Our Impact

Our Work

As more and more organisations move their core operations online, it can be challenging to reach and serve an audience without connectivity, smart devices, or strong digital literacy all delivered through SMS, Telegram and WhatsApp.

To date, the platform has delivered strong results across more than 20,000 households from 30 Kenyan counties, Uganda and Tanzania in more than 6 skill development domains and 7 languages, including Dholuo, English, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kiswahili, Ng’aturkana, Lugabara, Baganda, and Somali. 

Past Projects Themes

1. Business, CSLA Groups, and Record-Keeping for refugees: M-Shule provided SMS-based micro-courses on business, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship to youth and adult refugees in partnership with the Danish Refugee Council in English, Swahili, and Somali. We also delivered an SMS financial reporting survey to help users keep their business records as well as informational blasts. More than 600 refugees from four countries gained critical business knowledge, which saw an increase in understanding and implementation of key skills to drive higher household incomes. Through the central reporting dashboard and data collection system, the time required for data collection by the program team was also significantly reduced.
2. Knowledge development course for professionals: M-Shule partnered with Jacaranda Health to adapt their in-person training content into interactive text-message content that their healthcare providers can train with in the field. The team adapted 2 scenario-based maternity care micro-courses in less than one week, which will increase the organization’s ability to train more nurse providers for a reduced cost while improving knowledge retention.
3. Digital content delivery for youth with disability: M-Shule partnered with Light for the World  to work with youth with physical, hearing and visual impairment from 5 institutions to train them on employability skills. Most of the participants were interacting with a digital learning tool for the first time. We co-created and tested the product to make it appropriate for all users through Telegram and SMS.
4. Advocacy content for marginalized communities: M-Shule’s SMS Training and Monitoring platform provided support to Oxfam in increasing community awareness on Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in the Extractives Industries. This was through providing advocacy-building communications to community members in English and Ng’aturkana.
5. Remedial learning and evaluation for primary school learners across East Africa: Our personalized tuition tool uses SMS to support primary school students in revising English, Kiswahili and Math, conducting formative assessments, collecting learner data, and providing automated SMS reports to parents. We pioneered storytelling through SMS, successfully adapting 8 stories, based on the general African context, into interactive SMS format that were accessible over basic feature phones. Our student users have improved their classroom exam scores between 7%-20% higher than their peers; schools report their classroom planning and administration have improved thanks to our analytics, reporting, and remedial guidance.

For this work, we have been awarded and recognized by the Mastercard Foundation, Google.org, Cisco, the World Summit Awards, the Global EdTech Startup Awards, the Next Billion EdTech Prize at the Global Education and Skills Forum, Nairobi Innovation Week, and more.