THE cheetah is unique in appearance, fast like the wind and strong — attributes Dr Paulette Trowers wants children to adapt, which is why she named her company after the feline.

CHEETAH (Connect to Higher Education, Electronic Tools, Application and Help) is a small corporation that creates unique educational resources for the pre-primary and primary levels. CHEETAH’s products include tablets, apps, toys, headphones, tablet accessories, and books.

Trowers shared with the Jamaica Observer what prompted her to start CHEETAH in 2006.

“I was helping my son. My son was going to college at the time. I did some research and I found out that a lot of children were not making it. They were not graduating from school, they were being retained. So with my love for education, I thought why not create a company that’s gonna make learning fun,” she said.

Fun is indeed incorporated into her products. The cheetah toy is very engaging as it dances and sings the company’s theme song, which encourages children to see themselves as leaders and reminds them that “how successful you are, has a lot to do with how much you know”.

The books written by her explore similar themes in their fictional adventure stories featuring personified animal characters. A distinctive feature about some of the books is that the Spanish translations are written on each page, giving students an opportunity to learn a second language from a young age. Some of these books are on the ministry of education’s booklist.

According to Trowers, the ministry is her biggest supporter as it has purchased tablets and books from CHEETAH. When she realised that students were not allowed to take home the devices, she designed a charging cart that holds up to 30 devices to assist with the organisation of the tablets.

“As far as I know, I’m the only black Jamaican or even female company that has its own brand of tablets. So here I am, I’m competing with the Dells and the Samsungs with our own brand of tablet PCs,” Trowers said confidently, pointing out that CHEETAH is different from its competitors. “We are really trying to get them to the next level. Our electronic tools would be our tablets and the apps. We have apps that we have created here in Jamaica. That’s what makes us a little different from the others. Right now we have three apps and others in the works.”

The company’s products are at the primary level. However, its founding CEO told the Sunday Observer that plans are in motion to create resources for the secondary level. In fact, CHEETAH has a memorandum of understanding with Notesmaster, an online platform with a huge selection of educational tools for high schools. Soon, users will have the Notesmaster apps on their CHEETAH tablets.

A returning citizen who strongly believes in giving back to the community, Trowers does so through ‘CHEETAH in the Community’, the charity arm of her company.

“It’s not a formal charity, but we do have social responsibility and we want to be actively involved in the communities where we do business. I give a lot of stuff to the school. I went to Ken Wright Primary. They were the first pilot programme for my app and they did very well,” she said.

Her school was not the only institution that benefitted from CHEETAH in the community. Recently CHEETAH was a sponsor of the Observer‘s Colour Tour.

“We went to different schools. We did a room makeover at Buff Bay High School. We redesigned it to have a jungle theme, and we want to continue that in different schools throughout the year. The tour was for six weeks.”

Another community project that CHEETAH was involved in was what she dubbed ‘Week of transformation: creating CHEETAH GSAT top achievers’.

“This was a big initiative with the ministry of education and some teachers colleges, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), and other partners. We identified the vulnerable schools, the ones that predominantly don’t do well, to help them and I gave them free books.

“We have partnered a lot with JTA. We have done Read Across Jamaica with them. This is a collaboration between the JTA and different schools where we try to encourage reading. So we have different volunteers going to different schools and stressing the importance of education and reading. With this programme we volunteered our mascot. I also gave away some of our books. We actually read to the children as well,” she said.

Trowers has many plans in store for her company, including going public. This is just one of many things that she has planned for CHEETAH. She wants all of her products to be more Jamaican. So the songs that are included in the package will be educational reggae songs that Jamaican children will enjoy and they will appreciate their culture some more. As a part of making the company public, the publishing arm CHEETAH Purr Publishing will no longer be limited to publishing CHEETAH books.

“We’re trying to create future leaders. We are trying to tell children that they are unique, they can be leaders, they can also make a name for themselves just like the cheetah,” she said, while sharing her desire to reshape her business and spread the importance of reading.