Ramshackle primary and secondary schools, low-quality teachers, ill-equipped libraries, and laboratories dominate the education system in Nigeria today. Unfortunately, successive Nigerian governments have not helped the debilitating situation as budgetary allocations to education continue to fluctuate.
For example, President Muhammadu Buhari budgeted ₦1.29 trillion for education out of ₦16.39 trillion 2022 appropriation bill presented to the National Assembly. This is 7.9% of the total budget. This is far lower than the 15% to 20% benchmark the United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) recommended for national governments to budget for education.
Consequently, of the ₦55.3 trillion budgeted by the Federal Government in the last six years, only ₦3.5 trillion was allocated to education and this represents less than 10 percent.
The funding of education in Nigeria is already ridiculous. What about the students and teachers? Students are not doing well in National Exams (WAEC, GCE, JAMB & NECO) for obvious reasons and the fact that they are being taught by half-baked teachers.
For example, in Kaduna State, two-thirds or 21,780 of 33,000 teachers failed a teacher assessment test in 2017 designed to test the ability to teach Primary four students rightly. To be sure, the Kaduna State government utilised a pass mark of 75 percent, higher than the 60 percent benchmark it allegedly agreed with the Kaduna State Chapter of the Nigerian Union of Teachers. Nonetheless, the failure rate is alarming.
Investing in this type of crippling system will probably not make any business sense. However, with technology, everything is possible. Perhaps, this was what Sim Shagaya, serial entrepreneur and founder of Konga and DealDey, had at the back of his mind when he established uLesson in 2019.
Enters Sim Shagaya’s uLesson
uLesson leverages best-in-class teachers, media, and technology solutions to create high-quality, affordable and accessible education for learners. The startup has built a platform that helps students be the very best they can be – an app that allows them to maximize their academic achievement and prepare for a future in various disciplines and subjects. It was launched to address infrastructure and learning gaps in Africa’s education sector.
uLesson offers a suite of educational products — a core curriculum video library, live lessons, and live personalized homework help — that provides holistic learning that is both interactive and tailored to the individual needs of primary and secondary school learners across Africa. Students can access the lessons via streaming and SD cards, where they can download and store the content, allowing them to study remotely, removing challenges around internet access limitations and costs.
Since its launch, uLesson has seen incredible traction from learners. In 2021, daily average users surged 430%, and live lesson demand grew by 222% since their introduction in September. The uLesson app has been downloaded two million times; 12.3m videos have been watched, and 25.6m questions have been answered.
According to the startup, students spend an average of 57 minutes on the app) which has led to parents investing in smartphones for their kids’ schooling either independently or via uLesson’s “device+plan” bundle, which is only available in Nigeria.
Parents also allow their kids to learn on their phones (roughly 50% of uLesson’s learners do that). The prices on uLesson range from a monthly fee of ₦7500 (about $18) to a two-year “device+plan” of ₦137,000 ($334).
Africa’s education system is severely challenged. Pupil to trained teacher ratios – 58:1 at the primary level and 43:1 at the secondary level — are some of the highest in the world. Classrooms are poorly equipped and learning outcomes are difficult to ascertain. Despite the poor state of the education system, African families deeply value education for its ability to unlock opportunities and provide social mobility. African families spend a large share of household income on education with Nigerian families spending up to 25% of income on schooling.
Online learning demand has only accelerated due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to enduring behavioral changes among African families. Families have embraced online methods as they have become more cautious in allowing tutors into the home. Uncertainty over future school closures has led to parents investing in smartphones for their children’s schooling. Roughly 50% of uLesson learners use their parents’ handsets.
The platform is available in other markets, such as South Africa, Sierra Leone, the UK, Liberia, Gambia, and the US, but Shagaya said uLesson has spread in these countries via word of mouth. Nigeria remains uLesson’s largest market by far and is responsible for 85% of uLesson’s paying users.
Attracting Funding
uLesson’s solution is tackling one of the vital problems facing not only Nigeria but Africa-poor education. Perhaps the personality behind uLesson-Shagaya has allowed the edtech to consistently raise funding from venture capitals and other investors.
Below is a timeline of fundraising by the startup
- Nigerian Edtech Startup uLesson Secures $3.1mn Seed Funding Ahead of Market Launch (2019)-Link
- Nigerian edtech startup, uLesson secures funding from Founder Collective (undisclosed investment-2020)-Link
- African Edtech startup uLesson Secures $7.5mn Series A Funding (2021)-Link
- African Edtech Startup, uLesson Raises $15m Series-B Investment (2021)-Link
Since its launch, the startup has raised funding. You can therefore bet that uLesson will raise more funding to scale. With the latest capital from Nielsen Ventures and Tencent et al, uLesson plans to continue to invest in product development, strengthen its core technology and add cohort-based learning features. Expanding on its flagship science and mathematics content, the company will add social sciences and financial accounting to the secondary level content library and qualitative and quantitative reasoning to the primary level.
Conclusion
Like technology is accelerating financial inclusion in the banking space, technology is also disrupting the education space with the likes of uLesson and others. uLesson’s unique value proposition is gradually restoring confidence in the Nigerian education sector even though it needs some overhauling by the government. Thankfully, with increasing mobile and internet penetration, entrepreneurs and founders do not need to wait for the government to find innovative solutions to the challenges. Perhaps someday the government will come around, work with these technology-driven service providers to turn around the various sector of the Nigerian economy starting with education. As uLesson continues to grow, it will no doubt have an impact on the type of students being churned out because primary and secondary education are the cradle and everything is wrong with it in the Nigerian context.
