EMPOWERING FUTURES:
How Educational Technology is Revolutionizing Africa’s Learning Landscape
NIKI KAPSAMBELIS
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended the world as we knew it, education became one of the most visible casualties.
From preschool through college, the pandemic disrupted in-person classroom attendance, the ripple effects of which remain a matter of much debate and research. But one fact became clear: online learning, which grew exponentially throughout the pandemic, was here to stay. And for some parts of the world, education technology — or edtech, for short — represents an opportunity to fill gaps that previously lingered for generations.
One place this is particularly true is Africa, where rapid population growth combined with a surge in the continent’s tech scene has made edtech a particularly timely investment, said Amy Ogan, Thomas and Lydia Moran Associate Professor of Learning Science in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Africa is the youngest and fastest-growing continent in the world. According to the United Nations, more than half of global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to occur there. If those projections are accurate, Africans will represent one in four people worldwide within the next quarter century. Likewise, the continent’s tech scene — particularly in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa — is producing a wave of developers, meaning talent is available.
Birth of a Strategy
Among those investing is the Mastercard Foundation, which established the Young Africa Works strategy in 2018 with the goals of enabling 30 million young people to access dignified and fulfilling work by 2030 via improved education and vocational training, connecting employers and talent through technology, and offering access to financial services for entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses.
As part of the strategy, the Mastercard Foundation established the Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning to build an impactful edtech ecosystem in Africa. One of the programs under the Centre is the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship, which launched in 2019.
Carnegie Mellon, and particularly the School of Computer Science, enjoys a long tradition of building effective, intelligent educational technologies. Ogan began working on the fellowship in its first year. The pandemic disrupted the program, but also brought with it the realization that edtech was more critical than ever for the program to achieve its goals.
“It was a crazy time,” Ogan said. After working in East Africa for eight years, with projects in Tanzania, Ivory Coast and Uganda, Ogan wound up teaching from her house in Rwanda. She saw firsthand how pandemic-related closures interrupted learning, just as they did around the globe. Startups began to focus on finding ways to address the disruption to educational systems by using the rapid growth in phones and mobile technologies to fill those gaps.
Christine Niyizamwiyitira, Scholar in Residence at CMU-Africa, co-leads the Carnegie Mellon partnership with Ogan. Niyizamwiyitira, who formerly worked for the Rwanda Basic Education Board, said technology can help not only when schools close — as they did during the pandemic — but also when classrooms are overcrowded, causing some students to learn remotely. When students don’t have access to a home computer, edtech can help by developing tools that work on phones or by using WhatsApp, said Niyizamwiyitira.
“We are trying to be practical, because we are looking for hands-on skills in edtech entrepreneurs that respond to educational needs even in a low-resourced environment,” Niyizamwiyitira said.
Amy Ogan, Professor in HCII presents edtech concepts to startups and tech companies as part of the Mastercard Foundation’s EdTech Fellowship incubators.
Christine Niyizamwiyitira, Scholar in Residence at CMU-Africa and Co-lead of the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship.
A Broader Reach
Although the Foundation initially planned to work with 12 companies, it decided to broaden its reach by reorganizing the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship to roll out technology incubators in countries across the continent.
Through the incubators, participants — whose companies include a mix of startups and some more established enterprises — receive training from CMU on ways to improve their products based on the science of learning. They learn how to arrange content to align with a curriculum so they can respond to the needs of teachers and students, and they receive faculty mentoring.
The program just completed its first year with three incubators, which were established in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. Each incubator worked with 12 companies; another five incubators are planned for 2024 in different countries. At its current pace, the Foundation’s EdTech Fellowship will have supported a minimum of 276 companies in the final year of funding the incubators. These companies are designed to become self-sustaining after the Foundation’s support ends.
“The fourth year is more knowledge dissemination: research, working with companies to see what we’ve achieved and seeing if there is any gap to be filled,” Niyizamwiyitira said.
Participants of the deep dive sessions at Ihub One, listening to edtech presentations, held in Nairobi, Kenya, and one of the tech hubs supported by the partnership between CMU and The Mastercard Foundation.
A Startup’s Perspective
One company that worked with an incubator in 2023 was Reflective Learning, which aims to solve backlogs in math and English education through an online tool that diagnoses knowledge gaps in individual students, then catches them up to where they need to be, said co-founder Eugene Pelteret.
“Math and language are quite unique in their structure in that they build all the way from when you are little up to the point where you actually write your final school exams,” Pelteret explained. “If you have small gaps along the way, the normal curriculum just progresses and it’s very easy to fall behind. Eventually, you sit in a math class where you’re not understanding what’s being taught, and you believe that you can’t do math. Meanwhile, that’s not actually true — you can, but you have to go back and find where the problem is.”
The company works to bridge gaps in a more accurate and cost-effective way than a traditional tutor, he said.
In many ways, Reflective Learning’s experience with the Young Africa Works incubator mirrored that of the students the company serves. As a young business, the practical constraints to growth can lead to small, missed elements, Pelteret said. “The incubator helps to refocus some of those elements and helps you to fill some of the gaps,” he added. “We’ve really valued the partnership. The Human-Computer Interaction Institute has just been phenomenal in giving us access to expert insights.”
Pelteret said the approach was individualized for each participant. Brand-new startups, for example, needed different resources than Reflective Learning, which was founded in 2017. And because edtech is relatively young, without much established research to date, having access to well-versed experts from CMU was helpful in determining if the company was on the right track.
“That academic credibility is really important,” he said. “Entrepreneurship is quite a lonely journey. It requires a lot of yourself, from both a personal and professional perspective.”
Young tech entrepreneurs take a break for a photo during the deep dive sessions at iHub.
An iHub presenter delivers a Learning Science presentation in Nairobi.
“This is an opportunity for us to engage in these kinds of partnerships that help us explore new questions that we couldn’t ask without working with these companies.”
Novel Research Opportunities
The partnership offers CMU the opportunity to conduct research with companies that collect large data sets from the users of their technology. The range is wide, according to Ogan, including companies using chatbots and apps for adult education and those using iPad games to promote early childhood development.
Ogan is hopeful that CMU will be able to take learnings from the companies and translate them back into educational concepts taught in the HCII’s Masters of Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences (METALS) program. Plans are already underway for a METALS capstone team to work on the Young Africa Works program.
“This is an opportunity for us that does not come along very often: to engage in these kinds of partnerships that help us explore new questions that we couldn’t ask without working with these companies,” Ogan said.
The incubators have worked primarily in English until now, although new languages are being added as new countries are selected for participation.
Pelteret said he hopes the project will allow companies like Reflective Learning to help Africa do more than simply catch up with more developed parts of the world; he’d like to get Africa ahead of the curve.
“Hopefully if we can do that as a continent, then we can start finding our own niche and our own strengths,” he said. “I believe as Africans we certainly have them, we just need to take ownership of them and push into them. Then we can find our own space in the world sector.” ■
A group photo from one of the Nairobi iHub deep dive sessions.