There is a saying in Kinyarwanda that goes: those who have firewoods eat a well cooked, savory meal: “abagira inkwi barya ibihiye”. That saying emphasizes the importance of timely preparation, planning that is key for the success of anything we carry on both personal, professional and enterprise levels.
Before the advent of electricity, gas and charcoal, firewood used to be the only thing to use to prepare a meal, and especially in the rainy season, those who never thought about preparing firewood inevitably faced challenges to be able to put food on the table. It is our hope that, though 2020 has been a challenge, we have all embraced it with a preparation and planning mindset.
For Standard Gateway, we have just done that, and for that 2021 can’t be a more exciting year. Our highlights have been the closeout of edrivingschool.org, the integration with our payment partner, the kickoff of kezastore.com development and finally our entry into the commercialization mode.
2020 generally started with a lot of excitement and curiosity. After all it was supposed to be the D-Year. It received a lot of buzz and rightly so, many countries have established visions and goals against the year. While the Covid-19 virus was already spreading like wildfire in China, the rest of the world was blindsided by what was really happening. Nevertheless some of us started to hear manufacturing operations shut down in SouthEast Asia and notably mainland China, with primary impact to the hardware market.
And when stay at home orders started to take effect towards the end of February, Standard Gateway was very slightly impacted, as we conduct most of our activities through video conferences and maximize our usage of different technical tools. We were indeed ahead of the time. For instance, our weekly meetings are conducted through google meet, while all our financial transactions are all done electronically.
Below are key highlights for 2020 and plans for 2021:
- In 2020 we were able to finalize and launch edrivingschool.org for three countries: Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. While most of the courses are provided for free, this gave us needed experience to operate our products in different countries and will prove to be important for our scalability plans in adding travel agencies outside of Rwanda on our Kezastore.com platform.
- In 2020 we kicked off development for kezastore and kezaservices. Two platforms that will directly move Standard Gateway in the commercialization mode. While kezastore will cater for consumer customers, we will position kezaservices to house solutions for enterprise or organizational customers.
- Due to the volume of activities, we de-prioritized the development of kezapay, the payment assistant in work that will give anyone the ability to transact and to sell online. Development activities will resume in Q2 2021, while we, at the beginning internally use it to process financial transactions, reports, agents network payments while we refine the product
- We also de-prioritized the development of a modern version of www.nationalexamination.com. Currently we have no immediate plan to resume the development internally until kezastore and kezaservices are completely rolled out.
- In Q4 2020, we held two pre-Launch events, one in Kinyarwanda, and the second one in English where we introduced Kezastore to our users. The business Launch is expected to take place in January 2021.
- Currently, We are in the process of establishing a media, sales and marketing that will be responsible for the ultimate commercialization of eticketing and online exams products on kezastore, engage travel agency partners and build a ticketing agents network (Planned for Q3 2021)
- We have baselined Quarterly events in February, May, August and November, to engage our partners and customers. The events will be held at the closest Saturday to the 15th, and will serve as a way to communicate new products and features primarily focusing on kezastore and kezaservices.
Truly, in every challenge lies an opportunity. For Covid-19, what has been obvious to everyone is the realization of how important technology is and will continue to be while we enter the new normal. We believe, Standard Gateway as an organization focused on Education and Technology will have an important role to play along with others.
For now, our main focus is to make it possible for customers to be able to browse routes and buy tickets online. While we believe there is opportunity to generate revenue and make the process convenient for travers, we also think it will help curb down Covid-19 and move us one step closer into preparing for the new normal.
Our education engagement will continue to gravitate around examination preparation. Currently we are the standard examination preparation resources for Rwanda though our flagship site www.nationalexamination.com, where we avail free of charge past papers and past keys. We plan to continue to do so, complementing free materials with low cost online exams that will give students the ability to gauge themselves in the preparation process.
Concluding, we come back to the Kinyarwanda saying we started with: those with firewood eat well cooked savory email. We believe with the preparation and plans we have laid down, the future is very bright for Standard Gateway. We hope you are excited to visit our new platforms kezastore.com, purchase tickets online and practice exams in January.
Until next time, Happy new year 20201, we hope it becomes a successful year for you, your family,friends and relatives from our team.
Cheers..
SG Team
N.B: This article was originally published at http://standardgateway.com/blog
Standard Gateway is an online and offline products and services provider focused on education and technology, visit http://standardgateway.com for more information | You can also visit our different products: www.nationalexamination.com | www.edrivingschool.org | www.kezaplex.com | http://kezastore.com |