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Nigeria’s educational sector is confronted with a combination of issues ranging from inadequate funding and obsolete organisational structures to lack of quality teachers and limited access to information.
To change this narrative in the sector and ensure that parents and students are well-informed in making choices, Jide Ayegbusi and Babajide Esho are using technology to redefine the sector.
Jide Ayegbusi
Jide Ayegbusi is the founder of Edusko Africa, a start-up business that connects parents and students with good and affordable private schools across Africa. The organisation also assists parents in making informed choices on their wards’ education ranging from elementary to tertiary institutions.
Lack of adequate information in the country’s educational sector for parents inspired Jide to establish Edusko in 2015. “There is limited information about the schools and parents have had to make this important decision on hearsay, shallow neighbour referrals and Google search,” Jide said.
“With over 80,000 private schools in the country, it is very difficult for parents to make the choice of the right school for their children,” the young entrepreneur stated.
Jide started his business in 2015 with N500, 000 which he got from his personal savings.
According to him, the business started generating revenue after the first six months of its establishment, stating that the business has grown tremendously owing to the highly motivated team he works with.
The Psychology graduate said that the major challenge confronting his business is getting schools to share his information with him.
He stated that all that is fast changing now as Edusko is getting a lot of referrals from schools that are already on board with them. “At the moment, we have listed about 4,000 schools and more than 5,000 parents have directly been referred to our partner schools. We are currently in over 30 states in Nigeria and over 10 regions in Ghana,” Jide added.
Jide urged the government to improve the country’s ease of doing business so that businesses, especially start-ups, can be profitable, adding that Nigeria ought to have a better business environment than South-Africa because of its population and large economic size.
The psychologist-turned- entrepreneur called on the government to grant tax incentives to small businesses and provide adequate financing to increase their survival rate. “Start-ups should also be given enough tax holidays, maybe 10 years, so that they are able to grow without any hindrance,” he said.
Jide said that Africa’s educational technology market is currently worth about $16 billion and expected to grow by 21 percent.
He said that the educational sector is very crucial in Nigeria’s quest for diversification, stating that the country should invest 26percent of its annual budget to the sector as recommended by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to diversify the economy, stressing that the place of education can never be ignored.
He said every entrepreneur should always think of solutions to problems they have identified in their society and work with a quality team to achieve objectives.
“Entrepreneurship, for me, is not just about starting a business and making money. It’s about problem-solving. Opportunities for business success abound where there are many problems to be solved like we have in Africa,” he told Start-Up Digest.
Babajide Esho
Babajide Esho is the founder of Skoolkive, an online educational platform that helps schools automate and effectively manage their processes. The platform helps school administrators and parents to easily receive and make payments through a single channel.
The business, through its biometric features, also helps record students’ clock-in and clock-out, which can be sent to parents to enable them to effectively and efficiently monitor their children in secondary schools.
Jide was inspired to establish Skoolkive to help address some of the challenges in Nigeria’s educational system. He established the business in early 2017.
Jide and his partners pooled funds from personal savings and secured a pre-seed funding from Procyon Group, which cumulatively amounted to over N2.5 million.
The Actuarial Science undergraduate tells Start-Up Digest that the business has grown since starting over six months ago. He says that the business has experienced early adopters of its technology in parts of Lagos and has signed a partnership deal with the regional sections of National Associations of Proprietors of Private Schools.
It has not all been rosy for the University of Lagos undergraduate’s Skoolkive start-up business, as access to relevant data has remained a key challenge confronting it.
“Access to the relevant data, which is critical to our business, was a very big challenge when we started. There wasn’t enough data we could access on key figures in education such as updated number of schools in Nigeria and number of student enrolments for the past five years among others,” the young entrepreneur says.
Jide wants the government to take more radical approach to data collation, emphasising the relevance of data in planning and decision-making. He also notes that such data should be made available in the public domain.
The young entrepreneur stresses that it is the various challenges in the education sector that has made the country lose over $4 billion to other countries from Nigerians schooling aboard, adding that if the government had invested heavily to develop the sector, the estimated dollar spent would have helped in growing the Nigerian economy.
“Some of these propositions include our partnerships with financial technology companies, which allow partner parents to access loans that will enable them pay school fees via salary deductions. This is an initiative we believe will keep us in business for a long time,” he discloses.
When asked his advice to other younger entrepreneurs, he says, “Understanding that you might fail many times before you eventually get it right, is one advice entrepreneurs need to always remember. I lost count of many things I failed at a particular project because I always kept on trying to build something amazing that people want.”
Josephine Okojie
