Nigerian startup uLesson raised $3.1m in seed funding led by TLcom Capital, looking to bridge the student/teacher ration in Africa. The startup integrates mobile platforms, SD cards, and culture-specific curricular to offer educational materials to secondary students. According to Tech Crunch, uLesson will go live in February 2020 in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Gambia.
uLesson targets the Anglophone countries in West Africa, where they face rapidly growing populations. Sim Shagaya, the founder, cites that West Africa has a population of almost 300 million with high teacher deficiencies. For instance, Sim cites that markets like Nigeria have a teacher to student ratio as low as 1:70.
“We’re targeting Anglophone West Africa…for a market of effectively 300 million people,” Shagaya told Tech Crunch.
“We have this massive gap…We’re adding more babies in this country nominally than all of Western Europe. Even if the [Nigerian] government was super efficient, it couldn’t catch up with the educational needs of the young people that are coming up,” continued Shagaya.
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uLesson will offer app-based home kits to reach students in high school with a subscription worth $70 annually. The app hopes to add a human element to their approach by deploying counselors to follow up on lesson plans.
Shagaya also revealed that the platform would offer an in-between for individuals who cannot afford a tutor. Finally, the founder plans to expand to East Africa after establishing a presence in West Africa.
