Nigeria is home to around 935 edtech startups, with an average of 77 new companies launched annually over the past decade. Globally, edtech carries a 60% failure rate—higher than most sectors, with closures clustered between years two and five, according to IndiaTimesJobs. 

AptLearn, a Nigerian edtech platform, shut down this month. It wasn’t unusual, as the EdTech sector was facing a funding drought according to Techcabal’s SOTIA report 2025. The companies exiting show a quiet withdrawal from a market they entered with considerable ambition. 

Each edtech startup arrives carrying a version of the same promise to democratise access to education, make learning affordable, and close the skills gap. Africa’s e-learning market was valued at approximately $3.4 billion in 2024, with projections reaching $19.7 billion by 2034. The survival data, however, tells a different story. “Edtech is hitting what we call the peak of disillusionment, quite the opposite of what I’d have expected considering the latest AI hype,” said Prosperity Olorunfemi, an edTech expert

AptLearn lasted four years. Edukoya, which raised what was then Africa’s largest pre-seed funding round of $3.5 million in 2021, did not reach its fifth. 

The market, by every forward-looking measure, appears substantial. And yet the companies building inside it keep closing. 

Converting free users to paid subscribers is the core constraint

The most persistent problem in African edtech is that reach is not revenue, and the sector has never properly solved conversion. 

AptLearn, founded by Akinola Abdulakeem (Àgbà Akin) and Adebisi Covenant, reported 200,000 users. Its fees ranged from $5 to $15, discounted from the original prices of $20 to $75. But even at those reduced rates, the pricing sits uncomfortably against a country where roughly 60% of Nigerians earn ₦100,000 or less per month. AptLearn was, in practice, a product for the urban middle class, carrying a democratisation narrative that it could not operationalise. The user it claimed to serve and the user who could actually pay were, more often than not, different people.

Olorunfemi says that “Except edtech startups are ready to play the game of making things very cheap for direct-to-consumer (DTC) between $1 and $5 and build systems and a brand that can help them to pursue economies of scale, I doubt they are ready to play in this market.” 

AptLearn’s promise of an AI pivot does not resolve a willingness-to-pay problem. When Zummit Africa, a Nigerian edtech startup, offered its AI-assisted learning services for free after launching in 2021, it achieved an intake rate of 80 to 90%. When it introduced a subscription model in 2022, that rate dropped to 30%. The pattern is not unique to Nigeria. Duolingo, one of the best-resourced language learning platforms in Africa, spent six years growing a free user base before attempting to monetise. By then, its users were conditioned to be free. As recently as 2022, only 6.8% of Duolingo’s 100 million monthly active users had paid for the ad-free tier. The freemium trap looks the same regardless of geography or funding level.

The trouble runs deeper than pricing, however. Even where the willingness to pay exists, the ability to act on it is constrained by infrastructure. A 50% telecom tariff hike in Nigeria in early 2025 raised data costs for consumers at precisely the moment edtech platforms needed deeper engagement, not less. Electricity access, device affordability, and data costs are active variables shaping user behaviour right now.

It competes for this data with other online activities. By 2025, 65% of global mobile screen time was spent on social and messaging apps. The phones edtech depends on for distribution are the same devices that TikTok, YouTube, and WhatsApp have spent billions engineering for maximum attention retention — all free, all algorithmically optimised. 

Beyond attention, there is the question of value itself. 

Edtech is not fintech

Fintech’s value proposition is immediate with money moved, credit accessed, and a bill paid. African fintech also inherited a pre-existing appetite for financial services and a mobile infrastructure layer. Learning offers a deferred return that depends entirely on the labour market honouring the credential. That is a harder sell. “It’s a plus. I’m much more focused on experience over academic qualifications except when I must look out for qualifications and certifications,” said GenZ HR

The platforms that have survived in African edtech tend not to primarily sell to individual learners. 

The B2B route has the clearest track record. Utiva and Yakili have sustained themselves by pivoting toward corporate training programmes. South Africa’s GetSmarter, which partners with universities to deliver online short courses, attracted significant investment before a clean acquisition by a global edtech company — one of the few unambiguous exits the African edtech sector has produced. Each of these businesses survives because its customers have a defined budget and a clear organisational incentive to spend it. 

Government and NGO partnerships offer a second viable path. In Nigeria, nearly all edtech activity is currently driven by startups, NGOs, and international organisations, not the state, which directs up to 98% of its education budget to salaries. In 2024, the Enugu State government partnered with Edves, a school management platform, to roll out smart school infrastructure across 260 schools. The model requires patience and navigating procurement cycles, but it produces a paying customer with institutional staying power.

The third path, and arguably the hardest to execute, is pricing discipline embedded in the product from the start. Tuteria has sustained itself by charging a commission on every lesson booked through its platform. 

Duolingo spent 13 years, a $183 million in fundraising, and a public listing before the model worked. It now has eight million paid subscribers and $748 million in annual revenue. That trajectory is unreplicable for most African startups operating with smaller rounds, tighter runways, and a user base with substantially less disposable income.

Of 935 Nigerian edtech startups, only 52 are funded. “The real players know that Edtech in Africa is a grant-based industry and will prefer you to register as a Social Enterprise and not a corporate organisation. It takes resilience to survive and thrive in Edtech, and very patient capital, the kind that VCs don’t like.” The investment that did arrive often tracked founder pedigree more than model viability. Sim Shagaya‘s uLesson raised $15 million in Series B funding at the time, the largest disclosed investment in African edtech, on the strength of a founder who had previously built and sold Konga. AptLearn had no equivalent signal. 

Edukoya said it was “ahead of its time.” AptLearn says it needs a “strategic reset.”

“Edtech builders are learning and readjusting to focus more on solutions that are solving these real problems that hold back Education in Africa than just jumping on promises of outsized returns due to a “1 Billion” market size that looks fancy only on paper but is unattainable due to the challenges.”

“This is evidenced by the recent investment thesis for the Mastercard Foundation Edtech program, although I strongly doubt they’ll find enough startups that fit that criterion,” He added

AptLearn’s closing statement says the platform will return with an approach that is more accessible, more affordable, and free. That is not a reset. It is a restatement of the original problem, with a different adjective attached.

The demand for skills development is genuine, but demand is not the same as a paying customer. The platforms most likely to survive in the edtech market in Africa will be those that recognised that distinction at the point of founding and built a transaction into the product before they built anything else. 

Last updated: April 18, 2026