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Good practice Imported

Tari — Rising Academies' Claude-Powered WhatsApp Assistant Brings Real-Time Support to Sierra Leone's Teachers

Sierra Leone · Freetown · See the Sierra Leone profile · See the Freetown profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 20% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Rising Academies, founded in Sierra Leone in 2014, launched Tari in 2025: a Claude-powered WhatsApp assistant giving teachers real-time lesson help, alongside student tutor Rori, linked by Oxford/J-PAL research to a 0.3 SD gain in maths learning.

150,000+ students
Students reached (combined Rori/Tari programme)
~1,000 schools
Schools reached
95 %
Teacher interactions handled directly by Claude
0.3 SD
Effect on maths learning outcomes (combined programme)
5 countries
Countries covered
Tari — Rising Academies' Claude-Powered WhatsApp Assistant Brings Real-Time Support to Sierra Leone's Teachers

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Rising Academies / Anthropic
Period
Since March 2025
Keywords
K-12 education, teacher support, EdTech, WhatsApp AI

Context

Rising Academies is an education network founded in Sierra Leone during the 2014 Ebola crisis. In its service regions, laptop- and broadband-dependent EdTech reaches under 5% of students, so the network partnered with Anthropic (announced 1 March 2025) to deliver two Claude-powered tools over WhatsApp: Rori, a maths tutor for students, and Tari, a companion assistant giving teachers real-time, curriculum-aligned lesson planning and classroom-strategy support.

Activities

Tari operates as a conversational WhatsApp assistant, with roughly 95% of teacher interactions handled directly by Claude, providing on-demand lesson planning, subject-matter support and classroom strategies to teachers across Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda.

Results

By the time of Anthropic's published case study, the combined Rori/Tari programme had reached over 150,000 students in roughly 1,000 schools across five countries. Independent research conducted with the University of Oxford and J-PAL found a 0.3 standard-deviation effect on maths learning outcomes, equivalent to roughly an extra year of learning — though this figure reflects the combined programme and is not isolated to Tari's contribution specifically.

Conclusions

Tari is newer than Rori and has not yet been the subject of its own published randomised evaluation. Rising Academies frames it as central to sustaining teaching quality where a large share of teachers across its footprint lack full pedagogical qualifications.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k) — Not disclosed in source material; delivered via WhatsApp and the Claude API rather than dedicated hardware, implying a lower-cost model than laptop-based EdTech.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Partnership announced 1 March 2025; had reached 150,000+ students and ~1,000 schools across five countries by the time of the published case study.
Staffing & skills
Rising Academies (education network, founded 2014 in Sierra Leone), Anthropic (technology partner, Claude model)

Conditions for success

  • WhatsApp-based delivery reaching students/teachers without laptop or broadband dependency
  • Curriculum-aligned, on-demand content aimed at under-qualified teachers

Common failure modes

  • Tari's own learning-outcome contribution is not isolated from Rori's in the published 0.3 SD result
  • No independent randomised evaluation of Tari specifically has been published yet

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding Own resources / municipal budget

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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