EdTech in Egypt: Prospects Fit for a Pharaoh
Egypt, the world’s most populous Arabic-speaking country, has historically been a hub for learning. At its peak in late antiquity, the Library of Alexandria reportedly housed some 700,000 different volumes; while Egypt’s present-day capital, Cairo, was home to one of the medieval world’s most influential universities, al-Azhar, whose foundation in the year 970 beat Oxford to the punch by around two centuries.
In our own time, unfortunately, Egyptian education has fallen behind. A report published in April by the emerging-market investment fund Global Ventures outlined some of the country’s challenges, including bloated student-teacher ratios and a curriculum out of step with the needs of the modern workplace — contributing to chronic underemployment among Egyptian high school and college grads. With its ballooning population (last year, it topped 100 million, fueling concerns about the strain on resources), Egypt will need to add 2.4 million new K-12 seats by 2023 just to keep pace.
Against this backdrop, the Egyptian government’s Vision 2030, which calls for “knowledge-based economic growth”through “digital transformation” and a “culture of entrepreneurship” might seem like a tall order. Yet there is good news, too. An influx of venture capital has seen the country touted as North Africa’s answer to Silicon Valley, while ongoing banking reforms are steadily opening up innovation in Egypt’s promising financial-technology sector.
In education technology, there are similarly encouraging signs. Egypt’s education ministry announced in 2018 that it had hooked some 2,500 secondary schools up to high-speed internet and was on the way to distributing tablet computers to every student. On the private sector side, Egyptian students can now enjoy the support of a number of well-funded regional edtech startups, such as the exam prep company Noon Academy and the online learning platform Abwaab.
However, with a handful of exceptions (such as the adult-learning marketplace Almentor), most of the big recent investments in Arabic-speaking education technology have been concentrated in K-12 or higher ed. That is understandable, of course: it’s where the most immediate and obvious needs lie. But, as regular readers of this blog will know, it is not enough. The knowledge economy, built as it is on the shifting sands of technology, can be as fickle as a sphinx, requiring us to learn new skills constantly. And that means lifelong education — a sector that is booming in the West but still in its infancy in the Middle East and North Africa.
For edtech investors, fulfilling that need could be a prospect as golden as King Tut’s tomb. And the opportunity goes well beyond dollars and cents — our even pounds and qirsh. Egypt is the cultural, geographic, strategic, and demographic fulcrum of the entire Middle East-North Africa region, with control over the vital Suez Canal and a population larger than the next two Arabic-speaking countries (Algeria and Iraq) combined. Today, Egypt stands at a crossroads. It could, as some predict, succumb to internal squabbling over dwindling resources, destabilizing the whole area. Alternatively, it could harness the talents of its hundred-million souls and become the economic engine of its region. Strengthening Egyptian education will help nudge the country toward the second reality. An investment in Egypt, therefore, is an investment in the prosperity and security of millions.
