Build the money of the future at https://currency.techpoint.africa/ Additional music from www.zapsplat.com. Photo Credit: Global Partnership for Education – GPE Flickr via Compfight FULL TRANSCRIPT [Voices: Call and response] Narrator: The voices you just heard are from a regular pre-primary class in rural Kenya. Only that the language of instruction is neither English nor Kiswahili, the two officially recognised languages of instruction in the country. Teaching in Kiswahili or English is not an issue if you were in Nairobi, Mombasa, or the 30% of counties that make up urban Kenya. But for kids in the remaining 70% of counties, it’s definitely inconvenient.   Abdinoor Almahdi: Imagine walking into a classroom, you’re just like me (I only know Somali) but the syllabus is in English or in Swahili or in French or some other countries like Rwanda and Djibouti. It’s like adding insult to injury. Narrator: That’s Abdinoor Almahdi, a Kenyan information technologist and telecommunications engineer, and the brain behind Kenyan edtech startup, M-Lugha. On this episode of Built in Africa, we tell the story of a young innovator building digital interactive apps in several Kenyan native languages, to support early childhood learning, despite locational challenges. Abdinoor grew up in Northern Kenya, a predominantly nomadic and pastoralist region, where most of the people speak only either Somali/Kalenji, as opposed to the country’s official languages of English and Kiswahili.  Abdinoor Almahdi: And actually it is almost 80% of the landmass  of Kenya. When I say ‘Northern Kenya’, we’re talking about almost 10 counties. And it’s where actually they experience the most severe educational crisis because of the socio-economic issues we have, from famine to droughts, sometimes flooding and cross-border conflicts. And then above all, now we have a language barrier. Narrator: A 2016 UNICEF report titled “The impact of language policy and practice on children’s learning” confirms that one of the fundamental challenges of learning in most African nations is the rich diversity of indigenous languages. More often than not, the language of instruction differs from children’s mother tongue. Abdinoor Almahdi: Imagine telling me this is my head and then still translating it into English or French, like ‘this is your head’. So it’s like you’re translating from unknown to unknown, instead of known to unknown. I know my mother tongue, so why don’t you use what I know to teach what I don’t know? So actually the first few years of education, we struggle a lot. Some of them even drop out. Because you take more time learning the language than even actually acquiring skills. Narrator: Fortunately, this worrying situation has not escaped the notice of the Kenyan government. About three years ago, the government introduced learning with an indegenous language into the new curriculum, such that textbooks for basic subjects were produced in Kiswahili. However because the focus is only up to the Grade 3 level, the initiative has limited reach, not to mention the generally unfavourable reception by stakeholders. Abdinoor saw an opportunity in all these.  Abdinoor Almahdi: Actually, from personal experience, I could not even read or write until Grade 7. Grade 8 is when I started learning a few things...