For our first African Edugames Q&A, we visited HeHe Mobile, based in The Office co-working space in Kigali, Rwanda. As well as creating apps of their own and for clients, the team at HeHe runs a 6-month-long code club program for secondary school students, at the end of which the students have fully-functional apps of their own to showcase.
I almost didn’t make it to The Office, HeHe* Mobile’s fashionable office in a leafy suburb of Kigali. Kigali’s roads are numbered, rather than named, and my motorcycle taxi driver didn’t recognise the address. Then on the way we were diverted by police after a block of houses caught fire, and had to wind our way round and round the hilly roads, stopping to ask for directions several times until eventually we found the place, and I was able to climb up to the second floor and meet the HeHe Team.
Clarisse, Amiri and Richard from HeHe Mobile
Founded four years ago by a team of young computer scientists and engineers, HeHe has grown to five permanent staff and five interns. They greeted me in their lovely light, open-plan offices, open to the warm breeze outside and decorated with their giant logo, funky couches and a wall covered in scribbled planning notes for their work. When I arrived they were all quiet and hard at work – an atmosphere of intense focus in the room. This is an ambitious and hardworking young company, and I was keen to find out what drives them.
Clarisse Iribagiza, their CEO greeted me warmly, and along with Amiri Mugarura, their CTO and Richard Rusa, their Creative Director, walked me through some of their recent work.
First, we looked at SOMA, a literacy app made in collaboration with A Thousand Hills Literacy, another education company based at The Office. The app is aimed at local children aged 2 to 8 and helps them in recognising the Kinyarwanda alphabet using simple game mechanics and engaging animal characters. Everything is localised, from the artwork to the music. Foreign import apps like DuoLingo are popular here, but possibly because they tend to be free from the Google Play store (relatively few Rwandans have iPhones). As Sofia Cozzolino, who was the literacy consultant on SOMA explained to me – East African customers want and need apps which contain recognisable and relevant contexts. A one-size fits all approach to apps may not work well in the East Africa region.
A screenshot from the SOMA literacy app
Then Amiri showed me a very different app – Safeboda, which is aimed at encouraging road safety in Uganda. Vetted taxi moto drivers who can demonstrate safe driving are given an electronic device which geolocates them, meaning potential customers can identify them within a certain radius and contact them to make a booking. The app works on both smartphones and the web – a lot of the work HeHe does is cross platform.
Although HeHe has created SMS-based apps for feature phone users, Clarisse is firm in her belief that it is time to take advantage of the growing smartphone user base in Rwanda and other East African countries, and to create apps relevant to the needs of East African consumers (which, as Sofia is keen to point out, can vary greatly from country to country).
An app testing session with HeHe’s code club
One of the pitfalls HeHe has found is that different app stores don’t provide a reliable revenue stream for paid-for apps as far as their local ecosystem is concerned. Rwanda’s payment systems don’t align with what most stores have to offer, and so “customers” of most international app stores in Rwanda are generally downloading only free apps. To get around this, HeHe are building their own digital content store to drive in more local content by local content developers, which integrates with the payment systems most Rwandans use, which are generally mobile-phone based. The store will open later this month, showcasing HeHe’s own apps and those of its partners. Clarisse is confident they will be able to roll out to other countries by the end of the year.
Lastly, the team showed me some of the apps created by children who were about to graduate from the first code club run by HeHe. The code club runs for six months, during which time the children learn how to design an app, create the necessary artwork and content for it, and then program in HTML5 and play test it to create a workable, useful education app or game. The results were extremely impressive, and a testament to the many hours of hard work put in by the HeHe team and their first cohort. It seems that, as well as leading the way for Edugames in East Africa, HeHe are ensuring that the next generation of educational app developers have the necessary skills to continue their work.
Graduates from HeHe’s 2014 Code Club program
*HeHe means ‘where’ in Kinyarwanda, and is a reference to the studio’s work in creating educational content which shows people where to go.
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