Mabati Rolling Mills (MRM) has rolled-out a project to help disadvantaged students in informal settlements improve their academic performance through the Eneza Education platform .
The steel solutions provider has committed to link up 40 students from Kibera Slums to Eneza Education, an interactive SMS based platform that allows primary and secondary school learners access lessons, assessments and live chats with a teacher on different topics. Manish Mehra, Business Head at MRM said the company is looking to shape career aspirations for 300 disadvantaged learners in Kibera Slums. The company handed a cheque of Ksh. 107,000 for 40 needy students to start their annual subscription into the platform.
“Through this sponsorship, 40 students from Kibera slums will be able to access free content on the platform for a year. The sponsorship is in line with MRM’s CSR pillar, Education,” said Manish.
Through a virtual modernized classroom, Eneza Education has been able to educate more than 3.8 million Kenyans via mobile. The platform has over 10,000 topics for Primary Schools and more than 8,000 for Secondary schools that cover the national school curriculum, organized according to how concepts are taught each term.
Eneza’s SMS platform is used in 3 countries (Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire) supporting three languages (English, Kiswahili, and French).
While receiving the donation, Irene Muithya, Business Development Associate at Eneza Education said all content in the platform has been aligned with the national syllabus. Learners are given bite-sized lessons and assessments with individualized feedback for each response. “Our learners score 22.7% higher than peers not on Eneza and our 97% of users mentioning improved scores,” said Muithya.
Since the inception of the platform, students have exchanged 400 million messages, answered 14 million quiz questions, and asked 350,000 questions to teachers on the platform.
In 2016, Safaricom invested Eneza Education through its Spark Venture Fund . The company was founded in 2012 by Kago Kagichiri and Tony Maravigilia who saw the opportunity that the expanding mobile ecosystem could provide for children who needed a reliable exam revision tool. Last year, Safaricom partnered with Eneza Education, Longhorn Publishers and Viusasa to provide free access to educational content for primary and secondary school students studying from home.