How we built a 700 African Entrepreneur-Community on Zoom

What we did, why people tried to get in the way, and why the result matters profoundly.

I’ve just finished co-teaching on Zoom an exhilarating course, AfricaLive!, to 700 immensely talented African entrepreneurs with my Harvard colleagues Carrie Elkins, the eminent historian of Africa, and Karim Lakhani, the data ustaad (or, as students nicknamed him, our digital ninja).

Here I want to share what we did, why people tried to get in the way, and why the result matters.

First, what did we do? There’s a lot of free content on the web – thanks to Sal Khan’s Khan Academy, several universities putting their course content online, and literally hundreds of inspired imitators.  But is it benefiting the vast majority of people in the world, the 6 of 8 billion who most need it? 

I don’t think so.  There are too many barriers, many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip. Information about these free materials doesn’t reach those who need it; if it does, there is limited ability to curate from among the thousands of available bits of content, most of which aren’t tailored to their needs; even for ‘free’ courses, certification is expensive and inaccessible. And so on.

So Carrie, Karim and I hit upon the idea of developing a pilot to show that these problems can be circumvented.   We started with a free online course I had developed on the HarvardX platform a few years ago that had become popular, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies (EEE).  Students from 200 countries access this six week-long course asynchronously (spending 4-6 hours per week on it). The course lays out a framework to explain why building an entrepreneurial venture in Bogota or Bujumbura is going to be rather different from building it in Boston, and crucially, discusses an approach to do something about this.

We knew there was interest from Africa, judging from the free enrolment numbers in EEE, but our intuition was that such a young continent must have orders of magnitude more learners worth reaching. But the content ofEEE was not Africa-centric. Meanwhile interest groups from Africa (foundations, corporations, quasi government entities), as from elsewhere, contacted me to ask whether the free course could be customized to their needs. Of course, such customization takes time and money.

We designed a pilot. Why not let students in Africa access the general content in EEE asynchronously during each week, and then supplement it with live Africa-specific sessions on Zoom on the weekends, for a modest fee?  Thus was AfricaLive! born.

Second, why did pretty much everyone we approach to help launch this oppose the idea for months?  Well, people oppose anything new. That’s just the nature of things. The idea of reaching a ‘new’ customer segment didn’t automatically fit into anyone’s pre-existing model. Several were skeptical that marrying asynchronous and synchronous learning was pedagogically worthwhile. Others, trapped in the mindset that poor countries need more poverty alleviation strategies ultimately grounded in charity, dismissed the ability or willingness of Africans to pay for quality content adequately to justify the expense of reaching out. And so on.

I’m glad we persevered, encouraged by a few believers. Ultimately, edX agreed to use its platform for the “asynchronous + live” model, Harvard gave consent to us to try, and Africa.com, an upstart online media company active across the continent worked for months on end to figure out how to micro-target African consumers across 54 countries and, the most Herculean task of all, figured out how to collect payments from so many different regulatory regimes.

Third, why does this matter?  To any educator, having 700 high quality students leave satisfied and hungry for more, is enormously satisfying. By the way, they all paid, even if several were through scholarships we offered! I believe they would all recommend the experience robustly, as would the faculty. The Dean of HBS visited one of our final sessions, left energized, and endorsed the model as a fabulous way to expand outreach beyond the limited numbers we can accommodate physically on campus.

But it matters also because it’s a small attempt to challenge an existing model of educational delivery. The same content can be used as a base for other customized groups – perhaps folks in India or Latin America, or perhaps folks specializing in healthcare, or non-profit management, etcetera.  Our pilot has shown, we believe, that while there’s a lot of free content out there, it can be made truly useful for large swathes of learners with a little bit of ‘last mile’ content enhancement in pedagogically effective ways for which learners pay enough to cover the costs and to reinvest in the approach.

And each of the thousands of online courses out there can similarly be leveraged creatively. The barriers are only internal to us!