Anita and Tunji focused primarily in our conversation on Tunji’s passion project called GIDIMO. He explained that there are two parts of GIDIMO’s success. GIDIMO has funding! It has the money to offer quality education. In most parts of Africa, 60% of education is privately provided. There aren’t enough schools and many children out of school. Those in school are not in good quality programs. We’re focused on remedial learning: those who are in school but not learning. The second thing is a great, innovative, game-based learning platform.

There is a great need. About half of Nigeria’s citizens are below 18. The numbers are huge. As a result, anything you do helps. You don’t get the same kind of sorting effect that we have with private schools in North America. In Nigeria, private schools are not uniformly expensive high-quality schools. There are a lot of schools run by retirees. Anything helps! Yes, there’s bad teaching, which reduces student motivation.

GIDIMO is oriented around a game called Battle of Kyrion. It’s a game that anyone can play. At first, prior to the pandemic, GIDIMO marketed it as a commercial product. You pay, compete, and win prizes. The game was developed by a group of friends on a retreat over a few days. It’s fun. The young people who play it fall in love with the learning that occurs by playing the game. GIDIMO has a great young talented team that thought for a long time about whether the product is gamified learning or a learning game. They studied learning science and decided to translate the topics in the curriculum into the game. They made a competence map and targeted the game at 13- to 17-year-olds. We tried younger students through support from Google but decided to turn back to teenagers.

Anita asked Tunji about how remedial students are attracted into this. How did GIDIMO work with the teachers and the school system to enroll students? Tunji explained that GIDIMO’s team went in and talked with students in a wide range of educational settings, i.e., public schools, high-end private schools, and lower-end private schools. The findings were that the kids who had plenty were afraid of losing their parents. The kids who had little were afraid of having little in life. GIDIMO meets the needs of the children who have less. The kids in the lower-end schools were excited and happy to find this. We just signed a partnership with telcos and a bank to rollout in 2025. We are shooting for 500k for 2025.

Anita asked: What are the bank and telco bringing to the model? Tunji explained that these new partners offer routes to market. The product has been reinvented as an offering through their products. The bank offers a product to moms and teenagers, for example. GIDIMO builds a brand for transforming young people’s relationship with knowledge as the basis for broader successes. The bank and telcos convey to their customers that they care about them. It is this care and compassion and excitement about the potential for learning that GIDIMO is bringing to the private-sector partnerships in exchange for distribution. This is uniquely African in some ways. You don’t need to do a lot of talking to convey the importance of education.

What advice does Tunji give to our audience? He advises you to think about the problem that you’re facing and how to solve it. We have 2.8b people in the developing world, of which half are below 18 years old. How do we educate these people? We’re a learning company disguised as a gaming company. The global south cannot afford the education system that is prevalent in the West. We need to innovate. The technology delivers deep learning at scale. This is about deploying solutions at scale using new technologies through resources and capabilities that are locally available.