Nigerian ed-tech startup W3tutor is committed to helping people acquire digital skills, both through its online courses and a concerted offline effort.
Founded in February 2016 by Prince Kwekowe, W3tutor offers a host of online courses on all kinds of digital skills, including programming, artificial intelligence and graphic design.
The startup’s mission is to ensure that people all over Africa have at their disposal all that it takes to become tech-savvy.
“We’ve developed a platform that has its community at the core of its activities. Every skill set has a clan which is led by professionals in that field. This provides the users with very vital real life access to experienced professionals as well as networking opportunities with those in their field,” Kwekowe told Disrupt Africa.
Currently, the platform has over 6,000 registered students who take courses online on the platform, and this number is swiftly growing. But W3tutor is seeking true scale by also building a strong offline presence.
“There are not enough indigenous digital skills training centres to serve the teeming populace, and very few platforms utilise both an online and offline medium to reach the market,” said Kwekowe.
Aside from its online courses, the self-funded W3tutor also facilitates offline lessons between tutors and students. Around 900 students have participated in offline training sessions in the last 10 months, with the startup targeting all the major Nigerian cities.
“We plan to build offline learning centers in key areas around the country to help enhance reach to users with limited internet access. We also plan to extend offline training to other countries with time,” Kwekowe said.
The startup makes money from the sale of premium online courses and the offline training, and is generating enough to easily cover its costs and steady growth. Yet scaling in a meaningful way is expensive.
“The cost of operations is one of the biggest issues we’ve experienced. Creating company-standard video courses requires expensive, sophisticated gadgets,” said Kwekowe.
This may require W3tutor is seek funding at some point in the future, but for now strong, steady growth is the order of the day as the startup effectively blends online and offline learning.
