Most of Kenya’s population is living below the poverty line, making rapid development next to impossible. And that is why we need to start from the grassroots and build upwards. Make life easier for the less fortunate in the society and give them a better chance of improving their living standards. According to me, the best way to do this is not by giving them money and dropping bags of food from the sky, but educating them using the simplest methods possible.
I, for example, have been born and bred in the slums of Kibera, one of the largest slums in Kenya. I went to school in Olympic Primary School, one of the few schools that we have in Kibera. I have vivid memories of having to carry a huge bag filled with exercise books and one or two text books: books were very pricey! I would have to share this text book with 6 or more of my classmates, some having to read the book in an upside down position during lessons. The irony of it all was we used to write almost 90% of the content in the text book into our exercise books so that those without text books would have revision material when they went home. Getting revision material was very hard, and nothing much has changed. A good solution would be providing text books to all the children in the school, or even better coming up with a cheaper and affordable way of getting revision material to the students.
This is where Mprep comes in. We use the most available, effective and simple mobile technology to give the less fortunate children in Kenya a chance in education. We ensure that even the most isolated slum school in Kenya gets just as much as the well off schools in the country. We believe that this simple technology can go a long way in terms of providing quality education in the country. Mprep is a simple mobile phone application that allows children to revise for their exams using the mobile phone. It is a simple procedure: for instance if a student wants to take a quiz on Mathematics, the student sends a message with a topic in Mathematics, say frac1( which is a code for Fractions) to a number (8512), and they will get a reply with questions on fractions. The questions will keep coming automatically once a student sends an answer. After a quiz the student will be able to know his/her marks and their rank.
We aim to provide education to the poverty stricken areas and as a result reduce poverty, lets make the community aware of the many things they are capable of doing to reduce poverty. Small things done with the community could change the whole community. Think about a drop in the ocean, does it change the water levels in the ocean. In my opinion it surely does.
Chris Asego, Operations Director