Long before schools closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, 19 year-old Doroles Mihanjo had developed Maktaba, a mobile app that offers affordable and quality educational content.

The high school graduate and self-taught computer programmer created a digital platform that offers easy and fun learning material for students in primary school all the way to high school.

Maktaba, Swahili for library, is now more than ever playing a key role in connecting students to learning material, and publishers to potential readers.

The platform also offers graduates career advice from experts. It contains animated and simplified notes, mock national exams and self-assessment tools that help candidates prepare better for exams.

Developed in 2019, the Maktaba mobile app has 965 registered users with more than 5,000 downloads. It has 10 teachers selling their content online and two professors from the University of Dar es Salaam offer their books on the platform.

Maktaba has 14 employees, a full time chief technical officer and other contract employees who check on the quality of the educational content in line with the Maktaba model.

Born and raised in southern Tanzania, Mihanjo graduated from St Francis Girls High School, in Dar es Salaam.

She is currently not interested in pursuing a college degree because she wants to grow her company.

“I plan to further my studies when all systems are in place so that other people can run the business,” she said.

“Schools across the country have been closed due to the Covid-19, but students can get notes and past exams papers through this application and by May teachers can access material for a certain period of time for at least 99 students, after students pay for the app,” Mihanjo said.

She loves maths and especially its application in everyday life

“I plan to visit various schools advertise in media and use content marketing to raise awareness about the Maktaba app, but we mostly rely on word-of-mouth to reach communities,” she said.

Maktaba sells past exam papers for between Tsh250 ($0.107) to Tsh5,000 ($2.146) depending on a student’s level.

“The objective of Maktaba is to reach out and help more students. We are adding more educational content for students and integrating a live teaching platform that can host about 100 students,” Mihanjo said.

Maktaba is conducting a maths contest in partnership with Tanzania Data Lab and International Youth Maths Challenge, based in Germany.

Mihanjo says that quality education is the only solution to abject poverty in African communities and her platform seeks to help with this.

According to the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality, nearly 80 per cent of primary school pupils don’t get quality education because of challenges in getting teachers and learning facilities.

“I am determined to make an impact on education in Africa,” she said.