Co-Creation Hub (CcHub) will be launching a $15 million accelerator program named “The Edtech Fellowship Program” for 72 startups in Nigeria and Kenya over the next three years.
The accelerator program is aimed at bolstering and enhancing the influence of edtech startups throughout Africa, while also aiding founders who provide technological solutions to tackle the challenges of innovation in the educational sector.
According to CcHub’s co-founder and CEO ‘Bosun Tijani in a discussion with Techcrunch, “Africa’s $2 billion education market, now more than ever, requires more unorthodox solutions. And CcHUB, which has run several edtech initiatives (one of which I have volunteered for) and backed successful and failed edtech startups in the past via its incubator and accelerator programs, is hopeful of discovering such solutions addressing challenges across K-12, tertiary and skills-to-jobs markets.”
“Our thinking is quite broad. We know that the core will probably be narrowed down to a few areas depending on what we see, but we’re challenging ourselves not to fund the most obvious solutions,” he noted. “We’re not just going to back any startup; we’re going to see that these startups are also driving learning outcomes.”
With the assistance of an in-house research team solely focused on collaborating with portfolio startups and testing their products from launch to scale, CcHUB aims to undertake this responsibility. The team, which is part of a 30-person crew spanning several expert groups, will be provided to selected startups in both locations.
These groups, including product development, government relations, pedagogy and learning science, portfolio management, communication, instructional design, and community building, will offer shared resources that will be crucial to each startup’s team building, MVP and prototyping testing, go-to-market strategies, engagement with organizations, and receiving user feedback.
These value-adds will complement the initial $100,000 funding that startups will receive during the Edtech Fellowship program.
Tijani believes that this program will jumpstart the ed-tech ecosystem expecting that out of the number of startups, at least 20-30% of them would live for another three to four years. And that will allow us to know if technology can truly work for education in Africa.
Apart from providing the funding for startups, the $15 million earmarked for this program will be used to handle other resources in the accelerator, including personnel costs as well as providing support capital to startups as they progress.
According to Tijani, the follow-on capital will come from a $50 million edtech fund CcHUB plans to launch within the next 12-24 months; an anchor investor has committed an initial $5 million, he said, while adding that the innovation hub is in talks with telcos like Safaricom and MTN to explore arrangements that could see them become not only investors in the fund but also distribution partners for edtech solutions in the Fellowship’s portfolio.
“This is also what’s unique about this program. The people backing us are not just saying, ‘this is money, go and invest.’ They are putting serious skin in the game and funding us to be able to raise capital, which is not common in the VC space. The way we’re looking at our pool of co-investors is stacked. We’re not only at VCs but development finance institutions and telcos. In general, this activity that CcHub is embarking on will derisk investment for a lot of the VCs out there who may want to put money in edtech startups,” expressed Tijani.
