Chuuse

African tutors find it difficult to create and sell a course online, Our solution aims to provide an indigenous web and mobile based platform that will help tutors upload content and easily get found by learners on the internet. The impact we hope to achieve is connect more teachers and students in emerging communities to the internet by making it easy for more teachers to become users and actors in using the internet to reach students. This will improve the welfare of teachers who earn very little because of economic hardships in developing nations.

Many African users; teachers and students do not have the ability to access, adapt and create new knowledge using ICT.
The digital opportunity index scores released by International Telecommunication Union revealed that Nigeria was ranked 31 in the African continent with very low score of 0.41, 0.03 and 0.01 for opportunity, infrastructure and utilization respectively. McKinsey and Company found that the top reason African individuals do not access the internet is because they have not developed the digital skills to do so. 

We developed a learning management system that serves both users such as students looking to learn a new subject/skill and tutors looking to create and upload digital content.

We also developed an Artificial intelligence API called Expert Systems (ES) that helps students to choose career choices based on their results and performance and have career guidance.

Our product serves both users including tutors and students,

1. Tutors looking to digitize their knowledge and content by helping them with an easy user friendly interface and resources to create and sell a course online using our platform and

2. Students leaving high school and in tertiary institutions with career guidance, counselling and development.

Our target user is between ages 16 to 35 of the population, this age bracket consist over 70% of the Nigerian population age.

We are using our solution right now in upskilling talent in tertiary institutions and learning from the engagement of users to better develop a solution that serves them better and meet that career needs, we have made our courses very affordable and are deeply concerned about making it affordable so as to reduce the barrier of entry and usage of our product.

Also we implemented the career path API test to help users who visit our platform for the first time with a career counselling test and decide on a college major to do based on their O'level performance.

For tutors we onboarded 5 tutors on the platform and we have seen the needs and help tutors need and are using this information to create a better strategy and product that can help them create digital content with ease.

This will help us create a better product that will bring more inclusion to tutors in Africa who excluded from the digital space.

Chuuse is solving the problem of digitization of offline teaching contents and digital inclusion of teachers in Nigeria, Our solution provides a web platform to enable local teachers to create digital courses, launch and grow an online learning community fast. Since Covid - 19 affected the normal routing of education in Nigeria, students had to repeat an entire academic year because they were not able to learn online from home.

Our solution seeks to equip teachers regardless of age, gender, location or ability with culturally relevant digital literacy skills to enable participation in the digital economy. 

We selected the Prototype stage because we have developed an MVP and are still in testing phase of our product. We have tested our prototype on paying users and are post revenue but haven't launched fully by investing in marketing and onboarding.

Our prototype testing is helping with the user feedback and observation which our team is constantly using to further develop the product as well as test models for marketing, revenue and user satisfaction.

Our learning platform is designed to keep users on the platform for more than 100 minutes anytime they log in, this is done using AI career tests, counselling, gamification and content for upskill.

We are using technology to enable different tutors and plan to have offline digital creation centers where we can help tutors with support and studio aid in creating and uploading content for learning for users.

Our solution currently serves over 40 paying users including individual B2C and organization B2B. Our aim is to help over 5000 tutors digitize content in the next one year and a 100,000 tutors over the next 5 years.

We measure impact based on target for sustainable development goals 8 which aims to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. Our aim targets specifically target 8.6 to substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training. Virtually every area of our lives is increasingly dominated by the internet and digitized services; individuals unable to access, interact and use digitized services are gradually excluded from enjoying basic benefits in the society.

Impact will be measured by economic benefits on tutors and students from using and leveraging digital skills either through scalable income for tutors or increase demand for learners due to upskill using our platform.

Also we measure impact through retention of users on our platform who keep subscribing to have access to benefits and community we are building.

Right now 3 in 5 users of our platform say they will come back to learn updates or extended courses on Chuuse.  

Co-founders- 2

full-time staff- 5

contractors- 2

Part-time staff- 1

I started working on this solution shortly after the lockdown was lifted during the global lockdown of covid19 in 2020, I and my friends who were going through a professional course were unable to continue classes because our tutors were forced to stay at home as well as students and other workers in schools and training centers. 

I created a product that I and my friends could use to learn self-paced courses with the use our mobile phones and laptop devices, I and my co-founder who is the chief technology officer left our jobs and started this journey to drive digital inclusion in the education sector.

Our team comprises of product, software, data analyst, data scientist, designers, business and sales. We have culture that is healthy and are learning enthusiasts.

Our experience is in sectors that are relevant to what we are building, I have an experience working in startups and education, and our team has experience in government, technology, education and non-profits, With companies like African University of Science Technology, eHealth Nigeria, Federal Inland Revenue Service, Cowrywise etc.

Our approach is to first include females and males in a way that the both genders are equally well represented in the team, giving opportunities to each individual and allowing everyone to achieve career growth based on merit and results. Something likened to a bottom-up approach based on the foundation of a healthy culture that makes the environment friendly to the genders and an enabler to growth irrespective of religion, tribe or gender.

I am applying to solve because I want to be a part of the solver's alumni network. Learning the "Business and impact planning for social enterprises" course by MIT professor Anjali Sastry on EdX, opened my eyes to a new insight on how business can overlay with social impact. I believe this is one of the benefits of becoming a solver, the access to a network of MIT staff, resources and support group during the 9 month program will help our organization to scale our solution within our target population and meet our desired impact in helping tutors digitize offline teaching contents. 

We also require funds to help our business at this stage, the grants and support for partnerships will enable us to meet our current obligations and accelerate the work we started 11 months ago to drive digital inclusion in Nigeria.

Due to our funding and impact milestones goals, mentorship around financial and product /service distribution is most important because we do not want to run out of money and have breaks in other for operations to always be smooth, as well as keep expanding our service reach to meet more users and client base in a scalable way.

Financial support could include working with us to help maintain proper transparent accounting practices, financial reporting to stakeholders and list of partners, advisory on pitches and source of funding, investor relations etc.

Product / service distribution includes partnership support to leverage corporate partnerships for accreditation, technology/telecommunication to reduce cost of internet for users access in rural communities, to reach more teachers and learners.

Facebook: We have our communities on using facebook products, a partnership with the organization will help us explore features to help improve the community we are building using their platform and device a way to use it to penetrate more users in rural area as a strategy for learning.

MTN: MTN is the largest telecommunication company in Nigeria with over 58 million active subscribers, we aim to partner with them to find ways to reduce the cost of learning for users using the network to access learning content on "chuuse".

MIT faculty: partnership with MIT could help us with getting accreditation and imploring best practices for content development, deployment and review for usage with best standards for local traditional content created in our region. 

HP Inc commits to accelerate digital equity for 150 million people by 2030, during Covid19 463 million students could not access remote learning. Chuuse aims to help educators and practitioners to address their respective digital inclusion constraints and opportunities. This focus will contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and help bridge needs with resources and holistic solutions in  education, and economic opportunity.

Considering the development advantages that ICT offers, those who are on the disadvantaged side of the digital divide will remain digitally excluded and underdeveloped. The level of information and computer illiteracy in the rural
areas is alarmingly high. Apart from illiteracy, most people in these communities are low income earners and as such, the provision of ICT facilities remains a luxury. It is commonly reported that internet access in rural communities is poor and almost nonexistent.

We will use the HP prize for advancing digital equity to:

1. Offer classes in general computer skills and technology training either online or offline within rural and urban communities
2. Provide designated spaces, equipped with smart devices for tutorials within target communities                                                                              3. Ensure that digital content is discoverable via any interface                        4. Introduced teachers to different types of digital resources and content.

Every year thousands of high school students in every country face the challenge of choosing their most suitable university/college course. It is a difficult and time consuming task because many factors contribute towards taking the accurate decision like student interest, marks in high school, financial status of the parents etc. Many students should approach some human experts who has knowledge about the colleges and courses. With today’s increasing number of colleges and courses the details provided by a human expert may not be fully sufficient to judge whether a college/course will suit for a particular student. Artificial intelligence methods like Expert Systems (ES) can help and save time in this domain because an ES can provide a fast expert advice based on the knowledge from its knowledge base component.

As an organization we are using AI to amplify our impact in the live of our clients/customers (students) who subscribe to our platform through our expert system technology that is integrated on our LMS platform using an API, this aid students in decision making for career choice based on variables like High school marks. We are developing our technology to include other factors and are using the data from users to offer and develop our Expert System(ES) technology. 

The prize will help us develop this technology and make it a stand alone product to solve deeper problems and advance inclusion in education.