Digify Africa Launches WhatsApp Learning Platform for Free Access to Digital Skills

Online learning has been rising in Africa for the past decades, but the high cost of data and access to resources is still one of the challenges that young people encounter in marginalized communities. This means a lot of people have not been able to make use of the opportunities the digital world presents.

Digify Africa collaborates with Facebook to create a WhatsApp learning bot that tackles this challenge. The learning platform is called “Naledi”, it provides low data cost and accessible online learning for young people on the African continent with limited access to devices and connectivity.

The COVID 19 pandemic has led to the acceleration towards a digitized world, putting more urgency on finding solutions to address the existing digital divide. Naledi provides a practical learning alternative suited to the African environment, ensuring that learners are given a solution through a platform they use the most: WhatsApp.

The aim of Naledi is to create Facebook Digital Marketing experts through the interactive learning material. The WhatsApp bot focuses on Facebook products as a digital marketing tool specifically for entrepreneurs and startups.

It provides content that is an engaging and immersive learning experience which includes study groups in a self-paced learning journey that allows the participant to enhance their skills themselves in their convenient time, and get assistance when they feel stuck. In 2020, Naledi was first utilized with a group of UNISA postgraduate students. The project was accomplished collaboratively by experts partners Clickatell, Techys, and talented youths from Geekulcha.

Naledi is now available to youths in Africa. Participants can enroll for any skills that will assist them in pursuing a career in digital marketing and have a deep understanding of how to develop as entrepreneurs with the use of digital tools.

Since 2014, Digify Africa has been at the forefront of enhancing youths across the African continent. The company has trained more than 100, 000 people through a variety of programmes like the award-winning Dignify Pro, Ilizwe Lam, and Boost with Facebook.

Naledi is part of a series of learning bots that Digify Africa will be launching together with Facebook to deliver digital skills and knowledge to a wider audience across Africa. This is not only an innovative addition to our offering but also a testament to our commitment as an organization to driving digital inclusion across the continent.

“I am thrilled to see this example of homegrown innovation from the African continent come to life,” says Digify Africa CEO Gavin Weale.

“It has been our ambition to deliver learning through WhatsApp since we developed an early demo in 2019, with the goal of making use of a free and widely spread application like this that can reach more people with low cost. The challenge is figuring out how to make the learning experience on WhatsApp valuable and seamless and the collaboration between Digify Africa and Facebook allows us to provide the first exciting iteration of that.”

Facebook Regional Marketing Manager for Africa, Elizma Nolte, “Facebook is committed to empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs and marketers in Africa. Digify Africa has been assisting us to drive scaled education for a long time. When covid 19 struck, and we could not provide students training in person, we started to make use of WhatsApp as a delivery channel which led to the creation of Naledi.”

“We are continuing to scale this impact to the world. Not only building on Naledi’s reach but also seeing how we equip all our education partners to empower a whole new generation of mobile entrepreneurs.”