The Venture Fund is proud to see portfolio member, Afinidata, graduate. They’ve come a long way⁠— from numerous product iterations to deep diving into understanding their ecosystem better, strengthening their business model, and gearing up to take their solution to market. They’re now ready to collaborate at a larger scale as they find new pathways to work with partners, investors, and the open source community.

Using Frontier Technology for ECD

Existing early-childhood education options, such as daycare or private tutors, are often expensive and difficult to scale. There is a large gap for effective, easy-to-access educational tools that are inclusive with lower income families. Imagine if each parent had their own virtual tutor for free to help them provide adequate early-childhood education (ECE) to their children.  Afinidata uses artificial intelligence to provide parents with a personal assistant that guides them with personalized and effortless early-childhood activities, delivered directly into messaging apps they already use to communicate with family and friends and without requiring any new downloads. 

The past twelve months was one the most impactful years in Afinidata history. After receiving investment from the UNICEF Innovation Fund, our company growth was incredible, changing the path for Afinidata and for the families that use our Virtual Tutor ‘Afini’.

To date we have:

• Reached 45,000 families in 10 months.

• Delivered over 600,000 educational sessions 

• Developed a unique machine learning algorithm with 24% higher usage rate compared to similar applications. 

• Formed strategic partnerships with academia Harvard, Swiss Tropical & Public Health Institute.

CHALLENGES 

The biggest challenges our team faced were user growth sustainability, and improved support service to retain users and acquire new ones. All this, while simultaneously testing new functionalities and business models. Also, we didn’t know how to track the Virtual Tutor’s impact. We knew we were reaching families, but how do we retain them? Were we really helping them? Were we giving them the solution they were looking for?

These problems were real, and we faced them by tracking little flaws until they were solved. We also expanded our team to make sure specialized people were working on specific problems, bringing solutions and innovation to Afinidata.

TRACKING IMPACT 

From the beginning of our development process, we decided to focus on how to track impact by creating a three-stage plan.

Phase one - Engagement: We knew we had to engage with parents, persuading them to try Afinidata. If that didn’t happen, we lost. We had to create a relevant solution adapted to their lifestyle that kept them connected with us.

For this, we designed multiple interviews and user tests to discover pains and gains and worked with parents who already used the Virtual Tutor. Through intense user research, we improved on functionalities, and created a solution that didn't tell parents what to do but instead strengthened our relationship with them, making them feel heard so we could later use technology to guide them and give them the best recommendation.

After several iterations, our algorithm and user experience have increased up to 24% of usage rate against other solutions that suggest generic content or based only on a child's age and not personalized.

WAY FORWARD 

Finally, this is how 2020 looks for Afinidata: 

Phase three - Randomized Controlled Trial: we know we are impacting children’s lives in the long term. We are changing the game for children thanks to the Botnar Foundation, the University of Basel, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, ETH Zurich, and Harvard. In a Multi-Investigator Project, the principal investigators along with Afinidata will assess this platform through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 2,400 families with young children in San Marcos province, Perú Cajamarca region. We are looking to grow our business model and take Afinidata globally.

Hope you can stay around to see how Afinidata keeps changing the world, bringing equal opportunities to those who need them.

 Photo Credits | Top: © UNICEF/UNI281099/Herwig | In Article 1: © Afinidata | 2: © UNICEF/UN0312689/Sokol | 3: © Afinidata