Edufina is a newly launched startup that aims to fill in an empty space providing comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date information about universities around the Arab world.
The portal targets both students and parents, and enables them to access very detailed university data and statistics, as well as use a set of comparison tools in order to compare between all options that match their needs and interests.
What’s great about Edufina is that it collects all this information that is freely available from universities but still cumbersome to get a hold of into one place, in a clear and structured way, through a simple and really nice interface, that enables users to run and filter searches on, run comparisons between different universities on, and come to their final decision on which university better suits them.
The kind of details provided per university go from the university contact details and location, down to the different faculties it has and specialties that it offers, registration details, student breakdown, average prices, scholarships possibilities, university facilities and a lot more details as well as statistics about the university.
A really interesting tool available on the site too is the smart searcher that enables students to put in their interests and have the site suggest universities for them to look at. The forum section of the site also provides students and parents the ability to interact with other users to ask questions about which university might be best for them.
The site also provides information that is useful for students who are still early on in their education cycle, telling them which branch of studies they should go into in order to go on and study a certain specialty in university.
An events section of the service highlights the different events that are being hosted or sponsored by universities, and helps students find out about education information events. With
Edufina also plan to launch a social networking platform through their site in the near future, so that students are able to interact with classmates in their university, their group of friends, or just the students in each of their courses.
Edufina is currently in Arabic only, even though the English version is planned to come out soon. Its university directory also only covers Jordanian universities at the time being, with over 100 information categories, but the plans are to expand the service to cover all Middle Eastern countries, providing users from across the region with data about universities in the region.
In my last trip to Jordan a few days ago, I got the chance to sit down with the CEO & Founder of Edufina, Asad Akbar, who moved to Jordan from the US just a few months ago to launch the startup, and he took the time to take me through the site and explain all the features and work that was put into gathering the data and structuring it in an easy way for the user, which is a really impressive feat. And even though I can’t share many of the future plans he told me about, I think it’s safe to say that this startup is aiming high and could end up changing the education sector in the Arab world as we know it.
Thanks for the review, we will be launching the English interface soon, so stay tuned. If anyone has any comments or questions, you can email me directly at asad.a@edufina.com. Education is too important to leave behind in the new tech world, and the Edufina team is proud to do its part.
Waiting for the English interface — it’s very important detail and event for youth orgs even in Russia.