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Every week, African Start-Up follows entrepreneurs in various countries across the continent to see how they are working to make their business dreams become reality.
(CNN) — Fresh faced and full of energy, five recent graduates sit around the conference room table. They all hail from a different African country, and they all have big dreams about revamping education in their continent for a digital era.
These are the headquarters of Funda in Cape Town, an online training platform that’s been partnering with universities in South Africa to provide short e-courses for users. Helped by a single private investor, the tech education portal is looking to harness a growing demand for online learning by allowing students to log into classes remotely.
“At Funda, we develop learning management systems and provide content development services to higher institutions to take their courses online so that the general public can access them at a cheaper price,” says Nigerian-born Kolawole Olajide, one of Funda’s founders.
The flexibility that comes with e-learning is just one of the many reasons Olajide says the online education tool has found success.
“It’s responsive to the students’ schedules,” says the 22-year-old entrepreneur. “But also managers who want to do courses but are too busy to do them can now use [Funda] and sign in when they get back from work and access the resources online.”
Olajide came up with the concept for Funda — which means “to learn” in Zulu — at university when he found he couldn’t take school home. He had hoped to start the company in his homeland of Nigeria, but the obstacles were too great.
“It was very difficult because they were not digitally ready,” he recalls. “They did not understand what I was trying to do. The second problem I faced was internet penetration in the country. I thought South Africa was more stable so Funda had a higher chance of success there because many people already have the Internet.” (READ MORE)
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