Eight startups from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe have been selected from a pool of 800 entries, to participate in the second cohort of Cape Town based edtech incubator, Injini. There is a dominance of Nigerian startups as three of them are among the selected, while two are South African startups.
All startups selected operate in the EdTech sector and are solving problems in the African educational sector in its own way. The announcement was made at an event hosted at Amazon Web Services’ office in Cape Town.
According to Injini founder, Jamie Martin, speaking on how the startups were chosen, “Firstly, what we look for is an innovation that creates access. Is this a different tech that’s going to allow more people across Africa to access great quality education? The second thing is we look for a great team. Because as you probably saw a lot of these guys are very early stage, so we as much back the team as we back the innovation,”
He went further to say that, “We always do test them against what’s been tried elsewhere in the world, what approaches in education tend to work. There’s also been a bit of criticism that tech in education is sometimes not evidence-aligned, so we try to be as evidence-backed as we can,”
Speaking on the dominance of Nigeria, Jamie was quite amazed as he said that, “One thing that stands out for me is the coming of the Nigerians. We had no Nigerian companies in our first cohort. (In the) second cohort when we held an event in Lagos we got three of eight companies from Nigeria,”
The five-month incubation programme will provide each of the eight participants with $50 000 in direct funding, office space and accommodation.
See the selected startups below:
Bluebic (Nigeria): Cloud-based school management software for early childhood development (ECD) and K12 schools.
eLimu (Kenya): Literacy app which provides users with stories as well as games written and illustrated by teachers and artists.
Langbot (Ethiopia): Facebook messenger chatbot that uses proven gamification and AI to teach languages.
Learning Factory (Zimbabwe): Platform that provides users with multimedia educational resources delivered via a solar powered server.
Lightbulb (South Africa): Platform that connects students with experts in addition to allowing them to access educational resources online.
Nahana Africa (South Africa): Providing science and mathematics teachers with both online training as well as teaching content.
ScholarX (Nigeria): Platform which assists prospective university students source tuition.
SlateCube (Nigeria): Platform enables users to train, hire and manage top talent.