EDUPRENEURS: NETWORKING AND EMPOWERING EDUCATION ENTREPRENEURS TOWARDS A RESILIENT EDTECH ECOSYSTEM IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
About the project
The purpose of this project is to develop a digital business ecosystem in Southern Africa able to leverage the edtech infrastructure and education software development in the region. Such an ecosystem aims at solving challenges risen due to the lack of digital infrastructure and personnel with digital competencies, even more exacerbated due to the covid-19 pandemic. Although there are few relevant edech solutions across Southern Africa, such initiatives still remain isolated, decreasing the potential of consolidating successes to the regional level.
The project approach aims at building a strong collaboration between its stakeholder through participatory design and strong collaboration. For the initial stage of building up the ecosystem, the consortium members will guide all the project stakeholders with a participatory design and co-creation methodology to think collectively about the three final outcomes: the digital platform, the capacity building and the policy paper. In addition, the consortium will guarantee that all the project stakeholders will establish and maintain functioning corporations and communication among each other, so that the ecosystem becomes sustainable.
Key Objectives
- To build a digital platform for strategic partnership. we will provide the needed digital infrastructure for entrepreneurs to collect and process data about potential customers across the region; to network with relevant stakeholders (b2b and b2c); and to promote their services and products.
- To increase digital and business competence through capacity building. we will empower education stakeholders, software developers, and entrepreneurs on digitizing processes and innovating business towards sustainable economic growth and resilience in challenging times.
- To publish a policy paper on building-up a resilient business ecosystem. We will integrate practical experience with knowledge creation, resulting in a policy paper for supporting southern africa governments to consolidate resilient start-up ecosystems in sectors other than the edtech field.
Together, they solve the current problems in the southern africa start-up ecosystem, because they give the digital infrastructure for business networking, capacity building for empowering stakeholders, and knowledge transfer for broader scalability.
Project Partners