About Darasio

Most private schools across Africa are small, low-fee, and run on paper registers, exercise-book ledgers and a WhatsApp group. The software that exists is built for well-resourced institutions: expensive, complicated, and written on the assumption of an IT department, a reliable connection and a laptop for every member of staff.

The result is a head teacher spending a weekend adding up marks by hand, a bursar chasing fees from memory, and parents who learn their child missed a week of school when the report card arrives.

Cheap enough that a school charging modest termly fees can adopt it. Simple enough that an administrator with no technical training can run it. Fast enough on a low-end Android phone over a poor connection that people actually use it rather than reverting to paper.

And country-aware from the first line of code. There is no such thing as “the African school system”. A platform that calls everything a Term and everyone a Principal is already wrong in half the countries it claims to serve.

Administration is necessary but it is not the point. The point is whether children learn. A curriculum-aware tutor that can explain fractions to a Primary 5 pupil at eight in the evening, patiently, for the fifth time, in language pitched at them, is worth more than any report we can generate.

That is the long-term aim: that every student has a portable learning record — what they have covered, what they have mastered, what needs practice — so teaching can meet them where they are. It is also why we are careful. Children’s data deserves more caution than a growth metric.

Openly about the limits. The AI tutor says when a question is outside the curriculum it has rather than inventing an answer. Teachers review anything it drafts. We do not let it make claims about a child’s ability or circumstances, because it is not qualified to and the cost of being wrong falls on the child.