Like great things that start from small beginnings, Faiz Bashir started FlexiSAF fourteen years ago to address the administrative problems of enrolment, grading and records in Nigerian schools. In just twenty days he built a software to solve the challenge and today, 120 tertiary institutions and 700 schools are running on this system. Having scaled that hurdle, he scratched deeper only to realise that administration was never the real obstacle, delivering quality education was.
For Africa, a continent that boasts the world’s youngest population, where 60% are under 25 and has the fastest-growing tertiary enrolment rate globally at 4.3% per year, there was a need to go a step further. Market Data Forecast revealed that the eLearning market across the continent is projected to grow from $200 million to $20 billion by 2032. These statistics are real and the demands are mounting as institutions struggle with hiring lecturers or developing curricula. For an innovator like Bashir, the vision was how to create a solution through AI.
Delivering Excellence with AWS
Today, 130,000 learners across 260 universities are the beneficiaries of the ingenious solution by FlexiSAF in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with the launch of Distinction.app in April 2024. The platform which runs entirely on AWS Generative AI models from Amazon Bedrock, specifically Nova and Titan, power content generation while sixteen microservices handle everything from document processing to student analytics.
The app has been so helpful enabling students with personalised learning paths that adapt in real time, giving automated grading and instant feedback. It is so spontaneous that if a lecturer types in a topic, the platform generates, within two minutes, a complete high-quality course including lecture notes, video content, flashcards and quizzes aligned with the institution’s curriculum. Within a year, it has proven to be a lasting solution with 1.3 million AI-generated questions, 7 million questions answered and 1.2 million hours of learning delivered.
Making Edtech Affordable
Beyond its first-rate service, the app has an economic angle. In terms of affordability, at a monthly rate of $2 per student, the platform has proven that it was truly designed for Africans by an African. Its affordability has helped to boost customer retention at 96%, ensuring recurring revenue and encouraging bulk institutional licensing which has encouraged FlexiSAF to project a 40% market share in Nigerian tertiary education by 2030, up from 10% today.
Why Co-create with AWS
“Our experience with AWS has been exceptional, not just from a technology standpoint, but from a true partnership perspective,” a confident Faiz said referring to his team of 100 employees. The feat achieved with Distinction.app is major because building an AI infrastructure that serves hundreds of thousands of concurrent learners across multiple countries would typically require a team several times that size. But many thanks to AWS who provided the architecture and the acceleration, making the process a walk in the park.
Jyoti Ball, General Manager for SSA at AWS, capturing the organisation’s capacity and willingness to support innovators ready to revolutionise and scale, echoed Faiz’s statement, “Building on AWS, FlexiSAF did it in months, not years. That’s what co-creation looks like when you remove the barriers and let builders build.”
Looking Ahead
FlexiSAF is expanding across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with automated video generation, AI quality assurance agents and deeper personalisation which according to Faiz, “AWS credits enable us to experiment, iterate and scale our AI capabilities rapidly; significantly reducing the barrier to innovation.” The public-sector experience is already proven with Nigeria’s Education Loan Fund (NECO) at 2 million+ student records, NECO national examinations, with 7 million+ registrations and state-level deployments in Kaduna and Bauchi.
For Ball, it’s a game of fastest thinkers who can provide solutions which AWS is ready to offer support as he concluded, “Africa’s youth are not a future opportunity; they are a present demand. The question was never whether 60% of this continent’s population would need digital education infrastructure. It was whether anyone would build it fast enough.”