Innovation

Kemal Arifoglu ,who is the founder of the business, started to do this job from 2001 and when he started to do this job he also was a student and wanted to provide Turkish students get a much more qualified education. He thinks everybody deserve a qualified education across the world and he also defend the idea of getting qualified education should not be hard and expensive. Of course he is not paying the cost of language school but he and his team are helping students or non-students to decide where they should get an education and find them a country and language school within their budgets without any charge.

Inspiration

While Kemal Arifoglu was a student in Middle East Technical University in 2001 he went Work & Travel programme and he imagined that why all the students shouldn't get this experience and why would it be so hard? From 2001 to 2003 he provided work & travel programme to people and he was also thinking about how to help students with other ways to provide them qualified education. He knew that, the language schools are not that good in Turkey and he believed that if a person want to learn a language, he/she should learn it in its country. Because the results were really different between 2 students who gets the language education in Turkey and from abroad. He started to make aggreements with the language schools from USA and Europe to provide students better language education with reasonable prices. Then he started to do this as a job.

Overall impact

In the first years of the business, students were afraid a little bit because they didn't know what will be the outcome from the language education abroad and they did not want to risk their money but after 2 or 3 years business founded, he already helped more than 100 students to decide and where they would like to get a language education. Almost all of the students were satisfied from their education abroad and more than half of the students would like to get language education next year. The students who went abroad to get qualified education suggested to go abroad to their friends and after 5 years the number of people who wants to get qualified language education increased from 10 students to more than 200 students.

Business benefit

The income of the business is not coming from the students directly because the company do not charge students with money. The income of the business coming from the language schools because of the aggreements they make. The company gets commission from the language schools to help them to find and meet with more students and that is all. Also there are 4 employees in the company and the company wants to increase this number in the future. In 2001 these businesses were not popular and they were not well-known but after some time passed, this industry also created a competition between its rivals. It is actually a new sector in market right now and it is still growing.

Social and environmental benefit

To become a beneficial and conscious individuals, education is very important as we all aggree. But the quality of education is depending on environment and country. To get much more qualified education, sometimes you should go abroad and at this step the companies involving into these innovations. As mentioned before, the company wants to help people to get them qualified education abroad. It can be language education, university education or internship. Because Mr. Kemal Arifoglu wants to help people in his country to develop themselves and get better education and become more beneficial individuals in the future.

Interview

Kemal Arifoglu, Aim2Flourish Interview