By Gigi Ncgobo, Venture Scale Lead at Injini
So, you’ve successfully rolled out an EdTEch pilot programme. Thousands of tablets have been deployed, there are glowing dashboards, and you’ve got high “time-on-app” statistics. You may have even received some great press. But have you actually succeeded?
After all, there are hundreds of EdTech startups across Africa, but how significant an improvement has there been in key metrics like literacy and numeracy over the years? In South Africa – the continent’s most developed and biggest economy – the evidence is mixed, at best. The most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) study, released in 2023, for example, found that 81% of Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning in any language, down from 78% in 2016. And while 2025’s 88% Matric pass rate was the highest in the country’s history, the country’s school dropout rates remain alarmingly high.
Now, education is a complex field, but if EdTech programmes were successful, we’d expect to see at least some movement on those assessment metrics. Part of the problem, I believe, is that the African EdTech space is optimised for activity. That’s understandable. Investors want to see adoption and ongoing use of a product before investing further.
But there needs to be a renewed emphasis on attainment, too. Busywork shouldn’t be mistaken for educational breakthroughs. And as an industry, we must ensure that investors understand this and are focused on impact over adoption.
Breaking through the busywork trap
Before looking at how to do that, it’s important to understand how EdTech startups end up falling into the busywork trap in the first place.
One contributing factor is that any tech project inevitably comes with a lot of data. And when you’re a startup, especially in the early-stage phase, any numbers going up are cause for excitement. But logins, downloads, and “minutes spent” are poor proxies for learning in resource-constrained environments. That’s especially true when you bear in mind that hardware maintenance and connectivity issues create the illusion of innovation while draining actual teaching time.
Perhaps the most notorious example of a project looking good on paper is Kenya’s Digital Literacy Programme (DLP). Often colloquially referred to as the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) Kenya initiative, the programme was launched in 2013 and saw the Kenyan government pledge to issue laptops to every child starting primary school. The goal was to leapfrog Kenya into a digital economy by ensuring the next generation was tech-savvy from day one.
After spending billions of Kenyan shillings, the project was quietly shelved a few years later. A combination of logistical and social oversights, including infrastructure gaps, teacher readiness, poor prioritisation, and insufficient maintenance and security, brought it down.
The new investor thesis: The “unit economics of impact”
While the DLP was a government programme, startups can easily fall into the same kinds of traps. That’s especially true when they’re being pushed to prioritise vanity metrics by investors who only understand those metrics, or who are obsessed with growth at all costs.
Where the shift needs to happen is towards efficacy at scale. One way of measuring that might be The New Investor Thesis: The “Unit Economics of Impact”. That might, for example, mean asking “How much does it cost to move one child from illiterate to reading for meaning?” rather than “How much does the app cost?”
To embrace those kinds of metrics effectively, investors must also immerse themselves within a broad African context. Only then will they learn why tools and methodologies developed in Europe and Silicon Valley may be poorly adapted to Lagos, Nairobi or Johannesburg.
It’s also important that they understand that achieving impact means augmenting teachers, not replacing them. As such, an offering which reduces a teacher’s administrative burden will achieve a lot more than one that reduces the time they spend teaching.
Return on instruction
By reframing those unit economics and using real-time assessment data as a feedback loop, EdTech startups can go from providing return on investment to return on instruction. That, in turn, will lead to widespread adoption, bringing the investment return organically.
Ultimately, if African EdTech is to leapfrog global standards, it must stop counting how many people opened the door and start measuring what happened once they walked inside.
