Ileemore

In Nigeria, based on the statistics released by JAMB (Joint Admission Matriculation Board) and WAEC (West Africa Examination Council), about one million students fail at least one of the matriculation examinations needed for admission into tertiary institutions, every year and have to wait another year before they can retake the exam. Last year, 2021, 1.1 million students failed the UTME(Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination) out of the 1,340,003 candidates who registered. That is a 86% failure rate. 

Yet, parents spend close to one billion dollars on extramural lessons, past questions textbooks and exam fees every year. It’s heartbreaking to know that 51% of these parents live below the poverty line of $2 per day and are only striving to give their kids the best education and a good life. 

This problem exists because of a lack of quality educational content especially in the area of test preparations.

This problem can have a direct implication on Africa’s labour force as the continent’s population is expected to double to about 2.4 billion by 2050, making it home to the world's largest working-age population. This can render the growing population unequipped for the future of work.

In the short term, this problem has a psychological effect on the students. Most of them are depressed and don't see themselves capable of achieving academic excellence. In the last six years, there were five recorded cases of students who committed suicide for failing the UTME.

Ileemore is an e-learning platform that helps students prepare for matriculation examinations and provides teachers with strength and weakness analysis of students to improve learning outcomes.

The platform enables West African students to take tests on past questions of matriculation examinations. We present the answers in a comprehensible, conversational and interactive approach with the aid of diagrams and animations to drive home the point. Students can take tests based on topics, get formative feedback and learn adaptively. Students can also ask their own questions and get quality answers from our tutors.

Based on these engagements, we want to do a Question-Level Analysis using Artificial Intelligence to analyze each student's strengths and weaknesses, for each subject. With our solution, students are being assessed as they learn and given the help they need before taking an examination. This will further give students all the help they need to gain admission into a tertiary institution, develop their potentials and live a good life.

The platform can be assessed through a web and android app. We also deploy a regularly-updated offline version of the platform on computers via an intranet - made up of mainly a raspberry pie and router.

Value Proposition

Students: We help students prepare for matriculation examinations with well-solved and well-explained past questions as opposed to what they get in their usual past question textbooks and other test prep platforms.

Teachers: We help teachers quickly identify the areas of weakness of students at a micro-level, individual and class-level. A teacher can know the specific sub-topic a student or a class is not performing well in before they take a matriculation examination. Teachers can then stretch and challenges students, with the data and resources we give them. We also reduce the teacher workload.

Every member of my time has faced the problem my solution is solving. For instance, I finished secondary school, top of my class but I still had to write the UTME (a matriculation examination) 2 times before I could gain admission into a university.

My team consists of business developers with a cumulative 11 years of entrepreneurship experience across various industries. We have a software engineer with 7+ years of experience building software products across four industries. Between 2016 and 2017, I co-ran an initiative that provided free and quality tutorials to students in low-income communities.

We also have a team of facilitators who have been in the secondary school education system for 7 years and have witnessed firsthand the problems inherent.  They have tutored secondary school students and have been able to see certain needs of students such as the need to relate what they are being taught to real-life experiences, the need to have a personalized education, having in mind the ease of access and affordability.

For every user that signs up on our platform, we constantly engage them to get feedback and better understand their pain point. We also ensure that their problems are being solved.

Earlier in 2020, my startup, ileemore.com started attracting users organically from four other countries in West Africa. Having achieved product-market fit, I'm at a point where I need all the help I can get to scale my startup and push for access to Quality Education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I want to harness the great support system of Solve to improve my core technology, form partnerships with relevant stakeholders and scale across the African continent.

Data is hardly used in the learner's journey in Nigeria and major parts of Africa. Almost every time, students are assessed at the end of a semester. At this point, there is little that can be done to help the students.

However, with our solution students are constantly being assessed and given the help they need before taking a matriculation examination. This way we are able to create a movement from assessment of learning to assessment in learning and assessment as learning in the Education space.

We also adopt the concept of Learning Engineering to develop our content, deliver our content, create a reliable data-rich learning environment and improve the pedagogy. 

Our solution also makes use of Artificial Intelligence to measure each student's strengths and weaknesses based on how they answer each question in a test. This helps us to curate a personalized learning path for each student.

In the next year, I want to help 100,000 students to pass their matriculation examinations so as to gain admission into tertiary institutions advance their life, develop their potential and live a good life. This is made possible by partnerships with 1,000 tutorial centres in Nigeira.

Already, we have an online presence in three other West African countries, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone - asides from Nigeria. In the next five years, I'm looking to form partnerships with schools and tutorial centers in these countries and other African countries, in order to amplify our impact.

I measure progress by the growth in the number of people using my solution, the pass rate of matriculation examinations, the number of underserved student communities I'm able to reach and the number of students that my solution helps to gain admission into tertiary institutions.

My theory of change is to build a robust e-learning platform like that of BYJU(the most valued edtech in the world), to reach students from all kinds of communities.

The platform will make education affordable, accessible and personalized for the African child.

With this, the growing population of Africa will be equipped to live an equitable life, fulfil their potential and contribute meaningfully to their society and the world at large.

My technology is mainly software accessible through a web and android app. Our web and android app makes it easy for students to access our content seamlessly on any device. The solution utilizes the Computer Based-Test technology to enable students take tests on topics and past questions of matriculation examinations, do revisions and enable to us to analyze their learning track. The stacks are HTML 5, CSS 3, MySql, Javascript and PHP.

Our solution also makes use of Artificial Intelligence to measure each student's strength and weaknesses based on how they answer each question in a test. This helps us to curate a personalized learning path for each student, suggesting where topics and to focus and improve on. 

We also deploy a regularly-updated offline version of the solution on computers via an intranet - made up of mainly a raspberry pie, networking cables and a router.

We always ensure that we have a balance proportion of diverse people during our recruitment process.

We also have a policy that accepts everyone.

Our business model is a mix of B2B for schools and B2C for parents and students and B2B2C with tutorial centres. We offer subscription plans to parents and students at the cost of N1000($2.4) for one month, N3000($7.2) for three months and N6000($14.4)8 for six months. We set up our platform via a Local Area Network in schools on the schools’ existing computers at the cost of $ 600 per year to solve the problem of internet connectivity and hardware. We run a B2B2C model with tutorials centres. They earn a  commission for every paid user they sign up on our platform. We have achieved product-market fit with this as this model reduce our cost of customer acquisition by 80%.

We have achieved product-market fit with our B2B2C approach, partnership with in-person tutorial centres. The model reducess our cost of customer acquisition by 80%. We plan to scale this model in the next year by partnering with 1,000 tutorial centres and becoming profitable and sustainable.

We have partnered with 10 tutorial centre and made revenue of $150 in one month.