The real reason African EdTech startups don’t scale

The real reason African EdTech startups don’t scale

By Michael Wachira and Dr Mmabaledi Kefilwe Seeletso

The product works. Teachers use it. Children learn faster. Then the pilot ends, the funding cycle closes, and nothing connects to anything larger. The company runs out of runway. The lesson goes nowhere.

This is not one story. It is the story of African EdTech, repeated across countries and product categories and funding cycles, and it keeps repeating because the diagnosis stays politely on the surface. The sector frames it as a market problem, or a funding problem, or an infrastructure problem, depending on who is doing the framing. It is a systems problem. The products exist and many of them work. The system around them does not.

Building a digital learning platform for Kenya’s Competency-Based Curriculum — one that works offline, runs on low-end devices, and is delivered in partnership with a mobile operator — is not a compromise in quality or ambition. It is a deliberate response to the realities African learners face every day. The solution succeeds because it is designed for those realities. Yet the moment it crosses a border; entirely new barriers emerge. Authentication systems change. Procurement frameworks differ. Content approval processes begin again from scratch, as though the platform has never been tested, validated, or proven. A product that already works is forced, market by market, to repeatedly earn the right to work.

The same fragmentation plays out at the policy level. Teacher education resources developed for one SADC member state go through a full evaluation cycle in the next as if they are new. Distance learning content built by institutions with deep regional expertise cannot travel across borders without facing the same approval burden that untested content faces. Governments spend meaningfully on EdTech without any agreed framework for knowing whether it is working. Procurement committees’ default to what can be measured quickly: devices distributed, licences purchased, screens deployed. The measure of success becomes deployment. Learning rarely enters the equation until after the contract closes.

The funding numbers reflect what investors actually see when they look at this sector. In 2022, African FinTechs raised close to $1.5 billion. African EdTechs received $24.6 million. That gap is not explained by weak products or absent demand. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 98 million out-of-school children, the highest of any region globally. More than 8 in 10 children across the region cannot read a simple text by age 10. The projected teacher shortage reaches 17 million by 2030. Demand is structural and growing. What investors are pricing is risk: without common standards, without interoperability, without shared data on what produces outcomes, there is no credible path to return at scale. The market exists. The infrastructure to make it legible to capital does not.

AltSchool Africa put a specific face on this in 2025. Real users, genuine traction, and a market too fragmented and too financially pressured to sustain what had been built. Inflation, rising data costs, and households unable to hold subscriptions closed the gap between a company that worked and one that could grow. A version of that story surfaces somewhere on the continent every few months. Different product, different market, same underlying constraint.

M-Pesa and Moniepoint did not become what they are because individual startups figured out payments country by country. They are built on shared rails: common identity infrastructure, interoperable systems, and frameworks that let products travel across contexts without reconstruction. Digital Public Infrastructure for Education (DPI-Ed) applies that logic to learning. Interoperability layers, shared data systems, certification frameworks, and procurement standards that let tools work together, be assessed against each other, and cross borders. Without them, every EdTech company rebuilds from zero in every market. Risk cannot be priced where there are no common standards and no comparative evidence base. That is the actual reason serious capital has stayed cautious.

In February 2026, the 39th Ordinary Session of the AU Assembly welcomed the Africa EdTech 2030 Vision and Plan and directed member states to adopt and localise it, with explicit reference to investments in digital public infrastructure for education. The Vision sets out specific interoperability requirements, a shared data architecture for measuring outcomes across borders, and standards that allow a developer building for one context to produce something that functions in another. Years of technical work at AUDA-NEPAD sit behind that commitment. It is not a symbolic resolution. It is a specification.

Africa’s e-learning market is projected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2024 to $7.7 billion by 2033. By 2030, young Africans will account for 42% of global youth. The RESPECT programme, launched in Liberia in February 2026 and reaching teachers from all 15 countries in low-connectivity rural settings, shows what DPI-Ed looks like when it moves from policy to classroom.

What the sector also needs is practitioners working on these structural conditions together rather than in parallel. Mwanga wa Elimu launched at the AU Summit in February 2026with Founding Luminaries from nine African countries, drawn from ministries, EdTech companies, research institutions, and curriculum bodies. It is not a new institution or another report. At eLearning Africa in Accra on June 3rd, it launches the policy toolkit covering procurement guidance, interoperability standards, and data governance — practical tools for the domestication work that now needs to happen at national level.

African developers have never lacked the ability to build products that work. The real challenge has always come afterwards — the need to rebuild for every border crossed, navigate procurement systems that disregard proven evidence, and operate within fragmented or non-existent data infrastructure. That is the gap now being addressed. What happens next will depend on whether governments, builders, and investors choose to treat this as shared continental infrastructure — or continue waiting for someone else to complete it first.

About the authors

• Dr. Mmabaledi Kefilwe Seeletso is Director of the SADC Centre for Distance Education at Botswana Open University and Executive Secretary of DEASA. 

• Michael Wachira is CEO of Virtual Essence Limited (MsingiPACK), Kenya.

Image credits – Kojo Kwarteng