Techpreneur School

The formal education system in Kenya and many African countries does not put enough emphasis on entrepreneurship. As a result many young people leave school with little in the way of practical business skills, condemning them to become job hunters. Our platform aims to solve the skills gap by providing an e-learning center for entrepreneurs to learn skills not taught in school. We work with established entrepreneurs to create online courses that can teach the youth how to run various types of ventures. Our courses are designed to empower the youth to learn the best practices in any given industry and enable them to set up their own business. Our platform also provides a means by which established entrepreneurs can mentor upcoming rookies in their field. The combination of expert knowledge and close mentoring provides a fertile ground for encouraging entrepreneurship among the youth and helping to reduce youth unemployment. 

Kenya just like many other developing countries has a problem with youth unemployment. In Africa youth account for nearly 60% of the unemployed. In Kenya youth unemployment is at 35%, and this represents close to 80 percent of the unemployed people in the country. Many youth are unable to secure formal employment after they complete their formal academic training. And since many of these youth do not have entrepreneurship skills, being unable to find formal employment leads to frustration since they lack an alternative. A big reason many youth do not venture into entrepreneurship is the lack of skills, courage and mentoring with regards to business. Many Kenyan youth simply do not know what it takes to start and run a business, and many are afraid to start something and fail especially since they can't find mentors. Those brave enough to try usually face a myriad of challenges. This is why few ventures get launched and many of those that do end up failing. The lack of adequate training on entrepreneurship in the academic pathway is a bottleneck that stifles innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa. It also contributes to the unemployment problem among the youth.

Our solution is to create an e-learning platform designed to share entrepreneurship skills and empower the youth. We have built an online learning platform where we create online courses that can be accessed by anybody. Our courses are created in partnership with experts in different fields of entrepreneurship. For instance we get a pig farmer to create a pig farming course in collaboration with our content directors. The resulting course is packed with all the information needed to teach someone how to get into the business of pig farming straight from licensing, fund raising, infrastructure development, market requirements and others. By working with seasoned entrepreneurs in creating the courses, we ensure that the online courses are value-packed and have the maximum impact for learners. We also provide a platform where the experienced entrepreneurs can interact with students taking their courses and offer expert tips and advise to upcoming entrepreneurs. In addition to providing online courses and mentoring, we also organize events where the community of entrepreneurs can meet up to share experiences and positively reinforce learning. Our platform is accessible over any internet enabled device via a web browser and also has Android and iOS mobile applications. 

Our solution is primarily targeted at the youth. In Kenya while the national unemployment rate stands at around 10%, youth unemployment is at a staggering 35%, with close to 800,000 youth entering the job market each year. As such it is imperative to find alternative sources of livelihood for these youth since not all of them will be absorbed by the job market. We believe the solution lies in teaching youth the best practices around business and helping them set up and run sustainable entrepreneurship ventures. Therefore our solution is designed to primarily impact the youth in Kenya and other African countries who are struggling with finding employment and would like to consider entrepreneurship. We have engaged with many youth as we built our platform to understand their needs, and have designed various mitigating mechanisms into our solution to cater for the specific challenges facing African youth. We believe given everything that we have put together in our solution, we will empower the youth to become more entrepreneurship oriented and build more sustainable businesses. This will go a long way towards addressing high youth unemployment in Africa and the social-economic and security consequences of such unemployment.

The challenge we are targeting is supporting new businesses in under-served communities to create jobs through providing access to skills, networks and capital. The problem of youth unemployment and lack of entrepreneurship skills falls squarely within that challenge. Many of the youth we target do not have practical business skills nor do they have networks in the business world. This leads to a low number of new businesses getting started up and many that start fail due to lack of adequate business mentoring. Our platform allows the youth to acquire both skills and networks in order to become successful entrepreneurs. 

Our solution is made innovative by the fact that we have partnered with actual entrepreneurs to create our content. As such we are getting the knowledge from the experts which creates a lot of value for learners. The skills taught are practical business skills as learned over time by the experienced entrepreneurs and thus differ greatly from the typical academic training most of our learners went through in school. We also have supporting features that make our platform highly innovative. In addition to having mobile apps for our platform, we also have a loans platform which allows us to do mobile lending to learners. This is used to give them study loans to cover paying for the courses on the platform. These loans can then be repaid slowly by the learner over time as they use their new skills. We hope to extend this model to providing startup financing for our learners in the near future to co-finance and support their ventures. The biggest innovation of our platform is the provision of mentoring and an online community of entrepreneurs. We believe this will have a very big impact on fostering an entrepreneurial culture among the African youth. Other innovations are the heavy use of data science to profile the best courses for different learners, as well as using social media to spread word about entrepreneurship and the courses. We are a data driven company with innovative approaches to education and entertainment utilizing data science and social media to empower learners.

Our core technology is a learning management system backed by a video streaming service. That is how we deliver online learning content. We are also using a content management system as well as forum software to build our online community. Social media marketing is also something we heavily use and data science is a staple of our work. In data science we specifically use neural networks and deep learning to identify the best courses for different learners based on their individual preferences and likes. This pathway recommendation algorithm will form the core of our IP as it will enable us to recommend to learners the ideal courses for them based on a host of highly subjective features. A feature that will optimize the likelihood of positively spurring a new entrepreneur into launching a venture after going  through our program. We also have mobile and web applications to deliver our content to learners in an intuitive way. We are currently working on a mobile lending platform and working out the algorithms to determine credit worthiness as we provide loans to enable learners take our courses and settle the debt later. At a future time we shall extend this study loan platform to a full startup loaning platform based on big data and analytics.

We are using the same technology deployed by other online learning platforms such as Udemy, DataCamp, Coursera, Thinkfic and many others. Learning management systems are well known and tested technology. With regards to mobile lending we are partnering with the JiSort platform, a B2B startup creating lending platforms for other companies. Most of our technology is industry standard and has been applied by many of the world's top companies. Our innovative technologies created in-house are the machine learning applications that power our recommendation engines. These are still in development but mirror similar algorithms built by the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. Therefore all our technology is widely used.

We believe that cultural change with regards to how people perceive business and its risks, can only be achieved by creating a strong community of successful entrepreneurs. The status quo in Kenya has each entrepreneur going it alone and thus there is little in the way of solidarity, support or encouragement. The few success stories are rarely highlighted and most people only hear the many stories of failure. This leads to a perception among the youth that entrepreneurship is difficult, risky and generally a less stable pathway to earning a livelihood compared to formal employment. We believe that building a strong community of successful entrepreneurs will not only lead to skills transfer, but will create a reinforcement mechanism by which more people will be drawn to entrepreneurship. The change will happen when people start seeing success stories from many different individuals and begin to realize that they too can be part of such success stories. We aim to build a community that empowers and encourages entrepreneurs and provides everything they need to succeed and inspire each other. This empowerment through skills, mentoring and positive stories will gradually lead to a cultural change in youth perceptions regarding entrepreneurship and the risks in it. We believe that this will spur the change needed to encourage a self-sustaining stream of youth into entrepreneurship. Our short term goals are to foster skills transfer and the dissemination of positive entrepreneurship outcomes. Our long term goals are to build a strong community of entrepreneurs and create a mechanism that facilitates a steady stream of entrants into that sector of the economy. In this way we believe we can have a powerful positive impact on youth employment, living standards, social progress and national security by empowering the youth with opportunities for productive livelihoods. We believe that all these changes will start with a cultural change based on numerous interviews done with youth as we researched into how best to tackle youth unemployment in Kenya. Various respondents cited common issues at the core of which is the lack of adequate entrepreneurship training and culture.

We are currently serving around 100 people having launched just this month (June 2020). We target to be serving at least 10,000 people in a year, and possibly 1000,000 people in 5 years.

We want to empower between 1000 to 5000 youth in Kenya to launch entrepreneurship ventures within the next year. We hope to expand this number to over 20,000 youth in 5 East African countries within the next 5 years. We plan to achieve this by onboarding as many entrepreneurs as we can in relevant sectors and in different countries so that they can teach skills that youth in those countries can relate to. We also plan to achieve this by rapid scaling of our services across the region in a few years time.

The biggest barrier is financial as we lack resources to market our platform adequately and create courses and content for learners. Beyond this we anticipate challenges in penetrating rural areas with low broadband internet. However we are in discussions with certain telecom companies on means of mitigating this challenge in the future. The biggest challenge is financial since all our plans including the lending platform to support study loans as well as startup loans all require financing which we are still seeking.

We are currently fund raising by applying for grants and debt financing from banks. We are also bootstrapping and using the founder's cash reserves to jump start the business. We hope to transition to applying for venture capital or angel investor funds in a year's time to fund our regional expansion plans. With regards to broadband internet in rural areas, we are working with a telecom company on a product to make our services available in rural areas.

Not applicable

We have 5 full time staff.

We have the passion, skills and experience to bring the idea to reality. The founder is a serial entrepreneur having been involved in a few startups over the last couple of years. One of the secured over 2.5 Million USD in venture capital funding so he brings experience in startups to the table. The other members of the team are men and women who have extensive experience working with the youth in Kenya and engaging with them on matters of learning. We believe we have the right mix of skills to build this business.

None currently. However we are in discussions with a telecom on partnership to create a data package by which our learners can access our platform without incurring additional data charges for the streaming video. This is intended to buffer our customers who will be accessing the platform via mobile 4G networks. We are also looking to partner with a micro-finance to begin actualizing our mobile lending platform as we go along.

Our business model is to sell online courses that teach youth entrepreneurship skills. Our platform has a learning management system that guides a learner through a course once they subscribe to it. We work with experienced entrepreneurs to create courses that have a lot of value to learners. We then package these courses and sell them on our platform. We take care of all the marketing, payments processing, technology stack and other aspects involved in selling a course. We then split the net revenue from the course with the entrepreneur who created it. Our partners get a sustainable source of income by sharing their knowledge, and our customers get value from highly useful information. We make money by facilitating it all. In addition to direct selling of courses, we also have a subscriber based service that works as a video on demand service. Subscribers will be able to get premium content by subscribing to this service where we plan to offer not just educational content, but also infortainment content. That is information that can be considered entertainment, such as documentaries and the like. Our business model is to be a content production and marketing house based on delivering value both in fixed price courses as well as in subscriber based content.

We are currently bootstrapping using funds raised by the founder. We are also applying for seed grants to support our early work. We plan to transition to getting an angel investor within the next one year, and probably venture capital fundraising to fund our regional expansion ambitions. All through this we will be collecting revenue from the sales of courses on the platform, as well as the subscribership.

We are applying to Solve to be part of this great community you have over here and to get support and mentorship as we build our platform. We would like our platform to have global appeal as we plan to scale outside of Sub-Saharan Africa in a few years and provide entrepreneurship pathways for learners across the globe. Solve allows us the platform by which to build a product with local focus but global appeal by interacting with our people from around the world. We hope the community at Solve can help us get past some of our barriers. We are also applying to secure some financial aid for our startup to allow us to rise. We believe the grant from Solve will go a long way to helping us get off the ground. We also believe through Solve we can meet potential future investors.

We would like to improve our capacity with regards to fundraising through joining Solve and also improve our capacity for marketing.

Any organizations involved in entrepreneurship, micro-finance and education are of interest to us. However we don't have specific examples we have singled out.

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We qualify for this prize since our platform is targeted at helping youth acquire critical business skills to enable them start business and earn a livelihood. These are the same youth who have despaired in their search for formal employment and thus entrepreneurship represents their bets chance at a good job. We would use the prize monies to kick start our program to loan entrepreneurs who have taken courses with us some startup capital for their small business. Such funds would go a long way to supporting upcoming entrepreneurs who have recently acquired the skills they need to start a  business and now require initial capital.

We are qualified for this prize since we are heavily using deep learning and specifically deep neural networks to deliver value to our clients. We are building machine learning models to identify the best courses and learning pathways for our customers based on their academic background, personal interests and market demand. We will use funds from the prize to improve our recommendation algorithms so as to add the most value to customers. Our goal is to build an AI that can recommend the best entrepreneurship learning pathway for an individual based on the personal strengths, weaknesses and interest. We believe our Ai will lead to more fulfilling and sustainable entrepreneurs.

We believe our solution has the capacity to transform Africa and empower its youth to become excellent entrepreneurs. We believe the impacts of this will be felt in the national and regional economies of the areas we work in. We believe that the lessons drawn from this will be applicable all around the world in empowering the youth. We therefore believe we qualify for this prize and will use it to fund our exapnasion from the original country we launch in (Kenya).