Co-Creation Hub (CcHub), a leading innovation hub in Africa, has announced the launch of a $15 million accelerator program called “The Edtech Fellowship Program” to support 72 startups in Nigeria and Kenya over the next three years. The program is designed to empower edtech startups across Africa by providing technological solutions to address the challenges of innovation in the educational sector.
CcHub’s co-founder and CEO, Bosun Tijani, stated in a discussion with TechCrunch that Africa’s education market, worth $2 billion, needs more unconventional solutions to improve learning outcomes across K-12, tertiary, and skills-to-jobs markets. The accelerator program will identify and support such solutions while providing funding of up to $100,000 to selected startups.
CcHub’s in-house research team, comprising experts in product development, government relations, pedagogy and learning science, portfolio management, communication, instructional design, and community building, will collaborate with portfolio startups and test their products from launch to scale. These shared resources will be crucial to each startup’s team building, MVP and prototyping testing, go-to-market strategies, engagement with organizations, and receiving user feedback.
The Edtech Fellowship Program will complement the initial $100,000 funding that startups receive, and 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. Tijani believes that this program will jumpstart the ed-tech ecosystem and that 20-30% of the startups selected will live for another three to four years, allowing CcHub to determine if technology can truly work for education in Africa.
CcHub plans to launch a $50 million edtech fund within the next 12-24 months, with an anchor investor committing an initial $5 million. The innovation hub is also 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. Tijani notes that 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.
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