Shupavu 291 By safaricom and Eneza education

Student can smile all the way to quality knowledge and good grades. On 3th of February, we launched Shupavu 291  to 400 schools across Kenya in conjunction with Safaricom our partner. The revision study tool works through SMS and USSD and can be accessed from any mobile by dialing *291# or sending the word START to 20851.The response we got was amazing and surely uplifting. We gained 23,000 new users in a span of a week and better user engagement than ever before.

Shupavu 291 enables students to take quizzes, search subjects and topics to study as well as access of wikipedia summaries without requiring any internet connection. With the service, teachers and parents can check reports on individual student performance and school performance via SMS. All this is just at a flat rate of Ksh 30 for unlimited usage of the platform per month.

The most invigorating aspect of Shupavu 291 is the ASK-A-TEACHER feature, whereby students ask questions remotely to a live teacher. To use the service, students have to text a message starting with the word ASK followed by a space and a question to 20851. Since it is a teacher assistant tool, it is open only outside class hours,to be precise, 7pm to 9pm.

During the Elimika na Shupavu 291 launch, we had not anticipated great activity on our ASK-A-TEACHER feature. Little did we know that we had built a study tool for all until we started receiving questions from our users. Originally designed for primary school students, we were surprised to get secondary school questions on subjects like Biology and Chemistry. Thanks to our robust system, everything fitted in pretty well.

Back to the response from ASK-A-TEACHER: In the first week, we identified significant areas of interest by students.The topics in which majority of questions were asked by students ranged from Geography, Religion, Sex, Politics to Drugs.

Here are some examples of questions asked:

• Who discovered that Pluto had disappeared?
• Does Mercury have a moon?
• What is Drug Abuse?
• What is Biology/Chemistry?
• Why do male mosquitoes not suck blood?

Others wanted to know about sex while some asked totally unrelated questions away from education,like this one: What is twerking?

Overally, Shupavu 291 roll out was a big success to the students, our valued partners and the company at large.