Nigerian ed-tech startup Harde Business School is building an online open university, which aims to provide learners across Africa with a masterclass-like experience of learning.
Founded in January 2021, Harde Business School wants to tackle educational challenges in Nigeria and throughout Africa.
“These challenges include limited admission capacity across all tertiary institutions, a curriculum disconnected from industry needs leading to increasing unemployment rates, and inconsistent university calendars due to frequent strikes by unions,” said Dami Oguntunde, the startup’s co-founder and COO.
Harde’s flagship product, Hardeverse, is a web-based application learning management system. Its offerings are divided into micro-courses, expert-led courses, and the Harde MBA, which typically takes an average of 15-18 months to complete.
“We had observed that of the two million students who write JAMB on an annual basis, only 600,000 of them can be assimilated into the traditional tertiary institutions in Nigeria, including polytechnics and colleges of education,” said Oguntunde.
“This is primarily due to the limited admission capacity and infrastructure deficiency. This leaves over 70 per cent of students disenfranchised, and unable to access quality post secondary education. This number keeps compounding every year.”
The Harde team thought, since the internet penetration among young Nigerians is relatively high, that it could leverage the ubiquity of the internet to provide affordable and qualitative educational programmes online.
“Also, we saw the gap in the quality of curriculum being delivered in the universities, evidenced by the unemployment rate. While jobs abound, the graduates being churned by the tertiary education system aren’t as equipped to compete for the available roles. This also informed the improvement of our learning delivery methodology and pedagogy to align with global industry standards and to achieve more sustainable and qualitative learning outcomes,” said Oguntunde.
Harde’s broad spectrum of programmes puts it in competition with, locally, Nexford, Unicaf, and AltSchool, while globally Coursera is a benchmark MOOC that offers most of its products.
“However, none of these platforms offer soft skills and proficiency courses with the gamified and interactive approach that Harde deploys,” said Oguntunde.
The startup is currently funded by a group of individual investors, plus an institutional one, but is still at the seed stage. In spite of that, within the first 18 months of its launch, it had garnered over 35,000 learners on its platform.
Most of those learners are based in Nigeria, but Oguntunde said Harde does have some “minimal” footprint in Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK).
“The objective is to expand into other regions within Sub-Saharan Africa within the next 12 months,” he said.
Harde makes money by charging learners a fee for accessing courses and downloading certificates on the platform, while it also makes B2B and B2G revenue from organisations. The company is doing decent revenues, but is not yet profitable.
“Product development takes a little while,” said Oguntunde. “We’re looking to optimise our tech infrastructure and content development timeline for a more efficient product deployment cycle. We also plan to launch the Hardeverse mobile application before the end of the year. We believe this will improve our traction and adoption by the market.”
