Elevator Pitch
Africa's EdTech system simply doesn't work. Over 85% of 10-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read, despite tens of billions of dollars spent on EdTech courseware over three decades. Why? Because African EdTech's Four Barriers — misaligned policy, low-end technology, fragmented data, and broken economics — define a dysfunctional system in which even the best EdTech courseware can't scale.
Africa's EdTech Breakthrough was the decision to design a new system that lowered all Four Barriers at once. The Breakthrough System delivers a free, open source Digital Public Infrastructure for Education that runs on the old, low-end smartphones that African teachers and households already own.
The Breakthrough Project will cost less than $75M a year for seven years — and it will collapse Africa's $4 billion in annual EdTech courseware spending to zero, while delivering benefits unheard-of even in the Global North.