Agree or Disagree: We Need Less Edtech

I was talking to a group of students — smart, curious, clearly motivated — and at some point I started asking about the tools they use for studying. Not just Wekoya. All of it. The apps. The platforms. The resources.

And what I found wasn't what I expected.

These students had access. Many of them had phones. Several already had accounts on various edtech platforms. The tools existed.

But they weren't using them.

Not because of connectivity. Not because of cost — at least not for the ones in that room. It was something else. Some didn't quite understand how to get value from the tools. Some didn't see the tools as relevant to what they were actually trying to do — pass their exams, understand a concept, prepare for a specific challenge. Some had simply never been shown why the tools mattered.

I kept asking myself the same question on the drive back:

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If students have access to the tools and still aren't using them — what exactly are we building?

Here's the thing about the edtech industry right now — it's loud. I see an average of 10 new edtech products every week. Sometimes more. Every week, someone is launching a platform, an app, a learning management system, an AI tutor, a gamified curriculum tool.

Nigeria alone has 34% of the top 50 edtech companies in Africa. The market is projected to reach $400 million in Nigeria by end of 2025. Globally, edtech crossed $189 billion last year.

The numbers are impressive. The activity is undeniable.

But here's the question that keeps me up at night: How much of that activity is translating into actual learning?

Because the evidence is uncomfortable.

A landmark study across 73,000 students and over 1,000 schools in Sub-Saharan Africa found that the promise of edtech as an equalizing force remains largely unfulfilled — not because of a lack of technology, but because of inadequate digital literacy, limited teacher preparedness, and tools that were simply not designed for the context they were dropped into.

Research in Nigeria specifically found that many edtech programmes fail before they even start. Devices get locked in cupboards. Platforms go unused. Technology becomes — in the words of one researcher — "a decorative idea rather than a learning tool."

And then there's the line that hit me hardest when I read it recently, about Edukoya — one of Nigeria's most promising edtech startups, which raised $3.5 million, the largest pre-seed of its kind in Africa at the time, and shut down in early 2025:

"Outputs are not outcomes."

Part of the problem is what we celebrate.

We celebrate downloads. We celebrate accounts created. We celebrate devices distributed. We celebrate funding rounds. We celebrate press coverage.

A 2024 analysis by NORRAG found that many edtech programmes — including donor-funded ones — measure success by the number of devices distributed or applications installed, rather than tracking whether students actually learned anything differently.

That's not impact. That's activity dressed up as impact.

And as founders, we're not innocent in this. The pressure to show growth — from investors, from partners, from the industry — pushes us toward metrics that are easy to count. Downloads are easy to count. Learning outcomes are not.

The result? We build for optics. We ship features that look impressive in a demo. We design for the person signing the procurement contract, not the 15-year-old sitting in a classroom in Lekki trying to understand quadratic equations before WAEC.

This is the part that the industry needs to sit with.

For years, the narrative has been: if we just get devices into the hands of students, everything changes. And there was a time when that was partially true — pure access was the bottleneck.

But for a growing number of students, especially in urban Nigeria, that bottleneck has shifted. The Rwanda example is instructive: a large-scale government laptop distribution programme did not improve learning outcomes in maths or reading. Not because the laptops were bad. Because laptops alone were never the answer.

The bottleneck now is adoption. Relevance. Behaviour change.

Teachers who understand how to integrate tools. Platforms that meet students where they actually are — linguistically, culturally, academically.

The industry hasn't fully caught up to this shift. We're still optimizing for access in a world where many students already have access but still aren't engaging.

I run an edtech company. I believe in what we're building at Wekoya. But sitting in that classroom in Lekki, I had to ask myself honestly: Are we part of this problem?

Are we designing for real student behaviour, or for the ideal student we imagine in our heads? Are we measuring whether students are actually learning better, or just whether they're logging in? Are we building for the exam halls of Lagos and Ibadan, or for some abstracted version of a learner that doesn't quite exist?

These questions don't have easy answers. But I think the willingness to ask them is what separates builders who genuinely want impact from those who want to be in edtech.

I don't think the answer is less edtech. I think the answer is more honest edtech.

That means:

I came back from Lekki unsettled — but not discouraged.

Because what I also saw was hunger. Students who want to do well. Students who were genuinely excited when they understood that the tools they'd been given could actually help them prepare for their exams. Students who just needed someone to show them the bridge between the technology and their actual goal.

That's the job. Not building the most feature-rich platform. Not raising the biggest round. Not getting on a top 50 list.

The job is making sure that a student in a public secondary school in Lagos can open a tool, immediately understand why it matters for them, and leave that interaction a little more prepared than they were before.

We haven't fully solved that yet. Nobody has. But it's the only problem worth solving.

Joshua Obimba is the Co-founder & CEO of Wekoya, a learning platform built to help African students prepare for and succeed in their examinations. Wekoya recently partnered with Caring Hands Empowerment Foundation for an educational outreach at Top Goodness Secondary School, Lekki, Lagos.