Client Update: Glean Asia December 2023

Glean Asia has had an incredible year, with Jesse Orndorff and the team in Cambodia utilising an impact loan from LendForGood to overcome ongoing cash flow challenges and set them up for success in 2024.

Recently, Red Hat Impact director Ian Jones , together with LendForGood founder Cameron Neil , caught up with Jesse and we are thrilled to share with you their latest impact report and updates.

Building for success

After a long negotiation period, Glean has managed to acquire Plus Education, a tablet based education program, aimed at teaching English to mid and upper primary schools. With an agreement in place with the Royal Government of Cambodia's Ministry of Education, the program is linked to the Cambodian curriculum and is currently in 33 schools with over 3,000 student users. The Glean team recently went into the field to understand the needs of teachers and the school community prior to iterating and upgrading their product, which sees them deliver routers and ten tablets into each classroom.

Glean has now completed the gender based violence (GBV) reporting tool that was developed for a Ministry within the Royal Government of Cambodia. By synthesising information from all stakeholders, and systemizing the process, the new tool reduces the opportunities for user error and increases information quality for better advocacy towards future program designs.

During the update, Jesse unpacked some key insights that are valuable for all practitioners and supporters of Tech for Good approaches. This included:

Developing a product mix to overcome traditional agency work

In early 2023, Glean were getting stuck as a service provider, sitting in between the very small local organic agencies and the much larger agencies that catered to all of the large UN-type work. This led them to reflect:?

Can we start to develop our products that are built locally in Cambodia for Cambodians and meeting the needs of Cambodians?

The Jomneh platform was one of these new products, focussing on mobile only as a digital learning concept. In comparison to Western countries that have access to laptops and PCs, most? users in Cambodia will only ever have access to a smartphone, and with many systems originating from the US and Europe where programs are designed for desktop environments, it restricts the learning opportunity in Cambodia.?

Through their extended networks they were then able to acquire the Plus Education learning system. As they continue to refresh both of their Edtech products for continually evolving markets - as many people assume all Cambodians have smartphones? due to the data on market saturation rates, and digital literacy - the team are acutely aware that this isn't the case in rural areas, which requires them to have significant focus to ensure their products and services fit the needs of their communities from learning schedules, network connections and payment systems to reduce the burden on their customers and users.

Creating open source and scalable products

As the team? worked on the Plus Education system, they were careful to ensure it was? scalable, and remained committed to their open source approach. The application can now work in any language, or it can be themed to anything if a school wants a particular theme to help encourage their students' learning. In the Cambodian context, they have now added a library system which has over 500 books added. This ensures students can extend their own learning, in language appropriate localised content.?

The team are very excited about all of their tech platforms, including their DataForGood and Design for Good services, but the most they are excited about is Plus Education, just in terms of the scale that it could reach.

In 2024 the team is aiming to scale to over 100 schools in Cambodia and impact over 10,000 students. They are situated well for their growth, with the hiring of new staff, moving from 7 staff at the start of the year to over 14 staff now, including more dedicated coders and project managers.?

After having just repaid their first impact loan, and gaining considerable momentum for their products and services, the future is exciting for Glean Asia as they build out their suite of tech for good products. As they scale will also require additional impact capital, so watch this space for their LendForGood loan launching in January 2024.

For more information on the original impact loan completed via LendforGood, see the details here.?

If you would like to join the LendForGood community as a lender for the next Glean loan, you can access the application via the site, or email [email protected]

All words and images courtesy of Red Hat Impact and Glean Asia, December 2023