Family Pocket

Stage 1 Proposal

Every child accounted for. Every parent connected.

One platform for the whole school, from the bus and the gate to the classroom and home.
Prepared for

so this proposal is addressed to it
Subject
The Family Pocket platform:
modules, and the problems they solve
Prepared by
Rodgers Chayuga
Founder and Lead Engineer
Date
September 2026
familypocket.iowa.me/FamilyPocketNairobi, Kenya

The problem

A school runs on information that arrives too late to use.

Running a Kenyan school means coordinating dozens of moving parts every day. Most schools coordinate them with WhatsApp groups, paper registers, phone calls and spreadsheets.

Each of those tools works on its own. Together they leave gaps, and the gaps are always in the same places. A parent does not know their child arrived until the child comes home. A teacher spends the first half hour of the day on a register that reaches the office at lunchtime. A transport manager cannot prove every child who boarded a bus walked through a gate. A chef cooks for an estimate. A principal has to walk to a classroom to know what is happening in it.

None of this is a discipline problem. It is an information problem: the school already knows everything it needs to, but the knowledge is scattered across people, paper and phones, and it arrives hours after the moment it mattered.

What this document is, and what it is not

This is Stage 1. It sets out what Family Pocket does, module by module, and the specific problem each one removes, so you can judge whether the platform is worth your school's time before anyone talks money. Pricing, hardware, the implementation plan and the contract are Stage 2.

How it works

Two connected surfaces, and nothing else to buy.

Family Pocket is one platform with two faces. Everyone in the school uses one or the other, and both show the same data at the same moment.

The mobile app

Used by parents, teachers, transport managers, gate staff, kitchen staff and students on the phones they already own. Each person signs in once and sees only what their role allows. A parent never sees another family's child.

The management dashboard

A web control centre for the administration. Students, staff, classes, routes, gates, fees, communications and reports are all configured here, by your team, without calling us.

The devices, deployed and run by us

Every bus gets a scanning terminal and a handset for its minder. Every gate gets a terminal and a handset for its staff. Each child carries an NFC wristband. We supply, ship, configure, mount, update and maintain the terminals and handsets, and they stay ours.

It works when the network does not

The app reads from a database on the phone itself and reconciles the moment signal returns. Kiosks keep scanning offline and sync later. Nothing is lost while a bus is out of coverage.

You choose which modules your school runs

Everything in this document is part of the platform, but no school has to take all of it. Modules are switched on per school and per role from your own dashboard, so a school that wants transport and attendance alone gets exactly that, and can turn on more later without a new deployment.

The scanning equipment is ours to buy, deploy and keep working.

The school raises no purchase order and finds no supplier. We source the terminals and the handsets, clear the import, mount them on your buses and at your gates, provision them, push updates on a schedule, run health checks, and replace anything that fails in normal use. They stay on our books, not yours, and if you ever leave we collect them. What the school owns instead is the part that matters most: the database holding your records, and the hosting behind live tracking. We specify and operate both for you, and you can revoke our access to either at any moment. Stage 2 lists it in full, with nothing buried.

You are billed for students. Every other account is free.

Each enrolled student unlocks their own parents and guardians at no extra cost. Every staff account is free, with no cap on how many you create: class teachers, subject teachers, head teachers, the transport manager, drivers, bus minders, gate staff, the chef and kitchen team, club instructors, tag and asset managers, returning officers, and every administrator. The management dashboard carries no separate licence. A school running 40 staff accounts and a school running 400 pay exactly the same.

The modules

What we built, and the problem each piece removes.

Every module below started as a specific complaint from a real school. They are grouped by the part of school life they belong to.

018 modules

SchoolSafe: the journey between home and the classroom

The hours nobody in the school can see are the hours that carry the most risk. SchoolSafe makes them visible.

Live student tracking

Problem
From the moment a child leaves home until they walk into class, the school's knowledge of where they are rests on a driver's memory and a parent's faith.
Module
A parent-facing live status of Waiting, On the Bus, Approaching School and Arrived, with the bus on a map, an arrival estimate, and a push notification at every transition.
Solves
The parent stops phoning the school, because the answer is already on their phone. Each status change is triggered by a physical scan, not by someone remembering to send a message.

Gate control

Problem
Gate security is visual recognition and a sign-in book. If you were asked at 11am who is on the premises, you could not produce a reliable answer.
Module
Gate staff scan every student in and out on a dedicated terminal; each scan records the student, the gate and the exact time.
Solves
The school holds a tamper-proof record of who is on site at any moment: for the parent, for the board, and for an incident nobody hopes for.

Discrepancy alerts

Problem
The dangerous case is not a missing scan. It is a child who boarded the bus and never appeared at the gate, and nobody noticing for an hour.
Module
The system continuously compares boarding records against gate records and flags any child on one side but not the other.
Solves
The gap surfaces to the transport manager in minutes rather than at pickup time, while it can still be closed with a phone call.

Transport command centre

Problem
A transport manager's picture of the fleet is assembled from calls to drivers, and it is always a few minutes out of date.
Module
A live dashboard and a matching phone app: active trips, every bus with its driver, route, registration and passenger count, gate activity per gate, and the ability to end a trip remotely.
Solves
One person can run the entire fleet from a desk or from the road, and answer a parent or a principal without making a single call.

The bus minder's handset

Problem
The adult responsible for the children on a bus has no way to reach the school mid-route except their own phone and their own airtime, and no way to prove what they reported or when.
Module
A handset issued with each bus and paired to that bus alone, carrying the trip, its passenger list, and a direct line to the transport office and the school.
Solves
The minder confirms a child on or off, flags a problem, and is reachable on a number the school controls, not a personal phone that changes when the staff member does.

NFC tag management

Problem
Tags get lost, children change routes, and a tag issued to the wrong child is worse than no tag at all.
Module
A dedicated role for issuing, re-assigning and voiding student and staff tags, with the full scan history behind each one.
Solves
A lost tag is voided and replaced on the spot, and every tag in circulation is traceable to exactly one person.

Fleet health

Problem
Fuel is the biggest line in a transport budget and the easiest to lose track of; servicing happens when something breaks.
Module
Fuel logs, inspections, maintenance schedules and a parts register, kept per vehicle.
Solves
Consumption per bus becomes comparable, and a service is scheduled against a date rather than a breakdown.

School trips

Problem
A trip off site is the day the register matters most and the day it is hardest to keep, because the class is split across buses.
Module
Plan a trip end to end: batch the students, assign the buses, and scan them on and off in both directions.
Solves
The head count on the way home is a fact, not a recount in a car park.
026 modules

The school day

The daily record of who was here, how they were, and what happened.

Roll call

Problem
A paper register takes real time out of a teaching day, and the compiled version reaches the office hours after anyone could act on it.
Module
The teacher sees their class list and marks each child present, absent, late or sick with one tap, then submits.
Solves
The register is complete in under two minutes and visible school-wide instantly to the office, the head teacher, the kitchen and the parent.

Occurrence notes

Problem
The things worth knowing about a class, such as a fight, an injury or a child who has not eaten, live in a teacher's head and reach leadership only if it gets bad enough.
Module
A structured daily class log covering engagement, meals, discipline, incidents, health and departure, with a Normal, Warning or Critical marker on each section.
Solves
A pattern in one class becomes visible before it becomes an incident, and a serious note reaches a head teacher the same day it is written.

Occurrence bank

Problem
A head teacher managing eight classes has no way to see across them without asking eight people.
Module
Every occurrence note in the grade in one filterable view, with counts of critical flags, warnings and items still pending.
Solves
Leadership reads by exception. Nothing that was flagged goes unread, and acknowledgements are recorded against the entry.

Grade overview

Problem
Grade-level attendance is assembled by hand, usually a day late, usually incomplete.
Module
Daily attendance for every class in the grade: enrolled, present, absent, rate, and which classes have not yet submitted.
Solves
The head teacher chases the two classes that are late rather than collecting from all eight.

Teacher on duty

Problem
The duty teacher is accountable for the whole school that week but has less information than any class teacher.
Module
A duty dashboard: school-wide attendance, every occurrence note filed that day, and the parent feedback still waiting on a reply.
Solves
Duty becomes a role with a screen behind it instead of a walk around the compound.

Health records

In pilot
Problem
A child's allergy or condition is known to one teacher and to the office, and not to the person who needs it in the moment.
Module
A health profile per student, visible to the staff whose role requires it.
Solves
The information is with whoever is standing next to the child.
035 modules

Learning

The academic record, and the work that produces it.

Homework

Problem
Homework is copied into a book that gets left at school, and the parent finds out it existed when it is already late.
Module
Teachers set an assignment with subject, description and due date; it appears immediately in the app of every parent in that class.
Solves
The parent knows what was set and when it is due, on the day it was set. Subject teachers manage their assignments across every class they teach from one screen.

Class diary

Problem
A note home about one child either does not survive the journey or arrives without context, and there is no reply.
Module
Teachers write diary entries for an individual child or a whole class, delivered straight to the parent's app, and parents can reply.
Solves
A private conversation about one child happens in writing, in one place, and both sides can look it up later.

My subjects

Problem
A subject teacher works across several classes and streams, and no single view shows their actual week.
Module
Every subject a teacher is assigned, across every class, with the homework and records attached to each.
Solves
The teacher's whole load is one screen instead of a mental map of the timetable.

Timetable

Problem
The timetable is built in aSc Timetables, then re-typed into whatever system the school runs, costing an afternoon of work and a fresh chance to introduce errors.
Module
The school's aSc Timetables file imports directly, and each teacher then carries their own timetable in the app.
Solves
Nobody re-keys a timetable. What the deputy published is exactly what every teacher sees.

Examinations and results

Problem
Results live in spreadsheets on individual machines, and assembling a grade-level picture means collecting files.
Module
Examinations and academic records held per grade in the dashboard, with reporting across them.
Solves
The academic record is in one place, owned by the school, and survives the teacher who entered it leaving.
044 modules

Home and school

Replacing the WhatsApp group, the circular that never arrived, and the complaint that reached the board first.

Newsletter

Problem
Official announcements go out as paper circulars and WhatsApp forwards. Some parents never see them, and the school cannot tell which.
Module
The school publishes announcements with formatting and images from the dashboard, straight into every parent's app.
Solves
One official channel, no lost circulars, and no parent claiming they were not told.

Appointments

Problem
Booking a parent-teacher meeting takes three phone calls and still ends up double-booked.
Module
Parents browse the slots a school has opened, book one with a note, and track its status.
Solves
The diary manages itself, and the teacher arrives knowing what the meeting is about.

Feedback

Problem
A parent with a small complaint has nowhere to put it, so it either dies quietly or arrives at the board as a big one.
Module
Structured feedback with categories, star ratings and optional anonymity, routed to whoever owns that category, so transport feedback goes to the transport manager, not the switchboard.
Solves
Small concerns reach the right person while they are still small, and the school can see what parents actually think.

SMS

Problem
The parents who most need a message are often the ones without a smartphone.
Module
An SMS channel configured with your own provider, with balance, delivery status and full send history in the dashboard.
Solves
Urgent messages reach every family, whichever phone they carry, and you can prove what was sent and when.
052 modules

The kitchen

The one department that has to commit its budget before it knows the demand.

Chef roll call

Problem
The kitchen cooks against an estimate, because the real attendance figure arrives long after cooking has started. Over-catering is waste; under-catering is worse.
Module
A live attendance summary for the chef: total present and absent, which classes have submitted with exact counts, and which have not with their enrolment for estimating.
Solves
The kitchen cooks for the actual number in the building today, and the day's counts export for reconciliation.

Meals menu

Problem
Parents do not know what their child is eating, and a child with a dietary requirement depends on someone remembering.
Module
The published menu, visible to parents in the app and to staff on the meals view.
Solves
The menu is a published fact rather than a noticeboard nobody passes.
061 module

Money

Fee collection, reconciled automatically rather than by hand.

School fees and M-Pesa

In pilot
Problem
Fees arrive by M-Pesa and bank transfer and are matched to students by hand from a statement. Slow, error-prone, and the source of most parent disputes.
Module
A fee structure per grade, M-Pesa collection wired directly into the platform, automatic receipts, discounts, and allocation of each payment against the right student's balance.
Solves
A payment lands against the correct student without anyone reading a statement, and the parent has a receipt immediately.
075 modules

Running the school

The administration layer: what leadership sees, and what the school controls for itself.

Reports and analytics

Problem
Board reporting is a week of assembling spreadsheets from people who are busy teaching.
Module
Attendance, financial, academic and transport reporting across the school, generated from live data in the dashboard.
Solves
The report the board asks for is produced the afternoon they ask for it.

Asset management

Problem
Nobody can say with confidence what the school owns, where it is, or what happened to the equipment bought three years ago.
Module
A full asset lifecycle covering the register, department and location, movements, disposals and analytics, with a tag lookup any staff member can use from their phone.
Solves
An audit becomes a report instead of a search, and a moved asset is traceable to who moved it.

School elections

Problem
Head Boy, Head Girl and prefect elections run on paper, take a day to count, and are only as credible as the count.
Module
A digital election: register candidates, manage the roll, enforce the voting window automatically, watch results live, and generate an official returning officer's report.
Solves
The result is available when voting closes, with a report the school can stand behind.

Clubs

Problem
Clubs and holiday programmes are run out of a separate notebook by whoever volunteered, and the school has no visibility of who is enrolled.
Module
Club instructors manage their own registers and sessions in the app, and enrolment sits in the school's records.
Solves
Clubs stop being a parallel system, and the school knows where every child is after hours.

Module and role visibility

Problem
Every school system arrives with somebody else's idea of what each role should see, and changing it means a support ticket.
Module
A grid in your own dashboard where an administrator turns any module on or off for any role.
Solves
Your school shapes the app for your staff, in a minute, without a release and without contacting us.

Two modules are marked in pilot

Health records and School Fees are built and running, but we switch them on school by school rather than by default. Fees because the M-Pesa configuration is specific to your paybill, health because the data is sensitive enough to deserve a conversation with you first. Both are included in Stage 2 at no extra cost.

Who uses it

What each person in the school actually gets.

Everyone signs into the same app and sees a different school. These are the six views that matter most.

Parents

“From the moment my child leaves home until they return, I want to know they are safe.”

  • Live bus status and a map, with a notification at every stage of the journey
  • Attendance the same morning it is taken, with no phone call needed
  • Diary notes they can reply to, homework with due dates, and the school newsletter
  • A searchable history of every boarding and every gate scan
  • Parent-teacher meetings booked from the phone, and a direct line for feedback
  • One login for every child in the family, switched with a tap

Class teachers

“I became a teacher to teach, not to fill registers.”

  • Roll call in under two minutes, submitted school-wide instantly
  • Call a parent, report a sick child or record an early checkout from the same screen
  • Backdate a missed day and see a monthly submission roster
  • Diary entries and homework that reach every parent in the class at once
  • The daily occurrence note, structured so nothing important goes unrecorded

Head teachers

“I need to know what is happening across my grade, not just my own class.”

  • Every class in the grade: enrolled, present, absent, rate, and who has not submitted
  • The occurrence bank for the whole grade, filtered by severity
  • Parent feedback across every category, with the ability to respond
  • Acknowledge and comment on entries so teachers know they were read

Transport manager and gate staff

“Every child who boards a bus must arrive at school. Every child who enters the gate must be accounted for.”

  • Live trips, live buses and live gate activity, on the desk and on the phone
  • Automatic discrepancy alerts when boarding and gate records disagree
  • The whole fleet, its drivers, routes and trip history in one register
  • Fuel, inspections, maintenance and parts per vehicle
  • Route-targeted messages and SMS to the affected parents in one action

The kitchen

“If I know exactly how many children are in school today, I can plan meals without waste.”

  • A live attendance count that fills in as teachers submit
  • Classes still pending, with enrolment figures for estimating
  • Completed classes with exact numbers
  • Export the day's counts for reconciliation

The principal and administration

“I need to see everything, manage everything, and communicate with everyone, from one place.”

  • School profile and branding, which flows through to the parents' app
  • Every user, every staff role assignment, and the module grid that decides who sees what
  • Students, enrolment, parent linking and the school-wide roll call view
  • Classes, streams, subjects, timetables, examinations and the duty roster
  • Fees, M-Pesa configuration and discounts
  • The full SchoolSafe picture, newsletters, feedback, appointments and elections

Evidence

This is a platform in production, not a prototype.

Family Pocket is built and operated by the same team that would run your onboarding. It carries a Nairobi school every school day, over Kenyan mobile networks rather than office wifi.

9Production
services
880+API
endpoints
182Mobile
screens
4Client
platforms
~1,000Live family
accounts
Built for bad signal

The app reads from a database on the phone itself and reconciles when data returns. Bus and gate terminals keep scanning with no connection at all and sync automatically. A school in a coverage dead spot still gets a complete record of the day.

Real money moves

M-Pesa collection runs in production through Safaricom's Daraja API, with the payment confirmed two independent ways so a dropped network never leaves a parent charged and unrecorded. Receipts are issued automatically.

Your data is yours alone

Every school gets its own database, its own configuration and its own branding. No school's data sits in a table beside another school's. Adding your school is a deployment, not a row in a shared spreadsheet.

It updates live

A roll call submitted on a teacher's phone is on the principal's dashboard, the head teacher's grade view and the chef's screen before the teacher has put the phone down.

We are the engineers, not a reseller

Family Pocket is our own software, written by us. When your school needs something changed, you are talking to the people who can change it, not to a vendor who has to raise a ticket with someone abroad.

The difference

The same school day, before and after.

How it works todayWith Family Pocket
Transport safetyTrust-based, no recordsEvery boarding and alighting scanned and logged
Gate securityVisual recognition and a sign-in bookScan-based entry and exit, timestamped
AttendancePaper registers, compiled manuallyDigital roll call, visible school-wide instantly
Parent communicationWhatsApp groups and paper circularsOne app: diary, homework, newsletters, SMS
Parent visibilityNothing until the end of termReal-time bus tracking, attendance and daily notes
Meal planningCooked against an estimateExact attendance counts before cooking begins
Teacher admin30+ minutes a day on paperworkUnder 5 minutes for roll call, diary and homework
Fee reconciliationMatched to students by hand from a statementAllocated automatically, receipted on the spot
School leadershipWalk to every classroomThe whole school on one dashboard

Privacy and security

Children's data, handled the way children's data should be.

A platform that knows where every child in your school is at 07:40 carries an obligation. These are the commitments that come with it.

Separation you can verify, not just trust

Your records live in a database the school owns, on an account in the school's name. Two schools are two databases owned by two institutions, so there is no shared table for a mistake to leak across.

Role-based access

Every user sees only what their role requires. A parent sees their own children. A teacher sees their own class. Nobody browses the school.

Encrypted in transit and at rest

All traffic runs over HTTPS, and sensitive configuration is encrypted in storage rather than sitting in plain text.

Secure sign-in

Encrypted credentials, with optional biometric login and an app lock PIN on the phone.

A complete audit trail

Every scan, login and submission is logged with a timestamp and the person who made it.

You hold the keys, and can turn them

We connect to your database, your cache, your real-time server and your Maps key, and we hold none of them. Rotate a credential and our access ends that second, without asking us. There is nothing to request back, because nothing ever left.

Kenya's Data Protection Act, 2019

Because the school owns and controls the database, the school is the data controller and Family Pocket is a processor acting on its instructions, which is the arrangement the Act is written around. Family Pocket is not a place your data goes; it is the software that makes the data you already own useful. The specific terms are set out in Stage 2.

Stage 2

What it costs, what you need, and how we get it running.

Stage 1 answers whether this platform is worth your school's time. Stage 2 answers everything else.

It is the working document: your school's own per-student figure rather than a headline rate, exactly what you provide and what we handle, the equipment we deploy and its specification, the day-by-day implementation plan, the support commitment, and the contract terms in full.

Stage 2 opens on the commitment fee. It is KES 5,000, paid by M-Pesa, and it is deducted in full from your first invoice, so a school that proceeds pays nothing extra for it. It exists because the work that follows is real: a technician is assigned to your school, your environment is prepared, and your data import begins.

  • Your own per-student figure, calculated from your enrolment
  • One rate, with no per-module, per-role or hardware charges
  • What the school provides, and what we do for you
  • The equipment we deploy on every bus and gate, and its specification
  • The implementation timeline, phase by phase
  • Support commitments, uptime target and response times
  • Data ownership, export and deletion terms
  • The contract: subscription period, billing, cancellation

KES 5,000 by M-Pesa · deducted in full from your first invoice

This document is confidential and prepared for the named institution. “Every child accounted for. Every parent connected. Every school empowered.”