Elimu.ai: A Nonprofit DAO is Fixing Global Education
A crypto native nonprofit providing free high quality learning apps on a tablet so kids can teach themselves
This article is part of the April series on exploring social impact DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) a new internet native way of organizing around causes.
Meet Elimu.ai DAO
Education is a fundamental human right and kids everywhere in the world should have access to high quality education. This is however not the case, there exists a sharp divide and massive learning gap between the kids of the haves and the have-nots.
Elimu.ai DAO is on a mission to bridge that gap - their goal is to provide free mastery based learning apps to underprivileged kids on an Android tablet. Their apps enable kids to learn on their own while being guided by sophisticated learning technology. Adaptive learning apps are revolutionary. During COVID school closures parents everywhere heavily relied on adaptive apps to educate their kids with minimal guidance. Elimu is bringing the magic of these apps to kids who don’t have access to good schools, teachers and couldn’t afford these expensive commercial apps. For these kids learning can now be done with a free Android tablet preloaded with free apps. These learning apps currently cover basic math, english and writing and are designed to make learning fun and engaging.
Elimu.ai started as a semi-finalists in the 2017 XPRIZE Global Learning competition and became a DAO in 2020. They are a true crypto native organization that exists online and has contributors from all over the world. They use Github for software development, an Ethereum wallet as a bank account, Discord for collaboration and task management and Aragon for governance. They are a new kind of borderless internet nonprofit tapping into the kindness and contribution of people globally.
We did try to register the organization in the traditional way, but all we ended up with was paying thousands of dollars in legal fees for preparing all the required documents, and then they told us we might have to wait 6 months for a response after submitting them. At that point it just got more and more obvious that we don't need anyone's permission to start an Internet-native organization, and we certainly don't need to waste time and resources on bureaucracy that should rather be invested into actual value creation for the beneficiaries." - Nya, Founder Elimu.ai
To learn more about their operations and why they opted to be a DAO I interviewed, Harsh Acharya an active contributor to this community.
Tell us about your workflows and how do you manage as a DAO?
Harsh: We’re developing free and open source software for 387 million kids who are in the primary school range (6 to 11 years olds) and are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and math. Also there are 58 million kids who are not in school especially when you go to Swahili speaking countries in Africa and in Asia. The way we are approaching the problem is by developing fun and engaging adaptive learning apps with localized content, loading it on Android tablets and handing it over to kids to learn independently.
Our 3 key activities are - software development, content creation and distribution and all of it is community led. The DAO enables us to recruit contributors from all over the globe. We’re addressing a global problem and this requires global coordination. We are currently in India and the Philippines and next we want to go to Tanzania, South Africa, Cambodia and Nepal. To get our hardware and software into the hands of kids we need local volunteers, content creators and developers to help translate and localize content as well as help build these games and handle logistics. The DAO enables us to tap on global resources.
In 2020 we became a DAO and issued a governance token $ELIMU on the Ethereum blockchain. The token helps us incentivize contributions. The token is not listed anywhere and we are not trying to make money off this token, eventually if that makes sense we may do it. But right now we use $ELIMU token as a reward to contributors, simply as a token of appreciation.
There are times though when we can’t find volunteers so we put out bounties and pay developers in ETH to get work done.
Has being a DAO slowed down your operations in any way since it requires so much coordination?
Harsh: I've seen truly the opposite. One, it being a web3 DAO gets people excited. Also in our case we are dependent on engineering and it's not easy to find engineers who want to spend their time doing nonprofit work. Being DAO has really allowed us to go global and recruit people from anywhere and everywhere.
It has also allowed us to expand our wings without any bureaucracy. If you are running a nonprofit in more than one country the amount of paperwork you do is just insane. Now we don’t have to do any of that we can just focus on our mission. So being a DAO has really made it easy for us to operate globally.
The only thing I regret is we can’t access any of the matching grants you know when employees donate and company matches the donation. It kind of impacts our fundraising but I’m hoping there is so much money in crypto that it would eventually get easier for us to raise money in crypto, it’s just a matter of time.
Are you accepting only cryptocurrency donations?
Harsh: Yes we are only accepting crypto donations. If we take donations in Fiat then we have to register in 3 or 4 different places. The whole reason why we went down the DAO path is because we want to keep our operations simple. Also being on the blockchain provides great transparency, all the transactions are publicly viewable.
Fundraising must be crucial though since you have a hardware component. I’m curious how did you get funded initially?
Harsh: We have individual donors who came across our project on Github and Aragon. So it’s mostly been donations through word of mouth and we’ve bootstrapped. Also because are donations are in crypto, it kind of helps us when the value goes up. It also goes down, but when it appreciates we get more out of what we get donated.
Elimu DAO’s goal is to reach 50 million kids by the end of 2030.
📣 An Announcement
I have offered to help Elimu.ai DAO with their fundraising. I’ve been looking to get involved with a purpose driven DAO and Elimu’s mission resonated with me. I’m a big fan of mastery based learning apps, I use it with my kids all the time and during COVID it was their primary source of education. I would love kids everywhere to have access to similar high quality learning tools. Also since DAOs are the future of nonprofits I’d love to explore fundraising options that exist for them. Currently the fundraising scope for crypto native impact DAOs is very limited as compared to traditional nonprofits that have access to philanthropic foundations and also benefit from crypto donations. It’s going to be challenging but a great learning experience.
Go Deeper
How to Start a Charity (from your Bedroom) - Aragon on Elimu DAO
If you have any questions or ideas reach out to me on Twitter or leave a comment on my Substack.