Growing Our Community to Better Serve the African Child

Tanzania, like many countries in Africa, is confronted with a learning crisis. Even though it has made significant gains in access to and equity in primary education, learning is still low. This situation is even more urgent in rural areas where teachers and other educational providers often lack adequate training. Educational Technology (EdTech) holds enormous potential to address this situation. However, most children in rural Tanzania, do not have access to EdTech either in school or at home as a supplement to formal education. Moreover, learning content is not regularly created with vulnerable populations in mind, meaning that the kids who need specialized education are left behind. These challenges leave a massive, global inequity in learning.?

Ubongo aims to overcome this global problem by diversifying learning content, increasing accessibility, and expanding networks to make sure all kids have the opportunity to learn and love learning. Our innovative edutainment content is a cost-effective, highly adaptable, and well-evidenced method to increase learning outcomes & support formal education. With over 70 Ubongoers working collaboratively to impact 60 million kids across Africa by 2025, we know we have to intentionally grow our community and our impact even more meaningfully over the coming years to better serve the African child.

Since our beginning in 2013, we’ve grown from a small Tanzanian grassroots startup to a Pan-African non-profit and the market leader in African edutainment. We’ve learned so much along the way about how to engage kids in learning through quality, effective, localized edutainment, and how to scale our model. We’re excited about the progress we’ve made so far, but see so much more need and potential for growth which has led us to set an ambitious vision to scale our impact across Africa. In order to scale our impact, we know we need to reach underserved groups who need it the most. Ubongo defines underserved kids as vulnerable, marginalized, and those who are often without regular access to electricity and other forms of technology, including educational resources. And so, for the past few years, we have been figuring out how to effectively and sustainably reach them.?

Our journey began in July of 2021 with our very first distribution coordinator, Emily Magak , in Mathare, Nairobi. Emily helped us grow our reach to over 400,000 underserved kids in Kenya and built over 30 partnerships with community-based organizations.

To scale our reach in Uganda, we hired a Distribution Consultant who worked to identify partners that would be able to distribute our content to organizations that worked with kids. We partnered with Theirworld and YIDA Youth Initiative (YIDA) to increase our last-mile reach efforts in one of the refugee settlements in Kyaka II, Kampala, and their nearby areas.?

Our work in the last mile in Tanzania has been in partnership with RTI International on a USAID -funded project, #JifunzeUelewe, to distribute our content to five regions. Another incredible partnership is with the Hempel Foundation to combat learning poverty. The two-year partnership with Hempel Foundation allows us to directly reach and impact 9,000 communities across 15 regions in Tanzania by establishing a sustainable and scalable distribution model of our e-learning content.

We know that it is essential to have a physical presence on the ground to reach off-the-grid communities. The plan was to have one Field Distribution Officer per region with the ability to move in a strategic manner (for example: start with electrified rural areas, leverage new and existing community partnerships to build a network of distribution partners, etc.). This enabled us to cover our bases, and learn as we go as we conduct pre and post-assessments.

To facilitate this, 6 field distribution officers (and more to come!) will be conducting the important task of distributing our content to the target regions in Tanzania and forming partnerships with community-based organizations for scalability and sustainability.

Get To Know Our New Field Distribution Officers!

Shaangwa Francis is a strong believer in the power of education and training as means to community transformation. His role as a distribution officer for Ubongo enables him to achieve his dreams of positively impacting the African child by facilitating access to high-quality, localized, and fun learning materials, especially for underserved communities.

Bernadette Simba is a social worker who was inspired to get into field work after realizing the impact that access to educational content in early years has on our development. “If we can listen to children, hand them a shoulder and an ear, teach them early what we learned late, and play a role in protecting them, the world would be a better place.”

Maulid Ramadhan considers himself a? passionate humanitarian, with experience working on various educational projects for development, host communities, and refugee settings. In the past, he has worked with IRC for the PlayMatters project where he supported the localization of content that incorporates playful methodologies in learning for children aged 3-12 in the Northern-West of Tanzania for both refugee and host communities.

#EmilianaAlfred is an expert in youth-led programs in behavior change and project planning. Her favorite part of her role is facilitating the development of after-school clubs, seeking community-based partnerships, and mobilizing community resources to serve the African child.

Benmichael Ngongi has a law and business background but he is passionate about promoting social causes that have a big impact, especially for the African child. He loves the creative part of coming up with solutions to complex challenges and ultimately making a difference in the lives of children.

MARTIN KIGOLA was born in Mafinga town in Iringa and holds a degree in regional development planning from the Institute of Rural Development Planning in Dodoma, Tanzania. He believes that all kids should have access to transformative educational experiences and wants to find solutions to the challenge of making high-quality and fun educational content sustainably accessible to underserved kids.

Ubongo remains committed to building a sustainable and replicable model for distributing learning content to rural areas. With support from partners like the Hempel Foundation , we can reach Tanzania’s most underserved communities, teach them to love learning, improve their learning outcomes, and empower them to become agents of change in their own communities.?

Together, we aim to achieve a few key objectives:?

1. Understand the different resources and modalities in order to sustainably distribute Ubongo content to our last-mile audiences?
2. Develop a sustainable and replicable model (proof of concept) to distribute learning content, not only for Tanzania but for Africa at large.
3. Distribute Ubongo’s content to 2.8 million children in rural Tanzania over the course of 2 years, and improve their learning, cognitive, and social-emotional outcomes by 2024.

With a Head of Growth on board, and will soon be hiring a Head of Distribution, we are well-equipped to sustainably grow our reach across different markets in Africa.