EdTech: The Headway for Nigerian education.
A deep-dive on the Nigerian Edtech ecosystem
Hi friends 👋🏻,
Welcome to the first episode On Today’s Episode (sorry we’re not talking about movies, no pun intended:)
As I wrote this piece, the topic felt very personal to me as someone who has passed the “system”. But as the curious person that I am, I have so many more questions than answers and I hope that as I continue to learn and share my thoughts, we will be able to learn together.
One question I’ve been wanting to answer is: As the educational system in Nigeria is known to have decayed so badly, where does that leave our future leaders? Today, we’ll try to figure that out. It’s the beginning of the exploration, and certainly not the end.
Now, let’s get to it!
EdTech: The Headway for Nigerian education
If you ask any random Nigerian about the state of the educational system, I’m sure you’ll hear answers like: too many strikes, poor educational facilities, dilapidated buildings, untrained teachers, stale curriculum etc. it’s not that they are exaggerating but the reality is even far worse than you can imagine. The BBC reported in 2017 that Nigeria had the highest number of children out of school in the world at over 10 million. With an ever-rising population, enormous pressure has been placed on an already overstretched system, with 22 million children enrolled in public primary schools alone showing the burden on under-funded state schools.
Last year about 14000 students travelled to the US to continue their post-secondary school studies rising by 10% from 2019. The number of students enrolled in Unilag in 2019 was over 9000. Inferring from this, it means that instead of all these students pursuing a degree in Unilag, they preferred to attend the likes of the University of Notre Dame or University of Michigan or Boston University. These names don’t jump out to be the most popular or well acclaimed but you’ll be surprised to note that they are among the top 200 schools in the world. On the other hand, our acclaimed University of Ibadan barely manages to enter the top 500.
But really how did we get here? How Education is Run in Nigeria and Why That’s a Problem
There was a video I watched recently where the then former governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomole was carrying out a verification exercise on teachers (Former Governor Adams Oshimole interviews teacher).
Initially, the exercise seemed strange to me because a governor asking a teacher how to read or write didn’t come across as the most worthwhile use of his time. But after the two-minute mark, where the lady continued stammering, mispronouncing and misinterpreting words it spelt to me that this was a serious issue, an epileptic one. This is just one of the many cases of gross negligence in education by the government.
Years of lack of funding, inadequate research, dilapidated buildings of learning, untrained teachers (some would claim that the teachers lack proper incentives to motivate them), outdated curriculum and many more have resulted in what Malala Yousafzai has called “a state of emergency in the nation''. Another proxy to further buttress the point is in the EDI index. The Education for All (EDI) index is an index designed by UNESCO that provides a snapshot of the overall progress of national education systems towards Education. The value of the EDI for a given country is the arithmetic mean of four components:
Universal primary education (goal 2), measured by the primary adjusted net enrolment ratio
Adult literacy, measured by the literacy rate for those aged 15 and above
Gender parity and equality
Quality of education, measured by the survival rate to grade 5; Note: the survival rate is used as a proxy because of its positive correlation with average international learning assessment scores.
After all the calculations were done, Nigeria scored 0.721 ranking 108 out of 120 countries analysed. It is worrisome where we score low in the net enrolment and Adult literacy rate categories because these should go in tandem. When a child attends school, he should have obtained the right skills like literacy and numeracy that will serve him as he grows into adulthood but, ironically, that's not the case in Nigeria.
Upsurging Interest in EdTech
Technology is affecting every aspect of our lives and changing them by the day. But it’s not just our life, it’s businesses as well that are transforming and can’t afford to look away.
Yomi Kazeem in an article detailing how digital innovators are trying to plug gaps in Nigeria’s broken education system said: “Nigeria’s long-running shortcomings with the sector means education has always been big business offline ranging from elite private schools and expensive tutors to more affordable options which are only marginally better than public schools.” Yes, it has been a big business not only in after school services but in several other verticals and technology companies are beginning to get a sense of the opportunities therein.
You know the time in university, where your lecturer gave you an assignment or project to something that hasn’t been expressly taught in class (well they’ll say that’s what university is for) and you use Coursehero or YouTube as “resources” to help you, well that’s an example of an EdTech solution. The sheer proliferation of startups that have erupted in the past decade solving the problems entrenched in education is magnanimous. In the past decade, startups have started to emerge and since 2018, Edtech startups have been able to raise about a total of $8million. For a sector reliant on donations and grants from NGOs and governments, this is a welcome sign that the private equity and venture capital firms are looking at EdTech as a viable means of investments.
These Education Technology startups(EdTech) use technology in various forms (from flash drives to digital apps/tools) to support the delivery of education programmes and improve educational outcomes. Many of these startups fall within three broad categories:
eLearning – this includes startups like uLesson where they provide educational content in form of courses, modules and training.
Tutoring platforms – these are the classic forms of EdTech solutions in Nigeria and the big players here include Tuteria and Prepclass. They connect learners with private tutors via web or mobile.
School Management & Monitoring – this includes startups like Edves and Schoolable, MyClassConnect where they provide software to manage processes and activities in schools.
In addition to these three broad categories, there are more EdTech startups offering solutions in various verticals including offline and SMS based learning, educational entertainment, bots, directories and search engines, hubs, work experience services and many more. It is also hard for each of the startups in each category to act independently so more often than not, these companies provide blended services including two or more mentioned above.
Also, their “customers” are wide and varied including from pre-primary up to post-secondary school students.
source: Baobab Insights
Looking at the startups above, you’ll notice that each of them is solving an integral part of the educational system from providing a relevant curriculum to ensuring excellent student outcomes through standardized tests. This is centred around one thing: Focus.
Focus. Edtech startups know that solving the problems of education is hard and varied so each of their solutions is relevant to each stakeholder’s needs. Since the pandemic began and lockdowns were enforced uLesson picked up the pace from providing an offline, asynchronous product to launching an app that allows students from any location to access all video lessons & quizzes as well as supporting the students with data each month. Tuteria focuses primarily on private tutoring, Andela offers digital training with an expectation of employment at the end of the training, Gidimo uses gamification to improve learning. That focus means that everything the company does is oriented towards solving all of the problems related to that particular area and this doesn't stop students from taking up more than one of these. It’s almost anti-school, as the current system sees you stay in one school to get all the “benefits” whereas this is not always so.
Edtech startups give their users a focused solution where one doesn't try to cannibalise the other but can be complementary products students can use. For students, it is great because they don't have to go through an outdated curriculum and also can learn in a fun and engaging manner. For parents, they don't have to worry that their ward isn't getting the best from school and can also leverage this. For schools, they don't represent competitors but rather as a complementary tool to aid learning.
Schools like EdTech too
For the students and parents, the benefits of EdTech solutions are massive. Whether your child needs to improve on his math skills, you can get her a tutor on Prepclass. Whether you need to keep him engaged and curious about learning you can enrol him in Gidimo or get him a uLesson plan. If you want him to learn social skills as well as participate in a community, STEMCafe is available. The upside to this is huge as higher student participation and engagement can bring better results in the form of success in standardized tests and at the same time improving productivity and developing skills.
From the school’s perspective, applying these EdTech solutions to their “product”, give them visibility to a larger audience, credibility and a better way to manage bursaries and finances. With no way to improve budgets to cater for research or hire more teachers, these EdTech Startups are acting as a medium to improving curriculum quality and as well providing needed analytics showing areas of improvements for their students and staff. Edusko provides parents with a platform to review and vet schools thus removing the leap of faith parents usually have when enrolling their child. Tanteeta helps schools handle projects on courses like robotics and programming that schools wouldn't usually have the resources to do.
EdTech Business Models
Most of all the businesses presented in the image above make money in 3 ways:
Subscriptions
Commissions
Profit share
In the bear case that the EdTech space continues to grow at the rate it is currently, Nigeria’s out of school population increases and curriculums don’t reflect the existing realities of the workforce of today, EdTech is going to be massive to both parents and schools as the Ministries are slow to enact change and schools don’t have the budgets to independently create this services themselves.
Comparables.
The EdTech scene is not just native to Nigeria. The largest and most valuable EdTech startup is BYJU's, an Indian startup founded in 2011. The company is the most valuable EdTech startup in the world with a valuation of $10.5B. Unacademy and Vedantu, also Indian startups are currently valued at $2B and $600m respectively. India and Nigeria have a lot in common. The dynamics are similar in the sense that All three are large, fast-growing, populations. They both have youthful populations as well as out of school children (about 50% of the Indian population below 25 and Nigeria having about 48% below 15) and similar GDP growth rates with Nigeria at 2.2% and India at 4.2%.
BYJU’s offers online video-based learning programs for the K-12 segment as well as competitive exams. Vedantu is a knowledge network where any student can tap into a teacher directly and learning can happen in a personalized way, anytime-anywhere. Think of them as an Upwork for education but with a more rigorous student-centric approach. These companies are similar to their Nigerian counterparts such as uLesson or Prepclass and the market continues to grow and evolves similarly to Southeast Asia, I see a similar opportunity for our EdTech startups and the upside to their potential will be massive.
What Are the Risks?
Early-stage companies come with major risks and building a business in a developing country like Nigeria is high risk. Here are a few EdTech-specific risks:
Adoption of products by the target market may not become widespread in a reasonable timeframe for them to scale. The regulatory landscape can be challenging, unpredictable, and slow.
With a small part of the local market available, churn rates and CAC costs can be high.
Successful adoption requires both financial and tech education. There’s some aspect of buy-in that’s required of parents and schools as “children” don't make the purchasing decisions. The process can become drawn out for companies offering such services to this segment.
No successful exit at the moment to motivate additional PE and venture funding and everything could go still go wrong
The Future and the opportunity of EdTech.
Entrepreneurs in the EdTech space are starting to look at these challenges and develop solutions that help to reduce time spent completing administration tasks, increase the availability of trusted teaching resources and create methods of tracking the progress of students. With the wealth of solutions available out there, it shows a legitimate concern for the educational sector as well as a desperate need to provide solutions that help improve learning outcomes. More has to be done in creating a more connected ecosystem where each of these solutions can be integrated into each other thus providing the network, community and credentials that makeup education. Also, the government should consider education critical in developing a talented and educated workforce and with the implementation of EdTech solutions in our institutions we can only get closer to this vision. Nelson Mandela did say that “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Therefore, the future of our citizens is heavily reliant on how well they are trained.
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Thanks for reading and see you on the next episode,
Kamso.
Bruh this was a lot of work. Well done and keep writing!