Experts in the education sector have advocated the need for more financing to boost the quality of education in Nigeria.

This was the takeout at the just concluded March edition of Edtech Mondays, an initiative organised by the Co-Creation Hub in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation’s Centre for Innovative Teaching & Learning in ICT.

 The engagement session themed, ‘Accelerating Edtech Financing for Equity and Access in Nigeria,’ was moderated by the Programme Associate, Education, CCHUB, Abigail Anaza-Mark.

 Speaking during the panel session, the Chief Executive Officer/ Co-Founder, Edupoint, Oscar Obiorah, noted that there was no doubt that private investment had contributed a lot in amplifying the reach of ed-tech solutions and consequently improving the quality of education in Nigeria.

“Beyond that, education has become more accessible, and affordable with financing for edtech solutions. Also, we are beginning to see ed-tech start-ups delve into R&D to improve the learning outcome of students,” he said.

While restating the significance of public-private partnerships in the overall success of ed-tech financing, he urged the government to be more involved to achieve the desired results.  He explained that ed-tech founders must now begin to devise innovations that would accommodate everyone regardless of class or status.

In her remarks, Executive Director, LEAP Africa, Kehinde Ayeni, equally noted that a lot of resources and funds had been mobilised into the development and adoption of edtech solutions both pre and post-COVID globally.

While acknowledging challenges associated with accessing funds for ed-tech solutions in Nigeria, Ayeni attributed the challenges to factors such as duplicity of efforts among edtech innovators, lack of scalability to the work, and inadequate research to guarantee monitoring and evaluation outcomes reflect the sustainability of their business model. He urged the government to incentivise the use of technology in its policy framework as this will go a long way to make the policy more practicable

Another expert,  Gbenga Agoye, explained that there had been growing interest in edtech solutions as a lot of investors are now staking their funds on those solutions.

He identified scalability, market potentials, efficacy, and infrastructure of the solutions as critical factors investors consider in determining viability.