Unveiling Africa's Silent Edtech Revolution

I often come across several insightful articles that share similar views concerning the urgency to create rapid employment solutions for Africa’s growing youth population with predictions of over 22 million youth entering the labour market annually (World Bank 2023). One interesting ideal that has constantly caught my attention points towards aligning the exponentially growing labour force to take on remote employment opportunities from the growing digital economy that has over 30 million workers from the Global south (University of Manchester Global Development Institute).

In my reviews I have come across several practitioners sharing converging views on this subject ranging from Ndubuisi Ekekwe’s Havard article on Why Africa's Industrialization Won't Look Like China's, Fred Swaniker, The secret to creating millions of technology jobs in Africa, Caleb Meru & Justin Norman: The world’s future workforce is African , along vast international development programmes too. This growing consensus in different spaces is picking at an opportune timing where current policy frameworks are being analyzed in the international space with the International Labour Organization currently gearing up for next year’s first International Labour Conference standard setting discussion on Decent Work in the Platform Economy. 

Given the prevailing trends and research findings from organizations such as the World Economic Forum, which forecast that more than 60% of the global workforce will require retraining by 2027 with only half currently having sufficient access to training opportunities, it becomes imperative to reassess various current educational and skill development approaches. This reassessment across different levels of education can be quite complex based on policy frameworks and bureaucratic processes but outstandingly the Edtech sector is seemingly increasingly seeking to address these issues in today’s volatile digital economy landscape. It has become a niche for several to position themselves to meet the anticipated skills demands based on their fluidity to adapt learning programmes at a faster rate with the world’s speed. 

To start this off, the Edtech sector’s bloodline for several cases is the internet and zooming into the internet penetration rates across the continent we can see that there has been steady progress over the last years leading to roughly 36% using the internet in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2020. 

For a continent of over 1 billion and over 50 countries this is a promising percentage where over half a billion (53%) live in regions with mobile broadband networks but remain unconnected due to the high cost of internet ( GSMA, 2021). From the visualization below it quite evident that the internet costs vary greatly with five out of the ten most expensive countries to purchase from located here:

But astonishingly regardless of this trend, there have been substantial investments in startups within the Edtech sector with the highest record of US $81.03 million recorded in 2021 during the wake of the covid-19 when e-learning was looked at a grand savior amidst lockdowns: 

This sector had a funding increase in 2023 amounting to US $ 34.67 million which poses a great question around the motivation of such big investments. Could it be that the investors are getting it wrong? Or could it be that the need for relevant training programmes and infrastructural support for an increasingly young continent is a profitable venture?  A venture within a sector that has had fluctuating and increasingly declining general government investment based on UNESCO statistics for Sub-Saharan Africa:

On this same note a national mapping research done by EdTech Hub  commissioned by UNICEF's Digital Learning Team in July 2023 on how countries have been progressing in building and implementing e-learning systems deduced that:

43% out of the countries mapped in sub-Saharan Africa had out-of-date platforms since 2020 with content not revised and some links were not working (EdTechHub, 2023). 

 These two trends cumulatively in my view show us that there is a vacuum for development that the private sector is trying to solve through innovative financing methods. A spotlight on Coursera, one of the world’s biggest global E-learning companies with a market cap of $ 2.57 Billion and 1,401 employees according to Forbes, 2024, shades light on an interesting insight in this field which we may easily ignore on the basis of challenges associated with e-learning system integrations on the continent. In their recently published 2023 Global Skills Report comprising data from 100 countries and over 124 million learner’s database. 

Sub-Saharan African had the highest regional average growth rate in Professional Certificates enrollments of 80% ahead of the Asia Pacific region with growth that stood at 69%, and North America at 53% (Coursera, Global Skills Report 2023). 

Upon delving more into this paper’s country profiles you get to realize that Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country came in third with 142,000 enrolled learners behind the United States with 1.3 million and India with 654,000 enrolments. 

This testament of an astonishingly high record from Africa justifies a growing need for learning services suited to provide the economic traction that several youth crave to position themselves for the growing digital platform economy or national labour market. Though we must acknowledge that equally different countries have varying ranges of disposable income which have an effect on their ability to spend on services like education, internet, and electronic devices across different regions with varying bandwidth thresholds. International studies on Africa's market for online learning though despite such challenges forecast even more revenue growth for big players in the coming years: 

Different studies also show us that for those actively utilizing the power of e-learning while engaging in the digital platform economy are better empowered to take on more jobs with 88% from a study on 364 Kenyan gig workers affirming that undertaking micro-credentials improved their ability to get jobs on platforms (Gig Economy Initiative, 2023). 

82% of the Kenyan gig works also agreed to some degree that their micro-credentials were valued by digital labour platforms. (Gig Economy Initiative, 2023)

Across the continent some enterprises are equally developing models around providing upskilling e-learning services to the working class like Talstack based ibn Nigeria that won $850,000 in pre seed for their startup with their vision of upskilling Africa’s workforce, Alx Africa which has notably made great strides with over 80,000 learner since 2021 and Alison which is currently venturing into providing free LMS services to enterprises. International organizations are also equally making substantial investments across different paradigms ranging from MasterCard Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning in ICT,  UNESCO, and E-learning Africa that runs an inaugural event on this core theme.

I believe the education sector is at an interesting point in time with advances in Edtech that will surely have an effect on the transitions of different people’s trajectories in today’s dynamic labour market. I hope this has been an insightful piece for you on trends around the growing Edtech sector in Africa. There are for sure quite a number out there so feel free to share about other advances in the comment section. Cheers!!