Last year, during the Nairobi Innovation Week, Safaricom highlighted some of the innovative partnerships between them and start-ups Kenya. One of the startups highlighted was Eneza. Eneza is a mobile platform that unites students, teachers and parents. Using Eneza, students can access quizzes, mini-lessons, access to textbook material and ask teachers questions, search Wikipedia via web, mobile web or a USSD/SMS-based system. It also displays reports to teachers and parents on students performance.
Eneza which started operations 3 years ago officially announced the launch of its platform Soma na Shupavu 291. The platform has 527,000 users with 469,000 primary, 86,000 high school users and 17,000 teachers. So far, over 1 million lessons have been taken, 10 million questions and 90,000 questions asked with users charged Kshs. 10 per week to use the service.
To use the platform, users dial *291#. The platform then asks the user if they are a teacher or student and for students they input their gender, region, name and school. Upon registration, then selects the subject they want to study and they can then receive questions and respond to them. The answers for both accurate and inaccurate answers come with explanations. Other than the quiz students also receive mini lessons on various topics and can ask questions from teachers with responses provided in 15 minutes. The content offered by the platform is also approved by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development making it suitable for Kenyan student.
Most users of the platform are form the rural areas totaling 61% of total users with rural users totaling 39% of total users. The platform has further added 4,000 KCPE questions to the platform. Users can only access the platform via Safaricom’s network with content from Class 4 to Form 4 available. Eneza also has an android app (I must admit its very well done), through which users can also access this content.
