Applications of innovative finance in impact investing for the EdTech incubator ecosystem development in South Africa

Many current challenges exist for the EdTech sector in South Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. These include limited financial support; lacking education policy and the government support to create and enforce good policy; basic water, sanitization, electricity, and connectivity infrastructure; and sufficient data to understand where challenges truly are in the education ecosystem. “Innovative finance” is a way that can be used to tackle the inadequacies of the current system by bringing together impact investors who can fund risky early stage EdTech solutions solving for local problems, and incubators who can develop these EdTech solutions to navigate policy barriers while collecting data on the development process of the ecosystem. Re-designing what investment instruments look like for EdTech incubators can realign incentives for more and better EdTech solutions deployed in South Africa, and across sub-Saharan Africa