For any parent with a child in primary or secondary school, monitoring performance ranks high on the priority list.
This is because in current education system, the grades not only indicate the level of education students would achieve, but also their career path and ultimately the kind of life they may lead.
For this reason parents always contact teachers to follow up on the performance of their children.
Nyatha Githinji, 24, while a student at the University of Nairobi, saw an opportunity in this parent-teacher relationship and developed a technological solution to make the interaction more efficient.
“When we were in primary school we’d be given our academic report forms to take to our parents at the end of every term,” he recalls. “If I had not done well in a given term, I would always make sure that my parents never got to see my report card because the consequences would be painful.”
Githinji soon learnt that most of his friends did the same thing and it occurred to him many parents remained unaware of the accurate academic performance of their children until it was too late.
In his third year at the university where he had enrolled for a degree course in Computer Science, the idea to find a solution led him to develop Tusqee Systems, a short message service (SMS) based information sharing portal that has so far won him two awards and Sh3 million in seed capital. He was expected to complete his studies at the university this year but deferred his course to pursue the project.
“With the advancement in mobile technology, I began to explore how parents and teachers could leverage digital technology to share information that is pertinent to the performance of the children,” he states.
Tusqee Systems is a management information system that integrates the Internet and SMS technology to relay academic information for each student, to the parents.
“The format is very simple and all that is needed is for the school to have a computer and a reliable internet connection,” explains Githinji. “Once the software is installed, the school’s system administrator uploads the required examination records, which are then dispatched to all parents via SMS.”
He says that he developed the system based on the messaging service to make it accessible to all and compatible with any device. “SMS is fast, cheap and nowadays virtually everybody owns a phone that can send a text message,” he says.
“This makes it easy for the parents to obtain an accurate record of their students’ performance. At the same time, it saves the school administration the inconvenience and expense of writing or printing out progress reports for each student.”
Tusqee Systems is capable of more than just relaying academic information. According to Githinji, a school administration could use the system to share any kind of information about the school among its stakeholders.
“The system can be used to inform parents of their fee balances at any point of the school calendar,” he says. “In addition to this, the administration can communicate important dates like Parents Teachers Association and Board of Governors meetings, closing or opening days or visiting dates through text messages.” The information uploaded into the database could be used for long and short-term planning decisions. Its digital nature also makes its dissemination and storage easier. School administrators and teachers are spared the agony of missing school records.
The system is available for download free of charge.
Once it is installed, however, the school is required to buy SMS credit bundles, which cost between Sh3,000 and Sh10,000 a term depending on the specific communication requirements and number of students in the institution.
Githinji has also developed a similar system to cater for communication needs in companies and religious institutions. Tusqee Systems was voted the best software in the government, agriculture and education category at the Pivot25 competition held last year. It also won the IPO48 contest in August in which software developers won Sh3 million in seed capital. M-lab and HumanIPO organised the competitions, respectively.
However, there have been some challenges to developing the system.
“It was hard to come up with a solution that could be used across the board because different schools operate differently,” says Githinji. “For example, schools have different grading systems for their exams and having a standard system was a great challenge.”
In addition to this, he says that the current intellectual property laws in the country have loopholes and imitation is rife. “Some people have realised that there is some money to be made in this market segment and have tried to develop a clone to our system.”
