I am often introduced as an EdTech founder, because the most visible thing I have built, School Vault, serves schools in Nigeria. I accept the label as a doorway, then immediately complicate it, because the way “EdTech” is usually imagined is a large part of why education technology keeps underdelivering across Africa.
The standard picture of EdTech is pedagogical: learning apps, digital classrooms, content platforms, devices for students. Valuable work, all of it. But it rests on a quiet assumption: that a school is essentially a classroom, and that improving education means improving what happens inside it. A school is not essentially a classroom. A school is an institution, and the classroom is the part of the institution that everything else exists to make possible.
The institution behind the classroom
Consider what has to function for a single term of teaching to happen in a typical Nigerian school. Fees must be collected from hundreds of families, tracked, and reconciled, because fees pay the teachers. Records must be kept accurately across admissions, attendance, and results. Parents must be kept informed enough to stay engaged and keep paying. Reports must reach proprietors and boards in time to govern. Staff must coordinate across all of it, daily, without dropped handoffs.
This is the operational substrate of education. When it is healthy, it is invisible. When it is fragmented, with collections leaking, records contradicting, and communication failing, its costs land directly on learning: unpaid salaries, distracted leadership, eroded parental trust, teachers pulled into administration. You can install the world’s best learning app on top of a school whose operations are failing, and the operations will win.
Why so much EdTech bounces off
This explains a pattern every honest observer of African EdTech has noticed: tools that demo brilliantly and then quietly fall out of use. The usual post-mortems blame connectivity, budgets, or “resistance to change.” The deeper reason is that most tools ask the institution to support the technology, instead of building technology that supports the institution. A learning platform that requires clean enrolment data presumes the school has clean enrolment data. A parent app presumes the school’s communication operations can feed it. The presumptions are the product’s real dependencies, and they are operational.
Schools, meanwhile, adopt permanently the things that relieve their heaviest operational burdens. They keep what helps them collect, reconcile, report, and coordinate, because those are the activities on which institutional survival depends. Adoption follows operational gravity.
What education technology in Nigeria actually needs
If schools are institutions first, then the foundational layer of education technology is institutional infrastructure, an operational layer on which schools run:
- Financial coordination built into daily workflow, so collections and reconciliation are structural rather than heroic.
- Administrative automation that returns staff hours to the work only humans can do.
- Communication infrastructure that closes the trust gap between school and home as a system property.
- Reporting and visibility that let proprietors and leaders govern on operational truth, not reconstruction.
Build this layer well and something important happens: the pedagogical layer finally has solid ground. Learning tools plug into accurate records. Parent engagement tools inherit working communication rails. The classroom innovations everyone wants become deployable because the institution beneath them is coherent. Infrastructure does not compete with pedagogy; it is what makes pedagogy at scale possible.
The proving ground for something larger
This is why I describe education as my proving ground rather than my boundary. Schools concentrate every institutional pathology (fragmented finance, manual administration, communication gaps, reporting blindness) into one building with daily deadlines. Infrastructure that earns trust there, as ours has with over ₦960 million in institutional activity, has passed the hardest practical exam African institutions can set.
So yes: call it EdTech if that is the doorway. But walk through the doorway and the real subject is institutional modernization: in Lagos, across Nigeria, and across a continent whose future runs on whether its institutions can operate as well as its people can dream. The schools are where that future is being rehearsed.