Soma

A few weeks ago, I was talking to one of my friends about a social venture that I have spent most of this year working on. He wanted to know what we do and I told him that we provide online educational content like Wikipedia and Khan Academy to students in high schools but offline. His next question is what led me to write this medium post. The question was: “What is the point of that? Nowadays, everyone is online 24/7 anyway.”

This might come as a surprise to some but according to the United Nations, 52% of the world’s population currently has no access to the internet. That’s 4 billion people! Most of these people live in developing countries and especially in rural areas. Here, internet access is often slow, unreliable or not available at all. And even if it is available, many people simply cannot afford. This is what prompted us to start Soma.

Soma makes online open educational resources accessible to everyone, offline. We store these resources in our content servers that can be used in low-resource communities such as rural schools, non-formal school systems and even prison systems which would otherwise have no access to these resources.

There is a lot of great open educational content out there and it would probably take centuries for our small team to include all of it in our servers. For this reason, we have to prioritize. Currently, we look for content that is of high quality, has an explicit open license e.g. Creative Commons CC-BY, and what we think is useful and educational for our users. At the moment, we have these services but we are working hard to increase them:

We have tried our best to not only include material that prepares our users for their school exams but to also include resources that enable them to gain the skills that they have always wished to have. This explains why we have a whole medical encyclopedia in our servers yet our target users are high school students. Maybe, we still don’t have a cure for cancer because about 50% of the possible inventors have been locked out of the information they might need to get started. This is what drives us at Soma every day.

One thing that I love about Soma is our emphasis on emerging technologies especially coding. This summer we have been running a ‘learn to code’ program in four Kenyan high schools called Tucode. I have realized that when most people think about programming, they think that you have to be half-machine to do it. But I think coding is more about people than about machines. I think coding shares more with expression, writing, music and art; more than it does with math. This is why anyone can learn how to do it.

As humans, we really love stories. It’s easier to connect to a topic if you are telling it in terms of a story or a narrative. It’s not just getting up there and saying that this is the method to do this, this is the process, etc. It is about trying to create a story out of the technologies. This is the approach that we took with Tucode and we are incorporating into Soma’s learning platform.

At Soma, we are proud of being an African company. Africa has the highest percentage of people unconnected to the internet and this is why we chose to start here. In my opinion, the point of technology is not to help ourselves but to help others. We all want a diverse and vibrant African economy. The more people access Soma’s servers, the more they unlock their potential. And not only that, they inspire other people to realize what their life can be. That they can learn, do and create anything. We believe that there are more than a thousand ways to do anything and in each of those little differences are our individualities, and we want to celebrate that. We might not teach you all the one thousand ways, but Soma will give you a headstart.

This article was originally published on Medium.

This article was featured on Entrepreneurship @ UBC.

Learn more about Soma in the All projects page.