Mandala Group

James is a social entrepreneur, passionate about the building bridges between people and cultures, through technology to achieve a better world. James' social enterprise Mandala Group builds accessible mobile applications in disconnected areas of India and Kenya, including teleStory which enables illiterate parents to read to their illiterate children for the first time on feature phones and MCOCO providing coconut farmers with access to fair market prices and a marketplace over MPESA. James is on a mission to build an app store for the world’s most vulnerable billion users.

James is a recognised youth advocate as a Forbes 30 Under 30, Global Winner of the 2019 Facebook Social Entrepreneurship Award, Alibaba eFounder and UK Head Delegate to the Youth G7 in 2019. He is also actively involved in a number of impact communities including One Young World, World Economic Forum Global Shapers Community, Hult Prize Foundation and Gates Foundation Goalkeepers.

Mandala Group is a social venture builder, harnessing mobile technology in rural Kenya ontop of MPESA to build socially impactful solutions to problems of illiteracy, income inequality, and education. Mandala Group specialise in building low data and SMS/voice applications for feature phones and basic Android phones that serve and provide access for the hardest to reach and most in need users in the world. Whilst many of these applications are simple on the front end, Mandala Group have been able to apply emerging technologies such as machine learning on the back-end to give end users access to the benefits of technological innovation, such as automated loan decisions.We are solving basic needs issues for the world's most vulnerable issues and elevating humanity through basic information access.

We seek to solve basic needs issues for the 3.8 billion people still disconnected from the internet (Facebook State of Connectivity Report 2018). At our core, we are focused on supporting education within rural communities and the applications we build are targeted at challenges and opportunities within this space. Specifically, we focus on factors that enable education and we look at education as a broad area that extends beyond the classroom into spaces that include health education, economic education, and literacy. These areas are all key barriers and enablers for accessing education. Readiness is intertwined with literacy and all four barriers ultimately mean that those in need of information most in the world, go without it. 

Finally, as an activist my mission is to accelerate the leadership journey for underrepresented groups and prepare the next generation of UK leaders.

Mandala Group launch social ventures through designing, developing and distributing socially beneficial mobile applications in areas of low connectivity in India and Kenya - harnessing SMS, IVR and low data android applications. Mandala Group’s applications have impacted over 100,000 lives to date, bringing coconut farmers out of poverty and providing safe, reliable access to transportation. Through our new partnership with Mobile Vaani, the largest offline social network in the world (5 million users), our applications have the potential to scale to millions.  

In addition, I am a community builder across numerous organizations including One Young World, WEF Global Shapers and UN Foundation. Finally, I am a champion for underrepresented young people in the UK through the Future’s Leaders Network (FLN), one of the UK's leading youth non-profits. In 2019, I led the UK's delegation to the Youth G7, representing the voice of UK youth voice, with FLN.

To date, Mandala Group has served over 100,000 people through our different mobile applications. This includes: 

• MCOCO - 1,000 coconut farmers around Mombasa, Kenya, who we have doubled their income through selling their produce at market price and enabled transparency into the coconut supply chain for companies

• MREKO - 500 women entrepreneurs piloting the platform who have grown their businesses by over 20% via better business tracking.

• teleStory - 5,000 children and their parents which we have enabled to read for the first time and supported in achieving basic literacy levels 

• BuuPass - 100,000 train users in Kenya who can now access safe, affordable train tickets online or via text, without having to lose a day of work to go and queue to buy a ticket 

Through embedding user-centered design in Mandala Group's approach and co-creating solutions with local non-profit partners (e.g. Pratham) and end-users we have been able to create solutions for users needs, designed by users.

As a thought leader, I have written leadership pieces for Forbes.com, World Economic Forum, OECD and World Innovation Summit on Education, cumulatively with over 1 million views. 

Mandala Group at its center designs and creates for those who have left behind, given we create solutions for the 3.5 billion still offline without regular internet access. A specific example of this is in our solution teleStory in India. Through listening we discovered the best voices for our audio books were local teachers, in hyper-local dialect meaning end-users could understand the stories and trusted them. The content is created specifically for them, not just for anyone. 

As a British Indian, drawing my roots between India, Kenya and the UK, I was always struck meeting youth the same age with equal motivation but far less opportunity due to lower literacy levels. Realizing that the foundation of literacy is based on early-childhood education and being read to by your parents, which millions of children never receive due to parental illiteracy, I sought out to solve this. My co-founder and I built a basic tech solution on feature phones to enable illiterate parents to read to their children through an audio based solution and in the process founded teleStory. Through designing with offline groups with limited access to the internet, we discovered there were still billions offline and set out on a mission to create more solutions, leveraging the tech we had already built. This is of key importance because people who are disconnected from the internet are also disproportionately more likely to face other human issues such as illiteracy, lack of sanitation and poor education resources. 

Information is essential to the world around us - it can help farmers double their income by selling produce at the right price in the right place, it can help mothers appropriately care for the children during infancy and it can create a world of opportunity through education. Most of the information today in the world is held on the internet and yet 3.5 billion people are still offline. Further more millions of children never learn to read to access this information because their parents cannot. Literacy has played a role in the spread of Ebola, child marriage, malnutrition and gender equality. It’s a problem we know how to solve and it needs to be ended. The same with education access. 

I believe through championing access to information and scaling existing solutions to new users in innovative ways is the way I can make the biggest difference to the world. 

Combining tech expertise as a product manager (and designer) with community building leaves me uniquely positioned to build and scale mobile applications for vulnerable users.      

As a community builder, I am particularly well positioned to elevate the voices of others and build community driven solutions. These communities include One Young World, Global Shapers Community, Future Leaders Network and Hult Prize Foundation. Through these intimate global communities of 30,000+ people I can easily jump on the phone with friends and advisors from almost any country in the world on almost any topic. This extends to awareness and sourcing talent.

On the tech side, as a product manager, I have launched and brought multiple mobile applications to market, as well as achieved success in a number of technical hackathons, including Tech Crunch Disrupt London ESRI best hack. 

Our social enterprise, Mandala Group, has received recognition for this work including as a Forbes 30 Under 30, Facebook Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 and Gates Foundation Goalkeepers. 

In 2017, we ran out of cash as a social enterprise and had to make a series of choices around survival. To survive, we prioritized critical projects, ran cash flow projections and even raised funds from family and friends. Unfortunately, this was still not enough runway. Knowing that are talent was our most critical asset, from our developers who had built our tailor-able tech-stack across applications to our designers who deeply understood how to embody user centered design in product development, we made a design to do all things possible to keep all of our team at 8, whatever was possible. 

We found a solution through partnering with Hult Prize Foundation, the world's largest student entrepreneurship platform - helping to run their global innovation programmes and advise their impact startups. This short term pivot enabled us to build up cash to continue as a social enterprise, keep our staff and at the same time join a network of student entrepreneurs and mentors. Following this, we went on to win 55,000 USD Facebook credits in 2019 as part of the Facebook Social Entrepreneur Award. We used these credits to support on crowdfunding campaign which has supported our sustainability through 2020. 

In 2019, I had the honour and opportunity of leading the UK's youth delegation to the G7, the official gathering of the Group of 7 (UK, USA, Canada, Italy, France, Japan and Germany). Hosted in France, Macron took a lens of inequality of the summit, to push global leaders on some of the largest challenges of mass inequality facing our world today: climate change, technology, economic inequality and gender inequality. 

The experience was game-changing for me as a first engagement in both international relations and politics. It gave me a deeper understanding of the nuances of debating, refining and putting forward workable policies and has been a spring-board to even further engagement. Before the experience I’d worked in start-up setting and corporate but had never considered greater social engagement through existing institutions.

At the Summit I had the chance to engage with the Canadian Embassy, OECD, UN Women, UNESCO and Global Company for the Environment, as well as, think tanks, Universities and other G7 groups.

We identified a key issue in the intersection between the 3.8 billion people still offline in the world today and the disproportionate lack of basic services accessible to these groups, despite them still having access to a mobile phone. This led us to pursue opportunities to provide powerful solutions through simple technology applied in a new way. Simultaneously, we believed that education levels won’t increase unless people are given the opportunity to learn through literacy. 

Our innovation is in the connection of different dots within the ecosystem and applying proven technology in new ways through innovative distribution. On the back-end, so far we have developed a basic machine learning algorithm to categorise end-users suitability to provide loans, using alternative data sources. In case of MCOCO this means using measure of delivered coconuts and future yields expectations to provide access to finance, tapping into MPESA (mobile money) to track spending. 

Specifically, this means taking innovations in education or designing solutions for users end-needs around information and creating a compelling user experience that can be delivered over SMS or voice. Through following a stringent design process we are able to understand nuances on the ground to build simple user faces, even for those who are illiterate. Our tech stack for SMS and IVR applications is mainly Twilio based.