School closures in early 2020 across the globe due to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic brought along the greatest disruption to the education system that will take learners time to recover.

Learners, parents and teachers were forced to adapt to new ways of learning and this has not been achieved by all due to many challenges by learners coming from rural and unprivileged backgrounds.

To help learners keep up with their studies, we partnered with Mastercard Foundation to launch our SMS-based learning platform in Rwanda.

Learners in Rwanda are able to access curriculum-aligned content from revision lessons to quizzes and also the Ask a Teacher feature that enables them to ask academic-related questions to our pool of teachers and receive responses via SMS shortcode 2910 on MTN and Airtel Tigo networks.

The launch of Shupavu in Rwanda is part of the Mastercard Foundation’s COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Program, which has two main goals. First, to deliver emergency support for health workers, first responders, and students. Second, to strengthen the diverse institutions that are the first line of defense against the social and economic aftermath of this disease.

Since the launch, we have seen a steady increase in the number of questions asked by learners on a daily basis. Our teachers have been able to answer over 880,000 questions since October 2020 from over 250,000 students. Learners have also been able to complete over 95,000 quizzes on the platform and this number keeps growing.

Even as schools around the world continue to welcome back learners to resume learning, we believe that blended learning is the way to go. Learners can benefit from edtech resources especially as a supplementary tool from what they are taught in school and also learning institutions can now look at various ways of incorporating tech into their curriculum.