Thierry N’Doufou’s three eldest children tumble out of the car; the little one trips over her school bag as she tries to work out what to do with her break-time snack.

“We continue to go to school here as we went to school 100 years ago,” says the 36-year-old entrepreneur.

“The same heavy backpack, the same blackboard with the same chalk.”

And that heavy backpack is what Mr N’Doufou is hoping to lighten by introducing a bespoke tablet computer made specifically for schools in Ivory Coast.

Taking a tablet

Two years ago, he came up with Qelasy, Africa’s first educational tablet. “We thought about how to build a digital backpack; a tablet that will replace books, textbooks, notepads.”

The idea is simple; transfer a country’s entire education curriculum onto a digital format, along with sounds, animations and interactivity, and you no longer need a satchel crammed with school books.

The 36-year-old teamed up with a designer and then managed to find an investor to build a prototype.

This month his Qelasy tablet is going into schools for the first time. “This is a day I’ve been waiting for,” Mr N’Doufou says.

The Ivorian government will be introducing the tablets to 5,000 students in public schools, while some private schools in both Ivory Coast and Morocco will be running pilot projects.

They have also had interest from Ukraine, Macedonia, Senegal, Nigeria and France. “My dream is to reach all the schools in the world for a better education,” he says.

The tablets will also be available in shops at a cost of US$232, before tax.

Source: BBC

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