NawiriPro by Learning Point

Recognizing that 59% of youth will not attend secondary school in East Africa, Learning Point aims to create faster, more affordable and convenient educational pathways for out-of-school youth.

Due to the  COVID-19 pandemic, the formal economy is collapsing globally, causing a shift to the informal economy. There is a drive towards e-commerce and the lifeblood will be motorcycle couriers. Traditional in-person education and training is also no longer an option due to social-distancing mandates.

In response to the economic and educational shift, we developed NawiriPro, a free online web-platform for workers in the informal sector, starting with motorcycle couriers. The platform offers relevant but affordable online entrepreneurial and job readiness skills training and safety lessons on preventing the spread of COVID-19.

We envision expanding the scope of this solution during and post COVID-19, serving a variety of industries, in turn creating opportunity and employment tracks for millions of out-of-school youth.

Africa’s youth population is rising. Nearly 50% of all Africans are younger than 18, and that number is growing. These demographics, along with a scarcity of jobs, have led to dramatic rates of youth unemployment. 

Recognizing that 59% of youth will not attend secondary school in East Africa and that 85% of Kenyans work in the informal sector, Educate! sees a particular opportunity to create impact through our Kenyan entity, Learning Point. 

In 2019, Learning Point began running a bootcamp-style educational skills course, to equip out-of-school youth with the skills to launch and grow an enterprise in the informal market – starting with the motorcycle (boda-boda) driver/courier industry, with the potential to expand to informal retail kiosks in the future.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a drive towards e-commerce and the lifeblood will be motorcycle couriers. Learning Point sees these frontline workers as not only a key area for job creation, especially for youth during this crisis, but also key for ensuring that everyone whose lives have been upended has food security and access to essential items. Learning Point will train riders on how to safely handle and transport goods to customers during the COVID-19.

Learning Point, under the brand NawiriPro, is building a virtual, light web learning platform to teach youth how to do their jobs well, access e-commerce and marketplace app platforms like Sendy and Uber, and protect themselves and others from COVID-19. This would be an alternative certification to formal education.

Before  COVID-19, Learning Point operated as an in-person bootcamp program for youth in the informal sector. The training focused on an entrepreneurial score that graduates of the product get. The score showed their skills, academic achievement, monthly business revenue and personal savings– with the vision that it will be valued by potential loan providers, employers and others, to show their expertise and financial value. The score will resume post COVID.

Our response during COVID-19 focuses on an educational score, showing skills and academic achievement and is based on performance in the industry-specific business course and will be given as a grade on the boda-boda or retail course/program. After completion of the course, the score will be shared with marketplace apps in order to increase employment opportunities for riders. Additionally, users will be trained on COVID-19 prevention and control measures certified by the Kenyan Ministry of Health and Ministry of Youth.

Educate! tackles youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities.

Through Learning Point, Educate! is able to offer the same services to out-of-school youth working in informal sectors by finding alternative pathways to academic vocational school. Learning Point is leveraging its platform to expand access to our bootcamp in a way that more broadly helps youth and all informal workers both during and after COVID-19. 

Learning Point will engage the youth by providing depth and relevance to specific industries alongside COVID-19 prevention and control measures by:

• Ensuring quality and consistency in learner’s experience;

• Using a storytelling approach with relatable characters and conducting practice tests to support knowledge retention and sustain engagement;

• Offering spaced learning with in-built positive reinforcement to support higher retention and increase satisfaction;

• Encouraging peer learning and interaction with experts through the use of social networks;

• Providing engaging, interactive learning through rich multimedia (visuals and audio) experience with low resolution graphics and media

Learning Point aims to empower out-of-school youth with the skills they need to get jobs, create their own businesses, and earn an income. We focus on two of East Africa’s most prominent informal markets: motorcycle taxis and the retail kiosk industry to achieve this goal. We equip youth with key leadership and entrepreneurship skills, ultimately improving their livelihoods. As the demand for delivery services continues to increase, we provide trained riders while ensuring youth have the skills and knowledge to excel in the market.

Due to the high rate of unemployment and the lack of access to practical post-primary education, Educate! launched Learning Point to pursue innovation in this area. We are seeking to disrupt the systemic problem of unemployment among out-of-school youth by answering the question: “What could be an alternative path to academic vocational school?”

Furthermore, the disruption that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused to the economy will have lasting changes to how we eat, work, shop, exercise, manage our health, socialize, and spend our free time leading to new new habits and regulations based on reduced close-contact interaction and tighter travel and hygiene restrictions. 

Learning Point is providing boda-boda drivers, who have often relied on transporting customers and coming into very close contact with people, with skills training for and access to opportunities in the e-commerce industry. Long term, the skills and best practices that drivers who go through Learning Point’s training program develop is setting them up for success in this new economic environment.

Core to Learning Point’s COVID-19 response strategy is to not create “one-off” solutions to this crisis, but rather further our goal to prepare out-of-school youth with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. The free online web platform for learners and workers in the informal sector, starting with motorcycle couriers, will help them acquire skills, study online, and learn how to protect themselves and others against the spread of COVID-19.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Learning Point had to innovate in order to continue providing similar services to youth due to the current restrictions to in-person learning. This resulted into a transition from in person bootcamp education to a digital platform.

NawiriPro’s learning technology leverages best-in-class cloud hosting, a multi-service architecture consisting of a bespoke in-house front-end for presentation, and multiple stable open-source software for authoring, analytics and performance monitoring.

To achieve scale at the lowest possible cost, NawiriPro decoupled its learning, authoring, storage, retrieval and notifications systems into independent microservices, all optimized for specific use cases, but can automatically add or reduce capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance.

Inclusive access is important to NawiriPro, because we understand our users’ mobile habits and the competition for attention with other apps and services. Therefore, we chose to use a lite-mobile-web channel -- minimalistic design without download requirements -- to accommodate limited phone space and digital literacy skills. We are also in discussions with Safaricom to zero-rate or discount the data to  reduce any barriers to learning.

We also constantly evaluate the front-end with students. The student interface is a virtual teacher guiding when and how the student progresses, and we assess whether it fits our learning thesis and expected outcomes.

For future learning and scoring students’ mindsets and drive, NawiriPro collects and visualizes both learning and browser/returning engagement data to draw insights. These inform what to improve immediately and where to take the platform in the future while highlighting our top learners

NawiriPro uses basic web-based technology that is widely used. Learning point has been administering testing on the technology.

The Learning Point team would create content which would include the course, a lesson video, image or text and multiple choice assessments. Once the user has signed up on the platform or received account details to create a user account via SMS-Verification process, they will have to register through a simple questionnaire. Then they would be able to take a tour of the product (how to use the platform and platform guide). 

When launched, users of the platform will be able to subscribe to the services and access the courses on their smartphones on Nawiri.app web platform. Each course will have a course description, materials, syllabus and timelines of completion. Learners can discover all courses, monitor their progress and the administrative  dashboard would monitor the time spent per session and the number of times a user has attempted a quiz. 

To incentivize users, there will be a point allocation system after completion of course (lesson or quiz) and then they can receive a 

redemption of Points for Airtime or Internet Bundles. Finally, when the required courses are completed, learners will receive a serialized auto-generated certificate.

There are three primary areas that Learning Point is targeting with its solution, focused on the e-commerce industry and marketplace apps, the boda-boda riders and platform users themselves, and the health needs around COVID-19 protection and prevention. Our theory of change takes into account:

Marketplace Apps:

Marketplace apps are seeing a surge of demand for deliveries and they need a larger fleet of riders that they cannot train as in person learning is banned due to COVID-19. The web platform would train performers and activate them based on their score on their performance on the rider’s web platform.

Boda-Boda Drivers: 

During COVID-19, Learning Point’s online platform would train rides on safe deliveries. Riders will then be activated by marketplace apps based on their performance and location. We plan to assess the impact and results of Learning Point’s response strategy. Our draft monitoring plan for this work (in development) includes key performance indicators (KPIs) in the areas of:

1. Training module completion, measured in terms of the number of youth receiving and completing the training program using application usage data that will be collected after each module in order to measure;
2. Improvement in knowledge and/or skills, measured using an educational score based on module assignments and course grades determined at the end of the course;
3. Marketplace application usage, measured in terms of number of youth who have downloaded and are actively using a marketplace application. We will measure usage over time, which will be determined by final project scope, through application usage or a survey of participants at the beginning and end of the course.

Ministry of Health:

The public service sector needs to track the data of riders who have successfully gone through the COVID-19 prevention training. NawiriPro will provide critical information for tracking COVID-19 training including:

• How many people have successfully registered;
• How many people have started the COVID-19 course;
• How many people have completed the course;
• View the data by regions and counties with export functionality (csv/excel).

1. The current number we are currently serving: 0

2. The number of people in one year: 31,000

3. The number serving in 5 years: 500,000+

 Having a specific number of users in the next 5 years would depend on a number of variables such as attracting users on the platform. Given our new position in the market, it is nearly impossible to give any specific numbers since the information will be based on the rolling out of the system as well as retention, user optimization, activation, and referrals.

We are working at the county, sub county, and boda-boda stage (a stage is a highly localized and organized group of boda-boda riders who station themselves in a designated area and wait to solicit rides) levels to increase our reach, which could have the potential to add hundreds of thousands of users.

Core to Learning Point’s COVID-19 response strategy is to not create “one-off” solutions to this crisis, but rather further our goal to prepare out-of-school youth with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. 

COVID-19 has accelerated our need to think about digital distribution. Our long term goals include building an informal sector database of hundreds of thousands of active users from 19 counties. The urban counties like Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru etc, would function on the web platform while the semi-urban and rural counties an SMS Platform. Other longer term goals are to sell new drivers to e-commerce/marketplace and sell to advertisers.

Partnerships are key to our success. As of two months ago, that was one of our barriers but we have managed to move past it by establishing partnerships with Kenyan government ministries including: Ministry of Trade and Ministry of Health.

For deeper impact and scale we need to continue these partnerships, develop the certification of COVID-19 content with the Ministry of Health. Additionally, we need to pilot our mobilization strategy on the ground in order to build our database of trained boda-boda riders. We are also working on developing partnerships with technology based companies. 

As we expand in upcoming years, a potential barrier we are planning for is the challenges of reaching rural communities via our light-web platform. Therefore, as we iterate on our online system we are considering ways it can be translated to an SMS based system for users without a smartphone or internet access.

In terms of Partnerships, we have made progress in partnering with the necessary organizations in order to get the project running. Our partnerships with the government of Kenya and the private sector has enabled us to reach the milestones we have so far. However, we do continue to seek partnerships with other entities in order to improve our learning and our product. Our progress in partnering with technology-based companies continues. We have outsourced a few and are making final decisions around the remaining companies that meet Learning Point’s technology needs for sustainability and scaling.

Additionally, in order to address anticipated challenges and barriers with mobilizing users, we are planning to pilot our mobilization strategy in a sub county in Nairobi, in order to identify the approach that reaches the most potential users and converts the most number of riders reached in to active users.

• Full-time staff - 9

• Current Contractors - 7 (Tech Team 5, Graphic Designer 1, Audio 1)

• Outsourced Customer Care Team potentially starting in July - plans to hire 5-15 Agents

• Future staff starting September - 2 Designer Staff & 6 Tech Staff

Educate! is a non-profit social enterprise that has been operating in East Africa for 10+ years. As the largest youth skills provider in East Africa, having served over 46,000 youth intensively last year and reached almost 500,000, Educate! is uniquely positioned to reach a large audience of youth and make a significant impact. We have a wide network of partnerships with schools, teachers, governments, and thousands of youth. Our scale and reach, proven impact, partnerships, agility of our team, and the educational/skills products we’ve already developed and extensively evaluated and iterated make us well-positioned to deliver the solution.  

In its core, Learning Point is leveraging a skills bootcamp model called SEED, which Educate! helped run in Uganda in 2013, to pilot a virtual bootcamp model for out-of-school youth in Kenya. SEED showed 31% income gains in a randomized control trial three years after completion and is the best evidence we’ve seen for such a model. 

Early this year, Learning Point received great validation of its model. A cohort of 22 youth going through its three-week bootcamp in October was earning over 110% more income within several months, with the top drivers earning 4x more. The top income results were driven by large newfound business through the Sendy marketplace app platform, and validates the opportunity to plug youth into this and other such apps.

The driver of Learning Point’s strategy is partnerships, both with the government and the private sector. Details on key partnership discussions include the following:

Government Partnerships: 

• We have partnered the Ministry of Health to ensure we are communicating the appropriate and approved health practices around COVID-19. 

• The Principal Secretary from the Ministry of Trade in Kenya has sent letters of support to the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA), the retail trade association, and the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

• The Ministry of Youth has expressed interest in promoting this solution and extending it to other industries as well and has offered support in reaching out to additional potential partners, including sending a letter to Safaricom requesting a zero rating for data used on NawiriPro (more below).

Private Sector: 

• We entered into discussion late March with supermarket chain Tusky’s and marketplace app Sendy about helping prepare boda-boda couriers to deliver food. These discussions are temporarily on hold due to travel restrictions but should resume once the economy opens up more.

• We also entered into discussions with Jumia about similarly training boda-boda couriers in Kenya and potentially Uganda.

• Learning Point is in negotiations with Safaricom to see whether they can pay for sponsored data for the COVID-19 education and prevention content.

Through a bootcamp-style educational skills course, Learning Point aims to equip out-of-school youth with key leadership and entrepreneurial skills, as well as to connect them with e-commerce marketplace apps for employment opportunities, ultimately improving their livelihoods.

Through 1) skills-based content around business and entrepreneurship skills, including savings, marketing, customer service, etc. which users will develop from Learning Point’s online platform, NawiriPro and 2) receiving and educational score and being in the Learning Point database, which connects drivers to marketplace apps for employment we aim to improve livelihoods for these informal sector workers.

Based on learnings from Learning Point’s initial pilot in 2019, marketplace apps were key to increasing income for boda-boda drivers.

Additionally, the value of Learning Point’s training program, combined with its accessible database of drivers and its reliable educational score will be highly valuable to marketplace apps who are in need of skilled and trained drivers adding value to Learning Point’s database.

Marketplace apps are seeing a surge of demand for deliveries and they need a larger fleet of riders that they cannot train as in person learning is banned due to COVID-19. NawiriPro will allow them to select top trained performers and activate them based on their score on their performance on the rider’s web platform. They will be able to access a trained workforce to maintain quality service, and the necessary safety precautions.

In the first 6 months, Learning Point will offer NawiriPro at no cost to users or e-commerce employers, in order to build a database of riders. As the database grows, Learning Point will market advertising space to insurance companies and financial institutions.

In the long term, post COVID-19, Learning Point will work in partnership with marketplace apps who will pay us to train and activate riders as per demand. For users operating outside of the e-commerce space, they will pay a fee deducted from their income for the first 3 months as a placement fee for getting activated and trained.

As stated in the application, partnerships are a key part of our success. MIT Solve provides a diverse and rich base of individuals for us to partner with. Furthermore, being able to connect with other Solve teams would be beneficial in our growth as we continue to innovate in our projects. 

Being part of the MIT Solve community and receiving support from experts in the technology field would play a large role in helping us advance our goals in order to reach even more youth and help them succeed in their chosen professions. 

Additionally, funding from MIT Solve will support Learning Point’s COVID-19 response program in the following ways:

• Building the technology behind LP’s e-learning platform

• Designing the educational content

• Striking partnerships

• Testing with 5,000-10,000 users.

• Solution technology- Some technology landscaping advice to ensure we are appropriately integrating all key technologies.
• Funding and revenue model- Funding support for the technology, data rates (dependent upon mobile company partnership), content development, and user mobilization.
• Other - Support in striking partnerships with telecom providers to get preferred rates and access.

For deeper impact and scale we need to continue partnerships with organizations aligned with our mission. Some Solver members that we see that we could benefit from partnering with are: 

1. The Future is Offline - Offline access to vocational training and higher education for refugees

2. Poket - Poket is an application that incentivizes people to crowdsource information about small merchants in emerging economies. The app prompts users to contribute information to the system and verify others’ uploads in exchange for redeemable rewards, which encourages reliable input.

We also desire the opportunity to partner with MIT Innovation groups as we continue to build and improve our technology.

Educate! tackles youth unemployment by partnering with schools and governments to reform what schools teach and how they teach it so that students in Africa have the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities. Educate! aims to capture life outcomes : more businesses, more jobs, greater leadership, higher incomes, and stronger independence. 

Learning Point, an entity of Educate!, works with out-of-school youth in the informal sector to help them gain skills needed to succeed in their professions. We create faster, more affordable and convenient educational pathways for out-of-school youth and further our goal to prepare out-of-school youth with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. 

Additional funding from The GM Prize will further
Learning Point’s COVID-19 response program to: Finish building the technology behind the e-learning platform, complete designing the virtual and COVID-19 educational content, strike partnerships, and begin testing with 5,000-10,000 users and eventually roll out to 100,000+ users.