According to BD Funding Tracker, only 0.72% of the continent’s total venture capital was raised by African edtech entrepreneurs in 2022. Under its Edtech Fellowship Program, Co-Creation Hub (CcHub) hopes to raise this number over the following three years.
Between now and 2025, the accelerator programme plans to invest $15 million into 72 startups in Nigeria and Kenya. “We will introduce 72 edtech startups to the market during the next three years. Since you can be very certain that half of them — or 20–30% — would survive for an additional three–four years, we think this will jump-start the ecosystem and restart it. And by doing so, we’ll be able to determine whether technology can actually improve education in Africa “CcHUB’s co-founder and CEO, Bosun Tijani, stated.
The internal research team at CcHUB will collaborate with portfolio businesses through this accelerator to test their products from launch to scaling. Expert assistance in product development, government relations, pedagogy and learning science, portfolio management, communication, instructional design, and community building will also be offered by the premier African innovation centre.
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These groups will be essential to how each startup conducts team development, MVP and prototype testing, go-to-market strategies, interaction with organisations, and user feedback gathering through providing common resources. These added benefits will go beyond the original $100,000 in programme financing that entrepreneurs would get. In addition to the accelerator, there is a provision for follow-on investment, which will give seed or Series A investors diversity and decrease risk.
“If we invest intentionally in a very structured edtech inclusive ecosystem of government, teachers, investors, foundations, and even in some cases, the students and their parents, we believe that we can begin to gain a better understanding of how to use technology to improve learning in schools,” Tijani said in an interview with TechCrunch. “It is important that when we build a program that not only finds the smartest people in the startup ecosystem but also connects the startup ecosystem with government authorities, public sectors, schools, and academic institutions so that we can ensure that there’s a clear understanding of how to scale education solutions in the space.”
This fund’s establishment demonstrates the Tijani-led innovation hub’s ongoing interest in the edtech market. 2020 saw the acquisition of eLimu by CcHub, a significant distributor of digital educational resources and edtech in Kenya. According to CcHUB at the time, the acquisition’s objective was to turn eLimu into its digital education platform division.
Prior to this purchase, CcHUB collaborated with Nigeria’s top educational institution, Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED), to establish an Edtech Center of Excellence in 2019.
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And in August 2020, iHub, which CcHub bought in 2019, launched the iHub Teachers’ Lounge to provide instructors with the 21st-century teaching techniques and online teaching resources they need for more effective teaching methods and classroom collaboration.
In Africa, CcHUB boasts of a network of over 1100 startups that can be traced back to the hub’s innovation-focused programmes and interventions, more than 7,300 direct jobs created by its portfolio companies, 35,000+ indirect jobs created by portfolio companies through their value chain, more than $10 million invested in direct startups by CcHUB, and more than $150 million in outside funding attracted by the startups in their portfolio.
Co-Creation Hub fund startups Co-Creation Hub fund startups
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard