Babajide Esho: Providing digital solution to Nigeria’s education problem

Babajide Esho is the founder of Skoolkive, an online educational platform that helps schools automate and effectively manage their processes. The platform helps school administrators and parents to easily receive and make payments through a single channel.
The business, through its biometric features, also helps record students’ clock-in and clock-out, which can be sent to parents to enable them to effectively and efficiently monitor their children in secondary schools.
Jide was inspired to establish Skoolkive to help address some of the challenges in Nigeria’s educational system. He established the business in early 2017.
“The business was inspired by overstrained and out-dated schooling system in Nigeria and Africa at large. We believed that if we leveraged on technology, we could address some of the challenges evident in education in Nigeria, which included slow payment processes, and insecurity, among others,” he says.

Jide and his partners pooled funds from personal savings and secured a pre-seed funding from Procyon Group, which cumulatively amounted to over N2.5 million. This fund was used to set up the business.
The Actuarial Science undergraduate tells Start-Up Digest that the business has grown since starting over six months ago. He says that the business has experienced early adopters of its technology in parts of Lagos and has signed a partnership deal with the regional sections of National Associations of Proprietors of Private Schools.
“We also recently just graduated from the 2017 Next Economy Business Accelerator Programme by Co-CreationHub, which was supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We have also had advanced discussions with new investors ready to partner with us in scaling our technology considerably in other parts of Nigeria,” Jide discloses.
It has not all been rosy for the University of Lagos undergraduate’s Skoolkive start-up business, as access to relevant data has remained a key challenge confronting it.

“Access to the relevant data, which is critical to our business, was a very big challenge when we started. There wasn’t enough data we could access on key figures in education such as updated number of schools in Nigeria and number of student enrolments for the past five years among others,” the young entrepreneur says.
Jide wants the government to take more radical approach to data collation, emphasising the relevance of data in planning and decision-making. He also notes that such data should be made available in the public domain.
The young entrepreneur stresses that it is the various challenges in the education sector that has made the country lose over $4 billion estimated to be spent by Nigerians schooling aboard, adding that if the government had invested heavily to develop the sector, the estimated dollar spent would have helped in growing the Nigerian economy.
He, however, commends the government for its recent increase in budgetary allocation to education sector in the 2017 budget but adds that much more still has to be done.

The founder, who is also the CEO of thatbluebook, a digital media start-up, says that the online business has started growing within a short period of start-up owing to its strong value proposition that has helped it continue in business.
“Some of these propositions include our partnerships with financial technology companies which allow partner parents to access loans that will enable them pay school fees via salary deductions. This is an initiative we believe will keep us in business for a long time,” he discloses.

When asked his advice to other younger entrepreneurs, he says, “Understanding that you might fail many times before you eventually get it right, is one advice entrepreneurs need to always remember. I lost count of many things I failed at a particular project because I always kept on trying to build something amazing that people want.”

“You really do have to believe in yourself before anybody else will, because a lot of people will simple not understand what you are trying to do. I learnt that from my first successful start-up thatbluebook.com and I took this experience into creating another amazing solution,” he further states.

Josephine Okojie