#15. Edtech and culture in Emerging Markets
Culture and education are universal types of human wealth. Edtech in Latin America, a library on fire, and Rest of World to dive deeper.
Welcome! Issue #15 of Emerging Markets explorer 🧭 covers a special type of human wealth: culture and education. Edtech in Latin America, a fire that destroyed African cultural heritage, and Rest of World to show how people in EM interact with technology.
If you wonder what Emerging Markets explorer 🧭 is, start here.
The top Edtech startups in Latin America
Edtech is an industry that combines education and technology. It promises to revolutionize education by adding the far-reaching impact of technology.
Edtech is an industry with a strong sense of social purpose: they want to provide access to education for underserved people worldwide. It is a market that was valued at $5.9 trillion in 2018 and is projected to be worth $10 trillion by 2030.
The technological component of edtech makes the Internet a key enabler for it: people need access to the Internet to access Edtech.
In Latin America, 350M people (54%) of the population used mobile Internet as of 2020. The bandwidth reaches 610M people (94%), and while factors like affordability need to be improved, it shows that mobile connectivity can keep growing, and edtech along. Therefore, the investment interest in Edtech in Latin America is growing: in 2020, in Brazil, $62.5M was invested in Edtech, compared to $16M in 2016.
Edtech, like education, can be divided into many segments. HolonIQ mapped the top 100 edtech companies in Latin America below:
3 players to keep an eye on:
Descomplica 🇧🇷
Descomplica is the biggest edtech in Latin America. It is a Brazilian company for tutoring and University admission exam preparation, with 5M monthly students. It was founded in 2011 by Marco Fisbhen, a former physics professor.
In February 2021 they raised the largest Latin American edtech round: $84M, led by Softbank and Invus.
Platzi 🇨🇴
Platzi is a Colombian edtech company that offers live streaming and self-paced courses for technological skills. It was founded in 2013 by Freddy Vega and Christian Van Der Henst.
Platzi joined Y Combinator for W15, being the first Latin American company to join the accelerator. Today they are giving back from this experience by creating Platzi DemoDay: a 10-week accelerator and competition that opens the doors of the participants to mentoring and their investor network.
Crehana 🇵🇪
Crehana is a Peruvian edtech company that provides courses on creative skills and technical skills, operating in a B2C and B2B model. Crehana was founded in 2013 by Diego Olcese and Rodolfo Dañino.
Crehana benefited from the pandemic: they grew by 300% and now have more than 3.5M students. In December 2020 they raised 17.5M in their series A led by Mountain Nazca.
Failure story: the fire of the Jagger Library in Cape town
On April 18th, 2021, there was a fire in Table Mountain in Cape Town, which extended to the Cape Town University Library: the Jagger Reading Room.
The Jagger Reading Room was in the Cape Town University Library. It contained a large African Studies Collection started in 1953, with monographs from sub-Saharan Africa, and a collection on Southern African Languages, with documents that were extremely rare.
The Library caught fire in April 2021 after the Table Mountain forest fire in Cape Town. It was equipped with a standard fire protocol that prevented further fire extension. However, it did not have fire-proof doors to protect the material to overheat, which is a common measure to protect this type of heritage. This caused the massive destruction of material: 95,000 documents and a large part of the audiovisual collection.
Moreover, in a fire in a library, there are two components that can damage the books: the fire and the water.
A lot of documents of the Library collection were stored in the basement, which made them escape the flames, but not the water that was used to stop the fire. This led to all the documents being damaged by the water, some with minor damages and some more serious.
200 volunteers are helping UCT to recover the material damages, from salvaging the wet documents to accelerating the digitalization of this cultural heritage. The University had started a digitalization process in 2015, intensifying the effort in the past 3 years, which is still ongoing. The Vice-Chancellor Phakeng, while regretting the loss, hopes that this will give visibility to the cultural heritage in the Library and accelerate its digitalization process.
Source recommendation: Rest of World
Rest of World is an international nonprofit journalism organization. In their blog, they write stories of all sorts of technology in underestimated places. The writers have worked for places such as The New York Times, Quartz, or South China Morning Post.
The way societies adopt technology is not a one-way street.
Rest of World is a recent discovery that excited me: It went from chilling in my inbox to opening one, then reading a story, then spending the whole morning, then being overly inspired by their mission, to YOU HAVE TO CHECK THEM OUT IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT, to, I’d like to write for them, to, I wish I could produce such quality output, to a heavy imposter syndrome since they are very reputable journalists.
Sophie Schmidt founded Rest of World in April 2020. It is now a full-fledged team of reputed writers and editors, and they accept submissions. They document what happens when technology and human experience collide in places that are overlooked and underestimated.
The quality of the stories is outstanding, and it gets specific and clear enough so that you understand what it is really like in every story: from how Honduran migrant caravans are organized and scammed on Facebook and WhatsApp; to Cuban entrepreneurs fighting for a more connected island. If Rest of World is not on your radar, it needs to be.
You can read them here: https://restofworld.org/