Africa’s EdTech Problem Isn’t Talent. It’s the System.

Africa’s EdTech Problem Isn’t Talent. It’s the System

Joshua Valeta | President of the Distance Education Association of Southern Africa (DEASA) | Founding Luminary of Mwanga wa Elimu.

In 2019, five Malawian universities signed a memorandum of understanding. On the surface, that should not have been remarkable. Universities collaborating and sharing resources, that is standard stuff.

But it was unusual enough to be genuinely exciting. Through the USAID-funded SHEAMA project, where I served as ODeL Director, those five institutions opened their satellite centres to each other, shared faculty, and let students access a course at one college by walking into another college’s building. Institutions that had spent years viewing each other as competitors became, for the duration of the project, a functioning network.

It worked. Thousands of learners who had no viable path into higher education got one. And I left that experience not satisfied, but asking a question I have not been able to shake: Why did it take an externally funded project to get five universities in the same country to share a building?

That question has shaped how I think about Africa’s EdTech challenge through my work with DEASA. It is why the adoption of the AUDA-NEPAD Africa EdTech 2030 Vision and Plan by African Union Heads of State in February matters to me practically, not ceremonially.

For an EdTech developer or distance education institution in Southern Africa, taking a working solution to the next country means starting again. Different procurement rules. Different data standards. Different authentication systems. Different ministerial approval chains. Through DEASA’s work across the SADC region, we see this constantly. Member institutions operate with genuine commitment and strong pedagogical models. The problem is not will. It is the absence of shared infrastructure that would allow what works in one country to travel to another.

SADC has worked to change this. The Regional Open Distance Learning (ODL) Strategic Plan 2022-2030, developed across member states with UNESCO-ROSA, maps a path toward shared National ODL Councils and coordinated standards. DEASA has been building a regional database of ODeL experts so institutions can draw on knowledge that already exists in a neighbouring country rather than commission it from scratch. These are genuine undertakings, and they have moved things. But they hit a ceiling that regional coordination alone cannot break: without agreed continental infrastructure, every country has to reinvent the same agreements each time.

Ministries across the continent are spending on EdTech without a reliable way to know whether it works. This is not a criticism of ministries. It reflects a structural gap.

There is no agreed framework for measuring learning outcomes across EdTech deployments. No shared data architecture that lets governments compare platform performance or track impact over time. Procurement defaults to what can be counted: screens, devices, licences purchased. The measure of success becomes deployment, not learning. Investment continues in directions that may not be justified, and the cost lands on the learner.

The AUDA-NEPAD Vision names this directly, calling for robust data and research systems to monitor outcomes and equity as one of five core implementation pillars. It is the most under-discussed commitment in the document.

When African Union Heads of State adopted the Vision and Plan, it did not immediately solve anything. The fragmentation is still there. Procurement systems are still unreformed. What changed is the political basis for addressing those problems at continental scale. Policy harmonisation across 54 countries requires government-to-government commitment. No company can mandate it. No development partner can enforce it. Heads of State endorsement creates a different kind of opening, one that technical working groups simply cannot.

The Vision targets an interoperable pan-African EdTech ecosystem where every learner, regardless of gender, location, or disability, has equitable access to high-quality, localised digital learning. Africa faces a projected teacher shortage of 17 million by 2030, with millions of children still out of school. 

What DPI-Ed actually means

The Vision is built around Digital Public Infrastructure for Education, DPI-Ed. The label can make it sound abstract – it’s not. The university collaboration in Malawi worked because we had an MOU, a project structure, external funding, and a team holding it together. DPI-Ed is the infrastructure that makes that kind of sharing the default, not a special arrangement that requires a donor. Common identity management. Interoperable data standards. Shared infrastructure that developers and institutions build on rather than rebuild around, every single time, for every new country.

When it exists, a programme that works in Malawi can reach learners in Zambia without rebuilding from scratch. Governments can measure learning outcomes against a shared standard. Research becomes comparable across borders.

What does this require? For policymakers, the work is domestication: translating the continental commitment into national procurement guidelines, data standards, and cross-ministry alignment. Countries that move first will shape the regional architecture for years.

For researchers, the measurement question is urgent. There is no agreed methodology for assessing EdTech impact across African contexts. Without it, policy will continue to be made without the evidence it needs. Researchers should be designing the measurement frameworks now, not arriving later to evaluate what was built without them.

For regional bodies like DEASA, this is an opportunity to connect SADC-level work to a continental framework for the first time. That will not happen automatically. But it is genuinely possible in a way it was not before February.

I will be at eLearning Africa from June 3rd to 5th.

On June 3rd, Mwanga wa Elimu, the practitioner-led movement mobilising Africa’s EdTech ecosystem around the AU Vision, will launch a policy toolkit covering procurement guidance, interoperability standards, and data governance. If you work in education policy or research and you are in Accra, engage with it.

We have spent years building what we could within systems that were not designed to share. The political conditions to change those systems at scale now exist. I honestly do not know how fast things will move. But the opening is real, and I think what happens in the next twelve months matters more than people currently appreciate.