Description: Our team designed Ilm Exchange’s marketplace platform to allow schools easy access to a large market of educational goods and services. The platform aims to alleviate key failures limiting the ability of low-cost schools to innovate, improve, and provide higher quality education by matching schools to the products that they need to be able to improve student learning outcomes in an affordable manner. Our pilots have shown that targeted schools demonstrate interest in acquiring products & services through the platform.
Ilm Exchange: Education Marketplace
Asim Khwaja
Zainab Qureshi
Roohullah Gulzari
Citation: Khwaja, Qureshi, and Gulzari. "Ilm Exchange: Education Marketplace."
Project Design and Findings - make past tense
The Ilm Exchange’s Educational Marketplace platform aims to alleviate three major market failures that we have identified over the course of the LEAPS research agenda: (i) Lack of school access to financial resources; (ii) Lack of school access to affordable, quality enhancing educational inputs such as better textbooks, education technology, and teaching and learning aids; (iii) Lack of access to information on part of both parents and school leaders. To resolve these issues, we aimed to have the marketplace platform offer over 100,000 public, private, and nonprofit schools across Pakistan access to loans and financial products, educational products and services, and information on school quality and best practices.
The marketplace offers products and services from 18 suppliers in 8 categories: Bank Loans, Textbooks, Library & Co-curricular activities, Education Technology, Learning Materials, School Supplies (such as stationery & printing), and Solar Power. On the platform, schools can submit a “product request” online, through a field agent, or by calling the Ilm Exchange helpline. This request is then forwarded to the relevant supplier to fulfil the request and conduct the transaction.
We tested the marketplace across 3 districts of Punjab using trained field agents to outreach to schools. Our findings from this test process include:
Schools show interest in signing up for the platform and acquiring products
We found that 61.6% of schools that we outreached to became verified members of Ilm Exchange, i.e., after the field agent’s visit they logged on to the website and set up an account for their school. 109 of these schools made transactions on Ilm Exchange, which is approximately 7% of the total schools visited and 11.3% of the total schools registered. We observe that the vast majority of products acquired were those that schools were already very familiar with (such as ECE materials, stationery, printing and textbooks). Only 17.3% of all transactions were ‘uncommon’ products.
The likelihood of a school using the platform depends on multiple factors
We find that after the initial day of sign-up to the Ilm Exchange, schools that face more competition (as measured by the number of competing schools in a 300 meter radius) are more likely to use the platform. These schools are also more likely to order products. Furthermore, schools with higher fees are also more likely to use the platform. On the other hand, we see both usage of the platform and product acquisition decline with the age of the school respondent.
There are certain areas where we aim to improve the platform in the future
We recognize that going forward, there are a few areas where the marketplace platform can be improved. These include streamlining communication between buyer and seller, offering higher quality product selection at more affordable price points, and improving the marketplace website’s user experience.
Study Resources
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As a condition of use, please cite as: Khwaja, Qureshi, and Gulzari. "Ilm Exchange: Education Marketplace."
Marketplace products
Marketplace theory of change
Two-sided marketplace map