Ubuntu Education, which empowers African teachers with resources, networks, and growth opportunities, is onboarding upwards of 60 teachers per day, with nearly 7,500 already signed up.
Formed in May 2021, Ubuntu Education provides a platform – Ubuntu Education HUB – for teachers in Africa, where they can network, collaborate, access affordable continuing professional development (CPD) and grow their profiles.
“We use the platform to give teachers an elevated “voice” in education,” said David Marriott, founder and CEO of Ubuntu Education.
“The purpose of the HUB is to open lines of dialogue between all players in the education space. It gives the platform for schools to recruit directly from a pool of teachers, and it provides access to “Teacher Voice” for third party resource providers and developers.”
When founded, Ubuntu was just two founders, Marriott and Eric Mugwiza, both with the idea that education in Africa was suffering largely because of the lack of opportunity and the lack of value placed upon teachers in Africa.
“We created Ubuntu to create a mechanism that could reverse this,” Marriott said.
“We noticed how little opportunity there is for teachers to progress professionally for a number of reasons, including but not limited to, the cost and physical access to CPD. We also noticed how isolated teachers are as professionals, and having been teachers ourselves, we know how little credit is given to “teacher voice” in the wider education community. Creating a platform where these challenges could be overcome, at a time when more and more people are accessing things online, seemed like an obvious niche to fill, so we set about doing just that.”
Apparently, there is very little in the way of competition, in Africa, for what the HUB provides.
“There are providers who offer one or two aspects, but nobody has brought it all together under one umbrella like the Ubuntu HUB. The beauty of the HUB lies in its broad network effect and the ability to integrate all players in the system, whilst nurturing a vibrant community of teachers. This benefits everyone in the ecosystem; the more successful the HUB becomes, the more everybody else in the ecosystem stands to benefit,” said Marriott.
“In a global context there are similar education communities, but that target a global teacher audience. These include TES, T4 for example. However, their content often does not apply directly to the wider African context and they tend to have fewer applicable features to the life of a teacher in Africa. Nevertheless these are large communities which indicates the global desire for teachers to belong to a community that is wider than their own immediate contexts.”
Uptake has been “extraordinary”, he said. Ubuntu is onboarding upwards of 60 teachers per day, and currently has nearly 7,500 teachers signed up.
“This shows a real need for this community. But further than that, anecdotal feedback is very positive, with a 97.5 per cent approval rating for our various short courses, and further anecdotal evidence indicating a significant interest in the networking opportunities that the HUB will provide,” said Marriott.
Ubuntu Education has bootstrapped so far, for the most part, but also managed to get some funding to conduct a pilot study in digital transformation in schools.
“This project is just wrapping up now, but the funding gave us the opportunity to keep ourselves going,” said Marriott.
It was also one of 12 South African startups selected recently for the second edition of the Injini Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship in South Africa, which offers companies access to funding and other types of support.
“We have also been fortunate to secure some accelerator programme funding and are set to open our first raise in a few month’s time, which will give us the opportunity to expand our team and develop our full product in line with our community’s needs,” Marriott said.
Ubuntu has members in its HUB from 10 different countries in Africa.
“However, our primary markets are South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda. The market we are focusing on primarily is South Africa, and this is our target market for 2024. By the end of 2024 we aim to have 20,000 teachers on the HUB,” Marriott said.
“From January 2025 we will begin scaling into Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda, and from there we will scale throughout Sub Saharan Africa. By the end of Q4 2026 we aim to have over 200,000 teachers on board, engaging in the various networking, learning and recruiting spaces.”
Ubuntu has several revenue streams.
“The first is in the direct sales that we can make to teachers or members of the HUB. This represents our B2C revenue model. Next, we monetise the teaching job market by providing a jobs board for teachers, representing a B2B model,” said Marriott.
“Finally we offer insights into the world of education by surveying and polling teachers. These insights can be commissioned by interested third parties if they are looking for specific information that will help them develop their product or service, also representing a B2B model.
The nature of this network also means that new revenue streams will arise as the community grows.”
