When Enuma’s founder met The HEAD Foundation
By Ming Wong
In this post, our partner The HEAD Foundation shares the reasons for supporting Enuma’s entry into Indonesia, its expectations and plans for future growth.
CD Liang has served as the Director of Development at The HEAD Foundation (“THF”) since the charitable organization was established in Singapore in 2013. Trained as an engineer and a management consultant, CD leads a team that identifies projects to be proposed to their board, evaluates the credentials of prospective grantees and manages the projects to ensure that they achieve desired outcomes.
Shortly after CD met Sooinn Lee, Enuma’s co-founder and CEO, in her Berkeley office in November 2019, he invited her to Singapore in February to speak in a series of lectures on how Enuma is transforming early education by designing gamified applications that allow all children to learn independently using tablets and mobiles.
In Singapore, Sooinn shared her goal of bringing Enuma’s Global Learning XPRIZE winning application, Kitkit School, to Southeast Asia and CD’s interest was piqued. Following a series of discussions, CD obtained board approval for a grant to support the localization of an education super-app for young children to learn Indonesian, English and Mathematics independently. The app Sekolah Enuma (Indonesian for Enuma School), currently under production, will be filled with local content, values and culture, as well as stories that reflect the multiculturalism of Indonesia.
In a first, THF’s board also approved an equity investment in Enuma. CD explains, “To us it’s an exploration. If Enuma does well, we will be able to reinvest any profits into our grant giving. We hope this will become another way for us to increase impact and generate resources for future projects.”
This interview, which was condensed and edited for clarity, was conducted by video conference on November 18, 2020.
What was attractive about Enuma’s learning application and how do you think it will benefit Indonesian young learners?
After hearing about the success of Enuma in the Global Learning XPRIZE in Tanzania, we realized this could be a good opportunity for us to contribute to early education and to the student side of education. The main objective of education, after all, is to educate the young. Enuma can help fill the gap created by a lack of quality education for all, including a shortage of trained teachers. Indonesia is a large country with a big population; parts of it are very remote and so it is not dissimilar to parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. By picking Indonesia as a start in Southeast Asia, we can generate the largest impact.
How has COVID-19 affected THF’s focus and priorities?
Like everyone in the community, COVID-19 has created a lot of challenges for our foundation’s work and affected how we deliver our projects. By coincidence though, COVID-19 has helped us to strengthen our belief in Enuma’s solution. When teachers cannot reach students, Sekolah Enuma can deliver a solution where students cannot attend schools normally. If anything, COVID-19 can help us prove the concept and value of digital education.
What are your expectations for Sekolah Enuma for Indonesia?
Of course, we expect to see good results from Lampung and Medan (the two locations where the beta version of Sekolah Enuma will be tested starting in January 2021). We hope there will be larger-scale pilots and eventually reach 10,000 schools[1] to get the attention of Minister Nadiem (Minister of Education and Culture), and eventually make this one of the technology solutions to education that he has talked about. We are also thinking beyond Indonesia to Malaysia and other countries in Southeast Asia.
How would you define long term success for this project?
Compared to most of the work we have done before, impact measurement in this case is relatively straightforward and direct. We are working with school children and we can measure their learning outcomes eventually. Many things are recorded on a digital platform and they can be analyzed objectively. We can continue to collect and use data to fine-tune our content and approach. It’s our hope that there will also be independent researchers eventually looking at the data from our future pilots.
What thoughts do you have for prospective stakeholders (NGOs, schools, companies or foundations) who might be interested in Sekolah Enuma?
This is similar to how we were convinced about the Enuma solution. We looked at the XPRIZE competition. We looked at the outcomes in Tanzania. We looked at how organizations like KOICA have been endorsing Enuma. Eventually we will also need to get the support of governments, including regional organizations like SEAMEO, and to seek their endorsement. It’s not easy but we have to do it one step at a time.
How can THF help Enuma to tell the story?
What is happening with COVID-19 is very unfortunate, but it is also helping us to tell the story. I want to highlight two concepts that most people are not very clear about when it comes to education technology. We are not seeking to replace teachers. But if you are comparing not being able to go to school, not having a teacher, or qualified teacher, versus a solution like Enuma, then it’s quite obvious that being able to learn from an effective app like Enuma is way better than not being able to learn at all. And where children do have access, it can be seen as a complement, or even an accelerator, to help close gaps. And we have to remember, while we adults struggle to find resources to build more schools and train more teachers, many unfortunate children continue to grow up and forever miss the opportunity to be properly educated. They are the ones we are trying to help.
The second point is, like Sooinn has said, we have to distinguish between online education and digital learning. A lot of arguments against using tools like Enuma revolve around the fact that many remote areas do not have WIFI and we have to solve that problem first. Many people do not know that you can learn on a tablet without a WIFI connection. The difference may seem small but it’s very significant. If we try to explain these two important concepts clearly to the people we are talking to, it will eliminate a lot of arguments against such a tech solution.
Any final thoughts?
Being an Enuma investor has allowed us to work more closely with the Enuma team. We believe we, being more “local”, have better knowledge of the education sector in the region, as well as a strong network of contacts. So, we want to be able to contribute to the design and rollout of the solution, for example.
Compared to our other projects, Enuma is more direct in terms of its expected impact. We are therefore seeing a lot of enthusiasm from the frontline and eagerness of partners to work with us. So, we are setting the stage to get people to collaborate and to help create awareness. Of course, we eventually want to work closely with the Ministry of Education to make Sekolah Enuma available to every child who needs it.
I just want to reiterate. This is a milestone project for us. It’s our first attempt to work so closely with frontline students, teachers and solution providers on such a scale. Our beta-test may only involve hundreds of kids in the beginning, but we definitely want to reach thousands of kids and eventually tens of thousands of kids with Enuma. And that is when it gets exciting for the larger education community.
[1] At the Yidan Prize Asia-Pacific Conference 2020, Minister Nadiem referred to 10,000 schools as the tipping point to prove success for a particular learning approach and “buy it the right” to continue to be used in the future regardless of who the President or Education Minister is.
Ming Wong leads government relations and strategic partnerships at Enuma, Inc. ming@enuma.com
The HEAD Foundation is an International Charitable Organization, registered with the Commissioner of Charities of Singapore. Established in Singapore in 2013, The HEAD Foundation aims to help improve the lives of people in Asia by disseminating knowledge and sharing ideas, and by supporting and funding sustainable education and healthcare projects that develop social and human capital.
