Africa is a worldwide chief in fintech, however continues to battle with training and edtech. Africa has the worst-performing training system globally – in some markets, 90% of kids depart main college with out fundamental studying abilities. Fintech captured 60% of all African enterprise capital final yr, pushed by a transparent worth proposition: sooner, cheaper, higher providers. Remittances alone hit $56 billion in 2024. Africans had been already sending cash; FinTechs simply made it simpler.

Schooling, in contrast, receives lower than 2% of enterprise capital regardless of being a $160+ billion annual market, almost 3 times bigger than remittances. Why? As a result of too many African edtechs are constructing flashy know-how in quest of a buyer. The hype fueling synthetic intelligence (AI) threatens to amplify edtech failures.

Governments are already climbing aboard the AI hype practice. Nigeria lately introduced plans to coach 6,000 lecturers in AI.

We’ve seen this play earlier than

20 years in the past, the One Laptop computer Per Youngster (OLPC) initiative promised $100 laptops for each little one. International locations like Peru, Uruguay, and Rwanda joined in. In Peru, a multi-year analysis discovered no studying affect. Upkeep points, lack of energy, and untrained lecturers meant 50%+ of laptops stopped working inside 2–3 years. The identical story unfolded in developed markets like Birmingham and Alabama, the place the town scrapped its OLPC-based program after three years. The lesson: nice tech, unhealthy implementation—and worse enterprise fashions.

AI is quick turning into the brand new $100 laptop computer. Already, initiatives are promising personalised AI tutors for lower than $50 a yr or ultra-cheap LLM API calls at pennies per question. However an economical product is meaningless if nobody makes use of—or pays for—it.

Leapfrogging a poor enterprise mannequin is unattainable

Take one Kenyan startup providing AI-powered instructor help by way of WhatsApp; a wise supply channel given its 200M customers in Africa. However flawed mannequin: they plan to cost lecturers $10–$20/yr, regardless of most lecturers being underpaid and stretched skinny. A greater technique? Promote to governments. Kenya employs over 330,000 lecturers. Simply $20 per instructor might yield $6.6 million yearly. Develop throughout the continent, and this might change into a $50M+ enterprise—greater than 4x the turnover of one in all Africa’s largest textbook publishers.

Governments, not households, account for 70% of training spending in Africa. Whereas some African edtechs have achieved notable scale, many battle to develop past a slim base, sometimes elite personal faculties or middle-class households with web entry. In the meantime, 82% of learners lack web at dwelling, and 95% don’t have constant entry to smartphones. It’s not about scaling cool tech. It’s about designing enterprise fashions that work in the actual world.

A $100M  funding with no enterprise mannequin

Between 2014 and 2022, USAID invested as a lot as $96.2 million in Tusome, Kenya’s flagship early-grade studying program . At its peak, simply 18% of Grade 2 college students met nationwide English studying benchmarks—up from 12% at baseline . A 6-point achieve after eight years and almost $100M—was that good worth for cash?

Look nearer, and it turns into clear: Tusome was by no means constructed on a demand-driven mannequin. The Kenyan authorities’s contributions had been largely in-kind—lecturers and infrastructure it was already funding. Actual budgetary buy-in—for necessities like books and classroom visits—solely got here years later, and shortly stalled as soon as donor cash dried up. Now that USAID funding has ended, there are already indicators that Kenya’s hard-won literacy good points might shortly unravel.

A lot is made from a co-financing declare: that for each $1 USAID invested, Kenya contributed $0.70. However most of that wasn’t new capital—it was a reclassification of current spending, with little relation to precise demand. As an edtech investor, this feels extra like accounting acrobatics than an indication of traction. Ten years into Tusome, I discovered myself fielding queries from program employees who had been simply beginning to discover “sustainability”—solely after spending almost $100 million.

Schooling is, by nature, a government-led sector. In developed markets, the biggest billion-dollar training companies earn most of their income from public sector shoppers—federal, state, or district. The personal sector’s position is to construct partaking, useful merchandise that governments need to purchase. Too usually, growth actors misinterpret demand, specializing in ‘cost-effectiveness’ projections. However probably the most vital variable is usually neglected: engagement. TikTok didn’t change into the world’s most used app by being low cost—it received by being deeply partaking and culturally intuitive. If edtech doesn’t do the identical, it should fail no matter how good the AI is. 

That’s the lesson for AI in training: if nobody’s utilizing it, nobody’s paying for it. Too many edtech merchandise in Africa are nonetheless being pushed onto faculties, lecturers, and oldsters. The actual query is: the place are the merchandise being pulled?

AI received’t save edtech, enterprise mannequin innovation may 

Africa’s training historical past is affected by $50M and $100M initiatives—flashy tech pilots and impressive packages that didn’t scale as a result of they lacked one factor: demand. With no enterprise mannequin, even probably the most well-intentioned investments find yourself shelved.

To unlock AI’s true potential, we should rethink how edtech is financed, deployed, and scaled. We’ve seen this mannequin work earlier than: Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, helped vaccinate over a billion youngsters by enabling governments to purchase and ship what their folks wanted.

Is it time for Africa’s edtech ecosystem to construct its personal Gavi? The training disaster is pressing—and until we deal with the financing query head-on, we threat failing not simply at this time’s college students, however tomorrow’s economies. AI received’t leapfrog these challenges.

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Karim Mohamed is an African funding skilled with almost 20 years of expertise as an engineer, finance knowledgeable, and enterprise investor. Over the previous decade, he has led and suggested three African edtech funds totaling over $200M in capital, centered on enhancing studying and increasing employment alternatives throughout the continent.