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.
The phone field is optional at signup and sits directly beneath the email field. Beside it is a country selector, preselected from the learner’s detected location, which supplies the international dialling code. A learner in Lagos can type 08162715246 exactly as they would write it anywhere else, and a learner in Delhi can type their number in the local Indian format, with the platform converting both to the international form behind the scenes. Numbers entered with a leading plus sign are accepted as given, and the international access prefix 00 is understood as well.
At the login screen, the email field now accepts either an email address or a phone number. The country selector appears only once what has been typed stops looking like an email address, so learners signing in with email see no change at all.
“Email is a barrier we had stopped noticing,” said Abhinav Negi, Co-founder and CEO of Efiwe. “We built the platform mobile first, for phones on slow connections, and then asked every learner to sign in with the one identifier that has nothing to do with a phone. A teacher in a Lagos classroom watching thirty students try to remember which email they used a month ago sees the problem immediately.”
Chidi Nwaogu, Co-founder and CTO added, “The country selector mattered more than the phone field itself. We have learners in 154 countries. A dropdown that quietly assumed everyone was Nigerian would have been worse than no dropdown at all, so it covers every country and dialling code, and it guesses correctly before the learner touches it.”
Each phone number can be linked to one Efiwe account. A learner who enters a number already registered to another account is told so at signup rather than after the fact. Learners who prefer to keep using email are unaffected, and existing accounts continue to work exactly as before. Efiwe recommends that learners continue to keep a valid email address on their account, as password recovery still runs through email.
The change is available immediately at efiwe.com.
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