How South African Edtech Startup, FoondaMate, Is Helping Students Study With WhatsApp
How South African edtech startup, FoondaMate, is helping students study with WhatsApp
COVID-19 has reached pandemic proportions since its first detection in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, affecting students and education at all levels.
UNICEF claimed in a March 2021 press release that the temporary closure of educational institutions impacted over 168 million children worldwide who stayed at home as countries worked to flatten the curve.
As a result, schools shifted to online education.
Amnesty International, a global human rights organization, reported that students were isolated from schools when the COVID-19 pandemic struck South Africa, denying hundreds of thousands of students access to education.
South Africa has a 62 percent Internet penetration rate, which translates to 36.54 million Internet users in 2020, representing a 3.1 percent year-on-year (YoY) growth rate. And WhatsApp is the most popular social media platform in the country.
According to a Global Wellbeing Index (GWI) social media report (PDF), 96 percent of South African Internet users use WhatsApp. Dacod Magagula (CEO) and Tao Boyle (COO) founded FoondaMate, a WhatsApp API, in response to the growing user base.
Students use FoondaMate to download research papers, conduct keyword searches, define words, and perform basic mathematical calculations.
“We launched FoondaMate in South Africa in August 2020 after realizing that hundreds of thousands of students were unable to learn due to school closures and a lack of appropriate technology products,” Boyle explains.
“As a result, we developed a method for students to study online with the help of WhatsApp,” Magagula continues.
Why FoondaMate?
Magagula says he was the only student in his high school class who had access to a computer while growing up outside Mbombela in Mpumalanga, South Africa. His visits to neighborhood Internet cafes to download study materials had a profound effect on his life. He was the school's first student to gain admission to the University of Cape Town.
“Part of my success can be attributed to the abundance of resources to which I was exposed,” he explains.
That was not the case, however, for his co-founder.
Boyle attended a private high school with computers in Cape Town, but she encountered educational inequality during her third year at the University of Cape Town.
“I first became aware of educational inequality during my third-year internship at Funda Wande, a non-governmental organization,” she explains.
Her internship assignment required her to collect data on South African textbook spending. This proved to be a watershed moment in her life.
“This experience prompted me to consider scalable strategies for addressing educational inequality,” she adds.
Boyle met Magagula through a mutual friend. They discussed educational inequality and their discussions resulted in the founding of FoondaMate.
“My co-founder and I met at university, and the stark contrasts between our high school experiences were eye-opening for me,” Boyle explains.
“I've always wished I could share resources with more of the community's students. As a result, when WhatsApp announced the availability of its API in 2020, my co-founder and I realized that my wish might become a reality. And it was there that FoondaMate was born,” Magagula explains.
Using FoondaMate on WhatsApp
FoondaMate is derived from the Swahili language and translates as "study buddy." Boyle compares the WhatsApp API to "messaging a very knowledgeable friend."
Through the use of localized chatbots, FoondaMate enables students with limited Internet access to study online.
FoondaMate is committed to ensuring that students succeed regardless of the resources available in their schools or homes. They believe that while talent is distributed evenly, opportunity is not.
The edtech startup intends to change this by making opportunities accessible to all students through the use of a platform that the majority of students with a smartphone already own.
Given the high cost of traditional educational materials such as textbooks and group tutoring in South Africa, FoondaMate contributes to cost savings by providing those services via WhatsApp.
Certain students whose smartphones have insufficient internal memory are unable to download the apps that provide access to online resources. As a result, FoondaMate leverages the already-installed WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger on users' phones to assist them in studying.
Striking growth
Boyle describes their growth as follows: "We saw a 64 percent increase in signups month over month from May to June 2021, a 66 percent increase in Monthly Active Users (MAU) month over month from May to June 2021, and we recently reached 138,870 signups for FoondaMate, which is a pre-revenue product with initial pilot revenue to prove our business model."
Additionally, FoondaMate earns money through partnerships with financial institutions and post-secondary educational institutions. By partnering with financial institutions, we can provide sponsored information on financial literacy to users while also promoting the relevant product offerings of our partners.
This assists users, the majority of whom are low-income, in acquiring critical financial literacy skills while also expanding market opportunities for partners.
“For post-secondary educational institutions, we facilitate application processing through FoondaMate, allowing them to increase the number of applicants to their programs,” Boyle explains.
The critical value in this case is their ability to connect these educational institutions with brilliant and engaged students who might not be aware of their programs otherwise.
From South Africa to the World
As with M-Lugha, a Kenyan educational technology startup that assists Kenyans in learning in their native language, FoondaMate engages its users in their indigenous languages.
According to Boyle, "making resources available in users' native languages creates a unique form of user delight that affirms users while also providing access to education."
In addition to English, FoondaMate is available in ten African languages. They are, however, confronted with a problem.
“Developing FoondaMate is difficult because we are not only developing a technology, but also introducing it to communities,” Boyle explains.
It's quite challenging, as the vast majority of their users have never interacted with a chatbot. As a result, convincing users that they are not interacting with a human is difficult.
“We received requests from users to become friends with Nelson, the chatbot, requesting meetings or phone calls. That is, in fact, a challenge,” Magaluga admits.
“We've had to adjust our approach to ensure that students understand they're interacting with a bot and aren't disappointed when they're unable to hang out with their new friend,” Boyle explains.
However, the edtech startup has seen tremendous success since its August 2020 launch.
Over 130,000 students in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have downloaded over 1.8 million practice questions from FoondaMate.
Although these questions are universal, the team is working to make them more region-specific.
Though the majority of users are from South Africa, FoondaMate is also used in other African countries such as Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya.
FoondaMate's Latin American users hail from Colombia and Brazil, while its Asian users hail from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. And FoondaMate is actively pursuing expansion into these markets.
“We intend to triple our growth in Latin America and Asia. We're seeing an increase in interest in these regions, with requests to launch in India and Brazil, as well as to customize the product for these markets,” she explains.
Fintech startups continue to dominate the African tech space and attract venture capital funding, and the co-founders believe that African education technology startups are overlooked. They believe, however, that FoondaMate is paving the way in the technology space.
“With Africa having the world's youngest population and growing rapidly, there is a huge demand for education here, as our growth demonstrates,” Boyle concludes.
