Can Edtech narrow the education financial crisis across Africa?

A series of weeks back I shared an article listing the reduction in the percentage of government expenditure on education from 15.5% to 14.4%? across Sub-Saharan Africa as one of the core system drivers of the Edtech innovation spring. The recently launched Education Finance Watch 2024 report developed by The World Bank, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the GEM Report UNESCO sheds light on a more comprehensive picture of this financing landscape with two main trends I would like to focus on.?

One significant trend in this report highlighted how interest payments on public debt are outpacing education spending posing serious concerns in some African countries. Case studies of for example Zambia showed a 53% increase in public expenditure per capita on debt interest versus a 15% reduction on education as highlighted below:

This coupled with the second trend of declining education aid that dropped from 9.3% in 2019 to 7.6% in 2022 presents a ticking time bomb for education funding in the public sector. All this happening at a point in time where:

to achieve national SDG 4 benchmarks, Low Income and Low Middle Income Countries would need to increase total education spending from governments, households, and donors to between 4.2 and 6.5 percent of their GDP over the period from 2023 to 2030 ( Education Finance Watch 2024).

This pressure empirically builds further if we add in the growing population context which expedites the need for governments to explore more innovative financing mechanisms, debt restructuring, and above all in my view an improved efficiency in spending. Boosting domestic resource mobilization?by improving the design of the taxation system to better capture resources from large informal sectors was highlighted in this Education Finance Watch report as one way of increasing the revenue base and allocation to education. Past experiences though across the continent prove this to be very challenging considering recent events from Kenya’s Protests when new taxes were being considered. This in the end leaves a big question of what else can be done by other actors.

Could Edtech possibly mitigate this financial crisis?

Amidst the onset of seemingly downward financing and growing pressure for better education different market forces are already at play in this turbulence to mitigate some effects. The mitigation approaches I have come across are largely driven towards building scalable learning digital learning environments and mix offline tools from the private sector. Just this week on Monday HolonIQ a global market intelligence platform launched a collection of 50 promising Edtech startups from SubSaharan Africa:

An in-depth analysis of this year’s cohort and past ones showed STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics ) subsector took the lead with over a third of the group followed by Workforce and Skills alongside Management Systems gaining a significant share:

Nigeria held a third (34%) of the share of the cohorts listed followed by South Africa (28%) ,Kenya (16%), and Rwanda (6%) which rose at great strides from 2023.?

Another interesting database that sheds light on innovations in this Edtech field is one by AI-for-Education.org which highlights 50 AI products from 21 countries across 48 organizations based in Africa. Their interactive database brings out details about the product type, use case, education levels and studies on quality (click image to view database):

Upon reviewing the details of these two listings you realise some common patterns across their core objectives relating to improving education, providing wider access, cheaper education, and better aligned programmes to relevant training needs. All these cohesively aligning towards the World Bank Group Education Business Plan 2030 as a more central regional perspective reflecting majority of the models and problem statements. The combination of these actors drive towards improving education systems in one way shifts the sector and could mitigate part of crisis within the domestic market from a human-centric design perspective. This may be in the case of for example companies like Ubongo based in Tanzania that uses multimedia learning content to engage children across Africa in numeracy and literacy skills with over 40 million households in reach across 41 African countries. On the work force skilling side, another example to look at is Yvenetta Code in Ethiopia which has provided coding programmes to over 1,000 learners.

With all these private and NGO forces under play in the wake of Artificial Intelligence that offers more personalized experiences we stand to see more enterprises in this line on the rise to bridge the finance gaps. Despite the vast underlying systematic challenges in this field ranging from internet coverage and technology infrastructure growing positive trends (shared some here: Unveiling Africa's Silent Edtech Revolution) and awareness driven by groups like EdTech East Africa , Mastercard Foundation Centre for Innovative Teaching & Learning, and eLearning Africa are causing tides in the ecosystem. As always feel free to share your thoughts about this and new trends in this field. Cheers!!