ScholarX Launches LearnAM, a Localised Learning App to Improve Digital Literacy for 100 Million Africans

Among the challenges that Africa faces, education and securing good jobs remain at the top of the pyramid. It is worse in rural communities, as they are faced with no access to good education due to lack of finance, digitalization, and language barrier. But LearnAM is set to upturn this narrative.

Founded by ScholarX, LearnAM is a localized mobile platform that provides audio and visual content to improve digital literacy, digital skills, and vocational skills with a target reach of over 100 million people in Africa. With the current focus being Nigeria, LearnAM operates with the use of localized languages namely Yoruba, Igbo, Hause, and Pidgin English. Users can switch from the English language to any of these local languages when learning a course on the app.

On Tuesday, the world of tech witnessed the virtual launch of the educational diversifying app held on Zoom and Youtube. The launch was themed ‘The Making of a Skilled Economy Through Digital Inclusion and Education’. It hosted key industry experts in various panel discussions namely the Executive Director of VDF group, Gbenga Omolokun, Tayshira Khan, Regional Business Development Director, KaiOS, Damilola Emuze, COO ScholarX, Tayo Ogundipe, CEO, Intelligra, to name a few. They all took turns to give poignant takes on how to achieve digital and financial inclusion to the lowest level.

Taking the attendees down memory lane, Co-founder and CEO of ScholarX, Bola Lawal narrated how LearnAM became a silver lining idea during the lockdown. The parent company ScholarX had at the time faced a shortage of staff and funds. “LearnAM started as an idea during the lockdown. During the lockdown, a lot of things happened. Even ScholarX contemplated continuity. We lost a lot of staff and a lot of our funding pipeline for our scholarship management activities dried up, things were very difficult.” he said.

ScholarX conducted research and looked at the opportunities that were out there during the lockdown. LearnAM was born out of the need to create jobs for the many individuals who lost theirs due to staff shortages that befell many companies during the pandemic. And more importantly, filling the gap of digital literacy in rural communities. “Luckily for us, The GSMA Innovation Fund for Mobile Internet Adoption and Digital Inclusion just released a call for applications. We thought it was interesting and exciting that they looked at our idea, LearnAM.” Lawal said.

Also speaking at the event was GSMA’s Leonard Koray who noted that the call for funding received nearly 600 applications from startups and SMEs in 44 countries across Africa and Asia. “The winner was selected after a rigorous application process followed by a selection from an independent panel of industry experts. ScholarX actually won among the nine start-ups from these two continents. This is a very big deal, congratulations to the team”.

The fund also focuses on providing technical assistance to the winner. “For scholar X, we are helping them build the LearnAM app, and providing local context is important for this,” Koray added. 

ScholarX will also receive support from Airtel Nigeria and Intelligra, in incorporating a device financing program that enables individuals and members of co-operatives to procure a device preloaded with LearnAM app and affordable data services.

How To Register on LearnAM

The LearnAM app is currently available on two platforms, KaiOS and Android. It requires just a phone number and password for registration. This is because the target users mostly dwell in rural areas and most of them do not have email addresses.

After registering, the next step is for a user to fill in their first name, last name, email (not compulsory), sex, state, and education level.

The android app has more features that are not available on KaiOS. It immediately gives a user the option to select which language they will love to view the app.

How To Watch A Course on LearnAM

The three categories of courses include:

• Digital skills 
• Personal improvement
• Vocational skills

When a user clicks on a course in any of the categories, it shows an excerpt of what the course is about and also lets the user watch a mini-video on the course intro. It also lets the user select their preferred language to watch the course.

A user can click on the enroll button to view the various modules available for a particular course and its timestamp.

To track performance level, a user cannot skip to the next video until they are done watching the current one. This way it’s easy to tell that the user actually watched the content.

There is a search button available to search for a particular course and watch in their preferred language. 

Bola Lawal noted that by the end of this week, new features will be added on the Android version which will allow users to watch courses offline similar to Spotify and Apple Music. But the way LearnAM is going about this is that users would not have to download the course videos themselves. Once they are watching a particular module, the others are automatically downloaded to their device. Users can access the downloaded videos without having to visit the app.

Plans to get content providers as vendors on the platform are also in the works. The contents will be reviewed following LearnAM’s standard before they are made available to the public. There will be a revenue-sharing partnership between LearnAM and the content creators. Once a user subscribes to a content creator’s course, the earnings are read on the dashboard. A USSD code will be introduced to make subscriptions easy.

LearnAM is an opportunity for young people to continue to earn while learning at their own pace. It harbors localized individuals from 18-35 years old by utilizing a 360 approach to education. They can learn competitive relevant skills that position them rightly to secure international jobs. Some of the course topics available are as simple as How To Repair Mobile Phones, How To Navigate Google, and How to Monetise YouTube.

By 2030, LearnAM’s goal is to have created over 230 million jobs. For now, it has already begun expanding its tentacles in some Nigerian states namely Kwara, Ibadan, Kano, and Kaduna.