Arvind Nagarajan

Arvind piloted a new approach for improving education in resource-limited settings. He will rely on digital student assessments to increase transparency of education quality and drive improvements in school systems. He will pilot a tablet-based assessment in a low-cost center in Mumbai, and hopes to launch full time in 2014. Eric Pohlman, co-founder of One Acre Fund, is serving as a mentor.

M-Lesson

STUDENT TESTING CHALLENGE; KENYA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

A low-cost mobile tuition platform that measures and shares child, school, and regional current and projected academic performance. 

Learn more about the Student Testing Challenge and why student testing and public scorecards increase accountability in poor education systems. 

 

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

The Kenyan market has a present, distinct need for increased transparency and information around primary educational quality and performance. 

The key operational elements that will inform M-Lesson's success are technology, content generation, and management. The primary experience of M-Lesson's subscription-based product will take place entirely through SMS. A parent may subscribe to M-Lesson by sending a specific keyword to a registered shortcode. Following subscription, the parent will automatically receive one class subject multiple-choice question via SMS 6 times a week. They will be prompted to read the question to their child and ask them to select the letter representing the child's best answer. Once the response is received, an answer SMS is sent with the correct answer and an indicator if the child answered correctly or incorrectly. At the end of each week, the parent will receive an SMS informing them about their child's performance, ranks as compared to other students in the class and subject, and projected marks. They will receive another update at the end of each month. School managers, government and community leaders will be provided access to this information both through a web portal and through SMS. 

During the start-up phase, heavy in-person interaction with participating parents, schools, and education officials will be necessary to set up M-Lesson for local customer acquisition. The team will manually create school codes, collect student names and demographic information, and collect other information while building a customer base. If the pilot is successful, they will have enough information to invest in technological infrastructure development and build a more sophisticated web application and USSD user interface. 

 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Partner with 25 schools across Nairobi during the pilot 

• Reach 2,000 unique customers during the pilot 

• Send 96,000 SMS questions sent by end of the pilot with a 75% response rate 

• Send 720,000 SMS questions by end of year one with an 85% response rate 

FOUNDING TEAM

Claire Mongeau - Chief Executive Officer 

Johannes Oula - Chief Operations Officer 

Vivian Awuor - Chief Experience Officer