Indijin

About 10.5 million children are out of school in Nigeria, which is the highest rate in the world. This figure indicates that one-third of Nigerian children are not in school and one in five out-of-school children in the world is a Nigerian. Language barrier is one of the factors that has contributed to this alarming out of school figure in Nigeria. Language plays an important role in teaching and learning situations, not only as a subject taught in school but also, as the vehicle through which information is shared between the learner and the teacher. It is therefore important to use an ‘appropriate’ language in education. The word ‘appropriate’ in this sense means a language that can effectively capture and interpret all the aspirations of the teacher to the learner in a way that he or she best understands. The trend all over the world especially amongst the developed countries of the world is that the Mother Tongue is equally used in the school system as the medium of instruction. This factor has helped those countries (China, Japan, India, and South Africa to mention but a few) in no small way in achieving enviable development amongst the committee of nations because learners are able to transfer concepts learnt in the mother tongue easily. It is however sad to note that Nigeria, a multilingual with over 400 living languages, seems to be reluctant to tap into the benefits of using the Mother Tongue in her system of education. 

We are seeking to solve the absence of learning in local languages faced by people at the lower base of the pyramid. Despite the recent advancement in technology which has led to the development of online learning tools, these tools are not available for people in their local languages and neither are they accessible for people without access to the internet.

Indijin is a self-paced AI enabled solution that facilitates learning/education in each user's preferred indigenous language. Indijin is a Edutech application powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing. It enables its users to receive education and learn languages via web/mobile apps and USSD. 

The effectiveness of using the language a learner is comfortable with, a language in which he can express his thought and translate his internal ideas into articulate sentences has been established by many scholars (Taiwo 1976, Emenanjo1996, Osborn 2007, Olanrewaju 1996, Oluwole 2008, Obanya 1992). 

Through our solution, users will have access to content in 10 languages: Pidgin, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Twi, Zulu, Swahili, Wolof, Xhosa, and Ciokwe. This product would allow enterprises to reach more audiences and reduce the digital divide. For individual users, language proficiency certification can be obtained for human capital development. Our solution is available for users via mobile app and via USSD.

Our solution serves children in Nigeria who have little to no ability to speak or write in English language. It provides a unique opportunity for them to be educated and empowered in their local language so they can participate/use their skills in the global markets. The solution is designed to be self-paced, allowing users to learn based on their schedule and at the comfort of their homes.

CenterDIAL boasts of a robust and cross-functional team of experienced researchers, AI engineers, data scientists, sound engineers, software engineers, front-end web developers, and a large pool of volunteers and linguists. We have developed a smart AI enabled turn-key translation solution which leverages neural machine translation, statistical machine translation, and expert human translators to provide an incredibly fast, secure, highly accurate translation service to over 1.2 billion people in 10 different languages. Our work has been endorsed by the Nigerian Economic Summit - the largest convergence of government officials, civil societies, policymakers and the media - to break the age-long language barrier in disseminating information in a multilingual country by reaching over 6000 people in five languages with with our smart AI-enabled turn-key translation solution. We have deployed the same solution to Pan-African Bank - Stanbic IBTC. Most recently, our solution emerged as the winner of the Lagos State Innovation Challenge.

CenterDIAL is accelerating Africa’s inclusion in the tech ecosystem by building the infrastructure for the localization of digital products and the seamless transmission of information in local languages. To begin this innovation, we have decided to streamline our product strategy to three sectors: Educaction, Health and Finance. We have completed the first stage of the app development which is the creation of a smart AI-enabled turnkey translation solution. Given this progress and as we plan to update the app with new features, we plan to leverage and draw insights from AI and the broad-tech based community in MIT to develop a world class-locaized application across the three sectors

The challenge of making education accessible in local languages is an age-long challenge that has been identified prior to now but no one has been bold enough to develop a solution to address it. Our solution is innovative because it has been mapped out in such a way that it considers those at the lower base of the pyramid that do not have access to the internet through the availability of the USSD code. Our solution would be a watershed in history as it would bring education to the tips of all users in their local languages.

Our goal is to provide learning opportunities to 2000 students within a year and 20,000 students in the next five years using our solution Indijin. We can achieve this by improving our current solution with feature update and including more languages.

The following are the indicators we would use to measure our progress:

Proportion of children and young people (a) in grades 2/3; (b) at the end of primary; and (c) at the end of lower secondary achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics, by sex in their local language

Number of books translated to local languages via Indijin

Number of users on Indijin mobile app

Number of user on Indijin USSD 

Completion rate of learners on Indijin

Goal

To provide learning opportunities to 2000 students within a year and 20,000 students in the next five years using our solution Indijin

Output

Educate 2000 students in their local languages 

Activities 

Integrate USSD/Text-based component to Indijin app

Sign up 5000 users on Indijin

From the inception of the company we have incorporated diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work. Our Management team is made of a female who is at the forefront of policy and ensuring partnership with the community and people who can use our products. Further, we came about the idea of developing Indijin because we witnessed firsthand the unjust and complicated nature of the present educational system. Not only does it make learning difficult because people are forced to learn outside of their mother language, the recent advancement in edutech has marginalized people without access to internet. We are shattering this form of exclusion through our work