The revolt began, as many modern ones do, on social media.
In October, AltSchool Africa—the Nigerian edtech startup that trains Africans with in-demand tech skills—found itself on trial in the court of X. Current and former students complained of poor grading, missing lectures, and glitchy logins. Some called it a scam, others a disappointment.
Together, their stories exposed a deeper crack in Africa’s edtech dream. What happens when the promise of upward mobility is built faster than the system meant to deliver it?
In Lagos, ambition is a public performance. Everyone is building something, raising something, or pivoting to something new. The city hums with the vocabulary of tech—“scale,” “impact,” “disruption”—but few startups have tried to reimagine education with the same audacity as AltSchool.
Founded in 2021 by Adewale Yusuf, Akintunde Sultan, and Opeyemi Awoyemi, in the middle of a pandemic and a talent exodus, AltSchool didn’t just want to teach Africans to code; it wanted to manufacture employable humans for the digital economy.
The promise was seductive in that if the universities had failed to prepare the next generation for tech jobs, maybe a startup could.
But in recent months, that promise has started to fray.
A promise of shortcuts
The idea of AltSchool, when it launched, was revolutionary. In Nigeria’s public universities, strikes stalled learning, tuition was rising, and Africa’s tech industry was ballooning. In that vacuum, AltSchool’s offer—a diploma in tech within a year—was like a lifeline. It spoke directly to a generation eager to skip bureaucracy and enter the fast lane of the digital economy.
“I was part of the pioneer set in 2022,” said Peculiar Richard, a software engineer who joined AltSchool’s first software engineering cohort. “There were three semesters in a year, and for each semester, there were live classes every week, tests to follow, and final exams [to grade performance]. They took attendance seriously. You couldn’t graduate if you missed too many.”
The structure was strict, she said, but effective. “AltSchool taught from the basics—hardware, software, how the internet works—before moving to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. It was fast-paced, but the tutors were brilliant.”
For Richard, the experience was transformative. “I was working in marketing then, and AltSchool helped me land my first tech job as a frontend developer,” she said. “They even sent job recommendations through TalentQL, their sister company. It worked.”
She still keeps in touch with fellow alumni, a group that meets regularly to share job leads and even pool money for new courses. “That’s one thing they did right,” she said. “The community.”
That sense of structure and community was the promise AltSchool sold. A rigorous learning, career support, and belonging in a world where self-learning often feels isolating. But as the platform expanded—adding new courses and enrolling thousands of students across Africa—that scaffolding began to strain.
The unravelling
By 2024, AltSchool had scaled rapidly. While it declined to specify the number of learners on its platform today, it said it has “thousands,” shuffling into newly-created tracks and schools in product, data, and engineering. AltSchool’s social media feeds were filled with testimonials and congratulatory posts, the visual grammar of modern edtech like laptop selfies, confetti emojis, and stories of transformation. “When I did cloud engineering with them, it was solid,” said an anonymous learner who first enrolled at AltSchool in 2022 and returned to study another course. “But now I’m in the data science track, and we had serious issues. Imagine everyone getting 0 out of 4 CGPA. It took two weeks to fix.”
She was on scholarship, so she didn’t face payment issues herself—but many classmates did. “People complained about paying and not getting access to the learning platform. Others couldn’t join live classes even though attendance was graded.” The problems, she said, were logistical, not malicious, but they hinted at a system overwhelmed by its own growth.
“Their LMS [Learning Management System] was very clunky to use,” said another anonymous learner who dropped out midway. “It doesn’t tick 100% even after you watch all the videos. Some people were never added to Slack. The organisation just wasn’t there.”
The issues weren’t isolated. Across cohorts, students began posting similar complaints online—about confusing grading, poor communication, and unresponsive support. What had begun as murmurs on Slack became a chorus on X, where learners shared screenshots, stories, and resignation.
AltSchool, for its part, mostly kept quiet.
In a response to TechCabal, the company acknowledged these challenges, saying, “We’re aware of the recent challenges learners faced, and we’re not dismissing them. The truth is, we had a few technical and operational lapses that disrupted the learning experience for some learners, which naturally comes with scale.”
The company added that the issue was “limited to one track within a specific cohort,” and was “ resolved immediately after it was identified.” Yet the damage to trust was already spreading across social platforms, where screenshots often travel faster than resolutions.
The pedagogy gap
Not all experiences were negative. Some students, like Olu, a newly minted frontend engineer, speak of AltSchool almost reverently.
“AltSchool changed everything for me,” he said. “I joined with zero knowledge and graduated knowing exactly what I wanted. Tech isn’t easy—you can’t commit 1% of your time and expect results. The school structures the problem; it’s still up to you to solve it.”
His pragmatism reflects a wider truth: for many learners, AltSchool delivered exactly what it promised—access to the digital world, not a hand-holding experience. But for others, the marketing didn’t match the reality. The courses were pitched as beginner-friendly, but the pacing often assumed prior knowledge. Yet instructors, some students said, were more like industry professionals than teachers.
“The mentorship was poor,” said one Product Marketing learner who asked not to be named. “Facilitators acted like we already knew everything. Some were even rude. The whole thing felt rushed.”
AltSchool maintains that its instructors are carefully vetted.
“We follow a meticulous process for hiring instructors. All instructors are experts in their respective fields and are vetted for both technical ability and teaching skill,” a spokesperson said. “We also have systems in place to monitor compliance with our teaching standards, and sanctions are applied where necessary.”
Others echoed more frustration, describing AltSchool’s courses as oscillating between overly theoretical and confusingly fast, with little time to absorb the material.
“It was marketed as beginner-friendly, but it wasn’t,” said another. “The communication was inconsistent, the LMS kept crashing, and when we complained, they’d remind us about the Code of Conduct instead of fixing the issue.”
Responding to the broader concerns about rigidity, AltSchool said its cohort-based diploma model was “intentionally designed to mirror real work culture, where learners move together, collaborate on projects, and meet deadlines.”
The company argued that taking someone from beginner to intern level in twelve months requires discipline and structure, and that it “cannot be compared to self-paced platforms like Coursera or Udemy.”
Yet the gap between expectation and experience—between marketing and pedagogy—is perhaps AltSchool’s central tension. It promised to make tech accessible to anyone, but scaling that promise to thousands of learners scattered across Africa is a logistical feat even traditional universities struggle to pull off.
Growing pains in Africa’s edtech
AltSchool’s troubles, in many ways, mirror those of Africa’s edtech sector. Across the continent, startups have rushed to fill the education gap left by underfunded public systems. From Andela’s early coding bootcamps to new virtual universities in Kenya and South Africa, the promise has been to offer courses faster, cheaper, and directly tied to employability.
But scaling education is messier than scaling software. Learning doesn’t iterate like an app. It requires structure, feedback loops, and emotional labour—the slow, human work of teaching. AltSchool’s model—short, intense, and employment-focused—works best when supported by reliable systems like functional platforms, responsive mentors, and transparent grading. When those falter, the experience quickly sours.
AltSchool said it has begun a full review of its systems to identify “areas that no longer serve its current scale.” The company said this quarter’s focus is on fixing those bottlenecks, as it has restructured its support function into a “Learner Success Team” to handle issues faster. According to internal data shared by the company, the current first response time to learner complaints averages about 33 minutes.
For its primary audience of young African learners often betting their savings on a better life, the stakes are high.
One student, who enrolled for LMS and also dropped midway, remembers it vividly. “The LMS was down more than it worked,” she said. “It took forever to be added to a learning circle. Classes ran too long, and the complaints never stopped. The Slack channels were overwhelming. I dropped out before wasting another round of fees.”
For her, what hurt most wasn’t the glitches but the gap between marketing and reality. “They prey on the desperation of young Africans who actually want to make it,” she said quietly. “That’s the part I can’t forgive.”
Momentum requires performance
Part of AltSchool’s allure lies in its promise: students “graduating,” “landing roles,” “breaking into tech.” Its marketing and social media are awash with success stories. But several students noticed that when complaints began trending, AltSchool often responded by launching new campaigns, not conversations.
“They deleted comments that mentioned problems,” one learner claimed. “Instead of addressing the issues, they’d post more good news.”
AltSchool denied this.
“We will never delete a learner’s complaint,” said the company in a response to TechCabal. “Our approach is to engage directly, clarify facts where necessary, and move conversations offline when they involve sensitive details. Transparency is a core part of our culture.”
Many edtech companies, eager to attract investors and talent, operate more like tech startups than educational institutions. The focus is on scale, not structure. But education, unlike software, does not reward speed; it demands stability.
AltSchool has grown rapidly since it was founded. In 2024, the edtech, which now operates in Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda, partnered with a Cape Verde government arm to provide digital tech training in the country, marking its entry into that market, and also expanded to Malta, which it said would serve as a gateway to operate in “12 European countries.” It also claimed it was nearing profitability.
“Maybe they grew too fast,” one alumnus mused. “When we started, it felt personal. By the next year, it was all marketing.”
AltSchool said it now plans to stabilise its operations, improve learner experience, and tighten its internal systems before scaling further.
A fragile bridge to the future
For all its flaws, AltSchool has done something few African institutions have. It has democratised access to tech education. Its learners span cities and villages, from Lagos to Kigali to Accra. It has made coding, cloud computing, and digital marketing accessible to thousands who might otherwise never afford a formal programme.
And even its critics acknowledge that. “It’s not that AltSchool is a scam,” said one former student. “It’s that it’s not yet what it says it is.”
The company’s challenge is how to reconcile ambition with delivery. Can an edtech startup teach at scale without becoming impersonal? Can it maintain quality while pursuing growth? Can it promise a life-changing opportunity without overpromising?
AltSchool positions itself not as a traditional university but as a tech company solving an education problem.
“[As a result], we sometimes move faster than the systems can keep up,” said the company. “However, we’ve recognised this and are now strengthening our governance and academic structures to scale responsibly.”
Learning at the speed of hope
In many ways, AltSchool reflects the contradictions of the continent’s youth. Restless, ambitious, impatient for progress, yet still grappling with the limitations of its systems. Its success stories—like Richard and Olu—are real. Its failures, too, are real. Both exist side by side in the same Slack threads.
The company continues to enrol new learners. The tweets have quieted, the platform still hums. Somewhere, another student from Nigeria, Rwanda, or Kenya is logging in tonight, eager to change their lives in twelve months.
They may find what they were promised, including a solid foundation, a supportive community, and a pathway into tech. Or they may find the same glitches, the same silences. Either way, they will keep learning, because for many, AltSchool is not just an institution but a symbol of possibility in a world that often forgets them.
And possibility, even when flawed, remains one of Africa’s most powerful exports.
