In March 2021, Glowdom, in partnership with Eduix and the Namibian Business Innovation Institute (NBII) launched a digital platform for regional strategic partnership called Edupreneurs. The Edupreneurs project was funded by the Southern African Innovation Support Programme 2.
This blog post works as an information center and gathers materials about the Edupreneurs project with the purpose of disseminating our lessons learned.
Blog posts about the project
Edupreneurs offer capacity building in June
Networking and empowering education stakeholders from Southern Africa
Edupreneurs’ final capacity building workshop
Thank you for attending the Edupreneurs final event
The Edupreneurs Recommendation Paper is out!
Additional materials
1. SAIS Recommendation Paper (April 2022): The project consortium compiled recommendations for knowledge transfer in order to share best practices and lessons learned about building resilient business ecosystems. You can download the SAIS Recommendation Paper by filling out this form and downloading the document after the form submission.
2. Edupreneurs report (June 2022): you can download the short Edupreneurs report, which summarizes the project deliverables and stakeholders’ profiles, demands and offers, through this link.
The benefits of the Edupreneurs platform
The platform was designed from the point of view of three main users:
1) education institutions (kindergartens, schools and universities),
2) education companies, and
3) civil organizations that work with education.
Additionally, families who are searching for education institutions, services and resources can also use the platform and benefit from the information published on it.
Through the platform, these stakeholders can collect data about potential customers and suppliers across the region, network with relevant B2B and B2C players and promote their services and products thanks to a micro-webpage created to feature what they provide and what they need. For instance, while schools can use the platform to search for ICT suppliers, companies working with ICT infrastructure can find specifically those schools through the platform matching mechanism.
Besides the networking mechanism which empowers stakeholders with relevant market data, the platform offers the registered users the possibility to create and publish content through its blog section, so all the stakeholders can voice their contributions to enhance quality education in the Southern African region.
The platform has attracted and networked 92 education institutions, 36 companies in the education business, and 12 civil organisations from SADC. The data collected through the platform allowed regional understanding about education resources and needs. For instance, around 60% of the education institutions reported a need for classroom and ICT infrastructure, which corresponds to 30% of the services provided by the companies in the platform. Based on this information, decisions can be made regarding matching the services’ needs with the suppliers, as well as support the needed actions for the business ecosystem to thrive.
Future recommendations
The platform needs the support from government agencies across SADC to attract and engage a broader range of stakeholders, especially public education institutions, from which governments can collect and process data for prompt decision making.