Wisal: how do you pay a teacher you have never met?

The problem

A private lesson gets agreed in a WhatsApp thread and paid for by bank transfer to someone nobody has met. The parent sends money for a lesson that may never happen, the teacher gives a lesson that may never be paid for, and neither side holds anything that proves what was agreed.

The price is a negotiation too. Every teacher asks for whatever they think is right, so a student has no way of knowing whether they are paying a fair rate. And card payments are not widespread enough here to build a platform on a gateway. So this was a problem of trust before it was a problem of software.

What we built

Every teacher applies in the open, and is reviewed and interviewed before they appear in the marketplace.

The platform sets the price for each stage and each subject, so a student sees one known figure before they start looking. Teachers pushed back on this early on. It was still the right call.

The money sits in escrow. A student tops up their wallet by bank or mobile-wallet transfer and uploads the receipt, and a person on the team checks it by hand before the balance is credited. When a lesson is confirmed its price is reserved, and it only reaches the teacher once the lesson has actually finished.

Arabic came first. Every screen mirrors, the typefaces were picked to cover Arabic and English in one family, and the lesson runs on a meeting link generated automatically and dropped into both calendars.

What changed

A student knows what a lesson costs before contacting anybody. One price list, no haggling.

Receipts turned into a queue that clears in minutes. And every movement of money leaves a record you can read back: top-up, reserve, release, refund.

Four roles share the platform: student, teacher, moderator and admin. A guardian can follow their child’s account. Teacher earnings pay out in monthly runs, each country in its own currency.