Africa’s ed-tech sector has unlimited potential, with a great number of startups innovating in different areas, yet ultimately a lack of funding in a sector that still has a reputation for “impact” over “profit” may hold it back.
A recent Disrupt Podcast three-parter looking at Africa’s ed-tech sector, released in partnership with eLearn Africa, an ed-tech startup working to increase and expand educational and employment opportunities throughout Africa, examined the problems e-learning startups on the continent are solving, the innovations that are being scaled, and the support and funding ecosystem that is driving growth.
There are more than 300 ed-tech ventures active across the African continent, working in various niches, across various markets. They are filling critical gaps. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion of the six developing world regions, according to the World Bank.
Over one-fifth of primary-age children are out of school, and almost 60 percent of youth between the ages of 15 and 17 are not in school. There are many barriers to education for low-income households, with the main one being the fees, but concerningly many of those that do attend school are not receiving a quality education, due to under-resourcing and lack of teacher training.
“Lack of teacher training is something that goes on in K-12, and we’ve seen a lot of private entities basically enter at the K-12 from a tutorial perspective, from an after-school perspective, from a private school perspective,” said Brook Negussie, founder and CEO of eLearn Africa.
For those children who do stay in school, what is preventing learning institutions across the continent from providing the necessary quality of education? Lack of resources, and lack of teacher training, are the key things, Negussie says, meaning learners are often disengaged. And there is a long list of problems caused by lack of access to quality education across the continent.
“The list goes on with that. Economically it limits us, and it definitely does create inequality in society. And that reduces civic participation, in my opinion,” he said.
He believes African governments aren’t knowingly or deliberately underperforming when it comes to education.
“I truly believe most of them have great intentions of putting forth a highly educated society. It comes down to execution. Within ministries, generally you have your people that are able to do it, but if there’s the not capacity and the chain of command to implement those ideas, it rarely works,” said Negussie.
It is important to remember that challenges in providing quality education are not restricted to Africa, however. And as elsewhere, and as in other tech-based industries, the ed-tech space received a real boost from the enforced digitisation that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I remember pre-COVID, if you received an email back from a head of any university, it would make your day. During COVID, what we found is that a lot of the universities were ill-prepared. There was no budgeting set up for learning management systems,” Negussie said.
“Now what we’re seeing is that they want to grow with the learning management systems, and they want to be able to not just use it as a repository but actually create content.”
One of the things eLearn Africa has done is launch an online MBA in partnership with Rhodes University, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.
Owen Skae, professor and associate director at Rhodes Business School, says the stimulus to move towards a more hybrid model of education came from COVID, but they needed to find an innovative way of making it work.
“Through COVID we we had to pivot to virtual, online teaching. But we fully acknowledge that just putting lectures onto Zoom doesn’t really meet the need of the kind of immersive learning that needs to take place, especially if you’re in a small rural city in South Africa, and we really want to make our MBA accessible to Africa, so thought that this was a great way to do that,” he said.
With ed-tech, then, when it came to COVID, it was a case of not letting a good crisis go to waste.
“I think that what we realised, and I think we were spot on in predicting, that is that in the aftermath we would operate in a hybrid world,” said Skae.
Does a switch to a more digital way of teaching pose challenges to education providers, however?
“There’s a huge learning curve,” Skae said. “I don’t want to just say this is something that we can just do, we learned very quickly. Historically if you’re an expert in your area, you could probably just walk into the classroom, and even begin to speak off the cuff. Certainly we never did it like that, but in the virtual world you simply can’t do that.”
One misconception around ed-tech, Skae says, is that it reduces the cost of education, which is not necessarily the case.
“In the end you still have to deliver the same quality, and when one considers the development in terms of the platform and all of that that goes behind it, you need to have a production and machinery in order to make that happen,” he said.
“We certainly found during COVID that there was a huge misconception out there that suddenly one could could deliver it at a much lower cost. Having said that though, what it does is that it provides an opportunity for more students to register and so one hopes that over time as the unit fixed costs come down one can consider making it even more affordable from that point of view.”
There are also cost savings in the case of the Rhodes students in that they have to spend less time travelling to and from the university, as well as lower accommodation costs. Accessibility, rather than affordability, though, is the key benefit of ed-tech. But whereas the beginnings of Africa’s ed-tech revolution were on mobile, there has gradually been a move to desktop consumption of educational content, Negussie says.
“When we initially launched eLearn Africa we had, I would say, 93 per cent of people accessing the platform doing so via mobile, and they did not necessarily ever download the mobile app. They just go to the website and do the courses. Now we have transformed beyond just MOOCs and are building online degrees for an online degree. You have to be stationary on a computer,” he said.
We’ve heard all about the potential ed-tech has on the continent, but what challenges do startups operating in the space face. Funding is the main issue. In the last edition of Disrupt Africa’s annual funding report, which tracked investment into the continent’s tech space in 2023, ed-tech placed sixth for the number of startups funded, but was well off-pace in terms of total funding.
Twenty-three startups received backing, down on the previous year when 27 companies raised. Together, those startups raised US$34.6 million, just 1.4 per cent of the African total. Though this marked a 40 per cent rise on an even more sluggish 2022, it still compares extremely poorly to other key verticals.
The total amount of funding does notoriously fluctuate each year, yet clearly African ed-tech startups are not getting enough.
“When we started, it was a crazy idea, now I think there’s a little bit more of interest. The landscape when it comes to funding is concentrated on Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and a little bit of Egypt,” said Negussie. “So it’s pretty tough. You need capital in order to make the mistakes. We like to say you need a little bit of a burn rate until you get to the point of your business model actually working. And unfortunately we don’t have access to that throughout the continent.”
Why, then, are VCs less enamoured with ed-tech as they are with other sectors? Perhaps it is because they see the space more as an impact opportunity, rather than a profit one.
“It makes no sense, because you have a continent with thriving young minds that definitely could use good online education,” said Negussie.
DP #61: Learning digitally – how ed-tech is boosting accessibility of education in Africa, episode 2 – January 21, 2024 – Disrupt Africa has teamed up with eLearn Africa to release a three-part deep-dive into the African ed-tech startup space. In episode three, we’re digging into the funding and support ecosystem that is helping ed-tech startups scale, and whether more needs to be done to help the space fulfil its potential.
DP #60: Learning digitally – how ed-tech is boosting accessibility of education in Africa, episode 2 – January 14, 2024 – Disrupt Africa has teamed up with eLearn Africa to release a three-part deep-dive into the African ed-tech startup space. In episode two, we’re digging into the potential of ed-tech, and discovering how COVID-19 was not such a bad thing for online learning on the continent.
DP #59: Learning digitally – how ed-tech is boosting accessibility of education in Africa, episode 1 – January 7, 2024 – Disrupt Africa has teamed up with eLearn Africa to release a three-part deep-dive into the African ed-tech startup space. In episode one, we’re digging into the scope of Africa’s educational challenges, and how ed-tech startups are working to address them.
