In Nigeria, it’s not uncommon to see kids spend weeks and even as long as a term at home due to the inability of their parents/guardians to raise funds for school fees. What this results to is the growing trend where young people learn a trade immediately after secondary school, as a result of lack of funds to further their education.
To solve this problem, Bola Lawal and Maxwell Ogunfuyi, cofounders of ScholarX built a solution that connects young people in Africa to scholarship opportunities and individuals that are willing to sponsor their education.
In this insightful interview with Bola Lawal, he revealed a lot about the solutions ScholarX is offering, how the platform works, their future plans and his journey into entrepreneurship.
Tell us a little about yourself
My name is Bola Lawal, I’m the cofounder and CEO of ScholarX. We help African youth access opportunities to get education through scholarships, sponsors, through a crowdfunding platform and a scholarship aggregator mobile application.
I studied accounting at the University of Houston, Texas, after which I worked at one of the top oil companies, Konica Phillips. I worked there for about 5years, then I moved to work at other companies, including Accenture, as a Business Analyst. That’s where my interest in using technology to solve problems came from. I did that till 2016 when I met my cofounder, Maxwell Ogunfuyi through a mutual friend. We started ScholarX together and we’ve been running it till today.
I’m family-oriented, I have a wife and a kid; I’m very passionate about helping young people access opportunities. I love using technology to solve problems.
Tell us about ScholarX and the solutions you’re offering
ScholarX is an Edtech startup that aims to help African youth, ages 15-24year old, access good education by connecting them with funding sources through a scholarship aggregator app and a crowdfunding platform, which will connect them to opportunities and help them fund their education.
We launched in July 2016 with the scholarship app and then we launched a crowdfunding platform in September 2017. We’re also working on building a scholarship management system that would help track and manage the scholarship application process in a much more unique and elaborate way, with innovative features that would measure a lot of things, including the impact the scholarship is having on a micro and macro level.
What inspired the idea for it?
The inspiration for ScholarX came from our own personal examples. For me, I’ve had difficult times paying for school and I know millions of Nigerians have had that. I didn’t come from a totally poor or terrible background, but going to university was very expensive. I was at home for 3years because I couldn’t gain admission into a Nigerian university and I was lucky enough to go abroad and study, but paying school fees in dollars was very expensive. At some point, I actually got removed from school because of lack of payment. One of the ways I was able to get back in was through scholarships.
So, finding a way and using technology to help people access education and find various sources of funding to help themselves out is very important to me and my cofounder. My cofounder went to Lagos State University. He was almost a 1st class student with good grades and everything, but he only got a few scholarships because he had no idea about other opportunities out there. That also pushed him to want to create a platform that would connect people to opportunities in a very efficient way through the use of an interactive platform you can access through your mobile phone, that would give you feedback and also let you know about updates through a notification system. So, that’s where the inspiration for ScholarX came from.
How has the response been from Nigerians since launch?
The response so far has been encouraging. Though we’ve had challenges, especially knowing that we’ve been operating on a bootstrap basis. We’ve pretty much had to cover everything on our own and find creative ways to be efficient and to be able to make the right penetration. It’s been difficult quite frankly, but the responses has been good.
So far, till date on our scholarship platform, we have close to 20,000 registered users. On our crowdfunding platform, we’ve fully funded over a hundred students and there are still about 400 looking for funding on the platform. So, the response has been great. As we’re able to gain more traction, hopefully more resources and more funding would come through the door and we would be able to expand our reach in a very creative way. We’re also looking to reach people not just online, but offline through a series of experience centers called Success Hub by ScholarX, which would make the responses a lot more better and personal. But, it’s been go so far.
You recently launched Village by ScholarX, tell us about the successes since you kicked-off
Village has been both successful, a revelation and a challenge; all rolled up in one. Village is a crowdfunding platform and the basis of the idea is to connect people that need help to people that are looking for ways to assist, especially people that are very passionate about education. So, we’ve combined both a problem statement and solution thesis to create Village. So far, we’ve have over a hundred fully funded students and have been able to help them raise over N3.5m.
Village has seen various success stories. Personally, I got my driver’s kids to get on the platform and they got funded. We’ve had situations where people were kicked out of school for a whole year and they got funded on Village. Initially, it was interesting to people because they couldn’t understand how somebody that never met them before could pay for their school fees, and it’s happening. We had a school in Badagry where a teacher was kind of skeptical thinking it was a scam. All of a sudden, she started seeing students that were sent home because they couldn’t pay for their tuition, buy books or get new uniform, coming back to class. He was curious and wondered how they were able to do that, they told her it was Village by ScholarX.
Also, we take that opportunity to tell people, if you are looking to assist students, we’ve built a model that works and reaches the people directly. You should definitely check it out on our website and sponsor as many students as you can.
What processes are in place to ensure funding applications on the platform are genuine?
The whole idea village is that it’s a trusted platform where whatever amount of money you invest to help students would go directly to their education, not like a faceless NGO that would collect funds and we’ll never know what happened to the funds and who it goes to. The platform is a self-auditing, self-check platform. So, every donation and sponsorship on the platform can be seen on the landing page. Students can also check in and monitor what’s going on.
It’s not a perfect process yet, we still want to solve some things, we’re still working on making the user experience and user interface better both for students and potential sponsors, but it’s been doing pretty well and we hope things get even much better.
We’re very transparent. We do not pay the students directly, we pay the school. We also do a thorough verification process. It’s very thorough that folks thinking of scamming people of their money end up backing out when they see how much we require to be able to get the funding. But it’s been a very good experience so far, we’re very happy we took that step and hopefully in the coming month we’re able to reach more students.
What has been the most exciting moment since you started running ScholarX?
Most exciting moment was when we partnered with BTA, Tosin Ashafa. He awarded scholarships to 10 young people in Lagos area through our platform ScholarX. Tosin is an accomplished entrepreneur, he’s done very well with all his various enterprises. He shares a lot of the visions that we have in terms of investing in young people and assisting people in helping them get opportunities.
He wanted to give back and he felt ScholarX was the right vehicle to help deliver that. The most exciting was after we had gone through the process of selecting the right students, he hosted them to a luncheon at his office in Ikoyi. Not just the fact that he awarded scholarships to 10 students, but the fact that we did our job and the 10 students we picked were actually very bright; so much that he offered two of them internship position at his company. That was extremely exciting to me and to the rest of the team.
As a matter of fact, one of the students that got the scholarship took that money and used it to start up a chicken farm. She got the scholarship, didn’t necessarily use the money right away on expenses, but reinvested it. The profit she gains from the chicken farm can be used to sustain her education. Herself and her parents would be relieved from always looking to get other opportunities of funding for school. It’s just very exciting to see what can happen when you uplift people and when you give them opportunity. So, that’s definitely one of the most exciting moments for us.
Tell us a little about your foray into entrepreneurship
My dib dab into entrepreneurship wasn’t one of those I just woke up one morning and I found a calling and I just made that decision. A series of events happened and I guess, how they say, the galaxies just connected and the things just came together. My background started from actually working for oil and gas companies in Houston, Texas and then I did move into consulting with Accenture. But I’ve always had that urge to do something back home in Nigeria. So, as thing would happen, in 2016, I got contacted by one of my really good friends at that time and he connected me with my cofounder now, Maxwell Ogunfuyi who had the initial idea of creating a scholarship platform.
We got together, expanded the idea and we’ve been working very hard since 2016 just to help deliver better opportunities for young people in Africa to get access to good education. I’m one of those people that believe if I’m going to do it, I’m going to put it all my effort in there and do it well. So, we didn’t say let’s just build an app, we decided to build a brand, a business. If you’re going to do that and get into entrepreneurship, you know a lot of things that come with it, it’s difficult . It’s probably one of the hardest things that you would do. But also, if you’re someone that thrives on results, in creating things and seeing things progress, if you break things down in little tasks and set high goals for yourself, when you start to see things progress in the right direction, it’s very fulfilling.
We’re just starting and it makes me very excited as an entrepreneur to see the potential of what we can do. So, that’s kind of how I started and things aligned.
What are the challenges you faced when you started out and how did you overcome them?
I’m not sure if you can say challenges because it’s just inbuilt. If you’re going to be launching anything, especially a digital or technology business in Africa, then Nigeria, there’s just challenges all around. From the market not being as sophisticated as it should be to low education level. The fact that people are not as educated or enlightened makes it a bigger challenge trying to get them to adopt your solution. Also, you discover that your user experience and user interface now becomes very important because the simpler the better, the lesser steps the better chance of getting more people to adopt your solution.
A lot of problems comes with launching a product in an emerging market like Nigeria that is multi-ethnic and religious. I always make a joke that if you launch a product in America, it takes one or two times for people to hear about it and adopt it. If you launch same product in Nigeria with its modifications, it takes about 6 to 10 times to get people to adopt something. This makes the customer acquisition much more expensive because you’ll think about all the things you need to do if you have the budget for it, you’ll think about radio ads, TV ads, social media, influencer marketing. All those cost money.
One of the ways we were able to disrupt our challenges was through influential marketers. We did some really funny, good ads in the early stages when folks like Maraji, Wole Arole, Omo Ibadan just started. We were one of the first companies that engaged them for ads, which was not as cost prohibitive as they are now, but it helped us grow. It was an efficient process and the return on investments was pretty high. You’ll realize real quick that communicating with your target base is very important, but there are different ways to communicate. Entertainment and comedy works in Nigeria, so we tried to tap into that and use it to connect with our people.
What we also did initially was that we make that conscious decision to make ScholarX a compensational brand. So, it’s not just for us, it’s for you as well. The more people that get on board in terms of users, the more successful we would be and the more opportunities for us to create our own scholarships were people on our platforms increase their chances of winning scholarships to help them sort out their tuition and expenses. So, those are some of the ways we’ve being able to overcome.
What are the future plans for ScholarX?
For ScholarX, we think the future is very bright. We are building a pan african solution for the access to education gap. Human capital growth in Africa is a key mission for us in delivering education to people who may not necessarily think they have the opportunity to do so. Building platforms and solutions that would help bridge that gap is key thing for us.
Some of the things that we’re working on in a couple of months is a total redesign of our scholarship app as well as our crowdfunding platform, to create a better user experience for both our students and our sponsors. For students on the platform, we’re creating a scholarship management system that connects everything together and helps manage the application process for scholarships that we manage.
We serve as fund managers for scholarships, organisations and corporations that have large funds for scholarships, ScholarX is the right place to put the funds because you’ll be able to track everything. From the activities of the scholarships to students, the success rate and impact. We’re building a system that would be able to efficiently manage and track all of that. That’s exciting of us and it’s coming up soon.
We’ve also recently launched Success Hub by SchorlarX. Think of it like an experience centre where people can come and access the internet and talk to scholarship and admission advisors. The hub would host weekend classes for foreign applications exams. The first hub was launched this month in Badagry. It’s an impact play, so there would be centres in Epe, Ikorodu, Alimosho, it’ll extend to the South West and eventually around Nigeria.
Those are all the exciting things. We believe in the future of Africa that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing and we’ll just continue to invest our time and effort in young people, so we can help move the country and the continent forward. That’s the future for us and we’re very excited to share out story.
