Technology becomes relevant to the lives of people when it can benefit everyone and anyone with access to it while making the everyday processes easier.

For Mariam Muganga, her Academic Bridge application is basically an application that can link together everyone related and necessary to the educational process. The application which designed brings together all the stakeholders which includes students, parents, teachers and the school administrators together under one platform.

The application which was designed in 2014 by the 27-year-old was released for use in 2015 and is currently being used in 90 schools – 84 in Rwanda and 6 in other regional countries; Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

Receiving an award from the International Telecommunications Union in Bangkok in 2016, the application was commended for its role in improving education with the use of information and communications technology.

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Muganga is a graduate of Computer and Information Sciences from University of Rwanda’s College of Science and Technology.

In a statement, she said “Usually, parents send children to school and it is the teacher who looks after them until a parent gets the child’s performance results at the end of the semester. It means that the parent is not effectively involved in the education of their child. What we are trying to do is to ensure that a parent is updated all the time, especially because when they are involved in the schooling of their child, as a result, the child succeeds in class and it reduces school dropout rate as in most cases dropout is attributed to lack of enough follow-up by parents, leaving all the responsibility to school managers or teachers alone”.

She added that the application, Academic Bridge reduces the stress parents have to go through to keep track of their children’s results and performances as they receive timely information about these results.

For ease of use and information sharing, the application uses an information management platform which uses web, SMS, email (for school) as well as guidance to easily monitor the progress of the students in the schools that the application covers.