academy

Kapurika Academy intends to make self-teaching and skill learning accessible to every disadvantaged child and youth through educational videos in local languages that are distributed online through an MOOC and offline through memory cards and pen drives in the rural areas of Nepal first and then to the world.

Millions of disadvantaged youth, especially those going to public schools in Nepal don't see their teachers regularly. Due to politicization of schools and education administration, majority of the teachers don't give sufficient guidance to their students. The scenario is more likely to happen in rural, impoverished places. In addition to that, due to corruption and inefficiency in the government's textbook providing agency, many of the school children don't even get textbooks. They are left with no options and are denied of any opportunity to learn. Similarly, millions of adults in Nepal don't have access to educational materials in local languages. 

We have seen similar initiatives become successful. Examples - Khan Academy and Room to Read. My idea is to build on these initiatives and take them further. Khan Academy is available online only and there are no Nepali video lessons in it. Moreover, lessons taught in Khan Academy might be inaccessible for Nepali youths because they lack even the knowledge of the fundamentals that is required for understanding those lessons. Similarly, it will take decades for Room to Read to reach all the youth of Nepal because building libraries/producing physical copies of books is costly. Videos, you can replicate infinitely. 

Kapurika will enable millions of youth to educate themselves and self-teach new skills and technologies through educational videos that are available both online and offline in their local languages. Therefore, youth, mainly the disadvantaged youth will benefit from it. The education videos/courses will be deployed both online through an openly accessible website and offline through memory cards, pen drives etc.

Track the views in YouTube channel of Kapurika Academy - 240,000 youths/students will have watched our educational videos.

Track the sales/distribution of the memory cards/pen drives to the rural youth. - 10,000 youths/students will have accessed the educational videos offline.

Although there have been various initiatives on this front, none of the initiatives have focused on rural disadvantaged youth of Nepal who don't have proper access to the Internet and language acts as a major barrier to learning. Kapurika Academy intends to solve both of these problems using basic technologies such as computers and mobile phones.

The most important aspect of Kapurika Academy is that it focuses on self-learning rather than making people dependent. In today's world it is necessary that everyone learns to keep learning. Kapurika not only helps youth enhance their skills but also instills in them a hunger for knowledge which will ensure that they will keep learning and do so independently.

All the videos will be freely available online. The videos/courses will also be accessible through memory cards, pen drives and DVDs whose cost will come around 6 dollars per unit which is accessible for even the poorest communities of Nepal. The schools of remote areas can access the videos through the computer systems (although very rudimentary) available in their schools and youths can access them in their mobile phones.

During its pilot phase, the organization will provide the funding for this initiative through its savings. In the longer run, the initiative will sustain itself through the nominal fees charged from the schools or the end users themselves.

Some of the disadvantaged youth in rural Nepal still don't have access to electricity or cell phones which will impede the spread of these educational videos. But the cell phone proliferation is growing rapidly and electricity is also being delivered to even the remotest parts of Nepal. So, I think that will not be a problem.

Through Solve, I hope to finalize my business plan and the distribution strategies for Kapurika Academy. And I also hope to prepare a set of educational course for grade 8, 9 and 10 in the pilot phase so that I can see how impactful it will be. 

It is just an idea that we have been deliberating on at Onion Films Nepal for about a year now. Our potential partners could be Room to Read, RTI International and other various non-profits involved in education. Nepal Government's National Centre for Educational Development could also be a potential partner.

In the context of Nepal, we don't see any competitors yet.