The council of British International Schools(COBIS) is the largest premier global association for British schools as well as international British schools overseas. COBIS serves and supports over 250 schools in 77 countries, also has over 230 commercial supporting members who export goods and services to schools that are members of the council. They organize conferences at various times of the year, that offers high quality speakers, seminars and workshops for school owners, proprietors and leaders.
As an associate partner of COBIS, Educare technologies was invited to the annual flagship conference held from May 6th to 8th, 2023 at the Intercontinental Hotel O2, London, UK. Being the only indigenous African technology company accredited to the council, it is a true testament to how far the company has grown from a school portal management system to an internationally recognized Enterprise resource planning solution provider; It also gave us a huge edge over other participants and exhibitors.
The theme ‘Leading Learning for a New Paradigm’ was extremely fitting to us, as it tied into our software which was thoroughly showcased to the various school owners that were present. The new seamless all-in-one platform which captures all facets of school administration, operation and academic activities in a single dashboard. This came as a pleasant surprise to the school owners as they were previously only used to seeing such services sold to them in separate packages, they flocked to our booth and showed great interest on the set up of our platform regarding lesson plans, school curriculum and inventory for schools. They were also pleased with our support channels, which are available via phone and email (and open 24/7) as opposed to other companies communication strictly by email. It displayed to them that educare has a human element in our relationship with our clients.
We were also opportune to exhibit our newest product educare for Business which is geared towards deploying customizable software to help in the daily operations of small and medium sized enterprises and also large scale businesses. This new product of course extends beyond schools and can be used by individuals and even government agencies. This new software is already up and running with positive feedback from the companies who adopted it in its early stages.
Being in a completely new environment , we also took the time to evaluate the market and point out some key characteristics. What we discovered was a stark difference in main interest of school owners in Nigeria and the UK, which is the fact that while the Nigerian school owners trust our capabilities completely they are more focused on the pricing of our services as they intend to get the absolute best what what they pay for. The school owners we came across in the event however were more geared towards data privacy policy and our compliance to such policies. Suffice to say they were extremely satisfied with the responses they got, as we were able to secure meetings for demos of our platform with various schools that were present.
Our trip to the O2 (although originally seen as a strict business endeavor) gave us an avenue to bolster relations and display the innovations of our enterprise. It showed us the difference in thought processes of various school owners and allowed us to physically reach an audience that would have otherwise doubted our credibility had they not seen it for themselves. A very successful trip indeed.