Paying for textbooks by the page: how Kytabu is disrupting Kenyan education, with Tonee Ndungu
The East Africa Business Podcast: African Start ups | Investing | Entrepreneurship | Interviews · samfloy
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Show Notes
The main way that students learn how to pass an exam is by reading from a textbook.
Traditionally, this has been built on the premise of publishers printing physical copies,
distributing to schools and taking cash payments.
This all comes at a cost, which is prohibitively high for a lot of schoolchildren in East Africa.
Tonee and I spend this episode discussing Kytabu.
They’ve turned the model on its head by digitising the content of these publishers, and allowing students and teachers
to access what they want, when they want it,
renting chapters from a book at a few US cents per day, paid for with mobile money
We also discuss how a lot of Kytabu’s employees are still at university, other trends that Tonee sees in the East African EdTech space and how a different interpretation of doughnut can completely undermine attempts from abroad to distribute educational content
It’s a great example of using scalable technology to disrupt an industry, and so I hope you enjoy