M-Shule raises undisclosed funding from Engineers Without Borders to deploy its platform across Africa

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Kenya’s M-Shule, an edtech startup using SMS to deploy tailored education content for children in Sub-Saharan Africa has raised undisclosed funding from Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) to take its mobile learning management platform to 144 million primary school students across Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Claire Mongeau, CEO and Founder of M-Shule, “We are excited and thrilled to work with EWB Ventures as a partner and investor, given their deep expertise, commitment to ongoing support, and shared focus on ground-breaking and sustainable change. This partnership will enable us to continue to innovate in primary school learning alongside our stakeholders, and scale our impact across the region.”

M-Shule uses artificial intelligence to create and deliver personalized learning experiences for each child and empower schools with insights all through SMS and web. As students engage with platform, the data is provided to parents, teachers, and school administrators and stakeholders for insights and opportunities.

Having launched in Nairobi, Kenya in 2017 from M-Lesson, M-Shule aims to scale to educate millions of children and learning communities around the African continent and the world. Mshule.com becomes the eighth venture to receive a cash investment from EWB Ventures the venture arm of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) which invests up to $100,000 in ventures from concept to revenue. The Canadian firm chose M-Shule because its platform has a holistic and unifying approach and arms stakeholders in the primary school ecosystem with data-driven tools critical for improving the quality of education for all students.

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“We are delighted to welcome M-Shule to our portfolio where they join other bold teams defiantly tackling some of the world’s most challenging problems,” said Nicky Khaki, Managing Director for EWB Ventures.

Being based in Sub-Saharan Africa where around one billion children will need to be educated in the next three decades makes M-Shule so attractive to EWB. EWB also sees the current educational landscape as ill-equipped to handle this demand as millions of children are currently falling behind.

Though Sub-Saharan Africa has the fastest growing and the youngest population in the world, too many students are locked out of future opportunities due to issues such as high pupil-teacher ratios, high teacher absentee rates, and lost classroom time. Statistics show that up to 40% of students in SSA remain illiterate even after 5 years of school and 42% of SSA students drop out before the final year of primary school.There are just 28% of SSA students are enrolled in secondary school.

M-Shule aims to give equal opportunity for education to reduce prospects for economic growth and exacerbate issues such as hunger and child mortality as sustained access to equal education can increase income per capita by 23%.

Some of its competiton include Eneza Education and Kukua among others.

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