Sierra LeoneEducation2025 – ongoingRising Academies
Rori, a WhatsApp math tutor for students in Africa
Rising Academies' WhatsApp math tutor Rori raised student math learning by 0.3 standard deviations in outside studies
Problem
Rising Academies runs about 1,000 schools across Africa. Conventional edtech reaches fewer than 5% of students in its regions, and many students have no app downloads or banking access.
Approach
The team built Rori, a virtual math tutor, on the Claude Platform. It mixes pre-written lesson plans with generated conversations, checks open-ended answers and redirects off-topic questions using retrieval augmented generation. It runs on WhatsApp, so no app download is needed and data costs stay low. The organization also launched Tari, a support tool for teachers, built the same way.
Results
Takeaway
Delivering the tutor through a messaging app students already had removed the app and payment barriers. The learning gain was measured by outside researchers, not only by the company.
Categories
- Size
- Small business
- Industry
- Education
- Business function
- Production and quality
- Innovation type
- Product and service innovation
- AI technology
- Generative AIConversational and voice AI
- Adoption
- Off-the-shelf tool or platform
- Evidence
- Vendor case study
Sources
Source summaries
Anthropic's customer story describes how Rising Academies built the Rori math tutor and the Tari teacher-support tool on Claude, both delivered over WhatsApp. It cites studies by Oxford and J-PAL researchers that found a 0.3 standard deviation effect on math learning. The page carries no date; the Internet Archive first saved it on November 10, 2025.
Full details are in the original sources.
