AI learning platform expands across Sub-Saharan Africa
Education technology company EDATECH has expanded its AI-powered learning platform, EDAT, to schools across sub-Saharan Africa following a pilot involving more than 60 secondary schools in Edo State.
EDAT brings students, teachers, parents and school administrators onto a single platform while using artificial intelligence to provide personalised learning support based on individual student performance.
The founder of EDATECH, Sylvester Juwe, said the platform was designed to give schools a unified view of each student.
According to Juwe, the platform was developed to address the fragmentation in school systems, where institutions often use separate platforms for results, attendance, communication and other administrative functions.
He said, “Schools do not need another app. Most are already carrying several, each knowing a fragment of a child and none of them talking to the others.
“We built one system that learns each child once, so the teacher, the parent and the school leader are all working from the same understanding.”
Juwe said the expansion followed a pilot that demonstrated the platform’s potential in real school environments.
“At the January competition in Benin City, students participated in teams comprising two students, a teacher and a parent, described by the organisers as Human Fusion Units.
“The teams used machine-assisted learning to answer questions based on the same material used to establish a machine benchmark.
“Despite power and network failures during the event, students continued with the competition,” Juwe said.
The competition was held in Benin City in partnership with the Edo State Ministry of Education and the Association of Private School Owners of Nigeria.
The company’s Education Operations Lead, Davidson Ohiafi, said the platform was particularly suited to African classrooms, where teachers often have to manage large numbers of students.
Ohiafi said, “In our schools, one teacher may be facing 60 or more students, and no teacher can give each of them individual attention by willpower alone.
“Going live means every one of those children can now get support shaped around them.”
He explained that EDAT tracks students across tutoring sessions, competitions, learning games and community projects to build a continuous picture of their academic progress.
He added, “The platform also rates questions according to their difficulty, rather than simply marking answers as right or wrong, allowing student performance to be compared consistently across locations.
“Students can access information about their progress, league standings and areas requiring more practice, while teachers can monitor class performance through learning-outcome heat maps, schemes of work, lesson plans and end-of-term reports.
“The system also flags changes in student engagement, including declining effort or reduced participation, to help teachers identify potential problems earlier,” he said.
The Principal of Imaguero Secondary School, Nosa-Idiaru O. Y., whose students emerged winners, said the experience demonstrated the resilience of the platform.
“The power went off, the network failed, and my students still competed on the same terms as everyone else in that hall and finished first,” he said.
“Knowing this is now open to any school that wants it is the most encouraging thing I have heard in education in a long time.”
The technology co-founder, Nnaemeka Akabogu, said ensuring that the platform could function in environments where electricity and internet connectivity were not guaranteed was a major part of its development.
“Taking EDATECH into production meant a lot of hard work behind the scenes, much of it the kind nobody sees. But it matters, because schools need something they can count on,” he said.
EDATECH said the platform currently carries Nigerian curriculum content across 22 subjects, with more than 120,000 questions aligned with the requirements of the West African Examinations Council, the National Examinations Council and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board.
The company added that curricula for other countries could be authored and uploaded within days, allowing the platform to expand across sub-Saharan Africa without imposing a single curriculum on different education systems.
The Chief Inspector of Education for Edo State, Mercy Imasuen-Isibor, said the expansion could improve access to learning support for students.
“Our interest is straightforward: that a child in a public school in Edo has the same access to good teaching support as a child anywhere else,” she said.
“Seeing this opened to every school, and not confined to a pilot, is a step towards that.”
Media entrepreneur and EDATECH communications adviser, Chude Jideonwo, who joined the Benin City event remotely, said the success of the platform would ultimately depend on its reach.
“The test of anything built for African children is not whether it shines in a showcase, but whether it reaches an ordinary school on an ordinary morning,” he said.
Other co-founders, including Opeyemi Bright and Adeseye Ogunlewe, also described the expansion as a milestone in the company’s development.
to like, bookmark, and comment.
Comments
Join the conversation:
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.