Angaza Elimu's Growth Funding Journey: Advanced engines enhance student adaptation and teacher intervention in Kenya

Angaza Elimu was a recipient of bridge funding from UNICEF Venture Fund. In this blog post, Kiko Muuo, CEO, shares reflections on how the growth support enhanced Angaza's product features to offer better learning experiences for students and intervention mechanisms for teachers. 

Highlight the biggest key achievement of the investment period.   

Throughout the investment period, we were able to revamp our adaptive and interactive e-learning platform to a more robust and intelligent platform. We also developed advanced engines for student adaptation and teacher intervention. This means students can now receive a more personalized learning experience at their own speed, fostering self-development. Teachers can rely on the intervention engine more, giving them autonomy in guiding student instruction. 

With these product enhancements, we've successfully improved daily user engagement and increased product retention. Our daily student user base has surged from approximately 21,000 to over 82,000 (as of June 2024). Moreover, time spent on the platform has seen improvement, climbing from 29 minutes to 35 minutes. This boosts our confident that our solution stands as a valuable and essential tool in improving student learning outcomes and strengthening teacher pedagogy strategies.  

Tell us more about the product enhancements.  

1. Student Adaptation Engine regulates the content delivery component based on the output of the predictive model to deliver material according to a student’s performance level and interests, thus ensuring continuous learning improvement. Features include:  

• Relationship Mining Feature: This feature focuses on establishing connections between student performance and engagement with learning resources. It provides valuable insights into how students interact with educational materials. 

• Knowledge component(KC): We've implemented a unique-step KC model that links resources with knowledge components, incorporating Bloom's taxonomy. This model enhances the alignment between instructional content and learning objectives, fostering a more comprehensive and targeted learning experience. 

   

2. Teacher Intervention Engine allows teachers to intervene and override the automated system to better serve a student’s learning. Features include:  

• Clustering: The aim is to create student groups based on their abilities, optimizing instructional effectiveness and efficiency. This feature helps address specific learning needs within each cluster. 

• Domain Modeling: The goal is to understand how to present a certain subtopic strand and at what level of detail. This capability fine-tunes instructional strategies, ensuring a more personalized and effective learning experience for students. 

  

   

Tell us about your user testing and field experience with product usage.  

Our overarching goal is to enhance the proficiency of both teachers and students in engaging with digital learning tools, ultimately paving the way for improved educational outcomes. We anticipate two key outcomes from this pilot initiative:

1. Improved learning outcomes as demonstrated through increased student performance.  
2. Increased digital competency of teachers to deliver the national curriculum through digital tools. 

From a student perspective we seek to: 

• Understand the changes in learning performance between current learning modalities vs Angaza’s e-learning solution; 
• Identify what internal and external factors lead to changes in learning and performance (especially between different student groups); 
• Provide evidence of the relationship between student performance and engagement with the different digital resources; 

From a teacher’s perspective we aim to: 

• Enhance teachers' digital competency to proficiently incorporate digital learning tools into their teaching methodologies. 
• Improve teachers' ability to deliver core curriculum content and enhance their students' overall performance. 
• Identify internal and external barriers and enablers impacting teachers' utilization of digital tools in the classroom. 

Tell us more about your experience with open source.  

By engaging in the open source technical assistance program offered by the Venture Fund, we developed great standard documentation and coding practices. With the practices implemented we seek to attract a pool of community contributors.  

How has your business model and strategy changed over the last 12 months? What were your biggest achievements in this area and how will your business be growing over the next year?   

Operating on a B2B2C model, our primary emphasis lies in collaborating with ecosystem enablers dedicated to establishing school infrastructure, including devices, connectivity, and electricity. These strategic partners play a pivotal role in creating an enabling environment and seeding the market for our solution. Through these partnerships, we have witnessed remarkable user growth, with student users surging from 31,000 to an impressive 105,000. We intend to continue creating more strategic partnerships to fuel our user growth and conversion. 

 
What types of strategic partnerships are you looking to engage with?  

Our growth plan is anchored in cultivating strategic partnerships across various fronts: 

• Build strategic partnerships with development agencies, corporates, donors and the government to power our business development with a goal of expanding our reach in the market.  
• We aim to build and grow B2B2C agency distribution models to increase our market coverage. 
• Our educational data mining generates actionable insights which can power decision-making by different education stakeholders. We aim to monetize these insights. 

What’s next for your company?  

Over the next year, our objective is to significantly expand our active daily student users from 43,000 to 160,000, and our teacher users from 3,700 to 11,000. Simultaneously, we aim to enhance product stickiness, increasing engagement from 35 minutes to around 45 minutes. We anticipate that this improvement will create a positive ripple effect, elevating learning outcomes from the current 24% to approximately 30%. 

Final reflections on your time working with the Venture Fund?  

Working with the Venture Fund has been an incredible experience for our company. Team members from the Fund have gone above and beyond to provide us with critical support during the investment period. The mentorship, constructive criticism offered and networks created through the Fund will go a long way in powering our growth.  

Interested to learn more about or connect with Angaza Elimu? Visit their website, or follow Angaza Elimu on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.