Ubongo PlayRoom: Reaching Kids Across Africa with Educational Content

"The team quickly achieved tasks and effectively communicated each step they took or any challenges they faced." - Jacquiline Mujulizi, Digital Video Manager

About the app

Ubongo is Africa's leading producer of kids' edutainment. As a non-profit social enterprise, they create fun, localised and multi-platform educational content that helps kids learn, while also leverage their learning to improve their lives.

Ubongo reaches millions of families across Africa through accessible technologies like TV, radio and mobile phones. Their shows - Ubongo Kids and Akili and Me - currently air in 41 countries across Africa, in Swahili, English, French, Hausa, Yoruba, Luo, Kikuyu, Chichewa and Kinyarwanda.

The app we’re going to talk about here is the PlayRoom app. It is meant to be a digital space that is safe for kids and offers the optimal user experience for them to watch, listen, read and play with the content.

A screenshot from the app showing the main screen with a recommended section and an explore one.
 

Challenges

Ubongo distributes their digital content in the form of videos, audios, ebooks, games and more. These are available on different platforms (e.g. YouTube, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play Store etc.) and they reach large audiences on some of these platforms.

However, this approach of distributing content to their audience has created a fragmented user experience, which leaves kids and caregivers interacting with content in a way that is isolated from Ubongo's wider product ecosystem.

Additionally, these platforms are full of content from other creators, meaning that kids are potentially vulnerable to discovering inappropriate content before/after engaging with Ubongo content.

The main goal was to solve this by creating a digital space that is safe for kids and offers the optimal user experience for them to watch, listen, read and play with our content.

A screenshot from the app showing some available games.
A screenshot from the app showing some of the videos in the app.
 

Solution

The digital space created functions on mobile devices and the whole concept is built around the idea of a real life "Play Room", enabling users to also bring PlayRoom to life as a physical space.

The Ubongo PlayRoom app was developed using Flutter and Firebase. Figma was used to create an interactive prototype of the app, which is a digital mockup of the app that allows users to interact with it and provide early feedback before it is actually built. In our case, the prototype was tested by kids in Kenya and it was really successful.

In the first month after launch, on both iOS and Android platforms, the Ubongo app was downloaded nearly 5,000 times by users in Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. The primary audience for the app is kids aged 3-14, with a secondary audience of caregivers.

The PlayRoom brings all of Ubongo's original content together in one space, whilst also making it easy for users to engage based on content type, show and learning outcome.

Gif showing the prototype of the app.
 
 

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