A few years ago, I sat in a scoping meeting with a local college in Kenya that wanted to implement an LMS. When I asked the director why, his answer was: to facilitate sharing of ebooks among students and lecturers. They had chosen Moodle as their preferred platform. Spending a significant sum on one of the most feature-rich open-source LMSs in the world — to replicate file sharing — is a pattern that plays out across institutions in the region with depressing regularity.
The problem is not technology. The problem is the relationship between institutions and technology — and the assumptions, fears, and missed opportunities that shape it.
The Underutilisation Problem
Most public institutions in East Africa still have a long way to go in making the paradigm shifts required to genuinely adopt educational technology. A number have eLearning systems in place. Most of those systems are significantly underutilised.
An eLearning platform, used properly, offers measurable benefits: facilitating collaboration between students and teachers, monitoring performance, generating analytics, offering personalised learning pathways, and enabling the reuse of instructional materials. None of those benefits are accessible if the platform is used only as a file repository.
The gap between what these platforms can do and what institutions actually ask of them is, in most cases, not a technology gap. It is a capacity and vision gap.
Technology as Threat — and as Opportunity
A significant obstacle to deeper edTech adoption is that many teachers and instructors still perceive technology as a threat to their professional role. Some believe that eLearning, by allowing students to study independently, makes the instructor redundant.
This framing is both understandable and mistaken. Technology does not eliminate the instructor — it relocates and, in many ways, expands their role. An instructor who embraces digital tools can offer online tutoring from anywhere, collaborate more efficiently with peers, share resources at scale, and contribute to course design in ways that extend well beyond the physical classroom. The demand for Subject Matter Experts who can translate their knowledge into well-designed digital learning experiences is growing, not shrinking.
The Role of Open Education Resources
Cost remains a genuine constraint for many institutions. Custom eLearning platform development and content production can be expensive — disproportionately so for smaller institutions and those in under-resourced contexts. This is where Open Education Resources (OERs) play a critical role.
OERs provide access to quality learning materials for communities that cannot afford to purchase them. Initiatives like Kids Comp Camp, which has set up Raspberry Pi-powered classrooms in underprivileged Kenyan communities, demonstrate that meaningful digital learning environments can be created at minimal cost when the right tools and open resources are deployed thoughtfully.
The edTech industry in East Africa is growing — but so is the volume of low-quality, unregulated content being pushed into the space. Institutions need frameworks for evaluating and curating what their learners are exposed to, and OERs — carefully selected and contextualised — can serve as both a cost-effective and quality-assured alternative to commercial content.
Key takeaway: Technology is not the bottleneck for East African educational institutions. Vision, capacity, and the willingness to use what is already in place are the real constraints — and those are solvable.