TechCabal Daily – With 91% of students affected by shutdowns, is it go-time for edtechs?

91.3% of the world’s learning population have been affected by the pandemic

But despite the global upheaval, it is an opportunity for edtech startups in Africa to prove their usefulness.

Before now, African edtech companies have tried to break through the noise. Many offer learning tools for primary, secondary and pre-university students.
One group of people who will be thankful for these edtech products are parents who work from home. Working from home is hard. But try combining that with dealing with energetic and idle children who have nothing to hold their attention.

Last week, this article showed that schools in Nigeria are using Google Classroom and Zoom to keep learning going. But this week, Kay moves the conversation forward.

She talked to industry players like uLesson, Simbi Interactive and eLimu. The startups are seeing an increase in the number of users, with eLimu reporting over 3,000 users daily.

But Kay spots a market gap: there are few edtech apps for university students.

Here’s an excerpt from Kay’s article:

“there will still be millions of university students across the continent who will be unable to continue learning because the infrastructure, skill and structures are not in place to enable online or distance learning.”

DSTV Now, the streaming service which will allow MultiChoice mount a streaming challenge to Netflix will delayed. DSTV Now will allow customers access all DSTV’s content without using a decoder.

DSTV Now currently functions as an add-on for customers with active DSTV subscriptions. But the plan to make it a standalone service dates back to 2017.

The first target date for its launch was 2019. MultiChoice later changed this date to March 2020. But there will be more delays because of the coronavirus pandemic.

MyBroadBand quotes MultiChoice as saying: “We’ve completed development work and are in the second round of field trials. “We expect to launch commercially once the operating environment has normalised,”

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“It is definitely not a good time to go out to try to raise capital. Now is the time to lock down your cash resources,” White said.

“Whatever you can do to bolster your cash acquisition, you need to do that and you need to buy time. And that’s the real challenge with this situation. We don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

– Ben White, Founder/CEO, VC4A

According to this Stears business report, the global response to the coronavirus pandemic is affecting economies. Many countries are showing record lows in purchasing managers indices (PMI).

In Africa, the outlook is grim, with Quartz Africa reporting that the health crisis is quickly turning into an economic crisis. Despite the gloom, Kay reports that African startups are trying to keep their heads up.

“A lot of entrepreneurs will be faced with some tough decisions as they try to navigate liquidity crisis, layoffs, customer losses, and distorted sales cycles but coming out triumphant at the end boils down to being able to decide what should stay and what should go and advice from their investors will be very critical at this time.”

The short answer: No.

The long answer: No, but with 400 more words.

In this article, Techpoint answers 11 questions about 5G as the battle against misinformation continues. Here’s the WHO backing up the fact that 5G is not harmful.

“To date, and after much research performed, no adverse health effect has been causally linked with exposure to wireless technologies. Health-related conclusions are drawn from studies performed across the entire radio spectrum and provided that the overall exposure remains below international guidelines, no consequences for public health are anticipated.”

Other things we are reading:

+ How a 3-month internet shutdown in Ethiopia affected millions of people

+ Safaricom & Vodacom complete the acquisition of the M-PESA brand

+ Yet another article that reminds us that 5G poses no health risks. Sorry, conspiracy theorists.