During the month of November, pan-African edtech company Snapplify took home three prestigious international education awards. At the Reimagine Education Conference in San Francisco, Snapplify received the Reimagine Education Overall EdTech Award, as well as the category award for E-Learning. In Cape Town, Snapplify also took first place at the South African semi-finals for the Global EdTech Startups Awards, securing a shot at the finals in London in early 2019. Snapplify is at the forefront of edtech in Africa, and specialises in the enablement of digital learning by establishing a marketplace for digital education content, related educational services, and devices.
The Reimagine Education Awards winners were announced at the Reimagine Education Conference Gala Dinner in San Francisco on the 30th of November 2018. With over 1150 applications submitted annually and more than 100 independent judges committed to evaluating submissions, the Reimagine Education Awards are commonly referred to as the ‘Oscars’ of the Education sector. The Global EdTech Startups Awards is the world’s largest edtech startup competition. The Awards aim to identify, showcase and recognise the world’s most promising EdTech startups from across the globe. Snapplify won the South African semi-final leg held at the Bandwidth Barn in Cape Town on the 15th of November 2018. The semi-finals judges included Penny Tainton (Western Cape Government), Marc Cloete (Western Cape Government), Michelle Matthews (Head of Innovation, Cape Innovation & Technology Initiative – CiTi) and Ben Boddy (Consular General for The British High Commission).
In 2018, as the digital education sector continues to mature across the developed world, emerging markets continue to face multiple barriers that restrict equal access to digital educational tools. These challenges include (but are not limited to) restricted internet access, high data costs, lack of infrastructure, insufficient access to appropriate digital content and limited experience of digital tools. For this reason, Snapplify’s core focuses centre around developing solutions that lower these barriers to access and providing educational institutions with appropriate and reliable technical innovations to suit their specific needs. This means reducing the heavy reliance on expensive data, ensuring diversity of device integration, collaborating with international publishers for widely applicable, curriculum-approved educational content, and working closely with over 850 schools across Africa to nurture and support educators and students.
“It is an honour to be recognised at this level for the work that we do, and we view this as an incredible achievement for the Snapplify Team, Snapplify partner-institutions, and key partners and stakeholders who work together in support of the education sector generally, and digital education specifically,” said Snapplify’s CEO, Wesley Lynch. “We are grateful to the Reimagine Education Awards Steering Committee and the Global EdTech Startups Awards judges for their understanding of and support for what we do.”
Snapplify has a long history of working to improve access to books in emerging markets. They actively strive for radical inclusion to give individuals across Africa access to world-class digital learning tools needed to collaborate, innovate and thrive. Snapplify’s award-winning Snappbox – a hardware distribution solution for ebooks – has increased affordable access to digital books where internet connectivity is limited or expensive. To further this cause, Snapplify has been working with key telecos across the continent to allow for hundreds of thousands of digital education ebooks to be zero-rated. This zero-rating means that educational content downloaded through the partnership channels will have no associated data cost. These partnerships will make resources more easily accessible in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Botswana, Lesotho, Ghana, and Uganda.
