The early days
Learn.ink was founded while we (Georgia Barrie and Adam Wills) were working with small-scale farmers in Kenya 🇰🇪. Originally we were trying to create a totally different product: a tool for farmers to sell their produce and get access to high quality agronomy training. To cut a long story short, the market place solution didn't work...but the training aspect worked amazingly well. Motivated by the positive feedback from users, we scrapped the bits that didn't work and built new prototypes out of simple vanilla JavaScript - designed to load super fast on low-end smartphones.
The fact that we are both software developers 👩🏻💻 👨🏾💻 meant that we could quickly create working prototypes and test them live with farmers. These farmers became great friends, but also very honest critics, and we realised that digital products were often frustrating or deeply dissatisfying for them to use. Most of the training tools out there assume you have access to a laptop or a tablet and an unlimited WiFi connection. They assume everyone is totally comfortable using complicated interfaces and reading long sections of prose. And most importantly they forget that a great learning experience should be fun, not a chore.
The more we tested our prototypes, the more we realised that this wasn't just a problem for farmers. From health workers in India to sales agents in Peru, organisations around the world were struggling to build digital training that really worked in emerging markets. So we were spurred on to build Learn.ink with the mission to empower the new generation of global smartphone users with the training they need to get critical work done.
Launching Learn.ink
By strange coincidence we were in the final stretch of building Learn.ink in February 2020, just as the novel coronavirus started sweeping the globe. Almost overnight, organisations who were once hesitant about mobile training were suddenly cut off from their networks and searching for ways deliver their training remotely.
Although we were not planning to launch for another two months, a few weeks of caffeine-fuelled ☕ days (and nights!) meant that we were able to start onboarding organisations as soon as lockdowns started kicking in in mid-March. Since then we have helped organisations across the world to build amazing remote learning experiences. We've been amazed by the diversity and impact of the content that has been created: from training dairy farmers in Tanzania to training off-grid solar installation agents in Kenya to training citizen journalists in Sierra Leone.
Talk to us!
We're humbled to see so many incredible organisations who really care about empowering the new generation of smartphone users use our platform. They are sharing and scaling improvements in knowledge outcomes in ways we couldn't have imagined, and their work motivates us to refine and develop Learn.ink further.
If what we do sounds interesting to you then please come and talk to us. We (Georgia and Adam) are always excited to hear about the projects you are working on and to talk about how Learn.ink could work for your use case. You can email us directly on georgia@learn.ink and adam@learn.ink (or just shoot us a message using the chat bubble in the bottom right of your screen!)
A quick thank you
We couldn't have gotten this far without the support of some amazing organisations. We were lucky to win multiple awards that supported our work: the IDEO Amplify team were our first backers and taught us the real art of user-centric design, the CGIAR Inspire team supported and believed in our mission to build a global platform, and the FAWTech Prize helped us build and test rich, conversational learning experiences. More recently we received funding through WECA's Business Innovation Fund which supported us to design, test and build the Learn.ink Sequences feature. These organisations helped us create the mission, the concept and the code for Learn.ink and we are eternally grateful to them for their belief and support in us.
