Digital Public Infrastructure for Education is INFRASTRUCTURE
You're infrastructure people. You fund ports, railways, expressways, and power grids. You know how to evaluate infrastructure: fixed costs, marginal costs, useful life, revenue transition, and return on investment. I submit that Africa's Digital Public Infrastructure for Education belongs in the same portfolio — and that, dollar for dollar, it is among the highest-return infrastructure investments on the continent.
The Breakthrough Project builds a continent-scale, free and open source EdTech platform that runs on the old, low-end smartphones that are already common in Africa's low-resource communities. Also, it builds a competitive ecosystem of free educational courseware, a professional workforce, a finance-grade evidence system, and a governance architecture anchored by the African Union through the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD). The total investment is $488.2M over seven years (2026–2032). That's under $70M/year. By the early 2030s, the system is designed to be self-funding, with no further donor support required.
$488.2M is less than a single major port. Less than a single intercity railway. Comparable to a single 128-kilometer expressway. And it's designed to serve every learner across every African country for decades — while raising the return on every physical infrastructure investment that you already fund.
This essay walks you through it.
Let me start with why this is on your desk, not your education-focused colleagues.
Every physical infrastructure project you fund depends on an educated workforce for its economic return. A port requires literate customs officers, numerate logistics managers, and technically trained crane operators. A railway requires trained signal engineers and station managers. An expressway requires a productive economy at both ends. Physical infrastructure and human capital are complementary inputs. The IMF's own research — Working Paper 17/105, "Roads or Schools?" — finds that education yields higher long-term societal returns than physical infrastructure. Research from the Center for Global Development confirms that returns to physical infrastructure are significantly higher when accompanied by corresponding investment in education. Neither factor alone is sufficient.
You already know this intuitively. What you may not know is that Africa now has an infrastructure-grade education project — the project to build a Digital Public Infrastructure for Education for the entire continent — that answers the same questions your appraisal teams ask about every port and railway.
This is infrastructure. It answers infrastructure questions. And it multiplies the return on everything else you fund.
You know these numbers better than I do, but they're worth lining up.
Not one of these projects serves the entire continent.
Several of these passed the infrastructure appraisal process with projected GDP contributions and then underperformed.
These physical infrastructure projects were evaluated using the infrastructure logic I'm asking you to apply here — and their multi-billion dollar investments are failing to deliver projected returns in even one country.
The Breakthrough Project — $488.2M — is designed to serve every learner across every African country. To build, it will cost less than $1 per school-age child on the continent today, and once built, will cover its own costs while still being free to all of its users. $488.2M is just 12% of what Africa spent on EdTech courseware in 2024 — a single year. And the return is population-level:
At less than $1/school-age child in Africa — not even counting its use as a free and open source platform for adult workforce training — funding Africa's EdTech Breakthrough Project is among the highest ROI infrastructure investments that is available in Africa today.
The $488.2M funds six interdependent components (see Essay 27. The Ask for the full financial profile).
Coordination, Governance & Accountability ($101M). Three-pillar separation of powers, independent audits, fiduciary controls, stakeholder alignment. Credible infrastructure requires credible governance.
R&D ($82.4M). Five research projects that reduce per-unit operating costs at scale. Easy Curriculum Mapping (ECM, see Essay 22) and Easy FLN Localization (see Essay 21) convert multiplicative costs into additive costs — a transformation that applies to every app in every jurisdiction for the entire useful life of the infrastructure. That's the kind of cost-reducing economics you see in the best physical infrastructure.
These components are interdependent. Three decades of partial approaches — tens of billions of dollars — have demonstrated that no subset is sufficient (see Essay 29. Why So Expensive?). These six components, together, provide the "rails" of digital education.
No one would lay steel rails on bare ground. A rail track also needs sleepers, spikes, ballast, a standard gauge, and trained crews. The six components listed above are the minimum set of components that digital education's rails need, to successfully reach continental scale.
This is where Africa's DPI-Ed differs from most physical infrastructure you fund.
Most ports, railways, and expressways require perpetual public maintenance funding. Africa's DPI-Ed is designed to cover its own operating costs from Year 7 onward. The Platform becomes self-funding through trademark and certification revenue. The Ecosystem becomes self-funding through Sponsor Credits. Professional Bodies become self-funding through training and certification fees. Each component's start-up funding has a defined duration and terminal date.
And once built, Africa's DPI-Ed extends to additional jurisdictions at the cost of curriculum mapping and localization — costs that Easy Curriculum Mapping and Easy FLN Localization will collapse to near-zero. The $488.2M builds infrastructure whose useful life is measured in decades and whose geographic reach can expand thereafter at low marginal cost.
The start-up investment is released in three milestone-gated tranches (see Essay 27, Section 9): Tranche 1 ($129.6M, 2026–2027), Tranche 2 ($168.6M, 2028–2029), Tranche 3 ($188.0M, 2030–2032). Each gate is verified by independent auditors across four domains: governance, technology, delivery, and economics. If milestones aren't met, exposure is bounded. The structure converts a large infrastructure commitment into a series of smaller, evidence-gated investment decisions — the same phased approach you apply to every infrastructure project.
The Breakthrough System starts in Africa — the hardest market: the most languages, the most curriculum standards, the most constrained infrastructure, the deepest poverty. A DPI-Ed that works at continental scale in Africa is a DPI-Ed that works anywhere.
M-Pesa demonstrated that systems designed for African realities can lead global adoption. DHIS2 demonstrated that DPI built for the Global South can become the global standard. The UNESCO-UNICEF-ITU Charter for Public Digital Learning Platforms calls for precisely what the Breakthrough Project builds. No system currently exists that fulfills this vision at continental scale. Africa's DPI-Ed is designed to be the first — and then to scale to LMIC-dense regions and beyond.
For an infrastructure investor, that's a global multiplier built on an African proof of concept.
I'm asking for a conversation, not a commitment.
The full case — essays, project plans, governance documents, and financial models — is public and available for your due diligence teams. I'd welcome the chance to walk your appraisal team through it, using the infrastructure evaluation framework you already apply, and answer any questions that they might have.
Jim Plamondon CEO, Spix Foundation Email: ceo@spixfoundation.org
For less than $1/child, you can help to fund Africa's Digital Public Infrastructure for Education that will, thereafter, be self-funding for generations, and expand across the world. And the educational return — measured across every child, every teacher, and every school — will increase the ROI of all of the physical infrastructure that you have already built or will ever build in Africa, the LMICs, and beyond.
Thank you for your attention.