Taking Money and College Mobile
Progress made in Mobile Money and Mobile College Projects
At Enactus FUTO we have a mantra of always helping entrepreneurs in our community and beyond. In May, we poured energy and several volunteer hours into Making Entrepreneurs — a project which has been running for the past five years but one which we reinforced this year to focus on widows, farmers, the fishing industry and National Youth Service Corpers in our community. 75 individuals have been trained, 20 businesses started, 1700 stems of Vitamin A rich cassava distributed to 17 farmers, all targeted at raising their income level. We have created access to loans for the corp members and have collaborated with a recent Materials and Mettalurgical Engineering graduate to design and build a Portable Fish Dryer (PFD) that cleans up the fish drying and preservation process. This project was headed by the hardworking Maduka Godfrey, a Computer Science student.
In June, we focused our efforts on kids aged between 8 and 13. The project is called NUORAH — an acronym for Nutrition, Oral Health and Hygiene awareness. The goals set have been achieved — nearly 2000 kids in three community primary schools have been taught the rudiments of proper dental care, hand washing and hygiene. They have also been equipped with the leadership skills necessary to imbibe this new culture into their peers. Their parents and guardians are testimony to the impact made — we have helped school authorities and parents fill avoid. Amaka Ndukwu is at the helm of this project and largely responsible for its success.
In July, we are going ‘tech’ and taking ‘mobile’ along with us. Entrepreneurs in the mobile money industry in Nigeria understandably have a tough time explaining the concept, its usability and even usefulness to the general masses. When we contacted Paga in March this year for a partnership to make mobile money spread on our campus, we identified a similar problem of lack of understanding by the target populace. Paga has about 1.5 million users; impressive as it may sound, the number is not up to 1% of the entire population of both the bank-ed and the unbank-ed in Nigeria. For a service that reaches both sets seamlessly, one of the problems with their services has been the nagging issue of platformization. More and more, people are accessing the web through apps than the internet — mobile phone apps are the new bookmarks. In order to fill this void, we decided to leverage on the ubiquity of one particular platform — Android, to begin the progress process.
Before doing that though, we successfully registered four agents on campus to set the tone. Once the agents were mobilized, we moved in to the application development deploying a Rapid Action Development methodology to design and develop a high quality system in the shortest time possible, with the best available skill set. The PagaMyCampus application has become a reality; if you are wondering what the reach might be like, it is important to note that 3 in every 5 students on campus use an android device, and the app our technical team has designed is built to be just as useful with internet connection as without it. Transactions are not hindered in any way. The long term goal is to work with Paga to adopt this strategy and identify campuses to spread the reach of this mobile money service. It is probably safe to say now that we have a vision, that one day, parents will not need to go to a bank to send money to students on campus, but will instead just Paga it, through PagaMyCampus (absolutely no pun intended!). The app is here. Enactus FUTO mobile money project is headed by Opara Vivian, a Biomedical Technology student.
We are also taking colleges mobile this month. Why? How? It has so happened that the turn of the new millennium heralded a new internet era, where information is king. Even back in the early 2000's when access was difficult for most, it was clear that in no time, everyone would have access to connection or a mobile device at least. Fast forward to 2014 and the reality stares us all today. Internet technology has taken over and many of the biggest industries have joined the party — think e-commerce, relationships, job search, medicine, media, sports and the rest of them. It is important that education is not left behind; in fact globally, there has been a steady rise in the number of of online schools/academies (RDI, Coursera, EDX, NovoEd etc taking courses from places like MIT, Stanford and Angelica Ruskin), with one or two springing up within Africa including our very own Beni American University, founded by Gossy Ukwanokwe. Obtaining degrees online is the new cool. Beyond online schools and academies, there has been a steady rise in the number of web platforms, groups and forums dedicated to learning, inquisitiveness and discovery — this is the future of education. The most popular of them all is Quora of course.
At Enactus FUTO, we have seen a void in our secondary school systems. The reasons schools kill creativity are many, but one of them is the lack of feedback that comes form inquisitiveness. A teacher comes, teaches what they know (whether right or wrong), the students absorb them without question; those who are smart grab it, those who aren’t leave it for later or when the exams are around the corner. The next time the teacher shows up, it is to introduce something new, without proper attention to know if what was last taught has been understood and if the students have attempted to identify real life applications for it. This was acceptable during the age of the printing press when information was ‘hoarded’ in texts that were barely affordable or available, not in an internet age of open learning and resources.
Mobile College is designed to address this. Starting with students at the FUTO International Secondary School (FISO), we will attempt to train science subject teachers on the concept of collaborative and feedback-based learning, after which we would proceed to design an online platform that would allow them get students’ feedback on classes via SMS, without compromising on their privacy. The hope is that the teachers can use the feedback to know what concepts they need to explain better and where to point the students for further learning, other than text books. We would further teach the students how to use the internet to advance on lessons taught in the classroom. For all the wrong things that kids do with the internet today, we cannot and should not take it away from them. We should rather take learning to them through the kind of platforms that they use everyday on mobiles. This project is headed by Jane Okoro, a microbiologist.
July promises to be an exciting month with these projects and as it coincides with the annual Enactus National Competition that begins on July 15th. This is a call for more hands — students, partners and board members, to enable us foster progress in our communities through the positive power of business.
