Kidato, an online school designed to address the school overcrowding issue in Africa, has just announced its latest round of funding.
According to TechCrunch, the company has announced that it has raised a $1.4 million seed round to expand its educational efforts.
Learn Start Capital, Launch Africa Ventures Fund, Graph Ventures, and Century Oak Capital were the companies that led the investment. The company also reports that there were other private and angel investors involved in this latest round of funding.
Kidato was founded by Sam Gichuru, a Kenyan serial entrepreneur, back in 2020. A father of three children, Gichuru says that he was inspired to found the company when he realized that there were several Kenyan professionals — like himself — who were struggling to keep up with the cost of private school tuition which can go as high as $8,000 a year, according to TechCrunch.
“I moved them from private schools to homeschooling because that was the next option to give them the same quality of education but at an affordable price,” Gichuru told TechCrunch. “That was when I started noticing the other challenges private schools had.”
However, Kidato does more than just help offset the cost of private schools. It also does a great job of addressing the overcrowding issue found in public schools all throughout Africa. According to TechCrunch, the average public school in Africa has a 50-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio. And finally, Kidato addresses the issue of school distance — the average student in Nairobi, Kenya, has to be up by 5 a.m. to be on the bus by 6 a.m. and in school by 7 a.m., making it nearly unsustainable for the average student.
The company has also implemented after-school programs like robotics and chess, art, coding, and debate classes. Typically, they are usually found among students from affluent schools; however, they are being democratized by Kidato to the more than 700 registered students using its platform.
