The Future of Education in Africa

TL;DR: The future is characterised by socioeconomic and climate-driven chaos. Traditional schooling cannot cope and will be disrupted by enlightened e-learning via smartphones. Africa’s prosperity is dependent on education that grows intellect in the youth, delivered by affordable, accessible mobile learning experiences.

If its primary purpose is to prepare the youth to thrive in the future, why is education entrusted to institutions so intrenchably wed to the past? Education should be the most aggressively future-driven of all sectors. Tragically, it is the opposite.

Of course the future of the world itself is not that clear. In the coming decade you could find yourself anywhere on a dystopian spectrum from utter socio-economic desolation to a bubble of tech-laden bliss. Where today’s teenagers fall on that spectrum tomorrow will be determined by many factors, one of the most important being the quality and relevance of their education. In many parts of Africa, getting an education at all is problematic. E-learning via educational technology should have been a solution long ago.

Evolution in edtech worldwide has always been handicapped by the assumption that since education is primarily a government or school responsibility, edtech must have a B2G or B2B business model. The customers of edtech are seen to be not learners but government officials, school principals or teachers — who in turn see their customers as tertiary institutions or employers. Products, services and organisational structures are formulated accordingly. Even “leading edge” tech giants like Google and Amazon define their education business as teacher-centric, completely excluding learner-centric B2C education from their mission. Since edtech adoption processes within governments and schools are slow, risk-averse, job-protective, defensive about pedagogical paradigms, and often corrupt, there’s little incentive to innovate.

B2C education, where creators of powerful learning experiences provide them directly to learners via smartphones, is resisted by the establishment. Yet is the most economical and practical way to immediately provide quality education at a national scale.

CX becomes LX

Obsessive commitment to customer experience is the best route to architecting products or services with enduring success. In the 21st century, where old-school routes to prosperity (get a degree, get a job, join a profession) are no longer as relevant to practical reality, we should focus on the learner as the primary customer of education. We should deliver the benefits in process, content and outcome which will best serve the learner’s interests in the increasingly uncertain future. This means putting learner experience (LX) at the heart of our architecture, and delivering intellect outcomes which current educational systems neither acknowledge nor attempt to measure.

Education’s current format of batch-processed, synchronous knowledge transfer, requiring cohorts of people to congregate daily in a designated physical location, has no place in the 21st century. If schools and government departments do not take the lead, within the next three to five years education will undergo a consumer-led transformation, becoming self-paced, direct-to-learner, via smartphone. Physical schools and tertiary institutions will be largely disintermediated and, for institutions and educators to survive, they will have to fundamentally reinvent the nature of their role.

Pushing today’s content and processes online is merely changing the channel. It serves no purpose unless the learning experience changes too. The way curricula are formulated must be completely re-architected and recreated, so that the processes which result in learning become continuously compulsive and motivating. By this standard, most existing e-learning earns an F. To someone learning largely on their own, a textbook can never be a page-turner — whether it is printed on paper or transferred to a little screen. A remote teacher, either Zoomed or recorded, cannot engender the same quality of connection with each individual that is achieved in a classroom.

Hacking a cheap quick fix is as counterproductive in education as it is in other industries. Mobile e-learning must be architected to achieve a compelling learner experience. It must be produced creatively and professionally with a serious budget, if it is to become a powerful, scalable learning solution in the post-proximity knowledge-ubiquity future we are facing.

Africa will lead the disruption

Developing nations, particularly in Africa, will spearhead this disruption, not least because in these places traditional education finds its poorest fit with socioeconomic realities: very young populations often growing faster than the economy; mushrooming informal urban settlements; widening chasms between rich and poor; inadequate government budgets for school construction, teacher training or textbooks; and a youth who have to trade off attending school against feeding their families. But everywhere, even among the poorest, mobile communication is second nature. In Tanzania, for example, mobile internet has a greater penetration than television or radio. Self-study via mobile phone will find a far more ready market here than in nations relatively well served by traditional schooling.

At a USB-ED faculty forum back in February, before Covid-19 rang alarm bells round the world, I shared this vision with my colleagues [slideshare link]. Participants were alarmed by my dystopian scenarios for the immediate future of the broader world outside of academia, and the need for institutions of learning to anticipate and adjust for impending socio-economic chaos. One faculty member said, quite earnestly, that his next move was to go home, lie on his bed and weep. I was delighted — it meant I had penetrated the complacency barrier so prevalent in the academic world.

A couple of weeks later the Covid-19 catalyst pushed into the deep end of the e-learning pool those who had spent decades dipping their toe and running away.

The upside of e-learning for educators is that, if they get it right, the scale of their teaching impact (and income) will no longer be constrained by geographic proximity or classroom capacity. The downside, of course, is that their competitors will be similarly liberated.

The pandemic didn’t change the future — it merely accelerated its already inevitable arrival. Many still want to believe that the disruption will all be over soon, and life will revert to normal. It will not. If anything, Covid-19 is the boot camp that prepares us for what is to come.

Why reality is so hard to see

It is typical for people to will the future in logarithmic curves, where everything tends to a predictable stability. We want to believe that the next few years will be pretty much like the past few years, only with a bit more technology and a bit more competition. Step changes in our own daily lives are difficult to even envision, let alone implement. For all the agile management philosophies, organisations are similarly hampered in their ability to change. Organisational structures, processes and culture are protective of incrementalism, and averse to disruptive change.

Yet technology advances exponentially. Consumer-centric technology pulls individuals into change in their processes at a rate that most large organisations are unable to keep up with. The gap between change rates of technology and organisations is filled with opportunities. And vulnerabilities.
When we think about the future, we want things to get easier, not harder. We focus on the shiny upbeat trends that the “wow! robots!” futurists hype at conferences, and we dismiss the uncomfortable signs of impending chaos.

The current breed of motivational futurists rarely paint the full picture (if they see it at all), preferring to showcase jaw-dropping tech innovations that are propagating in the small world of the affluent, and choosing to ignore the bleak dimensions of poverty, starvation, disease, dislocation, conflict and anarchy that are growing inexorably in the rest of society. If they comment at all, they tell us that the world is a better place today than it has ever been, pointing to increasing average incomes and similar aggregated (but deceptive) government macroeconomic data.

Feel-good sells better, and talking about darker scenarios risks you being labelled pessimistic, cynical, or unpatriotic. Discussing a dystopian future is uncomfortable in an organisational strategy setting; it’s more palatable served up in a movie, where we can tell ourselves it’s just entertainment.

But in a world where change in nature and in technology has become tangibly exponential, that denialist thinking is strategically dangerous. There are forces of change more powerful than Covid-19 approaching and their momentum is unprecedented.

If there is an upside to a pandemic, it is that we quickly learn to accept the vulnerability of humankind, and lose the conceits that once prevented us from caring enough to take action.

Covid-19 is not the first, and there will be subsequent and probably more frequent pandemics, adding layers of complexity to an already problematic world. If there is a new normal, it will be diverse abnormal ecosystems in which post-proximity societies evolve in often contradictory ways. But the future that was coming before the pandemic has not been deferred — it’s still hurtling down on us. We just can’t see it clearly because Covid-19 is so in our faces right now.

Over the coming decade amazing technological advances will still continue to proliferate, and a small percentage of the world population will still benefit. Those who can afford them, or those in wealthier nations, will encounter life-altering disruptions in finance, medicine, transportation, food, entertainment, education and lifestyle. Some of these advances will inadvertently dispossess the elite; some, like edtech, will democratise benefits for the masses.

Multipliers of change

But technological advances won’t defer the catastrophic environmental and human hardships that have now become inevitable. In the scramble to come to terms with this pandemic tactically, we risk ignoring in our strategic thinking the impact of change-multiplier trends. Trends such as growing inequity, climate change, mass-manipulation, and the wobbliness of democracy and capitalism, are all gaining momentum.

Inequity in income and wealth has reached a point where average national incomes are meaningless. Just 1% of the world’s population own half of all of the world’s wealth; and a handful of individuals now own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 50%. This concentration will be accelerated by the rise of AI and robotics, which will unavoidably erode white-collar and blue-collar workforces and implode most specialist professions. The resulting reduction in the earning opportunities and civic stability of hundreds of millions of people across all classes everywhere in the world will have impacts far greater and more enduring than Covid-19.

The 20th century expectation that every person will steadily improve their lot in life — and that technology and education will facilitate this expanding affluence — has for many become a myth.

As AI and robotics improve and proliferate, the individual is becoming uncompetitive and redundant. The issue often couched as the “future of work” is much more profound and complex than whether we do a version of our work from home. How are people to earn a living at all if machines are better, faster and cheaper? Perhaps, instead of considering how we may work differently, we should consider if we will work at all: is the concept of exchanging work for an income with which we buy goods, services, accommodation and governance, simply irrelevant? And if so, does money lose its purpose? What becomes of the economy, and, if the notion of jobs is gone, what purpose will be served by education?

If inexpensive machines learn and understand faster than people ever can, education needs an overhaul, in both what we learn and how we learn it.
Our connectedness is another growing liability. New technologies have changed how we communicate, access information, form opinions and interact. Two billion people — the most economically active on the planet — are intimately, immediately and obsessively connected. And tracked.

Immediate futures

The world has become very small for the individual, and very large for the enterprise. And because we are now so dependent on digitally-delivered insights, curated or created by AI and filtered by invasive personalized algorithms, our beliefs, values and behaviours are more easily manipulated than ever in human history.

Social media in particular has become an addictive global leveller, mushing everyone into a similar framework of identity and presence.

In reaction, religious, cultural and racial variances are becoming magnified as individuals seek to discover and affirm a more meaningful identity. The resulting frustration and intolerance find expression in increasingly strident voices. This anger is amplified by online social echo chambers, fake-news doomscrolling, and the lost tempering which proximity used to bring.
Social stability will wobble, and may fail. In response, more totalitarian regimes will replace the more liberal regimes of the last half century, aided ironically by personal data continuously compiled in intimate detail by technology giants. [see Marx / Zuckerberg: Does Facebook Carry Within It the Seeds of Its Own Destruction? my October 2019 article on how brand advertising money enables Facebook’s abuse of its users]

The world is in a state of continuous, expanding, fundamental disruption. Leadership of businesses and educational institutions cannot sit around in denial, hoping that somehow there will be a stable new normal. Nor can the political or spiritual elite.

The coming three to five years are, in many ways, the most exciting and opportunity-filled time that we have ever seen. But much of what led organisations to blossom in the past will now handicap their ability to stay relevant or grow. Leaders must let go of the past and craft the visions, strategies and structures to thrive in this evolving adversity.

Whenever a big event-based change hits, pundits all rush out forecasts for how “the” future will be when it is all over and a “new normal” crystallises. Most of these scenarios are linear or logarithmic, and provide advice to managers about how to deal with a change in the way we work, or how to survive recessionary times. This is helpful, even comforting, but being predicated on a presumed predictable future assembled from building blocks of the past, it is inherently risky. The reality is that there will be no single, familiar, easily-defined future.

If entropy tells us anything, it is that change will be more radical than we want it to be and there will be a multiplicity of simultaneous futures. Probable parallel scenarios range from luxuriously leisure-filled high-tech decadence, where robots and AI make our lives wonderful, to horrifically deprived, survivalist and ghastly. In the middle, alongside totalitarianism, are chaos, disease, starvation, anarchy and institutional collapse.

All of these futures coexist on a spectrum, illustrated below. Where any individual falls will be determined by how well they leverage their current circumstances; how skilled they are at complex problem-solving; how intuitively they anticipate change; how courageously and creatively they craft and implement strategies; and how adaptive and influential they and their networks can become. Education is a key to all of these. But if under the traditional approach to schooling only the prosperous can gain a quality education, the system keeps widening the income inequity chasm instead of closing it, dooming the masses to the downside of dystopia.

The climate catalyst

The biggest catalyst for disruption is often the least considered: The climate impacts everyone, irrespective of national borders. Images of clean air over Shanghai and clear water in Venice’s canals can deceive us into imagining that global climate change can be reversed in a few weeks of total economic lockdown. It cannot.

The damage that Covid-19 can do to humanity is tiny compared to what climate change will inflict. Covid-19 does not have the ability to destroy us. Climate change does.

While politicians endlessly negotiate international carbon reduction treaties, it may be already too late to stop the worst of climate change. There is a growing body of scientists who subscribe to the climate outcome model known as INTHE — Inevitable Near-Term Human Extinction — which asserts that no matter what we do now, global warming is beyond the point of no return, and we are accelerating toward the end of humanity as we know it, within a decade or two.

However bad it gets, one profound way in which environmental catastrophe is already manifesting itself, is in population movement. Currently there are “only” 40 million dislocated persons in the world. Over the next 20 years in Africa alone up to a billion people will be dislocated by drought, flood and famine — and by the conflicts they spawn. Cities and nations in Europe and Africa will be overwhelmed and some will become ungovernable. Human tragedy will unfold on an unimaginable scale. Unused proximity-era shopping malls, parking garages and office towers which have not been turned into vertical urban farms or hospitals will become overcrowded refugee habitations, as will school buildings and playing fields.

In South Africa, for example, 57 million inhabitants could see more than 100 million climate refugees coming across its borders. What happens to civil society in a country which already has an unemployment rate of thirty percent (59% among the youth)?

Given that the youth are legion and without them the future has no hope, what must become of education in Africa?

Climate-driven migrancy poses existential threats to governments, society and economies over the coming decade. Yet it is rarely considered in post-Covid scenarios or corporate strategies, and most families do not have a plan for surviving it. At an individual level, concern about global warming should be less about the wellbeing of coral reefs, and more about the future of your children. There are significant implications for what we should be teaching the youth now to enable them to thrive in chaos, and for how education can — and must — succeed in an increasingly stateless, homeless, mobile world.

Beyond AI & robots

Despite the agony of the masses, the elite everywhere will probably bask in the sci-fi future characterised by robotics and AI, but we are really just guessing what this will look like. The ongoing impact of cumulative change is hard to envision when technology is becoming more powerful at an accelerating rate. Consider how AI systems have advanced in only the past five years, and try to define where they might be in 2030. The human imagination simply cannot project how we will live even ten years from now, when, if the exponential rate of evolution continues, technology will be more than a thousand times more advanced than it is today; in 20 years it’s a million times and in 30 years a billion times more advanced. Here’s what it looks like, according to The Emerging Future:

The most fevered imaginations of sci-fi authors or movie makers cannot even begin to go there, and if they could their audiences would not understand. Our ability to conceive the world 30 years hence is as limited as was the ability of Paleolithic cave dwellers to imagine the industrial revolution. The role humanity has in that future will be determined by the actions we take today — as individuals, as businesses, as religions, as governments and as educators.

Things don’t just get more powerful, they multiply, diversify, or split into ever-growing numbers of alternative manifestations. Less viable niches collapse, others coalesce then expand. This entropy is a relentless phenomenon — systems in nature always tend to chaos. Technology is no different, nor is human society.

Unless you are an unashamedly elitist brand or industry, it is a strategic mistake to focus on only the affluent micro-societies of the immediate future. Bad stuff goes entropic too. And the good interacts with the bad.
You can’t hold out against entropy forever

Different facets of technology continue to evolve rapidly, not only in their hardware and software, but in the processes that they have enabled. We live and work in ways today that are massively different from only a few years or a few months ago. That rate of change is not slowing down.

Education, however, still requires learners to congregate in a classroom and learn from a teacher. The process hasn’t changed in centuries. Generally speaking, innovation produces changes in products or systems, while disruption results in changes in processes or customer experiences. The whiteboard was an innovation, as are textbooks on tablets, or remote classrooms on Zoom. These innovations don’t change the process of learning. They merely make it more efficient, though often less effective.

The above illustration refers only to the narrow field of marketing. You could create something similar in any field of activity. We go from disruption to disruption, each phase spawning multiple variants until another disruption kills off most of the incumbents and brings a new clarity. Education is one of the last hold-outs.

While our first reaction is to innovate, crises quickly foster real disruption. The Covid-19 crisis did not create the need for a more efficient approach to education. It accelerated its acceptance. But while the traditionalists in institutions will try to get back to what was, it is vital that we take this opportunity to build an approach to education which better fits the emergent realities of learners and society.

Where education is concerned, we should stop planning for post-pandemic recovery, and instead strategize a post-pandemic renaissance. We should not go backwards when we can go upwards.

The education of today’s teens is vital to the successful evolution of societies through the crises we will face in the immediate future. Not the education of last year, which prepares youth for the predictable working environment of last century, but an education focused on developing the thinking competencies needed to prosper in chaos.

Education can become a beneficiary of AI. Beyond smarter systems for administering current pedagogies, AI will be able to set unique learning pathways for each individual, and to create the content and experiences which populate those pathways. But AI learns from data and experience. If it follows the processes of today, it will develop draconian systems which force rote learning for exam preparation. So we should be deprecating the traditional approaches, and defining, crafting and deploying enlightened e-learning which AI can model and perfect.

However disruptive we think we are today, it is only the beginning.

Intellect as a core outcome

Only through raising the intellect, the thinking power, of today’s youth — en masse — can we help them deal with the uncertainties of coming decades. This cannot be achieved by our current educational processes, curricula, or institutions. Already in sub-Saharan Africa, even before the pandemic and before climate dislocation, 6 out of 10 teens were not in school. A new approach must be forged which educates when schools and teachers are not available, or when they are so overloaded they become dysfunctional. An approach which liberates great teachers from the constraints of the classroom, enabling them focus more on mentoring where it is most needed.

In school today we learn how to do badly what machines already do well. Given the accelerating growth and ubiquity of knowledge in every field, the imminent implosion via AI of many current work opportunities, and the explosion of new career options (however ephemeral), it is imperative that we rethink what we teach and how we teach it — if, in fact, we “teach” at all.

Preparing the youth for a future that is unpredictable is not something that government education departments, parents or schools are particularly good at. We don’t try to forecast the future and work backwards to define what should be taught or how to teach it; we tend to look at what was done in the past and merely update it, leaving widening gaps in future-relevant knowledge, skills and intellect. We allow tradition to suppress opportunities for quantum leaps forward.

Disruption in any field is rarely initiated by the incumbents. In education you cannot look to government departments or textbook publishers for revolutionary thinking. Disruption will come from learners needing a better way and from external teams who approach education from the perspectives of customer experience, technology and gaming psychology.

Instead of investing in new school buildings or computer labs, we should focus on rapid repurposing of existing capabilities (such as the learner’s own phone) for new and disruptive outcomes, replacing our existing expensive turgid processes with something which can scale and adapt quickly and economically.

This means having the courage to challenge and rethink everything that has been assumed sacrosanct. In education, this includes physical schools, teachers, textbooks, curricula and examinations. But it also includes pedagogy, instructional design and knowledge transfer. In addition, we need to start finding ways to capitalise on what we now know about neurology, teenage brain development and the psychology and neuropharmacology of motivation and learning. If you want teens to want to learn maths or science, particularly on their own, neither a textbook nor the threat of exam failure is going to foster that motivation.

Learning has to become gamified, leveraging the instantaneous mental reward mechanisms that motivate, minute by minute, rather than being dragged along by the fear of distant exams. Developing the wiring of a teenage mind to remember and regurgitate rather than to reason or intuit handicaps their ability to adapt and prosper in a fast-changing world.

Here’s a simplified view of the criteria MindZu uses in learner centric edtech architecture, primarily for Africa and Asia:

This does not mean abandoning curricula or their traditional building blocks, but it does mean re-evaluating the role they play in the development of thinking skills. There is a growing trend among parents, governments and learners, for example, to dismiss the study of mathematics. Maths is seen to be irrelevant (“I haven’t used algebra in my adult life” or “creative people shouldn’t have to do math”), and it’s difficult.

But it is precisely because maths is difficult that it is essential to learn. It is impossible to overstate how important learning mathematics is in forging a mind which is wired to think creatively, conceptually and analytically — a core foundation for all of the 21st century skills. That mental circuitry of the teenage prefrontal cortex grows in response to the abstract problem-solving challenges inherent in mathematics — but only if learners are taught to think.

Denial can’t hold back the tide

Institutions as immutable as education rarely adapt until change is imposed by government, competitors, or catastrophe. The visceral resistance from teachers when the Ontario government recently suggested imposing mandatory e-learning, is typical. When I first started advocating e-learning for executive development in the early 1990s, corporate trainers pushed back, convinced that face-to-face would always be superior. Twenty five years later e-learning dominates corporate education because it is more effective, more efficient, and more preferred by learners.

Now, teachers and learners around the world have experienced working from home and some of their prejudices and anxieties have been allayed. But because Zoom classes are less effective than face-to-face classes, or because an online textbook is less user-friendly than the paper version, the impulse is to return to the past. Let’s instead create new processes that have even better outcomes than you can attain in a classroom.

Politicians denied climate change till it was too late, because the smoothed graphs were not alarming and the raw upturns looked like anomalies; the music industry, newspaper industry, and most other long-established industries didn’t see digital disruption coming because they believed in the perfection of their processes and the power of their own momentum.

Long term historical trends are no longer good predictors of immediate future trends. We are living in times ill-suited to logarithmic thinking. Many futurists focus only on the datasets that they are comfortable with, so they risk missing the stuff that really matters — the new phenomena, “third rails” or the hard to graph stuff, like xenophobia, environmental migrancy, explosive pandemics, or that biggest trigger of unpredictable change, human emotion. Yet these are the things which change markets overnight and dramatically redefine futures.

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, slowness to adapt in any field is existentially hazardous. In education, it’s disastrous.

Quo vadis?

The future of education is not robot teachers in classrooms, as some are predicting. It’s not Zoom-based remote classes, or libraries of tedious videos. Education will be more fundamentally disrupted, and it will be adaptive to its specific learner environment.

Because of the deeply entrenched resistance to change among education incumbents, bolstered by parents who still want their kids to learn the same way they did thirty or forty years ago, B2C edtech disruption will have stages.

First, mobile edtech developers will engage with government to roll out hybrid solutions that support teachers and are possibly supplemented by other technology (such as television). Actual experience will demonstrate to government, teachers, parents and learners the advantages of a gamified self-study approach. Then, if its fees are miniscule, mobile learning will pivot to grow as a supplement purchased directly by parents at the request of their children, or provided free courtesy of governments or donor organisations. Within a year the exponential growth will begin. Within three to five years, mobile edtech will be the norm.

Elite schools and institutions will probably be with us for a generation or two, thanks to a combination of powerful branding, exceptional quality, parental nostalgia and government myopia. But even they will change their educational model to emphasise networked self-study, and will add unique value in mentoring. (In this respect, the Oxford model paved the way centuries ago).

Most schools and teachers as we know them will mutate or disappear. The best will become online mentors or creators of globally or hyper-locally relevant powerful mobile learning experiences. Education will become less about learning to store and retrieve data or knowledge, and more about amplifying the intellect’s mental hardware and software.

The giant B2G corporations currently controlling everything from curriculum development to textbook publishing to certification will find new dynamic learner experience developers eroding their dominance, providing compelling gamified education with better outcomes at massively lower costs. Disruptive edtech businesses will partner with governments and funding bodies to enable nation-wide pan-media penetration, or will go direct to learners via mobile apps architected for compelling teenager engagement.

Education will focus on enhancing critical thinking, creativity, leadership, emotional intelligence, and above all complex conceptual problem-solving. The study of mathematics and science is core to building this mental capacity. Whether they are among the AI-bot elite, a member of the vast dislocated disenfranchised, or in the dystopian wilds in between, education must help the youth acquire the thinking power and core skills to survive and thrive.

For the sake of future generations, we need to put in place now a system of education which
• provides compelling, motivating and self-guided learner experiences;
• is accessible via inexpensive smartphones (or their successors);
• is rapidly scalable at minimal cost;
• and is affordable to even the most disadvantaged youth.

It’s a vision we at MindZu have been pursuing in Africa and Asia, and even on our bootstrap budgets we’re able to provide a learner with a complete year of quality education for $4 or less.

As exponentialism kicks in, we will see increasingly powerful and compelling mobile learner experiences emerging which are effectively free, dispossessing many incumbents in the current education supply chain. And these disruptions will emerge from Africa, where funding is most scarce and the need is greatest.

The “developed” world is still comfortably stuck in the logarithmic vision of the future, convinced that retrograde e-learning like Zoom classrooms or videos of teachers is the next great leap forward. If developing nations wait for them to produce a renaissance in national education processes and individual learner experiences, it will be too late. That procrastination will cost Africa its future.

With little to lose and everything to gain, Africa can and must take the lead.

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Godfrey Parkin is CEO of MindZu, a mobile edtech startup, and of Britefire, a digital strategy consulting firm based in Cape Town.

Image credits:
https://theemergingfuture.com
https://britefire.com
https://mindzu.com