The pandemic left throughout Latin America a series of problems and challenges in basic and secondary education that must be assumed by all the actors in the ecosystem, from public entities to managers and teachers. In Colombia -for example-, the last Great Opinion Survey on Education, carried out by the Fundación Empresarios por la Educación in alliance with the polling firm Cifras y Conceptos, found that 39% of parents in the country believe that the quality of education has decreased and more than 60% are convinced that their children forgot the topics they already learned before 2020.
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And it is that a large part of these problems are also due to the lack of time for institutions to develop real educational strategies to improve the quality, content and teaching processes. A situation, which is largely due to the administrative overload that both private and public schools tend to have.
For this reason, technologies are increasingly necessary in education, since by digitizing and automating administrative processes, institutions can be managed more efficiently, allowing more time and resources to dedicate to teaching students. .
Something that fidu understood very well, a digital solution that optimizes the management of academic, administrative, financial and communication processes in schools and that is present in 10 Latin American countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and Peruamong others, where they cover more than 1,000 educational institutions.
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Nicolás Giménez, CEO and co-founder of fidu, points out that one of the biggest administrative inconveniences and that requires a high dedication every month is that of collections, “Since most schools still rely on bank receipts, cash management, and spreadsheets to manage these types of transactions. And in our advance through the region we have discovered that 70% of the time of managers and administrators is dedicated to solving operational problems, while on average two out of every five payments in schools fail to reconcile, in addition month by month there is a 10% of non-compliance in the same and 40% delinquency”.
In this way, this startup provides an agile and simple application that allows schools to offer different means of payment such as credit card, debit card, bank transfer, and even cash at collection points and also to access account statements. in real time, providing greater visibility and the possibility of monitoring each of the families automatically and efficiently.
“What we seek is to offer fairer, simpler and more accessible financial solutions, in this way, we developed a digital tool that allows institutions to automatically monitor debt, which streamlines the time that administrative teams spend on it. to these processes that are usually done manually”, Gimenez added.
Likewise, within the Great Survey of Opinion in Education, different experts pointed out the need to take into account points such as: teachers have a fundamental role in education; there are inequality gaps; a plan is required to level the lost learning and it is necessary to strengthen the relationship between parents and educational institutions.
“Under these factors, schools need to have technological tools that adapt to their needs, that simplify their educational processes and improve communication with parents. And most importantly, it is to free up more resources and time so that educators can dedicate themselves to what really matters: the education of students”, says the CEO of fidu.
It should be noted that this startup closed a seed investment round of 5 million dollars a few days ago led by the Lightspeed Venture Partners and NFX funds, in which renowned unicorn founders in the region also participated, such as Felipe Villamarín and Andrés Bilbao, from rappi; Matías Woloski, from Auth0; Roby Souviron, from Despegar, and Fabián Gómez Gutiérrez, from Frubana.
With this injection of capital, they seek to improve their digital solution, consolidate themselves in the markets they reached, such as Colombia, and encourage educators and managers of Latin American institutions to have new tools that allow them to improve education systems in the region.
