Egyptian Social Startup 'Nafham' Strikes Game-Changing Partnership With Unilever

In a game-changing move towards enabling online education in an overpopulated country, Egyptian social startup Nafham has just partnered with Unilever and Digital Republic to engage more and more youth in creating crowdsourced educational videos – this time, for high school and university students.

“We approached Unilever to engage high school students, and we are now cooperating to create courses focused on soft skills,” Nafham's Co-Founder Mostafa Farahat tells us. The platform, created together with Mohamed Habib and Ahmed Alfi, offers online videos with five- to 20-minute lessons - on YouTube and through their app - for students to access the national school curriculum online for free.  

Incubated by Flat6Labs and supported by an Ashoka fellowship, the startup began creating educational videos for Egyptian students and soon extended their efforts to help tackle the refugee crisis in Syria, having educational materials shipped from the war-torn country to enable online access wherever Syrian children are. Now, with more than 23,000 videos covering not only the Egyptian and Syrian curricula but also the Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Algerian educational curricula, the platform is gearing up to offer high schoolers and university students soft-skills-based lessons to help them shape their own future. CV writing, goal setting, interview techniques, presentation skills, and time management are some of the topics covered by the lessons.

“Through the sponsorship, we are building a system to help students log into the platform to create their own videos,” Farahat explains. In just 12 days since the partnership was secured, over 40 contributors have created their own content. “We started to engage the audience in creating videos on the topic ‘learn how to learn’; we received 130 videos in 12 days!” he explains.

The partnership was signed through Digital Republic Linked by Isobar’s 'Innomedia', the brand’s innovative digital media service, kicking off with a focus on three of Unilever’s brands: Rexona, Lifebuoy, and Signal. Rexona, for example, will reach out to students through the Rexona University programme, providing online support via Nafham in over 20 universities.

“Our partnership with Nafham is a contribution to ensuring the region’s youth is educated and equipped with the basic elements to tackle their own life ambitions,” says Asad ur Rehman, Unilever’s Director of Media for North Africa and the Middle East. 

Photography by @MO4Network's #MO4Productions.
Photographer: Ahmed Najeeb.