Why Impact, Not Scale, Determines the Future of EdTech

Lessons from Edukoya, Nigeria

When Nigerian edtech startup Edukoya announced its shutdown earlier this year, it sent ripples through the African and global edtech community. This was not just another company quietly exiting the stage - it was one that had once promised to redefine online K–12 learning in Africa. With $3.5 million in pre-seed funding, the largest of its kind in Africa at the time, Edukoya’s story began with extraordinary optimism. Its closure, however, offers a critical reflection point for all edtech founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders: impact must come before scale.

Nigeria’s student-to-teacher ratio stands at an alarming 46:1, a statistic that underscores the dire need for scalable education solutions. Edukoya set out to fill that gap by providing high-quality digital learning content and live online tutoring.

The idea was compelling. The need was clear. The funding was there. So what went wrong?

There are likely many reasons but one stands out for us: Edukoya, like many edtech ventures, measured success by outputs: the number of students reached, lessons delivered, and questions answered. By these metrics, the company performed impressively: over 80,000 students on the platform, 15 million questions answered, and thousands of live classes conducted daily.

But outputs are not outcomes. They don’t tell us whether a student learned better, a teacher taught better, or whether the system improved. Equating scale with impact is a key pitfall in edtech.

Too often, edtech founders and their investors focus on user growth and engagement data as proxies for success. The logic is simple: if more people are using your product, you must be doing something right. Yet, education is not a consumer app. Engagement alone doesn’t translate into learning. Real impact requires proof of learning gains and/or teacher development and society advancement.

Building for impact means integrating learning science, research validation, and teacher feedback from day one and NOT as a retrospective exercise once the EdTech has thousands of users. It means collaborating with researchers to test hypotheses about how children learn best, piloting solutions in classrooms, and iterating based on real-world data.

When external researchers can verify that your solution leads to improved learning outcomes, such as, for example, better test scores, enhanced teacher capacity, or stronger student engagement, you build not just a user base, but evidence-based credibility. That, in turn, attracts patient capital and enables responsible scaling across contexts.

Scaling with impact doesn’t necessarily mean moving slowly; it means scaling what works. A validated solution can travel from Lagos to Nairobi, from Accra to Johannesburg, with justified confidence that it will add value in each new context. As David Dockterman and I wrote in our working paper, impact and scale are inversely related, one cannot expect scale to automatically lead to more impact.

Edukoya’s shutdown is not a failure of vision: it’s a reminder that in education, good intentions and great funding aren’t enough. The company’s story highlights a pattern we’ve seen across many markets: when traditional venture capital models prioritize rapid growth and market capture over measured impact, edtech ventures risk burning bright and fading fast.

This is not to discourage ambition or innovation. Africa still needs bold ideas and brave entrepreneurs tackling its education challenges. But it’s also a call for patient capital, that is investors willing to stay the course, to fund research, validation, and long-term impact rather than immediate scale.

For founders, the takeaway is equally clear: define impact early, measure it rigorously, and design around it relentlessly. Let user numbers follow proven learning gains, not the other way around.

Edukoya’s story, then, is a powerful lesson for every edtech leader, investor, and policymaker: Impact is not what follows success. It defines it.