Inspiration
Coming from a small village in Rwanda, we have both grown to realize the limited financial knowledge of many Rwandans especially in rural areas. According to the World Bank group, about 70 percent of adults in the developing world have no access to financial services, a percentage far higher in rural areas. For example, rural Bugesera, Rwanda has three thousand residents with no bank accounts.
Our strong passion for social good, tech and inclusivity, inspired us to foster financial empowerment and literacy in underserved rural communities across Rwanda through an engaging and gamified learning experience with CashEd.
What it does
The product offers the following five main features:
- Text-message lessons (financial literacy): CashEd leverages Twilio to send users financial literacy lessons via text messages. These lessons are designed to provide valuable information and insights on managing finances effectively, making informed decisions, and building a secure financial future.
- Quizzes: CashEd offers quizzes as an interactive learning tool. Users can take daily quizzes to test their knowledge and understanding of financial concepts. These quizzes not only make learning engaging but also serve as a means for users to measure their progress.
- Language Translation: To overcome language barriers and ensure that financial education is accessible to a wider audience, CashEd utilizes Google Translate. This feature helps users understand financial lessons and content in their preferred language, making the app inclusive and user-friendly.
- Audience Data Analysis: CashEd utilizes the Metaphor API to gather data about its user base. This data helps the app understand its audience better, enabling the team to tailor content and features to meet the specific needs and preferences of the users.
- Ranking and Prizes: CashEd motivates users by providing a ranking system that showcases their performance compared to other users. The prospect of winning mini prizes adds a rewarding aspect to the learning process and can be a powerful incentive for individuals to improve their financial knowledge.
Every feature of our product is highly intentional and user focused. We opted for sending financial literacy lessons because most of our targeted users are often unable to access the internet or smartphones. Second, we used google translate to remove the language barrier hence making our service accessible to everyone regardless of their first language. The Metaphor API helps us to know our end-users better and how they are interacting with our product. The quizzes, rankings and mini prizes are designed to offer incentives for learning and motivate users to keep using the service.
How we built it
We spend a quarter of our time brainstorming the problems we were interested in and narrowing down the pain points we wanted to solve for our users. We simultaneously worked on the backend and front end of our product. While Carine started designing the Figma and UI of the web app, Freeman was working on the backend functionalities. We spent some time ideating different features such as text message to the user, daily quizzes, Google translations for non- English speakers and a data base that will help us reach the right audience. Using Technology
Challenges we ran into
Because of our travelling hurdles we had to miss most of the Friday activities and our coding time was cut short. One of the team members had travelled for 31 hours to the hackathon so it required extra effort to build our solution in a timely manner.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Working as a team and being able to work on an idea that we are both passionate about was truly a rewarding experience. We got to learn so many new technologies, met brilliant hackers and challenged ourselves to achieve the best, all In just one weekend.
What we learned
Carine: Because my background is traditionally in marketing, I was quite excited for the opportunity to explore the backend and hone my ability in tools such as Figma, bootstrap and react. Attending workshops on concepts such as career development and deployment of APIs provided me with the opportunity to learn useful new skills in the tech industry. Moreover, I loved getting to collaborate with my team to develop an app that addresses a real-world problem in my community. Pennapps was definitely a transformative experience.
Freeman: We learned how to harness technology to create social good. Mostly using python and the Twilio API to build our project.
What's next for Cash-Ed
If we had more time, we could have expanded on building our web app. Even those users our database is not able to reach but they are interested in our services can still register through our web app. In the future we would also like to add visual resources like images or integration of texts and images for visual learners.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.