Inside Efiwe

Efiwe Adds Phone Number Login, Removing the Email Barrier to Signing In

August 5, 2026

Efiwe learners can now add a phone number when they create an account and use it to sign in afterwards, in place of an email address. A country selector covering 241 countries and territories sits beside the field and preselects the learner’s country automatically, so numbers can be entered in the familiar local format. The change is live across the entire platform. Efiwe today announced phone number login, a change to how learners identify themselves when signing in. Until now, an email address was the only way into an Efiwe account. That works for learners who use email regularly and check it often. It works less well for a large share of Efiwe’s users, particularly younger learners and those in classroom settings, for whom a phone number is the identifier they know by heart and an email address is something created once and then half remembered.

Efiwe Introduces Adaptive Refill, Rewarding Learners Who Go Deep

August 4, 2026

Efiwe has updated its lives system so that the wait for a refill now depends on how much a learner has done in their current session. Learners who run out of lives after solving a significant number of challenges wait less than the standard three hours, with the reduction scaling up to a one hour wait for the deepest sessions. The release also fixes an issue where lives purchased on one device could fail to appear on another. Efiwe today announced Adaptive Refill, a change to how the platform’s lives system handles the wait after a learner runs out. The feature is live across all courses on the platform. Every Efiwe learner starts with 200 lives. A wrong answer costs 10, and when lives run out, learners have until now waited a flat three hours for them to refill automatically, or bought more to continue immediately. That three hour wall applied equally to someone who had solved four challenges and someone who had solved forty.

Efiwe Selected for the 2026 Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship

July 31, 2026

Efiwe is one of 12 startups selected into the 2026 cohort of the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship in Nigeria, implemented by Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB) in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. The Fellowship comes with $100,000 in equity-free funding and 12 months of intensive support. When we launched Efiwe in August 2025, we started from a simple conviction: talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Millions of young people across Africa and other emerging markets have a smartphone in their hand and no realistic path into a technology career. No laptop. No reliable internet. No coding education in their mother tongue. No way to prove a skill to an employer even after they have learned it. Efiwe was built to remove every one of those barriers. Today, more than 16,000 learners across 150 countries are learning to code on Efiwe, entirely on their phones, fully offline after a single page load, in any of 246 languages, including sign language. Being selected into the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship is a validation of that mission by two institutions that have spent years investing in exactly this kind of work.

Efiwe Learners Can Now Choose Their Own AI Tutor

July 25, 2026

Choosing Efiwe 2.0 changes nothing. Free learners continue to receive cloud-powered feedback once every five minutes, with the on-device model handling everything in between. Efiwe Pro subscribers and members of Group Pro and Group Pro Plus plans continue to reach the cloud model on every submission, with the on-device model stepping in only when the cloud is busy or unavailable. This remains the default for every learner, and no one needs to touch the dropdown to keep it. Choosing Efiwe 1.5 routes every request to the device. Nothing is sent to the cloud, no connection is consulted, and feedback arrives at the speed of local computation. For free learners this carries a quiet benefit: the five-minute cooldown exists to keep the cloud service sustainable, so it simply does not apply. A learner on Efiwe 1.5 gets instant, unlimited feedback on every challenge, with no waiting between attempts and no prompts to upgrade.

You Decide Who Joins: Moderation, Promotions, and Tighter Control Over Your Group

July 25, 2026

Group owners can now switch on moderation from the dashboard. It is off by default, and nothing changes for any existing group unless the owner deliberately turns it on. With moderation on, the invite link stops being an open door. Someone who registers through it still creates a full Efiwe account and can start learning immediately; they simply are not part of your group yet. Instead, they appear in a new Membership Moderation section on your dashboard, waiting for review. From there, an admin sees each request with the person’s name, email address, grade, country, and the date they applied. Select one, or select the whole queue, and choose Approve or Reject. Approved members join the group and appear in your user table with their progress tracked from that moment on.

Call for Implementation Partners: Bring Offline, AI-Powered Coding Education to Your Community

July 21, 2026

Efiwe is inviting organizations across countries in the Global South to apply as Implementation Partners to bring structured, no-cost coding education to underserved learners in their communities. This call follows the success of Efiwe’s pilot programs, including a Teach For Nigeria collaboration across 10 schools in Lagos and Ogun State, and a newly launched partnership with the Lagos State Government’s Education District IV covering 5 government senior secondary schools. We are now looking to expand this model to new countries and communities that face similar barriers: limited access to laptops, unreliable or expensive internet, and language exclusion from existing tech education resources.