One-Pager
Over the last three decades, tens of billions of dollars have been spent in Sub-Saharan Africa on digital courseware built for wealthier countries, in languages that were not children's own, on devices that schools could not afford, requiring internet connections that were unavailable, unreliable, and/or unaffordable. Each initiative tried to work within a system defined by African EdTech's Four Barriers: misaligned policy, low-end technology, fragmented data, and economics that make the West's solutions unaffordable. These Four Barriers reinforce each other. Attempting to lower any one in isolation leaves the other three impenetrable. The result? A functional-illiteracy rate that remains over 85% among 10-year-olds.
Africa's EdTech Breakthrough Project was built on a single decision: to design a new system that lowered all Four Barriers simultaneously. The result is Africa's Digital Public Infrastructure for Education (DPI-Ed)—a free and open source foundation for how an entire continent teaches and learns.
Here's the Vision: Using Africa's DPI-Ed, a teacher opens an app on the low-end smartphone that she already owns, and assigns a lesson to her students. Completing the lesson — perhaps on the student's household's smartphone — updates the teacher's grade book and advises the Ministry of the outcome. Africa's DPI-Ed can run fully offline; when reconnected, it synchronizes with her Ministry and resumes seamlessly. Its data qualifies her Ministry for results-based financing. It uses the fewest possible data bundles, and qualifies for the African Union's Education Rate. The courseware is provably the best available for her community's circumstances—aligned to its curriculum standards, in her students' Mother Tongue, and accessible to the disabled. It helps the teacher stay current with her own professional development. And it is free to everyone—to every student, family, teacher, school, and country.
A child who learns to read in her Mother Tongue learns faster, retains more, and is more likely to stay in school. A Ministry that can see its system's data clearly can make decisions grounded in evidence rather than assumption. A courseware developer who is paid based on "impact per hour" has its corporate incentives aligned with society's goals.
To deliver these benefits across Africa within the next seven years, Africa's EdTech Breakthrough Project requires less than $75M per year, which can collapse Africa's current $4 billion in annual EdTech courseware spending to zero—while delivering benefits never before seen, and while expanding the market opportunity for independent courseware developers and localizers.
The Breakthrough Project scales in three tranches: Tranche 1 (six countries) proves the hypothesis; Tranche 2 (21 countries) demonstrates scale; Tranche 3 takes the DPI-Ed across Africa and completes its transition to self-funding maturity.
The era of education technology that left Sub-Saharan Africa's students illiterate despite billions in investment over decades—that era is ending. The new era of Africa's DPI-Ed has begun.
Join us in Africa's EdTech Breakthrough Project!