The case study “Ubongo – Revolutionizing Early Childhood Education in Africa” highlights the various aspects of social entrepreneurship and innovation required to tackle a social issue and create impact in a large way. It discusses how 5 young professionals from different fields came together to overcome the challenges confronting the Tanzanian education system and devised highly innovative and cost effective learning solutions through Ubongo.

Tanzania’s education system was plagued by numerous issues that included low enrollments in pre-primary schools, a dearth of good quality teachers, archaic policies of the government, and widespread poverty. As a result, a majority of Tanzanian children did not have the requisite literacy, numeracy, cognitive, and social skills to earn a decent living on reaching adulthood. Ubongo tackled these challenges by producing highly engaging edutainment cartoons (both audio and video) and distributing them through numerous low-cost platforms such as TV, radio, and mobile phones that were accessible to a majority of Tanzanians.

The company followed the various principles of instruction and Human Centered Design, which contributed to the effectiveness of the content. The case also talks about the processes and strategies implemented by Ubongo for making engaging and effective educational content. The content developed by Ubongo (Akili and Me and Ubongo Kids edu-cartoon, Learn Anywhere Kits) was localized, involved children during development, and sought continuous feedback from teachers and parents. This led to highly effective learning outcomes.

The case describes how Ubongo used a multi-pronged approach to generate sustainable income and continue offering educational content through its low cost edutainment platform. It focuses on the alternate revenue streams sought by Ubongo and how it expanded to include recipients as diverse as out-of-school children to refugee children to children in schools in the US. The case concludes with Ubongo’s future plans such as creating content in more African languages and focusing equally on adult educational content. After starting in Tanzania, Ubongo forayed into sub-Saharan and francophone (French speaking) Africa. Its mission is to reach 30 million children in Africa by 2022 and eventually to reach every child in Africa (440 million).

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Issues

The case is structured to achieve the following teaching objectives:

	To understand human centered design can be applied in the field of social entrepreneurship to create effective products and services.
	To highlight how social entrepreneurs can leverage available basic information and communication technologies to transform teaching and learning.
	To learn how the different design principles can be applied to build effective and engaging learning and development courses.
	To understand the challenges of scaling up and generating revenue streams.
	To create awareness about the numerous opportunities available that cater to the bottom of the pyramid customers.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

UBONGO’S INCLUSIVE BUSINESS MODEL

KEY SUCCESS FACTORS

POSITIVE IMPACT ON CHILDREN’S LEARNING ABILITIES

GOING BEYOND AFRICA

EXHIBITS

Keywords

Product Co-creation; Design Thinking; Social Value; Social Enterprise; Human-centered Design; Inclusive Business Model; Market Assessment; Social Innovation; Scaffolding; Instructional Design; Ideation; Edutainment

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