Scholarshop

Solving Educational Pipeline Problems in Africa

There is a growing uneducated or undereducated population in Africa. Numerous infrastructural challenges have prevented children from having access to an education and even when they do, relevant topics are not part of the curriculum. Scholarshop not only provides an online store for the sale and resale of academic tools and services but also provides relevant educational content, in multiple languages, that seamlessly integrates into an existing curriculum. In order to ensure that every African child has access to an education, part of the profits would be used in building educational infrastructure in areas that are largely under serviced.

What makes Scholarshop innovative is that we approach solving educational problems holistically. The content which will be sold to schools would be based on not only the demands of the current workforce but also seamlessly integrate into the school's curriculum. The content would be structured to build cross cultural competence, multidisciplinary and critical thinking.

Technology is critical to our solution because the content that would be sold to schools has to work well on multiple media platforms and areas with low internet accessibility. Also, natural language translation would be used to translate the content into the numerous languages used across the continent.

Over the next 12 months, Scholarshop hopes to launch in major private schools across Abuja,Nigeria while providing free content to the under serviced public schools in the area. By the end of the year, we plan to have launched the school shopping delivery platform, the school ranking platform and co-creation spaces for children over the summer.

Over the next three to five years, I hope that Scholarshop would have created a new generation of politically, economically and environmentally consouis Africans. I hop that we are able to lobby the West African Examination Council to change the curriculum of West Africa to something that is relevant to today's economy.

We are still in the process of building the application and are speaking currently with potential schools.

We hope to serve 5000 students but the end of the first and millions of students by the end of the 3rd year

I am Software Engineer with a strong liberal arts background. So, I am able to be the technical lead and use my passive income to bootstrap my idea. 

We will use multiple revenue models depending on the product type. We will use the rental model for the educational content which would be sold to schools. E-commerce model will be used for the online store where students can buy and sale educational tools such as textbooks. Then services such as co-creation spaces, school bus shuttles and schools ranking will be paid for using the subscription model.

I am applying to Solve to not only get access to professionals in this field but also funding for Scholarshop. 

Key Barriers would include initially finding and I believe that Solve would be able to provide me with access to funding.