How a frustrated group of African entrepreneurs built mobile-first platform to close Africa’s education gap

In 2020, Isaac Oladipupo and a small circle of Nigerian entrepreneurs reached a breaking point. Like millions of African parents and students, they had watched bright children fall behind, not because they lacked ability, but because textbooks were outdated, teachers were stretched thin, and the internet that powers most modern learning tools simply didn’t reach their classrooms.

For instance, UNESCO’s report on Transforming Learning and Skills Development notes that delivering education well is not only a fundamental human right, it is also a critical ingredient of building solid foundations for the future, empowering people not just to develop the skills they will need for the workplace, but also ensuring that they can unlock their potential as members of society.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that there are 450 million school-age children in Africa in 2025, and this population is predicted to swell to over 600 million by 2050. However, although 75 million more African children are enrolled in school today compared to 2015, the number of out-of-school children has increased by 13.2 million to over 100 million during the same period.

For Africa to actively participate in the global digital economy, it’s a continent-wide imperative to unlock not just access to education, but access to the resources that will help children thrive in education.

Millions of children across the continent are eager but struggling to learn or are dropping out due to the high cost of quality education, outdated materials, and overburdened teachers. Schools also struggle with reliable web access, as the Global Education Monitoring Report found that Africa has the lowest school connectivity globally, with most schools lacking even basic electricity, making reliable internet rare. Mobile penetration in Africa is far higher, yet many learning platforms are built for the web.

Frustrated by excuses and inspired by possibility, they decided to build the solution themselves. That decision became Afrilearn.

Starting with a simple site called ClassNotes.ng, the team created curriculum-aligned notes that students could actually access on the cheap feature phones that dominate Africa’s mobile landscape. Within two years, the platform had become Nigeria’s most popular education website and crossed one million users across the continent.

But the founders knew notes alone weren’t enough. In 2022 they relaunched as Afrilearn: a fully mobile, gamified, AI-powered K-12 learning app designed from the ground up for Africa’s realities, low data costs, patchy electricity, and the need to make studying feel like play rather than punishment.

Today the numbers tell the story the founders once only dreamed of. More than four million learners in ten African countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gambia and beyond, now use the app.

Read also: How the tech sector can work together to close education gap in Africa

Students earn coins for completing lessons, battle classmates on leaderboards, watch animated video classes, and practice for local and international exams on Exambly, Afrilearn’s free testing platform.

Over 80 percent of consistent users report better grades within a single week, and independent tracking shows average improvement of up to 52 percent after eight weeks.

The app works because it was built for the continent it serves. Lessons download for offline use, data usage is ruthlessly optimized, and the gamification keeps children coming back even when the alternative is helping at home or working.

Parents receive weekly progress reports by SMS or WhatsApp, often the first time they have had any real visibility into what their child is learning.

Behind the scenes, Afrilearn has also become a lifeline for teachers and school owners. Its new AI-powered School Management Software, developed with Microsoft and NVIDIA through their African GenAI Accelerator Programme, handles fees, attendance, report cards, and results in places where paper records used to disappear during the rainy season.

Schools using the system save more than ten administrative hours a week and have increased fee collection by 35 percent to 40 percent. Teachers, in partnership with the teacher-training organization Schoolinka, now receive continuous professional development and AI tools that write lesson plans and mark quizzes in seconds.

None of this would have scaled as quickly without deep integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem. Azure hosts the platform and powers its personalization engine, GitHub keeps a distributed engineering team in sync, and Teams and SharePoint hold together staff spread across half a dozen countries.

Upcoming releases will push even further: adaptive learning paths that adjust in real time, predictive analytics to flag children at risk of dropping out, and offline-first flows that work even when the lights go out.

Isaac Oladipupo, CEO at Afrilearn, no longer sounds frustrated. “At Afrilearn, we are the ecosystem closing the gap between Africa’s potential and its future, where no child is left behind because of where they live or how much their parents earn. We are especially excited about our upcoming product upgrades that make personalised learning even more accessible to children at home and in school. Our goal is to reach 10 million learners across 12 African countries in the next 36 months. We believe that every child deserves a quality education that positions them for future success.”

His next target is unambiguous: ten million learners across 12 African countries within the next three years, with deeper partnerships already forming with UNICEF and the African Union.

What began as a handful of angry entrepreneurs refusing to accept another generation locked out of opportunity has quietly become one of the fastest-growing education platforms on the continent, one download, one lesson, one redeemed coin at a time.

Royal Ibeh is a senior journalist with years of experience reporting on Nigeria’s technology and health sectors. She currently covers the Technology and Health beats for BusinessDay newspaper, where she writes in-depth stories on digital innovation, telecom infrastructure, healthcare systems, and public health policies.

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