5 Lessons from Nigeria’s Largest EdTech Company

The Alternative to Advice on “What Edukoya Could Have Done Differently” 

Over the weekend, I was scrolling on LinkedIn when I came across a post detailing the many things Edukoya “could have done differently.” For the uninitiated, Edukoya was a Nigerian edtech startup, founded by Honey Ogundeyi. The company raised a $3.5m pre-seed in 2021, which at the time was reportedly the largest pre-seed round ever raised by an African startup. 

When the company announced it would be ceasing operations and returning the balance of capital raised to its investors, it spurred a ton of conversations. And while it’s important that we dialogue so that learnings can be unearthed and applied to the next crop of companies, we, all of us, need to be careful to not be on the sidelines passing strong judgements. Social media can become a megaphone where a person without any or with limited experience, figuratively yells at the top of their lungs commentary they have no business sharing. 

Theodore Roosevelt, in his famous speech, Citizenship in a Republic, said:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. 

I love this quote. I love the imagery. And I love how relevant it is for today. 

That said, cheers to Honey and the entire team at Edukoya for the time they spent in the arena. I wish you all the very best in this trying business of building in/for Nigeria. 

Now, on to the meat of this article. I thought it would be fun to take some of the comments I’ve seen around Edukoya’s shutdown and illuminate them using my learnings from leading operations at Nigeria’s largest edtech company, The uLesson Group.

Let’s get into it. 

Commentator: “Imagine if they [Edukoya] partnered with a mobile device company in China or Japan to build affordable, preloaded educational tablets.” 

This was the comment that stopped me in my tracks, so it’s fitting that I begin here. Why did I respond so strongly to this? Mostly because it was shocking that anyone commenting on education in Nigeria would suggest this given the significant devaluation of the naira against the dollar that has more than doubled hardware costs in the last 18 months. At uLesson K12, our preloaded education tablet, produced by a manufacturing partner in China, was a staple of our product offerings. But in 2024, we made a strategic pivot to sell those tablets only to the government. The naira devaluation drove up the cost of production and delivery of the tablets. Rising inflation and the impact of policies drove down the average Nigerian’s spending power. Our target market shrunk to an unviable size and selling to the government, in bulk, became the only reasonable business decision. 

So to suggest that Edukoya could have just partnered with a mobile device company in China or Japan to build affordable, preloaded educational tablets, is to show a shallow understanding of what exactly that entails as well as a lack of awareness of how the leading edtech in Nigeria has had to pivot in that area. 

Commentator: “Government Partnerships = Mass Adoption” 

If only it was as easy as an equation. Call a governor = your edtech product in all the schools in that state. For one, it takes a special type of team to crack the B2G (business to government) sales channel in any baseline, functional government. It takes an even higher grade of special sauce to be able to crack it, with all its complexity, in Nigeria. But the commentator has a point. Ideally, if you have an effective edtech solution that’s clearly driving outcomes, you can partner with the government to do that at scale. At uLesson K12, we partnered with the NDDC to deliver 45,000 of our education tablets to denizens of the Niger Delta. At Miva Open University, we have partnered with the Ministry of Health to train 774+ National Health Fellows. Partnerships with the Nigerian government are hard won and not without additional obstacles once the deal is inked. But, indeed, the B2G channel is a strong avenue towards mass adoption. 

Commentator: Edukoya should have built an AI-powered learning assistant that uses storytelling to teach core subjects. 

Leveraging AI to drive learning outcomes is a good suggestion and not surprising given how top-of-mind AI is right now. That storytelling is more engaging and leads to higher retention is also true. At uLesson and Miva, we are constantly finding ways to incorporate AI into our design, development, delivery and support processes. We’ve enjoyed some cost savings and have seen the efficacy of using AI in our content development and we’re currently building some next-level, outcomes-driving use cases for AI at Miva (more on this soon). 

Two additional thoughts: 

Sachetization

In the discussions around this shutdown were additional interesting takes. A former colleague mentioned sachetizing the product and the impacts of that decision. And I liked that he brought that up. Let’s talk about that a little bit: 

First things first, what is sachetizing? It’s essentially taking a product and breaking it into lower-cost pieces that more people can access at that lower price. Yomi Jemibewon of CardinalStone (also a Wharton MBA grad, ayyy) explains it really nicely in this video interview with Venture Valley. 

Sachetizing can increase your addressable market but introduces a host of challenges. If you initially charge 200,000 naira for a semester of classes and create an entry at 50,000 naira, with the opportunity to pay 50,000 naira each month for the next three months, you are more likely to churn the students who enroll at 50k than those who enroll at 200k. Essentially, retention takes a hit when you sachetize. Even if your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) doesn’t change or goes down a bit due to the increased pool of customers, your LTV (LifeTime Value) decreases, tanking your LTV/CAC ratio. 

PainKillers vs Vitamins

The edtech space is particularly difficult because a lot of the solutions that are focused directly on the customers are “vitamins” and not “painkillers.” 

In the education space, painkillers are the actual primary and secondary schools, degree-awarding tertiary institutions and job-placing certification programs. Vitamins are the after-school support tools, like Edukoya. 

Painkillers are the necessary items. Vitamins are supplements. Most people cannot do without a painkiller if they’re in pain. But they can skip on vitamins, especially if they are in a cash crunch.

This becomes evident in the edtech sector, when the macroeconomic climate has shifted. Vitamins get dropped, painkillers survive. At The uLesson Group, we’ve seen this impact on uLesson K12, which is a category vitamin vs Miva Open University, a private degree-awarding tertiary institution, a painkiller. If you’re starting a business in any sector, particularly in education, you need to be clear on what category your business falls into and be prepared to address the shift in customer demand based on what it is. 

Finally, execution >> ideas, always. So while we can brainstorm ideas based on the case study of a fallen company, execution is all that really matters. MJ DeMarco, author of The Millionaire Fastlane goes as far as saying “the owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.” 

Let’s keep imagining, but let’s always prioritize execution. And may we, who remain in the arena, continue to strive valiantly. 

Thanks for reading. Stay in touch with me via LinkedIn to be informed when there’s a new article published. And feel free to contact me for speaking and other partnerships.

Aniekeme