The year 2021 is finally coming to an end. And what a year has it been!

The Covid-19 pandemic hit the health, economic and social sectors really hard. And while the short term and long term effects of the pandemic are still uncertain in regards to education, what the pandemic has shown is that the current challenges hindering quality of education and improved learning outcomes need to be addressed urgently.

This year has indeed proven that incorporating technology in solving some of the perennial problems such as education will go a long way in improving both learning outcomes and create new learning pathways for all students across the educational spectrum.

During the course of the year we have been able to achieve a few milestones that we would like to highlight here as we look forward to reaching greater heights in the coming year.

As we close out the year, we would like to look at some of the things we achieved as we move towards achieving our mission of making 50 million learners smarter through mobile technology.

We have over 11.1 million users who have used our SMS platform across Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’ Ivoire and Rwanda with over 2.5 billion messages exchanged on the platform.

In Rwanda, Shupavu2910 reached over 328,000 by December. Having launched in October 2020 in the middle of the pandemic in partnership with Mastercard Foundation, we have seen great interest in students asking questions on Ask a Teacher with over 1.47 million questions asked. We also created a really cool TV show in partnership with Isonga media which you can watch here.

We partnered with World University Services Canada, Lutheran World Federation and Finn Church Aid to support refugee learners in Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei Settlement scheme respectively. We also partnered with Nyanza Initiative for Girls’ Education & Empowerment to help mothers out of school due to early pregnancy get back to school and MRM to support underserved learners in Kibera.

It has been great learning from each of our partners and are hoping to partner with more organizations in 2022 to support more learners in their

We are also very proud to have won Edtech Company of the Year at the Kenya edtech Summit.

We sincerely thank all the parents, students, teachers, partners and the community at large for supporting us throughout the year!

From us at Team Awesome to you and your loved ones, we wish you Happy Holidays!