This document discusses how mobile technology is revolutionizing education in Africa through Eneza Education, a Kenyan ed tech company. Eneza allows tens of thousands of Kenyan students to continue their studies remotely through SMS, accessing lessons, tests, and teacher feedback on their phones. Students pay as little as $0.10 per week for unlimited lessons. This widespread adoption of mobile learning could have big implications for human capital development in Africa by improving educational outcomes, especially where state education systems are ineffective. Mobile technology may allow education systems to "leapfrog" traditional infrastructure and reform approaches that have proven difficult for many African governments.

1. June 2016 African Business 39
PERSPECTIVES
T
his week, tens of thousands of Ken-
yan schoolchildren will pick up a
phone to continue their studies at
home. Working in English or Swa-
hili they will get instruction, testing
and feedback on all the core topics
at their class level. They will also
ask teachers about two thousand questions, and get
immediate replies, through an SMS menu-driven
interface. Come exam time, around a hundred thou-
sand Kenyan students will be jabbing phone buttons
for extra lessons. Welcome to Africa’s new class of
mobile learners.
This is about business, not just education, because
these students are paying for this school-of-the-air run
by Eneza Education, a Nairobi-based ed tech company.
KSh10 ($0.10) gets them a week’s unlimited lessons. The
heaviest users (around one in eight) are getting each
lesson, assessment and guidance for half a cent. This
is a revolution too because up to now, digital learning
in Africa was for the very wealthy, or for lucky ben-
Mobile technology could
revolutionise the way students in
Africa learn, but challenges remain.
eficiaries of a few donor-funded philanthropic pilot
projects. But the Eneza learners, who are lower-income
families attending average or worse state schools, are
a generation which will not wait passively.
The implications could be big for human capital
in Africa. A technology approach should not and
cannot substitute for classrooms and teachers with
their vital support to socialisation and cohesion, but
clicks-and-data, operating alongside the bricks-and-
mortar of schools, have plenty to offer. Where state
education systems are patchy or ineffective (which in
Africa means pretty much everywhere), the impact is
highest. Could Kenya’s encouraging start become a
wider African story?
The risk and sweat of setting up cross-border op-
erations in Africa is well known, but digital does have
advantages over other businesses when it comes to
getting continent-wide scale.
Continental-scale IT bets are being placed in other
sectors too. In April, for example, a portfolio of African
online retail brands, including Jumia, which operates
in 11 countries, received $85m of investment to expand
services such as taxi hailing and food delivery.
But education is not the entrepreneur’s obvious
choice for a one-click online delivery, and private
enterprise is not always welcome in the classroom.
Mostly, however, the stance of governments towards
privately owned education innovations is positive.
And in the mobile classroom, governments may not
be lead players. Step forward the smartphone industry.
The trend on smartphone affordability and penetra-
tion will overturn education as well as everything else.
The pattern touches those of school age most. At the
end of this decade, 180m African 14–24-year-olds are
going to be smartphone owners.
Leapfrogging is the metaphor widely used for Af-
rica’s phone infrastructure, which bypassed copper
wires. The term will apply to education reform as well.
Improving pupil outcomes is the task everyone wants
to achieve, and the old way to do it is painstaking
investment in teacher training, curriculum reform,
new schools and classroom IT systems. This is perhaps
manageable in the global North with large budgets,
strong states and static demographics. For many gov-
ernments on the continent, it is not an option.
Stephen Haggard is chair of Eneza Education. He is
an independent expert on education technology who
has held executive roles at the Open University and
written the UK government’s policy on massive open
online courses (MOOCs).
Making kids smarter
with smartphones
Above: Stephen
Haggard, chair of
Eneza Education.
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