StartupBus Africa was great fun and brought about some really exciting ventures. Some of them, however, have crept off the radar since the startup competition slash hackathon concluded last year November. Sterio.me isn’t one of them. The energetic mobile education outfit recently announced that it will be rolling out a trial of its services across 75 schools in Nigeria, once it has secured crucial partnerships.
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Sterio.me was founded by Christopher Pruijsen, Dean Rotherham and Danielle Reid and is an elearning startup that provides mobile education for young Africans who don’t have easy access to reliable infrastructure.
By giving students a unique SMS code, they have access to relevant learning material which they can listen to while they’re away from school.
Sterio.me CEO Christopher Pruijsen elaborates on the service saying that “a ‘Sterio’ is an interactive audio lesson, which is pre-recorded by the Educator and delivered via an SMS-triggered inbound voice call to the learner, in order to reinforce in-classroom content.”
He goes on saying, “It is such that every lesson contains ten minutes of audio content and questions, and teachers receive instant feedback on learner performance, saving them hours each day on marking assignments.”
Sterio.me is currently looking for partners in Nigeria to further its development in Africa’s most populous country. In terms of potential stakeholders, Tech Trends Nigeria notes that the startup has its eyes set on government entities that can support the creation of localised content, teacher unions that can promote general endorsement of the product, and local telecoms that can sponsor Sterio.me via their networks.
The learning platform is said to be completely free for both the educators and the learners, and the data collected will be shared freely with local and national governments and ministries.
