Safaricom has today announced an investment in Eneza Education through its Spark Venture Fund. Eneza Education provides mobile based education tools for primary school students. The company was founded four years ago by Kago Kagichiri and Tony Maravigilia who saw the opportunity that the expanding mobile ecosystem could provide for children who needed a reliable exam revision tool. Today, Eneza has spread to 11 countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Iraq among others and has over 1.1 million learners.
Their first partnership with Safaricom led to the development of the Shupavu 291 app which is an affordable, SMS based exam revision and learning solution. The Shupavu platform offers realtime course level progress, interactive lessons and assessment. Users can be able to access locally-designed tutorials, as well as chat live with a teacher either through a live teacher chat through either USSD or SMS, an online web app, an offline desktop app, or an Android app. In Kenya, learners have access to all subjects from Class 4 to Form 4 in the 8-4-4 curriculum, with courses designed to also cater for learners who have dropped out of school but would like to keep learning. Over the last four years, 90 million messages have been sent on the Shupavu 291 platform, with more than 14 million questions completed by learners.
The Safaricom Spark Venture Fund invests in startups by either purchasing minority equity stake or providing convertible debt. This allows young businesses to access the finances coupled with the technical advisory and business development services needed to grow their businesses. The fund’s first investment was in Sendy, a fast growing provider of on-demand, door to door delivery and transportation services. Recently, the Fund announced its second investment in mSurvey, a mobile-first research platform leveraging SMS and mobile messaging technology to simplify access to credible, on-demand data from the emerging world.