Meet the Founders - Akili Network
Kenya’s first educational TV channel, closing the learning gap and democratising access to education.
It's not often that a company can reach over 5.4 million customers every week in just over a year. But Akili Network - which launched Kenya’s first children’s educational TV channel, Akili Kids!– has done just that: it has already captured the attention of over a third of children under 13 in Kenya since its launch in March 2020. Founders Jeff Schon and Jesse Soleil, both veteran media and EdTech executives, recognised a huge national learning gap in Kenya. They saw their opportunity in television as 80% of Kenyans have access to a TV. Addressing this learning gap, they founded Akili Network and launched Akili Kids! which provides free, safe, educative daytime programming. Read on for our interview with founders, Jeff and Jesse.
Jeff Schon, CEO (L) and Jesse Soleil, President (R)
Describe your startup in two sentences
Akili Network has launched Akili Kids!, the first and only free educational children’s channel in Kenya. Our mission is to spark and support learning for every child in Kenya – especially those with the most need.
What gave you the inspiration?
We were doing some pro bono work for a Kenyan colleague. With both of our experience coalescing around children’s media, content and building businesses, we were looking at how we might help Kenya by articulating strategies to build a “Content Economy”. When surveying the landscape of content in the Country, it seemed a major gap that there was no safe and educative entertainment available for the children of Kenya. We thought – how many kids can we help? How many families could benefit? We then met with some entrepreneurs who had launched affordable schools across the Country. They told us that children often showed up for the first day of school without any letter or number recognition, and sometimes unable to hold a pencil correctly. We knew then what we had to do. We saw access to this kind of content as a basic human right.
How did you meet?
Jesse: I was contracted into Jeff’s group at Scholastic Education as a consultant to help write a spec for a piece of software. He was the VP at the time. Jeff went on to bigger and better things, and I had a career at Scholastic that lasted 8 years, exiting as the Acting President of eScholastic. When I left and started a new venture, he was the first person I called. Akili Network is our third time working together and our second venture!
Jeff: I hired Jesse to work in the Education Technology Division at Scholastic. He quickly established his value to the organization with a broad range of skills. He was definitely a “rising star”. I left Scholastic in 2005 and over the next five years, Jesse was promoted to a series of senior management positions including Director of the Lab for Informal Learning. When he left Scholastic in 2010, he called me to work with him on a children’s cross-platform property, which a couple of years later led to the founding of Akili Network.
What has been your greatest success to date? And your greatest challenge?
Our greatest success was overcoming our greatest challenge! We launched Akili Kids! literally days after the country was shut down by COVID and schools were closed in Kenya. Our broadcast server came in a week before the shutdown and a technician flew from Bulgaria to set it up. We had almost no time to learn the software before he had to leave, and we were uploading shows and cutting channel promos feverishly. The day after he left, the borders were closed. Our awesome team worked around the clock to get on the air as soon as possible. We changed our program line-ups because some of the content we were expecting didn’t come in before COVID froze activity at one of our distributors. We still hadn’t received a channel designation from our signal distribution partner. The channel designation came in at 11am on March 31 and we immediately commenced broadcasting.
We knew people were watching but had no idea what our reach might be. When our ratings research partner resumed operations, we received our first ratings research: in just four months we were the second most-watched TV channel in Kenya between 6am and 6pm!
How has Covid affected your business?
COVID exponentially accelerated our viewership because schools and businesses were closed and parents and children were at home together. It was literally a captive audience. We hit 2X our 2024 viewership projections in four months! On the downside, advertisers were paralyzed during the pandemic and ad buys all but stopped as they tried to determine how bad the pandemic was going to be. This delayed our revenues as we couldn’t even reach potential advertisers. As a result, we estimate our projections on commercial revenues will be 12 months behind the original projections. On the other hand, NGOs and Foundations suddenly had to pivot outreach strategies and they discovered we existed. This created a huge new revenue opportunity for us, and we weren’t even trying to tap into COVID communications funding yet!
What kind of impact is your business having and how do you measure it?
One of our potential Investors, Acumen, in the course of doing their due diligence commissioned an impact study in March 2021 by the UK research firm, 60 Decibels. The results came in and we were humbled:
We had a Net Promoter Score of 93%, the highest 60 DB said they’ve ever seen in one of their studies
95% of parents say their children’s quality of life is “very much improved”
96% say we have a “strong positive effect”
92% say their children’s learning experiences are “very good”
And most importantly, 95% of parents say there are no alternatives to Akili Kids!. 60 DB suggests this indicates a “highly scalable business”.
We also measure our success in Reach. The higher our audience ratings, the more effective we can be at reaching audiences. Our ratings are exceptional with 5.4 million children and 4.3 million adults every week.
When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up?
Jesse: A fashion designer
Jeff: An archaeologist
If you weren’t doing this, what would be your plan B?
Jesse: I could not conceive of doing anything else. I wake up with gratitude and enthusiasm every day. That said, I do have another venture idea around teacher research and communities, so I might have built that if Akili Network hadn’t worked.
Jeff: I’ve had a few great positions during my career, but Akili Network is the best of all. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be working on children’s media projects, both television and digital.
What would you save in a fire?
Jesse: My kids and wife, dog, passport, phone – in that order.
Jeff: Any living thing and then my laptop.
Who is your role model/ greatest influence? And why?
Jesse: My best friend. He is calm, humble, generous and a great leader. I met him when I was 21 and we have been friends for the last 30 years. He still inspires me to be better!
Jeff: Several teachers in high school at St. Stephen’s School in Rome sparked my intellectual curiosity. They were great guides to the world of literature and history and set me on a path to life-long learning.
What is your happy track?
Jesse: Energy Flash by Joey Beltram
Jeff: What a Wonderful World – Sam Cooke.
What are your company values?
Jesse: We think of all Kenyan children as our own children. They deserve every opportunity and protection our own children have.
Jeff: A culture of collaboration where we get the best of our team.
What are you most looking forward to in 2021?
Jesse: Spending every available moment with my family while building the greatest children’s brand sub-Saharan African families have ever imagined.
Jeff: Closing the financing round so we can work on creating locally produced programs and develop our business plan for geographic expansion.