29 min read

Edtech Solution For Early Child Development – A Chat with Lungile Maile

December 20, 2024

Edtech Solution For Early Child Development – A Chat with Lungile Maile

Lungile Maile is the founder of Nubian Smarts, an innovative ed-tech company committed to democratizing access to high-quality STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) education.

They believe that every child, no matter their background or location, should have the chance to explore and thrive in our rapidly advancing world. To bridge the educational gap by providing engaging STEAM learning solutions to early childhood centers, primary schools, and communities, especially in peri-urban and remote areas.

Lungile Maile shared with Today Africa the story of Meekono, how it began, and where they are now.

Tell us about yourself and about Nubian Smarts

A little bit of background about me. I’ve been in manufacturing for the past one and a half decades. I was doing operations and I was in the trenches of things where you manage operators that do the bottling and filling of beverages.

So I’ve worked for companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Heineken beverages and so forth. And that’s where my passion for Nubian Smarts actually started. I am a mother of three little babies. The youngest being seven months old. I really am excited about the future of Africa around the young population that we have.

I started Nubian Smarts because I saw that manufacturing companies or FMCG companies were moving more into automation with high-speed machinery that needed educational requirements that required you to have science and mathematics at a minimum at a grade 12 level.

Grade 12 is like your pre-college qualification here in South Africa. So before you go into varsity, you need to have grade 12 with maths and science. And a lot of the operators that were there didn’t have maths and science, even at a level of grade 10. And they could not apply for the new jobs because they don’t have the minimum requirements.

As a company, you can’t even send them back to training because their level of maths and science ends at a grade nine level. So they’re at that point and their minds have blocked off around mathematics and science. And they’re at a point where they think maths and science doesn’t help anybody. It’s not for everyone. It’s too hard and so forth.

Being a mother, I was like, what if my son who was three years old then, what if he gets to grade 10 where he can choose subjects? He decides not to do mathematics because it’s too hard. And I wanted to give him an opportunity to fall in love with mathematics and science. So I decided there must be something we can do about it.

Then I decided to create the new Nubian Kids app, which is a very first product as Nubian Smarts. So Nubian Kids app is an educational mobile game that promotes the understanding of mathematics. It has offline capabilities. It has a progress report that allows us to advise teachers in which areas the learners are struggling with. And Nubian Smarts was born.

So we decided to create the game. I got in touch with people that I’d gone to varsity with, that are doing the IT field side of things. And they then assisted me to create the game. Because I wasn’t creating a business, I was creating a solution to a problem that I saw. I didn’t think of how to make this into a business? How are you gonna charge people? Who’s your customer?

All those nice fancy things that I wish I’d known then, that I’ve had to learn the hard way. I decided to create a solution and, being a proactive person, I reached out to the Department of Education. I reached out to our then MEC, which is sort of like your Minister of Education at a provincial level in the province that I’m in, Gauteng.

He was very vocal on social media. I reached out to him and I said, I have this brilliant idea. You are introducing tablets into schools. Why don’t we have tablets that have games that are created by South Africans that are aligned to our curriculum? I’m thinking of one that does mathematics. And he said, oh, wow, excellent. Please do, go ahead. Once you’re done, come back to me.

I created the game and when I was done, he said, no, they don’t have the budget for anything with this one. So I was stuck with the product that I didn’t know who I was going to sell it to. All I wanted was kids to be playing with it. And we then went on a drive to get schools to register, which is not the easiest thing and anybody in edtech will tell you, getting into schools is like one of the hardest things ever.

I pushed on, I kept on trying. And at one point I was like, no man, this game is designed for kids as young as three years old. Let me prove that three year olds can learn mathematics. And I then went on to find private schools, which are early childhood centers.

What we do at Nubian Smarts is we bring STEM education solutions to early childhood centers. We went out there and piloted the game and we did a control group. So we had a group of 20 kids in a school. They were using the game on a weekly basis. We’d come with our devices, we’d let them play, we’d tell the teacher who’s struggling with what based on the report that we are getting.

And the teacher would advise, this is what you need to do. Add these counting games, sing these songs, go back and teach them shapes. We’d come in with our own resources around pictures, around games they can play. And we just went full force on this 20. And then the other 20, we just let them be.

At the end of the two months study, the school was like, whoa. And we said, we are done, these are our results. We did a study with all the kids. You’re gonna see the kids that we did with and the kids that you were busy with teaching. There was a huge difference, an 80% difference between the kids that were doing it with the Nubian Kids app.

The school was like, whoa, that is amazing. Can we continue having you? And I said, oh, somebody needs to pay now. I was doing a pilot study. I was just looking for this so I can send it through to the Department of Education again to say, wait, guys, I know you said you don’t have money, but this works.

I’m not talking about money. Give it to the kids. Let the kids play. How I make money out of this, let that be my problem. I’m not gonna charge you. Anyway, that was my idea. The school said, well, if you were looking for payment, just tell us your price and bring it back and get the other 20 kids back on track.

And that was our first customer. They’ve been with us since 2019 to date and we are still part of the school. And from those 20 kids, we’ve now had an impact on over 5,000 learners. So we’re very proud of the progress we’ve made. We’ve doubled down, we’ve gone straight in to see what are the issues that early childhood centers have and how can we then address it while also providing a market for our product.

We then decided to introduce coding, robotics, cooking, and arts. The cooking is really around, how do you teach a four year old science other than cooking? For us it makes sense. Cooking teaches you how temperature affects things. It teaches you how to measure recipes. It teaches you how you can change something by adding a different color, how certain movements really form things. So for us that is science, that is the basis of science.

We now do workshops where we teach kids cooking, coding, robotics, arts, and the Mathematics app is still the number one product that we are selling. Recently, we started hosting Kids’ STEM Festivals. In the early childhood center, we pick four to six year olds that get access to this.

But there’s another group of kids that are not in the underserved communities, they’re not really in the upper middle class communities where their parents are trying to provide for them but want their kids to learn how to do coding. So we call them STEM Kids festivals and we introduce the kids to drones, flight simulators, coding, robotics, cooking, and dance.

It’s a whole lot of fun for five hours with 4 to 13 year olds and really making STEM fashionable for lack of a better word. Yeah, but basically that’s what Nubian Smarts is.

Is Nubian Smarts an offline or online game or product?

It’s an online and Android-based game. It’s not on the Google Play Store. Reasons being that parents that pay are very highly unbanked. In South Africa most people have a bank account but how they use their bank account is when you get paid, they take out all your money from the bank because you don’t trust the bank to keep your money safe.

So you take out all your money and you put it safely in your house. They deal mainly with cash transactions. When the school is charging,they charge as part of that school fees and parents are more than happy to do that. If you put it on the app store and you say, pay on the app store.

The parents are like, no, I’m not going to put my banking details online. They’re going to steal my money. It’s a scam. What will happen if they withdraw all my money? And I’m not in the business of teaching parents to trust the internet. So we decided to take it out because it wasn’t yielding any results.

So the schools that subscribe to our platform, they get a link where they can be able to download the game. And those that don’t have devices, lease devices from us and we charge them extra for that. Those that have money, but don’t want to keep devices on site because of crime. They then pay us an extra fee for us to have somebody go into the school with the devices on a weekly basis.

How did you raise capital used in building Nubian Smarts?

It’s a lesson for everybody to not do what I did. So I had an idea. I thought the idea would work. As a Mbokodo that I am, a superwoman, I went through tutorials to learn how to code, and I learned. And I thought I did a very good job, and I coded my first application. Nothing worked.

Zero of the things that I did worked. It wasn’t working. To this day, I don’t even know where I left. Then I started sourcing other people to help me, and they gave me prices, because they are a business. Then I decided to take my 401k, my pension provident fund from my company. I was confident this is gonna solve so many problems, so many challenges that we have in South Africa.

And if I have to not work for three months while building this, it’s perfectly fine. So I resigned from work, I took my menus, I paid the guy, he built the game, everything was fine, the game was working. I went back to the Department of Education, and they said no. At that point, I found another job, so I was working again, it wasn’t an issue. And then it became bootstrapping for a very long time.

Number one, I couldn’t figure out who the market was. So when you attend things like Google Developers Launchpad and you go through YouTube tutorials, you’ll find that people will say, for apps, what you need to do is add monetization. You make money through ads. But my game was an offline game. So it means that once you’ve downloaded it, you can switch off your data connection. The child plays.

Once you are done, I advise parents and teachers to connect to some sort of network connection, whether it’s Wi-Fi at the mall or at work. So that we can be able to pick up the cookies and that forms our progress report. It means that you’re connected to the internet for five minutes. So when do ads come into effect? People were saying this doesn’t make sense, how are you going to make money out of ads?

Up until 2019, when we did the pilot, we didn’t have a paying customer. Nobody was touching us with anything. We’d go through pitches and we’d get through and investors would be like, nah, this won’t work. Aren’t you thinking of maybe doing it for the other grades?

I’m like, I’m gonna do for other grades because I’ve already spent half my money on creating this one. This one is what I have. Then 2019 I did that. And then I then applied for SAP Social Innovation and I had a paying customer. Now I finally prove that there is somebody who is willing to pay for this. And now officially it becomes a business.

Before then, people were like, don’t you think you should register as an NPO, like become a non-profit organization and NGO, apply for corporates to fund you. I’m like, no, I believe people will pay and 2019 was the first time we put funding externally.

SAP Social Innovation gave us 200,000 Rand, which is probably about $10 – $12,000. Then we were able to launch and expand. And in 2019, we went from having one center at the beginning of the year that really started off as a pilot to having 40 centers around our area. We were doing extremely well, beyond what I could have ever imagined.

And COVID happened, schools closed and my business died. And so I was then in step one but I had funding. Then I decided there were a couple of things we didn’t like with the game. Number one, the first version of the game, we could only register sixty different profiles on one device, which meant we needed more and more devices as we grew. So it became a very resource intensive thing.

During this period we decided to change it to allow anybody to log in and log off. Even if it means that at a point you need to be connected to log in and log off, different users can use it on one device. With this we can go into a school and with 20 devices, we can service 40 or 60 different kids just as long as we space the time accordingly.

Unfortunately, early childhood centers struggled the most once lockdowns were done. So in South Africa, we went on lockdown at the end of March and officially, ECD centers really did open around September. When they opened, parents had lost jobs so they were at home. And early childhood education wasn’t a priority for a lot of people.

We spent 2020, 2021 going back to the drawing board and trying to help the schools that we were in to get back to where they were. They were cutting extra projects. 2020, 2021 was a mess. In 2022, things started stabilizing. We started introducing new things as well so that we cannot only be for the underserved community.

But also really look at the community that is sort of forgotten because at an underserved level you’ve got government welfare. The parents are able to see that you’ve got your upper middle class. They’re working but not making enough in order to have expendable cash and they’re not making too little in order for the government to assist them. Everything is on them.

So I was like, how can I assist those people? And we added a bit more products on the lineup. And 2022 became step zero again. We started again and two years later, we are in three countries in 2024.

It’s been a journey. I did stay in the corporate for longer than I anticipated. And like most businesses, as soon as they start making money, they jump off. I couldn’t jump off because as I was growing, the resources that we needed became more.

But also I was still in the process of teaching my community on the importance of STEM education, on the importance of doing it in the first 2000 days. Instead of waiting when the child is 16 for you to say you are introducing them to coding and robotics. A lot of our work goes around awareness, making sure schools are aware.

Communities are aware of why it’s important in the first 2,000 days to make sure that your child is learning the most critical things like brain development is going on. Get them excited about coding, get them excited about robotics, get them counting, get them seeing the difference in patterns and shapes and so forth.

After being rejected by the Department of Education, what step did you take in launching your business into the market?

What the Department of Education did for me was very critical. They did say no, they don’t have funding after nine months of them holding onto my app and busy looking at it. They came back and said, okay, it is aligned to the curriculum. And I was like, okay, we’re on the right step, and it’s something educational.

But they said they can’t help me with money. So I spent a lot of time marketing and going door to door, knocking on schools. In South Africa, there’s different quantile levels of schools. Quintile one is the poor school. They don’t even have a toilet. They’re struggling with having enough classes.

Quintile two, they have a bit of infrastructure. They don’t have enough teachers, and don’t have textbooks. Quintile three, they have textbooks. They have a roof and might not have enough teachers for every subject, but the parents are paying very little. It’s almost a non-fee paying school. So those three quantiles, parents really don’t pay if you don’t have money.

Quintile four is your semi-private public school. The parents pay but the government also subsidizes a lot of the things. Maybe the government would pay the teachers, but everything else the parents pay for. And then Quintile five is a straightforward private school, the government is really not involved. They have their own list.

I was knocking on Quintile 4 because they have money. But every time I knock, they say, no, we have the product. And I’m like, no, you don’t have the product. They’re like, no, we have a math-based app. And I said, but then it’s not South African-based. This one is based on the South African curriculum.

I know you’ve got ONX. I know you’ve got mathematics, but those things will teach your kids to count in inches. We don’t have inches in South Africa. We have centimeters and meters. This plays a role in my child coming back and asking me questions from school. How many inches is this? And I’m like, what? I’ve never heard that. So it didn’t make sense to me.

I spent two years knocking on schools before I decided to start to go through to the childhood centres. I never gave up because I knew somebody needed the product. And that kept me going. I kept knocking everywhere except the government.

What’s your business model and how does your business generate revenue?

We are a B2B company. So we sell our products directly through to the schools. We only engage parents in terms of standing alongside the school. But we don’t market directly to parents for the Nubian Kids app.

For the workshops, we do a B2C where we sell directly to parents. They can purchase tickets and send their kids to our workshops. The schools that we work with are township-based schools and rural area-based schools. And there’s a misconception out there that parents in those communities don’t have money. I don’t believe it.

Reason being that Betway, which is the gambling company, makes the most of their money in townships. So I am convinced there’s money there. If Betway sees money, I see money too. So that was me. Find a way to direct it to good things and ensure the benefits. And all parents, regardless of whether they are poor or rich, we all want the best for our kids.

That is the foundation of being a parent. Once you give birth to that person, all you want is to protect them. You want to give them the best according to what you can provide, but you want to give the best. And I wasn’t going to sit there and think that people want to be given things.

This model for NPOs is kind of hard to sustain if you are going to do long-term work in one community. Because if my funders decide tomorrow, they’re not in the early childhood side of things and they want to focus on high school learners, why does that put my business at that point? So for me, becoming an NPO was really not a way that could be sustainable.

I know there’s people that have done it very well and kudos to them. I think it’s easier to convince somebody to pay rather than it is to convince somebody to fund you so that you can help somebody else. So for us, we found a way, the schools pay us on a monthly basis based on the number of learners that got access to our product.

The fee is dependent on the number of learners the school has. The more learners they have, the cheaper it is to have our product. So it becomes a bulk deal. If you have less learners, then it becomes a bit more expensive.

But even then, it’s still pretty much affordable in that we charge under $4 per learner per month at our highest level. So if a school has like less than 20 kids, we are charging them $4 per learner per month. If next month the school has 19 learners, we’ll only charge you under 19 learners.

But we do sign a contract that is for the entire year. So if a school joins us, they join us for a period of 12 months that allows me to plan better. You can’t do one month and then you’re out. You have to stay for the full 12 months. If the next year you decide, no, you don’t want to, that’s perfectly fine as well. But so far, nobody has decided they don’t wanna leave.

The only times that we had people leave was because of COVID, but that was understandable. I think everybody went through a hard time with COVID. Then the workshops which we host on our own, we charge 500 Rands.

So that is at about $40 per learner for the full five hour experience where they get access to drones, they get access to flight simulators, the dance, the work, the cooking, the coding, the robotics, everything in one five hour event.

And those ones we host in different venues across the country. So we sort of like Burna Boy. We host concerts. That’s what we do. We host concerts for the Math Kids festival. We go through different areas. And that one is we market directly to parents. The schools that subscribe to our platform also get access to the workshops, but they get like a smaller version of that.

Every quarter will come through and we will then introduce those learners to the coding because they’ve signed up with us for 12 months. We can easily provide that service to them and ensure that their kids also are not being left behind as we prepare for the future of work.

Basically straightforward schools charge the cost to the parents, how they escalate it, not my business. For us if we have free weekends we host our own workshops in different areas across the country.

Since you launched, what strategies have worked in attracting and retaining your customers?

For the workshops, we use social media marketing. We go crazy on Facebook marketing and Instagram marketing and we go full force. For the schools, what has worked is we’ve got referral incentives for the schools.

So if you as a school owner get another school owner to join us, you get a discount, a percentage discount for your school and then also word of mouth has worked extremely well. Main reason is that ECD Center owners have WhatsApp group communities that they are in, which is really a blessing.

And they all want to show off what they have. I have this in our school. We are teaching our kids through tablets. Our kids don’t just learn through papers. They use tablets to learn mathematics and how to write and all those things. So we use a lot of that through their word of mouth.

Once we get into a community, we become part of the community. We have brand ambassadors and their work is to work with the schools. For instance, a school doesn’t have access to devices and also that we send somebody over there.

They are usually people from those communities that we serve. So when we come into a new community, what we will do is we will find one center, find one brand ambassador. The brand ambassador’s job is to find more centers. They will go out as sales agents and really sell us to different centers.

They get paid according to how many centers they are servicing. For them, it’s also important to get as many centers as possible. The other thing is the language barrier. In South Africa, there are 12 official languages. I only know four. So it means that a lot of the places that we are in, I can’t even speak to the students in their language.

So the brand ambassadors really filled that role. Once we found one school that has signed onto our project and they said, okay, we want you for 12 months. We then host an activation at that center and we invite other centers from across the community.

We do a lot of cold calling because emails don’t work with our market. Half of the center owners are women that used to be teachers. They open a center and they ask the parents around the area to bring their kids. We do a lot of cold calling and we invite them to the activation. Once they are at the activation, we then follow ourselves.

But while we are doing that, we have the kids from that center experiencing all our different products. So you see and you also hear what your kids could be able to get. And you also hear from us and you meet us and you sort of feel like we are part of you, not the strangers coming to South Africa.

In Africa, what I’ve noticed with the three countries that we’re in; Lesotho, Swaziland, and South Africa, is that community is a big thing. We trust something because someone said they trusted.

How is the business doing today and what does the future look like?

2025 is very bright. 2025 we are launching in Canada. I was fortunate enough to go to Canada for a three-month entrepreneur in residence program through the University of Toronto and the Africa Impact Initiative.

As a business person, I always see opportunities. And I realized that the immigrant community over there has a yearning for learning things through the African way. We really planted ourselves, it’s our passion to raise the next army of African problem solvers in a way that is authentically African, in a way that celebrates the fact that we’ve been there.

They’re willing to ensure that children from that side are able to experience that. So we are launching in Canada next year during Africa Week Toronto. We also are working on addressing the 13 to 18-year-olds. So we are involved with the AI in Teens. We’ll be hosting a couple of techathons with them for the communities that we are already in.

We want to go into Kenya, Ghana, and that is where we want to be. Right now we wanna move south, north, southeast and west Africa. We want to find ourselves with a footprint on that side. If you’re an ed tech in any of those countries dealing with STEM education, let’s connect, let’s collaborate, let’s partner.

I don’t do things alone. So let’s walk the journey together and make sure that our people get the best of everything. I don’t want to do it alone. I don’t think it’s necessary. And I think Africa has enough opportunities for everybody to get a piece of the slide.

What key lessons have you learned in your journey as an entrepreneur?

When you’re starting a business, find a market first, that’s number one. Finding problems is very easy. Problems are always all around us. Whether you have money or you don’t have money, problems are always there.

Find somebody else who has the same problem and is willing to pay for it. If you do that, you will avoid the waste of days I spent trying to figure out who my market is. It’s hard running a business. It’s even harder when you don’t know who you are selling your business to.

So my first lesson, find the market and not a theoretical market like you saw in YouTube when people say, I have a million downloads in America. How many people are in America and where are they? Where is that person? Think of those things.

Lots of theoretical markets. Find a market for your product. And the other thing is, find your tribe. Find people who are going to support you. You don’t have to do this journey alone. I was a solo founder when I started. As time went on, I brought in others and I’ve convinced them to become co-founders.

So find other people to help you. Number one, it helps to have somebody else to bounce the ideas across. But it also helps on the days when you don’t feel like it. When you feel like I’ve had too many rejections, then no’s will come.

For me as a social entrepreneur, the no’s came because I was asking investors to invest and they would say, we would invest if you were selling this to a private school like Kuro. And I’m like, wait, Kuro can afford to get the top of the class thing.

I want the school in my community, the school that doesn’t have access to things, the school that has got a parent that at 4 in the morning they go to work and at 7 they come back. They don’t have time to help the child with homework. How do we have that school? And the schools in Kuro, when the child comes home, they go to after-care where they’ve got a tutor.

They’ve got all those things, they’ve got Wi-Fi in their house, they’ve got several devices in the house, they’ve got access to all those things. What about the school that doesn’t have one? So a lot of the no’s came from that, but it’s still a no. It’s still saying you’re doing the wrong thing.

And the other thing is to follow your gut. Yes, advice is important, but you also know where you want to take this business. You know why you started it. You know who you want to, why you want to do what you want to do. Stay true to yourself. At the end of the day, you only have to answer to yourself. Everybody else will not be there.

What advice would you give to other women who are just starting out with their business?

Being a woman is a superpower. It’s not a weakness. It’s a superpower. The empathy that you have, the care that you have towards your user, that is a superpower that you can utilize in order to change lives.

You might not have the skills to talk freely in a room because when you are in a conference. The men are the ones that are raising their hands up and asking all these deep questions. It’s okay.

You were meant to start the business that you’re starting. The world needs that solution. Africa needs that solution. Your family, your community needs that solution. Do not stop. It is not by mistake that you stumbled upon this problem. It was your purpose from the very beginning.

What you don’t have, you can always learn. If you are conscious about it, you can learn. I always tell people, I’m one of the shyest people I know, but when I talk about my business, it just lights up and I’m like, I don’t care.

I don’t care what you think about me, my business is my business, it’s what I’ve decided to do. So your passion will drive you. Your experiences and your background are exactly what your business needs. When you bring it through you are going to be able to change lives.

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