Posterity

Childcare without borders

In a quest to make ends meet, most households in Africa are supported by two working parents. As a result, more parents within this region are becoming aware of the need and benefits of quality childcare during the early years of their children’s development. Research shows that the first 1000 days of a child’s life are the most critical for a child’s development because 90% of a child’s brain development occurs within this period. In essence, it is crucial that as the primary and natural educators, the child's parents be involved in the child's activities within this period. It is therefore worrisome for parents to drop their children off at school every morning and have basically no connection to them for the greater part of the day. On the other hand, it’s disturbing for teachers and educators to have so much paperwork to manage on a regular school day that they would have to spend so much time away from the children. These educators have to manually keep a log of the children's attendance, communicate with parents about child development and daily activities, billing and payments, event dates or supplies that their children will need. These involve a lot of time and paperwork for the educators.

In order to solve the stated concerns, we have developed an app called Posterity. Posterity is a cloud-based service that provides a variety of classroom management and parent engagement features uniquely designed for early education. The platform is designed as a parent communication and collaboration portal for early childhood educators to send daily reports, photos, activity information, and so much more, allowing parents the ability to stay connected with their children throughout the day from any location.

We believe that quality childcare is a product of well run, efficient and profitable childcare facilities. We empower early childhood educators with an intuitive and user-friendly childcare software that helps them to streamline their operations by simplifying communication and collaboration with parents, reducing cost, reducing effort, saving time, increasing enrollment and ultimately increasing their standard of care for the children. For the parents, posterity will make them more involved in their children's education, give them a sensory appeal and help reduce anxiety.

We want to help bridge the communication gap between early childhood educators and parents. We believe strongly that one of the most effective ways to help children achieve ambitious educational goals is to empower their educators and involve their parents.   

Presently, communication between early childhood educators and parents is done manually. Majority of the early childcare providers in Africa make use of communication books and verbal means to communicate the children's development and daily activities with parents. 

As far as Africa is concerned, Posterity is a first of its kind and it is aimed at bridging the communication gap between early childhood educators and parents. We believe strongly that children whose parents are engaged in their homework, talk with them about school and help plan their education, make better grades and demonstrate better behavior at school and at home.

With the use of the Posterity app, educators can post activities and record the progress of every child. Parents will be able to view their children's welfare and development from any location in real time. This app can be used on any smart phone, tablet or laptop. One of our objectives is to help early childhood educators in this part of the world evolve with the technology revolution. Every communication done via the posterity app will be an opportunity for educators to promote parent partnerships and ultimately, support student learning.

Our target for this period is to have successfully completed a pilot and go on to on-board at least 500 creches and preschools in Nigeria before moving to other African countries. With this accomplishment, we hope to have started helping early childhood educators record effective communication and collaboration with parents, which is essential to create strong school-home partnerships and to increase parental involvement. Just as educators are skilled in the art of fostering young minds, they also require knowledge and skills to effectively communicate with their parent community.

Over the next five years, we plan to build a Pan-African brand that will serve educators and parents across the African continent. In a quest to reach a larger audience across Africa, we plan to translate posterity to other languages like French, Portuguese, Arabic and Swahili. We also have plans to partner Government Agencies and Childcare Regulatory Bodies across the continent. With these partnerships, we believe we can help millions of children achieve ambitious educational goals by using posterity to engage their parents.

Our base market strategy is to leverage on our relationship with School Hunters and the National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS). We will also employ outbound marketing using a team of sales and business development professionals. We will share our content on social media platforms like facebook, linkedin, youtube, twitter and Instagram to get in the faces of potential customers. We will use video explainers, contact popular blogs and websites, apply for awards, run contests and contact admins of related facebook groups. Email Marketing will also play a major role in creating awareness for the product.

We recently completed the prototype for posterity and we hope to commence a pilot by August 2018. Prior to the commencement of the app design and development, we spoke to thousands of parents whose children are in early years about how posterity would work and over 90% said they would gladly pay to use the platform. We have also been talking to several creches and preschools in Nigeria and majority of them have shown interest in using the app once it is completed. 

In the next 12 months, we hope to be serving at least 500 creches and preschools, 5000 educators, 10,000 children and about 20,000 parents. Over the next 3 years, we hope to have expanded from Nigeria into other African countries. With this achievement, we expect to be serving at least 10,000 creches and preschools, 100,000 educators, 200,000 children and about 400,000 parents. By the end of 3 years, we would have succeeded in promoting parental involvement across several schools and homes in Africa.

Ayoola Oluga is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. He previously co-founded a technology startup that handles electronic payments and collections for private and public companies. He has 10 years working experiences in various fields including Financial Advisory, Operations, Business Development and Procurement. He is responsible for the overall company vision and strategy.

Eno Bassey is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. He has about 12 years experience as a Solutions Architect and Web Developer. He is currently responsible for the back-end development of the platform. He oversees the platform design, development and any changes in system architecture.

The childcare centres will pay a monthly subscription fee to make use of the platform. The childcare centres will gladly pay for it because the platform will be easy-to-use and it has been designed specifically to meet the needs of early education. The platform will help the childcare centres automate their administrative processes, thereby saving them time and cost. Most childcare centres have shown interest in the platform already and they are willing to pay for the value we offer. We will offer them real value not just by meeting their needs but also by meeting their expectations.

Some of the possible barriers for posterity are inadequate capital to commit to a full stack development, proper exposure, the right partnerships, access into other African markets and building the right team. 

We believe strongly that Solve can help us with mentorship, product development, part of the required financing, as well as the kind of exposure that we need to make posterity a household name. We will also be needing some strategic partnerships with major players in Education and Technology and we believe that Solve can help secure such partnerships.