Rukia: Teaching beyond the blackboard

DAR ES SALAAM: EVERY year, thousands of teachers across the country are asked to produce something their training rarely prepared them for lesson plans, schemes of work, teaching notes and reports — all digital, all expected to be accurate.

Many don’t feel confident doing this alone, so they pay someone else to do it for them, then submit work they cannot fully check themselves.

Rukia Butenge, a secondary school teacher at Kijitonyama Sayansi Secondary School, saw that gap up close.

Her answer wasn’t to blame the teachers who struggled. It was to build them a system they could use on their own.

As co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wazo Nexer Innovations Company, Rukia is behind Wazo Learning, a digital education platform designed to bring school administrators, teachers, students, parents and finance departments onto a single system one that digitises school administration, teaching materials and financial transactions, while integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and live classroom features.

For Rukia, the idea is more than a business concept. It grew directly out of problems she experienced first-hand, in classrooms and in school offices. “I am a teacher by profession,” she says.

“I have served as a teacher of extracurricular activities, but I was also a deputy head of school for five years. I also worked as a school registrar and statistician.”

hose roles put her at the centre of a school’s administrative demands and brought her closer to technology than most classroom teachers get.

“I spent a lot of time using technological systems to enter data, analyse information and search for different reports,” she explains.

“That is where my passion for technology began to grow.”

That curiosity has deep roots. Rukia’s mother was an engineer, and some of her sisters also pursued engineering, she grew up in a household that pushed her toward science and, eventually, medicine or engineering as a career.

She studied science subjects at ordinary level, but family circumstances later placed her in a school without science options at advanced level, and she went on to study education at university instead.

The interest in science and technology never left her; it resurfaced through training programmes, exhibitions, competitions and innovation events.

From 2021 onward, she became increasingly involved in technology programmes through organisations including the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA), University of Dar es Salaam ICT initiatives, and UNICEF — often as the only teacher from her school consistently showing up to such events.

What began as supervising students in digital competitions turned into something more personal, she started attending the training sessions herself, learning alongside her students so she could genuinely support them rather than simply chaperone them.

“Every solution the students developed, I was involved in preparing and presenting with them,” she says.

“Through those activities, my passion continued to grow, and I found more opportunities to learn about digital systems.”

Building the platform That accumulated experience — administrator, registrar, competition mentor — eventually converged into Wazo Learning.

For school leaders, the platform allows administrators to register teachers, assign duties and track whether work has been completed, without having to depend on outside contractors to prepare sensitive school information.

That last point matters more than it might first appear, Rukia says schools that rely on external people to produce their reports and records are, in effect, exposing confidential institutional and personal data to people outside the institution.

Keeping that work inside the school, on a system teachers can use themselves, is as much a security decision as a convenience one. For parents, the platform is designed to close the distance between home and school.

They can make payments directly through the finance section, useful in private schools, and boarding parents can see exactly what their children need and what it will cost, rather than relying on a child to relay the message accurately.

The system also gives parents a direct line to raise concerns, whether about the quality of food or a child’s academic performance, without having to travel to the school in person to do it. For students, the platform goes further than administration.

It includes an AI-powered assistant to guide independent study, and a live classroom feature that lets a student stuck on an assignment request realtime help from a teacher.

“Sometimes a student may be stuck while studying or working on an assignment,” Rukia explains. “Through the live classroom, the teacher can connect with the student and provide further guidance.”

The platform also links teachers directly to digital materials tied to the official curriculum, cutting down the time spent hunting across scattered sources.

Throughout, Rukia is clear about what she wants the technology to do: support teachers’ judgment, not substitute for it. From pilot to policy attention Wazo Learning was developed in 2025 and is now being piloted in several schools.

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Asalam School in Zanzibar was among the first, with roughly 26 teachers using the system. At Kijitonyama Sayansi Secondary School, where Rukia teaches, around 46 teachers are being brought onto the platform.

Vituka Secondary School has begun adoption and is due for further in-person training, and Rukia says schools in Kisarawe, Kibaha and Bagamoyo are also being targeted.

The platform has also drawn attention from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

Rukia and her team presented Wazo Learning to ministry officials, who gave feedback and issued a recommendation letter to support further piloting — along with a suggestion to expand the system so education officials at ward, district and regional level could access relevant information too. “It has helped us greatly,” Rukia says.

“When we approach different institutions and explain what we are doing, we can also show that the system has been recommended for further piloting.”

Her ambition now is straightforward, “We want to reach as many regions and schools as possible.”

The company runs on a subscription model, with schools paying monthly or annually for access. The cost of building at night None of this has come easily.

As a full-time teacher, Rukia’s first obligation remains her students, which means most of the research, design and development behind Wazo Learning has happened after hours. “During the day, I have responsibilities as a teacher,” she says.

“Sometimes I have to wait until night to work on the system.”

The harder obstacle has been convincing teachers themselves. While gathering information for the platform, Rukia encountered colleagues reluctant to take part simply because they weren’t confident using digital tools, afraid of making a visible mistake.

That reaction shaped one of her core convictions: technology alone solves nothing if the people expected to use it aren’t given the confidence to do so. Digital transformation, she says, has to come with digital inclusion, not just new software.

A message for other women Rukia sees her own path as evidence against a persistent stereotype, that technology and engineering are fields women simply don’t belong in.

“I am a teacher, but I have also managed to become involved in technology,” she says.

“I have been able to balance the two because they are things I love.” For her, the point isn’t that women in technology have to give up other parts of their identity be it teaching, motherhood, whatever else defines them.

It’s that technology can become another tool for extending the impact they already have.

The work is still early. Wazo Learning is in a handful of schools, not hundreds, and the ministry’s interest is a recommendation, not yet a mandate.

But Rukia’s story is really about something smaller and more replicable than a national rollout, a teacher who noticed a problem most people simply worked around, and decided, mostly at night, after the school day ended, to build the fix herself.