Infobip, a global cloud communications company that enables businesses to build connected customer experiences across all stages of the customer journey at scale has been appointed by Ubongo, Africa’s leading edutainment company, to implement a WhatsApp channel with its latest offering Answers. Answers is Infobip’s chatbot building platform that uses the world’s most popular communication channels and provides faster customer support at a lower cost. With more than two billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is ideally suited to Ubongo’s use case.

Ubongo creates localised and multi-platform educational media that reaches millions of families through accessible technologies. The organisation calls itself “Africa’s biggest classroom”, they deliver their programmes via TV, radio, and digital channels to millions of children across the continent.

Before the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Africa’s primary school enrolment rate stood on average at above 80%, currently, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 250 million primary and secondary school children are out of school in Africa. The pandemic has had a devastating effect on the continent’s education sector, and the closure of numerous learning institutions in many African countries continues to negatively impact the quality of education.

Stephen Boustred, Head of Digital Products at Ubongo.

“We will use the chatbot to encourage smartphone users to essentially be champions of Ubongo and share our content with kids and parents who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it,” concludes, Stephen Boustred, Head of Digital Products at Ubongo.

Majority of Ubongo’s audience uses the WhatsApp chat application, so the company can leverage its reach and low data costs to get content to its users and drive deeper engagement, in three different languages – English, Swahili and Hausa. To start consuming the educational content, all users have to do is save Ubongo as a WhatsApp contact using the number +1234 900 1234 and start a chat by sending the word ‘Hi’.

With the intent of significantly improving school readiness and learning outcomes, whilst also promoting social and behavioural change for children, caregivers, and educators. Ubongo uses powerful storytelling, mass media technologies and rigorous research to create top-quality learning, reaching their audience through their preferred devices and languages. Ubongo's main distribution channels are TV and radio, enabling it to reach many families at scale, but they have recognised a need for digital platforms to enable their audiences to engage deeper with their content.

This is the first time that Ubongo is pushing its content as free downloads directly to its users, allowing them access content on-demand that will function offline, adding value in term of content sharing with users within the last mile that do not already have access to its content.

Olatayo Ladipo-Ajai, Country Manager at Infobip Nigeria says, “This is a wonderful partnership that aligns with our goal of connecting the world. The project is something that we are proud of and want to keep working on to see how we can help Ubongo do more.”