Would it be shocking to realize that about 20 million Nigerian children are out of school and 244 million globally?
Well, research by UNESCO affirms this. The appalling lack of access to quality education is saddening and despite collaborations to relieve this, more hands are needed.
Osayi Izedonmwen is one of such innovators working hard to reduce this rate and bolster quality education access starting from Nigeria and then Africa at large.
In this regard, he founded Teesas. Join us as he speaks on the company’s commendable reach, scale and impacts so far.
Kindly enlighten us about Teesas. What was the inspiration behind the name?
Teesas came from a Bini (Edo) word Etisa which means teacher. That’s a reflection of what we intend to do, which is to bring together the very best teachers, giving them an opportunity to impact lives, build leaders of the future, transform their minds, not just from the academic aspect but focus on developing the total child.
That’s why when you go on the Teesas platform, we are not just focused on academics but also total character building, strengthening the connection to our local culture and dialect, among others.
Correct me if I’m wrong please. Teesas was founded in 2021 after the pandemic hit hard in 2020. Was the idea of Teesas promoted by the pandemic or it had been cooking before the covid?
We had been planning and talking about developing an edtech platform for at least two years before covid came about. The reason is that we’ve always believed the future of education is going to be somewhat hybrid, and we already had a lot of interactions with kids because another company that I founded Imose Technologies, had become one of the largest brands delivering children’s educational tablets, for example, the Omotab educational tablets.
We already knew that we needed to increase the quality of educational content we put on the tablet and we also know that for us to reach children that are in the most difficult-to-reach areas, we had to leapfrog the structural hurdles through technology. So I had been thinking about this for a while.
Teesas last raised a $1.6m pre-seed fund December 2021, which was to stimulate your expansion into new markets and expand your product range. Where have you expanded to since then and what are the new products developed?
Last year, when we started, we were just rolling out primary school academic support products that essentially help children understand foundation concepts across subjects that are delivered from reception all the way to primary six. Today, if you go on the app, we’ve created so much value in terms of new products, now we have The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Kids, developed in partnership with Franklin Covey, the publishers of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of the world’s most trusted leadership training organisations. We are now their exclusive partner across Africa for education.
Within this period, we’ve also developed the secondary school entrance exam product. What it does is to really help children prepare for entrance exams into different categories of secondary schools — Catholic schools, National Unity schools, Military schools and all.
We’ve taken many years of past questions, broken it down, brought in the best and brightest tutors to really dig deep into how to answer those questions effectively, training the children and giving them many years of past questions that they can take on the app.
We’ve also developed a more robust product for learning Nigerian languages. That’s targeted at parents that want their children to get grounded and connected to their local culture, at home and in the diaspora.
Those are some of the things we’ve done in terms of enhancing the product range.
Regarding expansion, we’ve started making moves in Kenya, we’ve set up a full team in Kenya and we are at the early stages of setting up a team in Ghana. We’ve made quite some expansive moves in the last one year and we will continue to grow the business.
Did you have legislative issues when you launched in Kenya or Ghana, when it came to the Government and dealing with their rules, laws and policies?
We are still in the process. For Kenya, it was a bit straightforward, we registered as a full-fledged subsidiary. In Ghana, we had to look at the local laws and find the best ways to accommodate our business there. We are a law-abiding company so we have to focus our energies to align with the local legal requirements to register a company there and essentially, we’ve done whatever is required to register or set up. I wouldn’t say it’s easy or hard because the only comparison we have is Nigeria and relatively, we’ve had very good lawyers from the onset and it hasn’t been very difficult.
How have these products enhanced your growth and what are the impacts made so far?
We have done a lot of CSR and one which I’m excited and proud of is the Teesas Donate Program, where we have encouraged individuals to donate damaged devices such as tablets and computers to us, we’d repair them and infuse those devices with our educational content. We then deliver these devices for free, donate them to orphanages, IDP camps and we don’t just donate devices, we support those orphanages with one-on-one tutorials every now and then, and give them internet access for a year.
For a startup that came to life just last year, it’s something we are really proud of and we are clearly focused on giving back to society. We believe in creating value, impacting lives and at creating essential value for our shareholders because as an organization, our vision and ambition is to democratize access to quality education with the aim of developing the whole child and enhancing their future outcomes.
Today, we have lots of big schools such as Oxbridge, St Saviours, and others collaborating with us. Our goal is not to replace traditional schooling. We see our products as supplements to help schools truly deliver on their vision and that’s why we are super excited about programs like the Principal’s Academy, where we brought in principals, school owners, and administrators and we gave them a robust 2-day training, we brought an international coaching expert from the US to really teach them how to drive social-emotional learning, how to help children develop skills that they need to be successful as they move into the real world.
A lot of schools attended the program and it just reinforces our aim to strongly collaborate with schools with the aim of doing exploits.
From what you’ve said, could we say you also reach out to the underserved? For people that can’t afford education
Absolutely, that is the core essence of the Teesas Donate Program. We believe that as an impact-driven organization, no child should be left behind. Our commitments remain to make sure that every child, everywhere, has access to quality education and the only way we can do that is to find creative ways to bring in these underserved children that otherwise cannot afford quality education.
That’s why we are focused on the program, giving out those tablets for free, giving them access to quality education for free, so yes, our goal is really to get more people educated and that involves reaching the underserved and the difficult-to-access communities.
How have you been able to sustain and even intensify this growth and impact? As of January this year, you already had over 150,000 downloads on the Google Play Store. How much increase have you gotten now? Still on numbers, tell us about the tractions you’ve made so far?
We try not to be number focused at Teesas, we try to be more impact-focused and that is how we measure our success. Remember our core ethos is impact, we measure success by the number of lives that we’re impacting and the transformation that we are making in the lives of children.
When we go to schools and are able to expand the network of schools we collaborate with, those are things that we track.
Are you saying users can leverage your product without the app?
We’ve designed the product such that whether you’re on the web or mobile, you can have access to the app. We’ve made access as seamless as possible and we also recognize that 60% of Africans interact with products using their mobile phones and that is why both on android and iOS, we have the app available.
