By Prudence Minayo
Ann Nyakinyua Gathura is the founder of Ann’s Maths club. The initiative was conceived during the lockdown to help students love and appreciate Mathematics.
Being home at the time, helped her turn her passion for Maths into a business opportunity. The club’s slogan is I love Mathematics and it has helped thousands of learners change their attitude towards the subject.
In 2022, Ann won the Zuri Awards STEM category thanks to her dedication in providing quality services to help learners excel in STEM.
Here is her story as told by WoK.
Education
An alumna of Lockwood Girls’ High School, he graduated from Jomo Kenyatta University with a Bachelor of Science in Actuarial Science.
Setting up the Maths club
With help from her parents, she started tutoring pupils at the home garage. She started with four learners and the positive feedback from the parents encouraged her to turn this into a business.
In a recent interview with Nation, she revealed that the club has grown from the initial four to 10,000 members. At the beginning, she just wanted to establish a community.
She invested Ksh25,000 to purchase a whiteboard, lapel microphone, stationeries and a tripod. Initially, she would work at her job and and at the Maths club.
However, she continuously dedicated a lot of time to the club and finally decided to focus on it fully. The positive response from the parents is one of their highlights. There is also the fact that the club became profitable pretty quickly.
“I run the club on a free model for six months and in the seventh month I introduced a payment model. Within the first two months of launching the model, we had broken even and exceeded our revenue target by over 200 per cent,” she told The Nation.
The club has a way of tracking learners progress for both theirs and their parents advantage.
Learning from mistakes
One of the mistakes she made in her initial days, was mixing the club’s money with her own personal funds. This made it hard for her to track the finances. She settled on paying herself from the business then add it as a recurring expense.
As the revenue became steady, she opened a money market account and saved between 7 to 12 per cent of the product. She then opened a Sacco account and began to save 10% of her salary.
Career History
The Mathematics enthusiast has worked for a couple organizations including:
- Advanced Digital Learning Lab as the president
- Kenya Revenue Authority as a Business Analyst
- eMobilis Mobile Technology Institute as a Google Digital Skills Trainer.