Project description
Since its creation in 2016, the ed-tech start-up Uthini co-founded by Miguel A. Da Costa and Thomas Wrigley, is working to facilitate communication between all Cape Town citizens through a low cost platform of learning local dialects. The ultimate goal is to permanently break down language barriers to connect and reconcile South Africans, while enabling native-speaking speakers to earn money and benefit economically from their language skills. Although there are specialized accelerated course offerings, these are usually expensive in terms of time and money, making them inaccessible to the greatest number. In addition, these short-term programs do not include regular training opportunities and therefore limit skills upgrading. Uthini brings a real solution since both isiXhosa and isiZulu languages tutoring programs that it offers are available on subscription to university students and the general public. Based on video chat, supported by chatbot technology and separated into 12 sessions of 15 minutes per month for 8 months, they are cheaper, more practical and offer a high quality of human interaction since learning is done in P2P (person to person), the first language speaker using Uthini as a tool to provide practical and personalised language learning to the learner.
Tags: Crowdsourcing, Peer-to-peer
Useful links
Project summary
- Organization Uthini
- Location Afrique du Sud
- Creation date 09/05/2019
- Project category E-education
