Godwin Benson believes so, which is why he co-founded Tuteria, a platform that links students to nearby qualified tutors, to tackle academic apathy. Solomon Elusoji writes
For example, before the experience, the startup was making lot of calls, but they learnt how to prioritise requests and only make the really important ones. They also started to invest in providing training for tutors on the platform. “We didn’t change the product, just the process.” Two years after, the numbers of tutors have doubled to 16,000 while close to 6,000 people have paid for courses on the platform. .
“That’s the ideal: automation. That’s how we can handle large bulk of requests. Our current process means we need to hire a lot of people, make a lot of calls. Probably have a massive call centre. But that doesn’t scale. Right now we are trying to remove all the bottlenecks and empower the customer to serve himself.”
Henry Mascot, who has also worked in the Ed-Tech sector, wrote a blog-post on Medium in 2016. He emphasised providing value at very low costs. “Don’t believe that building a better product will make you successful,” he said. “Delivering something for cheaper will.” But perhaps the most important insight from the article is the argument that “it is much cheaper and easier to facilitate change with people instead of technology here.
PrepClass and Primal Tutor are two other Nigerian startups connecting tutors with students. Pass.ng offers computer-based tests for students who want to practice for specific examinations. EduRecords collects data on student’s learning experiences and uses algorithms to proffer real-time reports on how to improve a child’s academic performances. There are more.