Access to education has the undeniable catalytic effect to accelerate societal progress. As a result, academic and government institutions across sub-Saharan Africa are busy contemplating the pedagogic landscape that the EdTech community has aptly labelled, “ripe for disruption”.
At the forefront of this scholastic push, education technology providers are fundamentally shaping the way students around the globe process information, both individually and collectively. However, evolving issues of glocalisation and scalability are problematically affecting the implementation of EdTech within local African learning communities. How education startups position their core academic offerings across the continent over the next two decades remains a prevailing ‘glocal’ concern for the e-learning movement.
On average, there are 43 pupils to every teacher in the standard African classroom. According to UNESCO’s 2013/14 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, this is the worst comparative average, globally. Equally alarming, UNESCO claims that only 18% of young children in sub-Saharan Africa had access to early childhood education in 2011. These local issues, combined with a high rate of grade repetition among students internationally, signifies an inherent structural flaw within the global education system, inflicting lasting financial and educational implications for local learning communities and government institutions.
Despite this pervasive problem, there is a wealth of opportunity for EdTech companies to tap into Africa’s vast growth potential. With the explosion of global technological innovation over the past decade, the continent is fully embracing digital mobility, unearthing innovative ways to serve the African consumer’s kaleidoscopic appetite in goods and services. In particular, smartphones in Africa are becoming an ever cheaper commodity due to mobile operators forming strategic alliances with device manufacturers, thereby paving the way for increased online accessibility.
Contrary to this digital migration, it is widely held that the education sector has shown the most resistance to change, in part, due to the traditionally rigid, closed-source nature of learning institutions. However, despite the current teaching community exercising caution in adopting e-learning technology, there have been significant advancements in digital education platform delivery to learning communities across Africa, ranging from computer-administered common core testing to the usage of tablets within classrooms. This technological progress has paved the way for the implementation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have been dubbed by the MIT Technology Review as “the most important education technology in 200 years”.
One such firm that is harnessing digital platform delivery in Africa is Eneza Education, a Kenyan EdTech institution providing rural children aged between 14 and 25 with educational content via virtual tutors on low-end mobile phones.
Having become one of the most widely used mobile education providers on the continent, “Eneza has impacted the lives of over 860,000 students since 2011 in Kenya, Ghana and Tanzania … with further plans for market expansion over the next two years” says Anne Salim, Chief Operations Officer at Eneza Education.
In addressing systemic rigidity, EdTech startups need to be patient in their pursuit for academic progress. Infrastructural issues such as limited availability of electrical power and internet connectivity remain scalable challenges in implementing e-learning platforms. With this in mind, upcoming EdTech ventures such as Eneza Education require ongoing cognisance about the necessity for sustainability. In particular:
- how teacher training and development will be incorporated to improve systemic adoption
- how content will be adapted to a more culturally-collectivistic audience
- what measures will be taken to utilise local language content more frequently
- what funding model will be adopted to support financial longevity.
Envisioning the African continent embracing e-educational access for students may seem elusive, but the emergence of EdTech, with its mantra for shared collaboration, stirs hope for optimism.
E-Learning Platforms
| AFRICA | |
|---|---|
| Eneza Education | A Kenyan platform offering children across rural Africa with a virtual tutor and teacher’s assistant that facilitates access to educational content on low-end mobile phones |
| Koomzo | A Cameroonian cloud-based school ERP platform that ‘authomates’ academic and administrative school processes |
| Obami | A South African social learning platform that unifies educators and learners, while facilitating the set-up of an engaging learning eco-system |
| iSchool | A Zambian educational tablet platform tailored to the local primary school curriculum, focusing on teaching basic numeracy and literacy skills |
| GLOBAL | |
| Blackboard | Collaborating with teachers, administrators and leaders, this medium is focused on creating technology to help students learn |
| Blinklearning | An international platform providing teachers with the tools to create high-quality material adapted to the personalised needs of each student |
| Coursera | An online marketplace offering courses to the general public, partnering with top universities and organisations worldwide |
| Knewton | An open community encouraging users to create free and personalised, adaptive learning lessons to help students reach their learning objectives |
| UDemy | An online marketplace providing a plethora of on-demand courses for the general public |
Feature image by Oluwakemi Solaja on Unsplash
