“Nigeria is Our Biggest Market in Digital Content Broadcasting”

“Nigeria is Our Biggest Market in Digital Content Broadcasting”

Drivers of the leading edutainment platform, Cliodhna Ryan, Olatayo Olaniyan, and Iman Lipumba, speak about their market expansion plan across the African continent, the need for collaboration, free content training for content developers, especially in Nigeria, their biggest market in digital content broadcasting to schools and homes. Emma Okonji presents the excerpts

Ubongo recently organised a training session for content and app developers in Nigeria. What is your mission and what does the training seek to achieve?

Ubongo is non-governmental organisation (NGO) that develops educational contents with entertainment for African schools. Ubongo’s apps are designed with quality contents that are fused with entertainment and story telling that will enhance teaching and learning in schools.

Ubongo’s mission is to use top quality and localised edutainment to help African’s 500 million children learn, and leverage their learning to change their lives, through its radio and television programmes, including mobile phones broadcasting.

In developing educational contents, we use technology tools to develop digital contents and broadcast same through digital channels that would help enhance quality teaching and learning in schools. The one-day free training for education content developers in Lagos, will give content developers and educators the support they needed to develop more educational contents that schools could adopt.

How do you ensure content compatibility with school curriculum across the various African countries where Ubongo has presence?

Our educational contents are in line with government’s curriculum across Africa, aimed at developing the educational content across Africa, using locally sourced materials.

As an edutainment company, Ubongo is careful at keeping abreast with the broadcasting codes and regulations that govern content in different African countries, including Nigeria, because from the beginning, the key partner for us has been the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and our contents have gone through several levels of vetting from them, before broadcasting. NTA is a government owned broadcasting house with very stringent regulations, and they are keen at upholding the standard of education, and they are pleased to broadcast out educational contents that have a mix of technology. We want to inspire a lot more edutainment interventions in Nigerian schools, and we are advocating for the return of quality content in school curriculum. We will continue to invest in order to increase the number of languages, including local languages, through which we can reach out to the schools. During the workshop, we identified the needs of content providers and trained them in that direction free of charge. The essence is to grow more partners that will be developing school contents that will support teaching and learning in schools. During the training, participants were grouped and each group was made to identify some challenges in teaching and learning processes, and to develop solutions on how to address such challenges, through teaching that is combined with story telling and edutainment.

For how long has Ubongo been operating and what has been the impact since inception?

Ubongo was founded in 2013 in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania by a group of five people from different fields of learning like educators, actors, artists, animators, teachers and entrepreneurs. These people figured out that they had a mutual interest in education and in specifically finding innovative ways to address the learning gap and education challenges in Tanzania in particular at that time. So they decided to come together and bring their different skill sets and found the organization called Ubongo. Their initial goal was to create innovation in education and extend such innovation to several schools in Tanzania, and they later realised the need to extend to other African countries for wider collaboration. They were able to create different contents which were tested with school pupils to see how the contents appeal to their sense of learning. Given the success and wide acceptance of Ubongo’s app in Tanzania, we decided to extend it to other African countries.

So how do you apply technology in content creation and distribution?

At Ubongo, we create educational entertainment for children and deliver this educational entertainment through accessible technology channels like television and radio, but then we also use mobile and other digital platforms and these channels of delivery increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, including offline channels to reach the most difficult areas where people live and learn. So we used our first television show to target school children between the ages of eight to 14 years, and the content addresses Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), as well as life skills.

We later expanded beyond Kenya, to Ghana, Nigeria, with interest to spread across the African continent.

The Ubongo app relies heavily on feedback and research about the audience and parents. Our feedback from onset, shows that both parents and the students, loved the contents of the app as well as the television and radio broadcast of our educational contents.

One challenge that we had then, which had since been addressed, was that those below eight years old were also interested in the broadcast and they will join their elder brothers and sisters in watching and listening to the educational broadcast. So what we did, based on the feedback, was to develop content, using local materials that the younger kids could understand better.

A year later we designed our second programme, which targeted three to six years old, and it was really focused on early childhood development.

So those critical skills that children need to learn between the ages of three to five years or before they begin primary school, were designed and created. So things like literacy, numeracy, social emotional learning skills, motor skills, among others, were built into the content.

So we launched it in Tanzania and Kenya, and then soon adapted into other languages, and launched it in different markets in Africa. So our first time airing our contents in Nigeria was around 2017, where we launched a technology driven product in English language. It was later developed in Hausa language, and since then, demand has increased.

What has been the coverage area in Africa, and how many schools and households have you been able to reach?

So currently, across the markets, we are in 20 African countries and our shows are being aired and we currently broadcast to 24.6 million households a month across Africa, with Nigeria as one of our biggest markets.

Although we started from Tanzania, which is our home-base, but right now Nigeria is our biggest market when it comes to the number of viewers we are having. Our desire is to go Pan Africa, making education more relevant the people. Nigeria, no doubt, has the largest population of people in Africa, and her market is big and it has a big need for the kind of service we offer. We are currently looking towards making a lot more investments in Africa and the Nigerian market, and make learning much more fun for the people, through local content development.

What does this initiative seek to achieve and how do you intend to achieve it?

The essence is to revive the Africa educational system in today’s era of digital transformation where technology is driving virtually everything. The values of the Africa education are fast eroding and we are ready to restore such values as quick as possible, beginning from those in nursery and primary schools.

There is dearth of educational contents in Africa and Ubongo is rising up to that challenge to address it. In Nigeria for instance, children used to learn quality education on television and radio in the past, but not anymore because over the last decade, it appears such value system has disappeared. In can remember in the past when there was very rich local content available for children, but today, a huge gap exists between quality contents and general educational contents. Even though the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has regulations, we can hardly point at quality educational content for schools. We are seeking for more collaboration to take quality educational content to schools and our mission is to reach these children with edutainment. The free training we organised in Nigeria, will enhance the capability of broadcasters and content developers to develop more entertainment contents for Nigerian schools, and we plan to reach out to more schools and children by 2025.

How will you describe the participation of trainees in Lagos and how do you intend to scale it up?

The participants in Lagos showed high interest in the free training programme. They were put in various groups and allowed to brainstorm among themselves in identifying challenges in learning and also proffering solutions to identified learning challenges. The essence of the training is to grow content developers and inspire a lot more edutainment interventions by broadcast houses within the country. In achieving this, we are particular about localised content, and we will continue to invest in order to increase the number of local languages that we can reach these children with.

When we spoke to broadcasters and educational content developers, we tried to identify their needs because we know that they are very experienced with creating contents. So we looked at what additional support can we give them to help them create better content, specifically for children in schools. During the training session, we took them through a process of human centered design that we use in Ubongo. We believe that this process is really the key to our success in creating content that is both locally relevant to children, and to the school. We believe that children are key part of the creation process, so we also took them through our storytelling process for change approach. We believe that stories are powerful, because children learn best when they are entertained. The key to educating a child through mass media is to ensure that they are highly engaged in what they see and hear while learning. For this reason, we use stories, songs and games for children to become active listeners and viewers when they are engaging with the content rather than passively receiving the content. Our goal is to ensure that broadcasters are equipped to go ahead and take this approach and apply it to create their own content because we have research that shows that this approach works. Our research have shown that when children are engaged in the content that they watch, they will remember the characters and this will make learning a lot more permanent in them.

Can Ubongo partner with trained content developers, by the time they eventually come up educational contents that are attractive to schools?

Yes, Ubongo will be ready to partner with any of them with quality educational contents and apps that are appealing to schools, but that would depend also on the details on production capacity on both ends and the timelines of those things. I think our long term vision honestly is for us to run ourselves out of business, because our goal is not to be the only people creating educational entertainment for children across Africa. Our long term vision is that we equip broadcasters and content creators locally to be producing contents in order to create variety of options for children beyond what we produce. Here in Nigeria, we are really seeking to deepen our co-creation partnerships, and by that I mean, gathering a wider variety of children that we can work with to co-create the content.

How has technology helped in achieving your set goals for schools?

So I will speak to that in two ways. One will be within the content itself, and the other will be around the content. So within the content itself, we have some episodes that specifically look at digital literacy.

Also, how children can filter out content that is appropriate for them, how they can question the source of the content they access through the internet, and we believe that digital technology is really essential for this generation. We are also looking at equipping children to use technology to help them to learn, because it’s really a key tool for children’s learning. We saw all that playing out during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools and economies were locked down, and people were able to teach pupils and students through various channels that were powered by technology.

Our research has shown that most families have access to at least a basic feature phone. Through that phone, they can access our content through SMS because we have an SMS service that they can access. We recently launched our chatbot, which is a whatsapp chatbot that they can interact with and receive automated messages back to their phone. We also use interactive voice response, which is a free service that parents or children can call the number, and they will hear some clips from our content through the phone for free. In addition to that, we are looking at other offline methods, because sometimes, there won’t be a phone or a radio or television for content broadcast. In that situation, we can find places where people can come together to access it, whether it’s TV or radio. We also make use of USB sticks, where we preload all of our educational contents and take the USB sticks directly to communities and give to somebody who can download the content from the USB sticks and use them to impact knowledge.

Since your trainings are free of charge, how do you raise money to fund your projects?

Ubongo is a not for profit organisation and we fund our projects through fund raising. We also get a lot of support from organisations, friends, families and donor agencies. We use such donations to impact learning across Africa and our donors see what we do with their money and they are pleased to support us the more. Ubongo is also designing its programmes to suit the needs of schools and our approach and strategies are human-centric based and we build on knowledge expansion. So we are open for collaboration and sponsorship.

How do you align with the existing school curriculum across African countries, while delivering your educational contents, especially in Nigeria, which is your biggest market?

As educational content providers, and as an edutainment company, we are careful in keeping abreast with the broadcasting codes and regulations that govern school contents in different jurisdictions in Africa and in Nigeria. In Nigeria for instance, our key partner has been the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and our contents have gone through several levels of vetting with them, even just for their own broadcast. First of all, as a government owned media house that is very strict with regulations, we ensure quality products and contents for broadcasting on NTA.

Secondly, we work with consultants in every African country that we operate. We have invested so much in our consultants that understand the school system and their curriculum. So we work with a lot of consultants in every country where we operate.

So to answer your questions, our contents are strictly vetted before we push them out to broadcasting stations like television and radio stations.

We have partners that we work with, which addresses the cultural values that we project. We have built into our process, a co-creation with industry stakeholders.

So beyond just meeting the regulations of various African countries, we are saying that we have built quality programmes into all our processes, to ensure that we are not just observing the regulations, but also being sensitive to the cultural differences and cultural sensitivity of the people.

Related Articles