Akili Family: Whole Child Intervention

Research shows that 90% of brain development happens in the first five years of life, and positive early learning leads to better outcomes in school and life. However, “learning” is often equated with “schooling” at the policy, societal and familial levels, according to studies conducted in East Africa. 

Currently, 44% of preschoolers in Africa suffer from low cognitive or socio-emotional development. Ubongo’s early childhood intervention, Akili Family, has two major goals: 1) improve early learning experiences for 50 million families over a 5-year period and 2) fundamentally change the paradigm and perception of caregivers towards early learning in East Africa to child-centered, home-based early learning from birth until schooling. We strive to reach 15 million families monthly by 2020 with social and behavioral change messaging about early learning, to increase civic engagement around ECD, and to support caregivers to be their children’s first teachers using localized, free, high-quality edutainment.

While many African governments have recognized the critical importance of ECD, most efforts are siloed, with different ministries responsible for young children’s health and survival (Ministries of Health), their protection and wellbeing (varied Ministries across countries), and their early learning (Ministries of Education). Ministries of Health have invested heavily to reduce the mortality rates of children under the age of 5, drastically improving child health over the past decade–but the learning and cognitive development of very young children has been largely overlooked. 

In Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and much of Africa, learning (through government “schooling”) starts at the age of 6. These countries have implemented 1-2 years of government pre-primary education, starting around age 5. Their efforts in applying a pedagogy of rote schooling is not conducive to early learning, while also missing most of the critical window for brain development: the first 5 years. Couple this with the tens of millions of children who will be born in Sub-Saharan Africa over coming years, and we see that drastic systems change is needed if we are to help the next generation of future citizens not only survive, but also thrive.

Ubongo uses human-centered design while developing all of its content to ensure the programming is effective and impactful. Through this comprehensive process, we regularly co-create content with children and their caregivers, as well as quickly test this content in new markets for localization and adaptability. We connect with a diverse array of subgroups–parents, caregivers, children, and educators–to ensure that content is tailored to the local context, in the local language, for the local community. The messaging and specific content for the Akili Family series are based upon insights that we gather from these users, which we then rapidly prototype and continue to test during different stages of production. This ensures that information is effective and engaging for our target audience. Akili Family content pinpoints key learning objectives and provides engaging content in alphabet comprehension, numeracy, socio-emotional learning, reading and health, among other themes. We also address concerns that originate directly from caregivers, including brain building activities and how parents can “play” with their child using resources that are locally available. With the help of Solve, we will continue to engage with children and caregivers across Africa to produce engaging educational content that is available on the technology they already own.

Media intervention: Our Akili Family content leverages social and behavior change communication (SBCC) methodologies to improve children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development through engaging, localized cartoons. The fun and interactive content engages both children and caregivers in play-based learning activities and segments that have been proven to boost alphabet comprehension, numeracy, and school readiness. By producing media across a wide variety of platforms, including television, radio, mobile applications, ebooks and more, Akili Family educational content utilizes every avenue available to reach kids and families across Africa. The engaging animations, interactive songs, and friendly characters, alongside the educational content specifically developed with the child in mind, provides a comprehensive learning framework for pre-primary children and families. 

Akili Family’s cartoons have had positive outcomes for the children who watch the show. A study conducted through the University of Maryland found that after just one month of watching Akili Family, viewers outperformed their peers by:

• 24.0% in counting; 

• 12.5% in English language skills; 

• 11.7% in number recognition;

• 9.7% in shape knowledge; and

• 8.2% improvement in drawing skills. 

Leveraging existing technologies: The Akili Family program utilizes existing technologies to deliver localized, play-based learning content to children and caregivers across Africa. Free television airings seamlessly integrate Akili Family content with local TV shows, and radio programs are available for those without televisions. Akili Family educational media is accessible on any phone that has access to mobile applications, which extends the reach of our children’s cartoons and caregiver engagement features even further. By engaging with children and families through technology they already use, play-based learning and engaging socio-emotional development content become accessible and reliable parts of a child’s life. 

Caregivers as first teachers: Cognitive and socio-emotional development begin in the early years of a child’s life, long before they are enrolled in school. Education intervention that recognizes this fact allows parents and caregivers to become the teacher in their children’s lives. By utilizing Akili Family learning techniques, parents and caregivers can understand the importance of becoming key players in the engagement and stimulation that are essential for a young child’s developmental process.

Ubongo utilizes social and behavior change communication (SBCC) methodologies through media interventions to shift the paradigm of early learning. Right now, Akili Family is one of the only programs in Sub-Saharan Africa that employs SBCC frameworks to produce quality educational cartoons for children and caregivers alike. 

Ubongo’s Akili Family is special not only for the SBCC frameworks it utilizes in its curriculum, but also because the content is localized to the African context. Our programs are especially unique because they fill critical educational voids with effective, localized learning content. As we’ve developed our brand and spoken to caregivers and children, we’ve continued to learn about the gap in representation in local content. Families frequently turn to television shows made outside of Africa that feature characters their children can’t relate to. But it’s imperative that children see themselves in the books they’re reading and the shows they’re watching. Children and caregivers want to see media that mirrors their lived experiences: characters who look like them, speak their language, and share their culture.  

Akili Family also distinguishes itself through integration of caregiver educational content. In order for educational media intervention to impact early childhood development over the long term, caregivers must obtain the practical knowledge to play a role in their child’s socio-emotional development. 

Akili Family is the only Pan-African cartoon series available in Sub-Saharan Africa that targets both children aged 0-5 and their caregivers for SBCC with our engaging content and early childhood curriculum.

Akili Family programming and Ubongo content on the whole utilize existing technologies to educate in an empathetic and inventive way. Ubongo is committed to being platform-agnostic, meaning our educational content is available on almost any technology. TVs, radios, and low-feature phones exist widely across Africa, and are readily accessible to a majority of the population. 120 million households in Africa own TVs (Dataxis 2019), and tens of millions more watch TV in public spaces. Additionally, over 75% of African homes own a working radio (UNESCO 2013) and 80% of adults in Africa own a mobile phone (AllAfrica 2017). Therefore, quality, researched-based educational media that is available on a wide variety of platforms is a highly cost-effective and scalable way to improve cognitive and social emotional learning outcomes for young children. 

Ubongo capitalizes upon this connectivity across Africa by producing content that can be accessed by almost any media player. In areas without easy access to technology, we continue to work with solar companies to provide content through USB sticks and partner with organizations to screen Akili Family in community video halls. The technology is relatively simple; the key is the interactive programming and intensive development of content. 

Akili Family is a first-of-its-kind educational media product that engages children in early education objectives and encourages socio-emotional development through fun, interactive media on all platforms. Ubongo is revolutionizing early childhood development by utilizing prevalent technologies to engage caregivers and parents in engaging and informative socio-emotional and cognitive education.

Our theory of change springs from the understanding that early development and education in the first five years of life have a fundamental impact on the trajectory of a child’s life. Our program focuses specifically on the ages of 0 to 5, where there is almost a complete lack of early education for children in Africa. This is an age at which educational media such as Sesame Street, interactive radio instruction, and other media-based interventions have been shown to have significant positive impact on a child’s development and school readiness (Mares and Pan 2013). 

A study conducted by Dina Borzekowski from the University of Maryland found that Akili and Me viewers in Tanzania achieve approximately 0.1 standard deviation higher gains than control groups, comparable to the impact of attending government pre-primary in Tanzania (Bietenbeck et al. 2017). Additionally, the program maintains its strong learning outcomes when carefully adapted to other languages (Borzekowski et al. 2019). After just one month of daily exposure, Tanzanian children who watched Akili and Me outperformed control groups by 24% in numeracy and 12% in over school readiness. 16% of parents say that Ubongo’s programs have helped them to improve their parenting and 83% of parents say that Ubongo’s edutainment has improved their child’s quality of life. 

In 2018, Ubongo reached over 11.2 million families across Africa via TV, radio and mobile phones, and significantly improved the early cognitive development of an estimated 1.3 million children aged 2-4 in East Africa. 

By 2020, we plan to scale our programming to reach 15 million families monthly by continuing to dub our content in several other African languages in Nigeria and Kenya, as well as increase our reach through additional media platforms, such as radio and IVR. 

By 2025, we plan to have Akili Family reach 50 million families across Africa by expanding our content into more African languages. We will form partnerships with Free-to-Air TV stations in multiple African countries (as we have already done in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia) to keep our content available to families free of cost. We’re committed to keeping Akili Family content cost-effective and accessible to all children and caretakers–by scaling up our programming and adapting it to more languages, we can impact the lives of millions more in Africa through technologies already accessible to them.

One Year

Within the next year, we’d like to utilize economies of scale to reduce the cost per user for our Akili Family content. By expanding our reach into new countries and new communities, we can reach more people while keeping costs to the user to a minimum. In the next year, we’d like to expand our outreach to 15 millions families monthly, in order to provide quality educational entertainment to children at little to no cost to their families. We are also dubbing our content into 6 new languages; Twi, Yoruba, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, Kikuyu and Igbo by the end of 2020. 

Five Years 

Within the next five years, we want our content to be available on broadcast media in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to grow our portfolio of content to build Africa's first edutainment "universe" of connected, fun learning brands. To do this, we are systematizing our growth engine with a replicable model of entering new markets, while also stoking our innovation engine with research and development to create more beloved brands that will capture African kids' hearts and minds the way Akili Family has done. We eventually want Akili Family to be free for all families and accessible to every child in Africa, on whatever technology they use.

Regulation 

An obstacle we face is the increasing government regulation of media, which is especially a challenge in Tanzania at the moment, where we are based. We no longer have as much freedom to design and broadcast independent media content for children and parents. New laws and regulations are being put in place to ensure that media aligns with government messaging, and we foresee a number of new checks and approvals in the process of getting content to broadcast in Tanzania and other countries. 

Growth 

As Ubongo continues to expand, we must preserve the quality of our content and the communication links between team members. So far, our team based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has been able to ensure that research, scripts, audio and visual products are up to our high standards. However, as we grow into new countries and new languages, we must rely on trusted partners or train new employees to ensure educational and story quality are maintained. 

Digital Divide

While technological devices that house our Akili Family educational content are widely available across Africa, we’re conscious of the digital divide that affects our target population of kids and caregivers. We’re committed to bringing Akili Family programming to as many families as possible, so we produce our educational media to be accessible to anyone with a connected device. However, by providing engaging educational content to those who have access to technology, we miss a key demographic of families who could benefit from our pre-primary media.

Regulation

As a solution to regulatory issues, we are distributing content to as many additional media platforms as possible, beyond just government broadcasters, and ensuring we are constantly in conversation with broadcasters and regulators. We used to only be on free-to-air on TZ,  but our content is now on multiple channels and we have an increased Youtube presence (Akili and Me has 100,000 subscribers!). We are not only a Tanzanian brand anymore.

Growth 

To overcome challenges associated with growth, we have launched an online Ubongo knowledge internal management system to ensure the team members (even those working remotely) have access to the information and training they need to do their jobs. We will also ensure that the management team spends significant time in new markets to support country representatives and adaptation partners, as well as bringing them to Tanzania to ensure that they learn our Ubongoers' Principles and ways!

Digital Divide 

In order to prevent contribution to the digital divide, we partner with organizations to bring our localized media into non-electrified communities. This ensures that children and families who may not have access to TVs, phones, or radios still benefit from the quality education content that Ubongo produces. Recently, we were awarded a grant by a solar-panel company to bring our shows to non-electrified communities in 2019 and 2020.

• 36 full-time staff 

• 3 contractors

At Ubongo, we’re rapidly establishing ourselves as the market leaders in kids' edutainment for Sub-Saharan Africa. We have built our own research and production capacity in Tanzania, and have successfully produced and broadcast Akili Family content for 4 years. Our partners have conducted research that shows that children who regularly watch Akili Family have 12% higher school readiness scores and 24% higher counting skills when compared to control groups. Additionally, caregivers who utilize our Akili Family content are 12% more likely to read and engage in socio-emotional learning challenges with their children. We have spent 2019 in strategic planning and development testing Akili Family, and we are now positioned to rapidly scale the program. 

We have strong internal capacity to undertake expansion of Akili Family, with experienced operations and finance staff to manage growth, as well as depth of technical and creative experience in creating edutainment for East African audiences. On the technical and creative side, our full production process is done in-house at our studio in Tanzania. We do our own human-centered design and prototyping, with daily in-person testing sessions with kids. We have a custom built sound studio, full animation facilities and a production server for storage, data protection and reproducibility. Our team of talented multilingual educationalists, writers, producers, animators, musicians and sound engineers are full time "Ubongoers" dedicated to our mission. We are starting with massive and redundant reach on this scaling goal in order to bring transformative learning content to millions of families across Africa.

Ubongo partners with two organizations to develop and distribute Akili Family content: 

• Curious Learning: Ubongo and Curious Learning (co-produce/co-create) interactive, leveled books for children. Ubongo creates the storyline, animations, and soundbites for the books, and Curious Learning distributes the content on their (app-accessible) platform.  

• Enuma: Ubongo and Enuma work in partnership to develop applications for children. These apps encourage memory retention, play-based learning, and educational gaming on readily-accessible technology. Ubongo provides the characterization and video content for the applications, and Enuma creates the application software. We currently have 4 co-branded applications in production that will be available on the Google Play Store.

As Ubongo continues to grow its reach and continues creating more localized content across Africa, we have a hybrid business model combining grant and charitable revenue with commercial revenue through B2B and B2C sales. Currently, a majority of our revenue comes in the form of grants. To generate earned revenue and fund further edutainment content production, we are concentrating our business efforts first and foremost on co-production partnerships. Through our Ubongo Impact offering for partners, we reach families with important messages through our popular edutainment programs (both Akili and Me and Ubongo Kids). Additionally, we are pursuing strategic partnerships/consortiums in order to secure resources for further content creation. We will also continue to pursue licensing and distribution for pay-TV, VOD and other platforms, to increase institutional sales of content packages through the development of Ubongo edutainment kits for partners. Instead of concentrating our digital efforts in Africa for revenue generation, we will leverage digital distribution channels to provide partners with access to content kits, so that they can utilize our edutainment content with harder to reach populations.

Ubongo is rapidly expanding into many different African markets. Each market brings a mixture of revenue streams into our organization, from pay TV licensing to merchandising to partnership production. We are also leveraging our intellectual property to form licensing agreements, which help fund the creation Akili Family. As an organization, Ubongo has been leveraging its unique platform of fun and educational cartoons to help our partners, often development NGOs, spread their educational messages to many different corners of Africa. These partnerships form a key revenue stream, and we are pushing to expand both our reach and our recognition as an essential tool in impacting children’s education across Africa. 

Ubongo has a well developed infrastructure that allows for the production of all of our shows and products, in addition to expansion or localization of our products as we see necessary. This infrastructural support ranges from the production staff who are dedicated to making fun, high-quality shows to the researchers, writers, and educators needed to produce a successful educational product. In addition, Ubongo is an organization that focuses on sustainability, both creatively and fiscally, and we have been working tirelessly to achieve sustainable revenue. Our cashflow currently comes from a mixture of grants and the multifarious revenue streams we have established in our mature markets and are developing in our newer markets. We have plans to expand our revenue to comprise the majority of our funding within the next two years.

Mission 

Solve and Ubongo share the same mission. Solve aims to address pressing problems by providing support and resources to advance the work of early-stage tech entrepreneurs. We are an early-stage tech enterprise committed to utilizing media-based intervention solutions to impact early learning for Africa’s littlest learners. The scalability of our solution is massive; 2 billion more kids will be born in Africa by the year 2050 who could benefit from fun, quality ECD content, so there’s no time to waste.

Partnerships

Solve’s network of resources and support mechanisms will help us accomplish our goal of expanding Akili Family’s educational programming to 50 million families in Africa by 2025. As we continue to expand into new regions and adapt our content to different languages, we will need to continue to grow our network of partners. Solve’s extensive community can help us establish partnerships with adaptation studios, TV stations and outreach groups across Africa, so that our pre-primary media can reach as many families as possible in the coming years. 

Expertise

Every successful venture has a dedicated team supporting its mission and driving its change. As our company grows, we could benefit from Solve’s expert team of mentors to help us seek new talent, manage our resources and reach our long term goals. Personalized support and strategic guidance will allow us to continue to purposefully build Akili Family programming with the help of experts who have experience in pre-primary education, technology-driven solutions and the whole development of the child.

Ubongo is continually seeking partnership with organizations that will allow us to optimize our early learning results and broaden our audience outreach. We are most interested in expanding our growth in two main areas: monitoring & evaluation (M&E) and talent. 

Akili Family episodes, content and learning objectives are user-tested at every step in the production process. However, in order to continue to invest in rigorous analyses of co-creation procedures, content frameworks and behavioral changes over the long term, we would like to partner with additional M&E organizations. Past partners and funders have expressed an interest in Ubongo’s long-term impacts on children’s math skills, reading comprehension and cognitive development, as well as changes in caregiver actions after exposure and internalization of Akili Family learning objectives. Partnering with M&E organizations will allow us to evaluate the longevity and durability of Akili’s impact on early childhood education and socio-emotional development. 

We are also interested in making connections with organizations that specialize in talent recruitment. Here at Ubongo, we’re invested in utilizing the talent that originates in the region and in the communities we serve. It’s often difficult to identify expertise that will fill a specific role within the company, even when there is plenty of talent. By continuing to expand Ubongo using talent from within the community, we can increase our personnel to fit the company’s needs while also creating new roots across Africa.