Facebook Is Testing Sabee – A Learning App For Nigerians

Last year, Facebook opened its first office in Lagos. This office provided Facebook with a hub on the continent with a team of engineers. The office is also home to several other teams across Facebook – Sales, Partnerships, Policy and Communications. Sabee app is one of the first products to emerge from this Nigerian office. Sabee is tied to Facebook’s larger strategy of focusing more on serving the African continent, starting with Nigeria.

The app, Sabee, which means “to know” in Nigerian Pidgin is built entirely for Nigerians. It aims to connect learners and educators in online communities to make educational opportunities more accessible. The rationale for the app was born out of the desire to fulfil necessity for contact-less education after the impact of the pandemic. Also due to the evolving educational digital sphere that is expected to bring inexhaustible value and significant boost in the educational technology space. In addition  Sabee was born due to the complex factors that comes with the ratio of learners to educators around the country.

Facebook Product Lead Emeka Okafor, had this to say “There are 50 million learners, but only 2 million educators in Nigeria. With this small, early test, we’re hoping to understand how we can help educators build communities that make education available to everyone. We look forward to learning with our early testers, and deciding what to do from there.”

Sabee app is currently in its early alpha testing phase with fewer than 100 testers who are under NDA agreements with Facebook. The educational app is not available to anyone else outside the testers group for now, but the company hopes to scale Sabee to the next stage before the end of the year.  Although it went public on the Google Play Store briefly, within that short time it didn’t manage to rank on any charts in the store. Facebook aims for the educational app to be fully functional and accessible with internet connectivity that is as low as 2G. This expands service to a wide group of people that are often left behind by technology. Congratulations are in order for the great things happening at Facebook, it also recently became the 5th US company to hit the $1tr market cap milestone.