Giving Compass' Take:

•  The Queen Rania Foundation launched a competition that evaluated education startups on the quality of their innovation and impact in the Middle East. Nafez Dakkak, writing for EdSurge, discusses the lessons learned from this competition. 

• What challenges do education startups face in the Middle East that differ from the U.S?

• Here are eight tools that are the future of edtech. 

Whereas impact investment and venture philanthropy seem to be on the rise globally with players like the Acumen Fund, the Omidyar Network and others taking an active role in supporting education ecosystems around the world, there is essentially no such activity in the Arab region. This lack of support from both regional and global actors is quite puzzling for a region that adds around 300,000 new learners annually(to a base of well over 50 million students).

In light of the above, and inspired by conversations with actors in other parts of the world where small sums of capital have played a significant role in helping shape ecosystem building efforts, the Queen Rania Foundation(QRF) launched an award for education entrepreneurs in late 2018. We ran the competition to validate a few assumptions that came up in our research efforts, specifically whether there existed a strong pipeline of investable startups based in our part of the world. The competition evaluated startups on the quality of their innovation, their impact to date, and their potential to scale.

Over 400 applicants later, we are optimistic about the existence of a pipeline of worthy and investable startups working on everything from the creation of VR experiences for schools, to the application of AI to improve Arabic literacy learning. The startups were primarily located in Egypt (31%), Jordan (18%), and the UAE (8%), and our 16 semi-finalists boasted an average quarterly revenue at USD $500,000.

The competition afforded us the opportunity to dig deeper into the nascent ecosystem and come back with three key lessons:

  • Lesson 1: Help startups design for impact. 
  • Lesson 2: There are abundant opportunities (and technologies) for innovation. 
  • Lesson 3: The presence of highly centralized school systems might lead to further inequity.

Read the full article about edtech startup lessons for the Arab world by Nafez Dakkak at EdSurge