TechCabal Daily – Giga bites with Jumia 🤝🏽

BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGY IN NIGERIA

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of young people making their way to the gates of Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.

Many factors are responsible for this. With social media bringing diverse people together and creating a kind of border collapse, there has been a rapid increase in tech advocacy among young people, including those with no tech training.

Another factor to consider is the high unemployment rate in the country. The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics recorded the youth unemployment rate at 42.5% in the last quarter of 2020. Besides individual interest, these are two of the many factors that push many people to acquire digital skills – especially programming – in order to explore its many possibilities.

Nigeria’s rutted road to technology

But learning computer programming, even with the availability of accessible online resources, YouTube tutorials, and mentoring from online developer communities, does not make coding an easy subject for most newbies whose computer skills are in thin air. limit to MS Word and Mavis Beacon; many drop out of the course after only a few weeks of learning.

For Nigerian tech newbies, the reasons to quit aren’t far-fetched. In the absence of bootcamps, healthy tools, power outages that will certainly last for days, conducive environments and few resources for Internet connections, the constraints quickly become glaring for our aspiring developer.

Read more: Breaking Through Technology: The Struggle of Lower Class Nigerians.

PAYSTACK PRESENTS A WORK OF ART

TYRO ACQUIRES NAFHAM

This is Africa’s M&A quarter, and the latest Egyptian acquisition of edutech is proof of that.

In the latest news, Nafham, an edutech start-up describing school programs in Egypt, has just been acquired by Tyro. Nafham is a free platform that provides simplified explanations of topics taught in the MENA region in five to twenty minute videos.

Pass: Founded in 2015, the platform is one of the largest online educational platforms in the Middle East, with 6 million annual users and over 150 million views on its video content.

Novice, on the other hand, is an online tutoring platform where students can prepare for exams like IELTS or ACT, and learn a new language. Unlike Nafham, the platform provides paid services for students who want to learn from expert instructors around the world. Since its creation in 2017, Tyro has carried out 50,000 paid sessions on its platform, helping students in the region to improve their knowledge of English, French and mathematics, among other subjects.

Become the largest edutech in the MENA region

Nafham and Tyro are both doing great things in education with technology. While Nafham has a larger following with its pre-recorded sessions, Tyro has a more advanced platform that hosts live sessions.

The essence of the acquisition is to merge the two forces.

According to Tyro CEO Mokhtar Osman, the acquisition aims to capitalize on the technological capabilities and customer base of both platforms to take Nafham to the next level. “The two companies joining forces will make us technically the largest educational platform in the MENA region, offering both online one-to-one tuition and recorded educational video content,” he said.

Zoom out: The Tyro acquisition will see the company leading the leadership of Nafham in expanding the platform’s offerings and capabilities. In fact, Tyro has already secured funds for the new entity from several investors, including Flat6Labs and NXL Partners.

JOIN THE AFRICA OF THE FUTURE COLLECTIVE

INCREASED CONNECTIVITY WITH JUMIA AND UNICEF

COVID has highlighted a lot. From highlighting virtual working conditions to cat videos, many relevant questions regarding the technology have come to light.

One of them is the number of children, as a result of the blockades, who could not go to school because they did not have access to the Internet at home. UNICEF estimates the number of children not connected to 63 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), 9 out of 10 children are not connected.

As countries gradually lift lockdown measures, it is becoming evident that disconnection is not only an issue at home but also in schools, especially in developing countries in Africa. Internet penetration on the continent is low at 39 percent and this also includes education centers.

UNICEF and Jumia want to change this.

Offer the Internet to children

UNICEF has engaged Jumia as a partner for its Giga project.

Giga is an initiative launched by UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2019 to connect every school to the Internet. Since its inception, the project has successfully mapped more than one million needy schools in Central Asia and the Eastern Caribbean, successfully connecting 3,000 of them.

Now the organization is turn to Jumia—A company with unique local expertise and already existing data maps — to help map key locations in Africa where schools may need connectivity. Jumia will also work on the development of two prototype digital payment mechanisms that would provide a more efficient procurement process for the project in Africa.

LEARN WITH EFFORT