Hodari (Brave)

The Kenyan government changed the education curriculum in 2017 from an examination-based system to a more inclusive, Competency Based Curriculum (CBC). The new curriculum was deployed to children in Grade 1 in 2017, beginning to phase out the current 8-4-4 system.

Teachers trained and experienced in the examination-based system were meant to transition to the CBC based system through a complex litany of theoretical and practical training sessions to be conducted yearly, as CBC progressed to the next year.

In 2020, when COVID-19 hit, the trainings stopped and have never restarted. This has left more that 85% of teachers untrained and incapable of supporting the CBC curriculum adequately.  With students now in Grade 5, there is a desperation among teacher looking for ways to learn CBC while on the job.

The biggest hurdles with the new system is the intensity of the reporting system the teachers use for CBC, which is more vigorous, requiring daily progress reports written into a student assessment book for every student. There are more than 360,000 teachers in Kenya and 6 million students in CBC, with this number growing every year.

The impact of under-trained teachers, and additional cost for parents to get the CBC students assessment book that has increased the teachers' administrative labor teachers have all been a barrier to the delivery of meaningful education gains in the ECD sector in Kenya.

Hodari is a mobile application that digitizes Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) administrative processes for teachers to help reduce their work-load through, so that they can focus
more on their students.

The mobile application also provides video training content for teachers to help them learn how to deliver CBC content to their students. Using Hodari, a small sample group of teachers have been able to reduce the time they take on the CBC Student Assessment Books from 4 hours a week to approximately 30 minutes.

Hodari also removes the need for all the parents to purchase the CBC Student Assessment Book, lowering the cost for parents, and lets teachers send reports directly to parents, other teachers, or the school administrator through WhatsApp, email and SMS text. 

As a mobile application, the opportunity for Hodari to scale is exponential, and the data cost is reduced because of the kind of content on the application. There are various web solutions doing what Hodari is doing, but they are more expensive and need a computer, which most teachers do not have access to. The impact of COVID-19 and the way technology-for-learning was embraced also improved teacher interaction with digital learning solutions. This positive outlook towards EdTech has reduce the uptake friction teacher-facing solutions are having post COVID-19.

Hodari is a mobile application for Kenyan Competency based Curriculum (CBC) teachers working predominantly in the public school system, with 76% in rural and low-income urban areas with an average salary of $250. Hodari would support them by reducing the time it takes to fill the CBC Student Assessment books that keep them in school for longer hours than necessary.

74,000 teachers of the 340,000 in Kenya are actively teaching CBC to children in 5 grades around the country. As CBC progresses in Kenya, the number of students will increase, as will the number of educators teaching CBC. 2021 is the 5th year of CBC and there are seven (7) more years of phasing out to go, from the previous learning system to the new one. This means we have seven (7) more years of teacher training content to be created as the new CBC curricula is unveiled by the Kenyan Ministry of Education, in addition to the 5 years that have already begun.

In 3 years, we expect to have more then 200,000 teachers teaching in CBC and 6 million students in Grade 9 and below. We are working to make Hodari the go-to mobile application for teachers in the CBC system and expect to have 20% of the teachers in Kenya using the application in 5 years.

We believe that Hodari training videos will help teachers directly impact 3 million children, and the data they collect on the Hodari app on their students will be relayed to the local and national government, feeding into data-driven decision making and create policy in the education sector. The reduced time in the collection, aggregation, translation, and delivery of student data will additionally improve student intervention times and increase teacher engagement with students by 65%.

The reduced cost by eradicating CBC Student Assessment Books and the fact the reports can be sent digitally will help with inclusion for the millions of parents that do not have the money to purchase the books or live far from their children and will be unable to see the assessment book at the end of the school day. 

Kytabu’s leadership team has accrued 60 years of experience in EdTech, Telcos, content creation, personal development and platform development with proven results that have changed the Kenyan technology landscape over the last decade. The key company leaders are:

● Tonee Ndungu (CEO) - Founder of Kytabu with 10 years in EdTech. He has strong expertise in platforms and digital education being dyslexic himself and and MsC in Organizational Development. 

● Silvia Muturi (Teacher engagement lead) - A former special needs
teacher and current teacher engagement lead at Kytabu. Silvia been
working with teachers in CBC and is the project lead for Hodari.

● Steve MacKeown (CTO) - A 22 year experienced software engineer
with experience in language, platform, and physical medium agnostic full stack development with strong UX and digital content .

● Paul Mugambi (Board Chair) - Former Kytabu CEO and current Board Chair Paul Mugambi is the former Director of VAS at Equitel and Safaricom, credited with Skiza Tunes, M-Kopa and Okoa Jahazi projects that he oversaw. He leads a board of engineers, content creators, PhD holders and doctors that watch over and add value to Kytabu from their wealth of knowledge.

As previous Solve applications and winners, we have seen the immense value of being SOLVErs. We are excited about being part of a peer network with organizations doing similar work and exchange best practices, advice and support.

Through Solve’s global network, we want to learn from and meet with
potential partners within and outside the US. We're looking to grow our
institutional partners (both domestic and international education,
informal and formal education institutions) but currently do not have
networks or exposure outside of the US.

Also, given our resourcing requirements to meet our scaling goals, Solve's connections will be invaluable to ensuring access to a broader pool of technical/financial/strategic resources.

Hodari deploys technology that is current but has not been brought

together to create a single solution together with what is available for students and schools. These solutions are a learning management system, social networking tools and adaptive learning.

By bringing all these platforms together and supporting teachers, we create the opportunity to provide a virtual learning platform that enables peer-driven support both for teachers and students. This, in addition to the video learning content that caters for teacher training for CBC, would be a strong stage for teachers accelerate their learning path into the new curriculum Kenya is implementing.

Our 5 year vision is to maximize the potential of 300,000 Kenyan teachers and educators, to support their students changing their educational curriculum. By providing teachers with 1) training content on how to deliver CBC more meaningfully,  2) automating many administrative responsibilities for teachers 3) and keeping the application affordable and easy to use., we believe we will achieve our goals.

Hodari is a mobile application and the KPIs will be based on the metrics we collect on the mobile application itself. We have 5 KPIs we will be using to track Hodari’s performance. They are:

1) User downloads and metrics. This data includes geographic location, mobile phone type and time of day the download was done. 

2) App usage for lesson planning, schemes of work and data collection. This will include the school the teacher is in, the number of students in their class and the learning level the students are at, against the government timetable.

3) Teacher training videos watched. This will include the number of videos, how many times they were watched, times of the day they were watched and the user ratings on the videos.

4) Data collected on students. This will be done by looking at how many fields are filled by the teachers, how many times the data is added a day/week and the type of data that is filled in the student’s assessment fields.

5) The student progression over time based on the data input by teachers. Hodari will also look at the data itself to see how well the students are doing over time.

Our theory of change is centered on our teachers recognizing the need for support and their improved experience with technology over the last 2 years. COVID-19 forced many teachers to integrate technology into their teaching practice and the additional strain of a new curriculum has created an opportunity for behavioral change that is what Hodari would bring. We believe that because of the automated administrative tasks available on the platform and the digital content for learning that teachers will have access to, teachers will be motivated to participate and keep using the platform to grow both their own know how and increase their engagement time with their students.

Kytabu is a digital education suite that comprises of a school management system, learning management system, social networking platform, mobile apps for parents, teachers and students, and supports SMS text to create a virtual learning reality for education systems. Using deployed big data and adaptive learning technology, Kytabu applies behavioral science technology to a social networking underpinning our app for students and teachers. This helps us create virtual learning communities built on the teacher subjects and grade that can support their teaching plans.

Both Kytabu Inc. as an EdTech company and education as an industry, has relied on the input of women as both decision makers and contributors for a long time. In the creation, engagement and deployment of solutions in education, we work diligently to have women lead the projects we do because a large number of educators, parents and students are women. Creating equitable environments for working and innovation help in diversification of thought while eliminate stereotypical and systemic barriers that have prevented the full participation of women in technology and education.

Kytabu started as a mobile application for students to access textbooks,
audiobooks and videos curated from around the world that would support
and supplement the content students learnt in class. Kytabu has grown
and built solutions for content delivery for students and teachers on
web and mobile devices. Our custom built in-house Kytabu Learning
Management System (KLMS), Super-School Management System (KS3) and apps for parents, teachers and students are quickly growing across thousands
of users in the education technology space in Kenya. By charging for
these services as subscriptions, Kytabu will make its revenue
from the number of users and schools it gets.

We are currently generating an income from our other digital solutions. This helps us run the organization but we do not have enough to develop Hodari. Once complete and in the market, Hodari would generate its own income and become a paid for product by teachers. We are currently fund raising to have the product complete.

Some examples of our path to financial sustainability are:

Revenue: 2021 - $60,000

Jacobs Foundation - A grant for the development of the Girls4Girls mobile product under our #somanasi program:Grant - $220,000

Mastercard Foundation - A deployment partner and part of their first EdTech cohort in Africa: Grant - $40,000