Across Africa, the edtech sector is projected to surpass $7 billion by 2030, driven by rising smartphone penetration and demand for alternative learning pathways.

Yet beneath this growth lies a more fragile reality: many platforms built to serve this demand are not engineered to sustain it.

The visible layer of edtech, including the apps, dashboards, and content, often obscures a deeper question: can these systems actually hold up under pressure?

In Nigeria, where connectivity is inconsistent, devices are often low-spec, and infrastructure costs are dollar-denominated, scaling a digital classroom is not just a product challenge. It is an engineering one.

For Oluwasegun Ige, an Engineering and Operations Leader at Class54, this distinction is critical. With nearly a decade of experience across edtech, fintech, and civic technology, he has built systems that must perform reliably in environments where failure is not an exception, but expected.

“The biggest misconception about edtech in Africa is that growth is a function of features,” he says. “In reality, growth is a function of resilience. If your system cannot handle real-world conditions, no amount of features will save it.”

That reality begins with bandwidth. In many parts of Nigeria, students move in and out of connectivity throughout the day.

A platform that assumes constant internet access is already excluding a significant portion of its users. At Class54, this constraint led to a deliberate architectural choice: build for interruption.

Offline functionality was not treated as an add-on, but as a core system requirement. Learning materials, practice questions, and progress tracking were designed to persist beyond connectivity, with synchronisation mechanisms that reconcile user activity once access is restored.

The result is a platform that behaves less like a live service and more like a continuous learning environment, one that does not collapse when the network does.

But resilience is only one side of the equation. The other is cost.

In many African startups, infrastructure costs quietly scale faster than revenue. Cloud services priced in foreign currency can erode margins long before a company reaches profitability. At Class54, Ige approached this challenge with a clear constraint: operate at minimal cost without compromising performance.

The result was a system capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of users while running on infrastructure costing less than $50 per month.

This was achieved through disciplined engineering such as lean API design, efficient storage strategies, and careful allocation of compute resources.

“In this environment, efficiency is not optional,” Ige explains. “Every unnecessary request, every redundant process. It all adds up. If you don’t design for efficiency from the start, scaling becomes expensive very quickly.”

This efficiency extends to system architecture. In edtech platforms, APIs are not just connectors, they are the system’s nervous system. Poorly designed APIs introduce latency, limit flexibility, and make future development increasingly complex.

At Class54, the API layer was built to accommodate growth from the outset. Features like practice history, leaderboards, and AI-powered explanations were integrated into a structure that prioritizes speed and modularity.

This ensures that new capabilities can be added without degrading performance, an essential requirement in a space where user expectations evolve quickly.

Yet performance alone does not guarantee engagement. In Nigeria’s competitive digital landscape, users have little patience for unreliable systems. A slow-loading quiz or a lost session is often enough to drive a student away permanently.

“People talk about engagement as if it’s a design problem,” Ige says. “But the first layer of engagement is trust. If the system works consistently, users stay. If it doesn’t, they leave.”

Another layer of complexity emerges when platforms integrate with the broader digital ecosystem. Payments, messaging, and identity systems each come with their own constraints and inconsistencies. Ige’s experience across communications and fintech infrastructure underscores the importance of designing for interoperability.

“In Africa, you are always integrating with something,” he notes. “Different providers, different standards, different levels of reliability. Your system has to absorb that complexity without passing it on to the user.”

For edtech platforms, this could mean connecting with examination bodies, enabling payments for premium content, or integrating communication tools for student support. Each integration introduces potential points of failure, and each must be engineered with care.

What emerges is a picture of edtech that looks very different from the one typically presented. It is less about interfaces and more about infrastructure; less about content and more about continuity.

With over 60% of Africa’s population under the age of 25, demand for accessible education will only grow. But meeting that demand will require more than scaling user acquisition. It will require building systems that reflect the realities of the continent.

For Ige, the path forward is clear.

“Technology in Africa has to be intentional,” he says. “You design for constraints, such as network, cost, devices, and then build systems that thrive within them.”

That philosophy is quietly shaping Nigeria’s digital classrooms, not through what users see, but through the engineering decisions that ensure they can keep learning.

The EdTech platform has helped over 300,000 students across Nigeria prepare for and pass local and international examinations through mobile-based practice, offline learning resources, and online instruction.

The update comes as registration for the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) is expected to commence soon.

According to the company, the new features include AI-powered explanations for exam questions, expanded offline practice tools, and a live online lesson module.

The AI explanation feature is designed to provide step-by-step reasoning for exam questions, with particular focus on subjects such as Mathematics and Physics.

The system explains how answers are derived rather than simply presenting final results, a model the company says is intended to support conceptual understanding.

In addition, Class54 has introduced live online lessons that allow students to participate in real-time virtual classes led by subject instructors. The sessions are structured to cover syllabus topics and examination strategies through interactive teaching.

Speaking on the technical development behind the update, Class54’s Chief Technology Officer, Oluwasegun Ige, said the platform was built to balance academic depth with mobile accessibility.

“Delivering AI-powered explanations and live lessons in a lightweight mobile environment required careful optimization,” Ige said. “The focus was to ensure the platform remains usable even with limited data access, while maintaining strong offline functionality.”

The platform also continues to offer full offline access to over 25 years of past JAMB and WAEC questions, alongside a voice-enabled assistant that reads exam literature and summaries aloud for users.

Class54 operates on a single subscription model, which covers JAMB, WAEC, and Post-UTME preparation. The company says the plan is designed to reduce the need for multiple exam preparation tools.

With the 2026 examination cycle approaching, Class54 stated that the latest update is intended to provide students with additional digital learning options alongside traditional study methods. The mobile application is available on both Android and iOS platforms.

More About Class54

• Class54 is a Nigerian education technology platform focused on exam preparation for local and international assessments. The company provides mobile-based practice tools, offline learning resources, and online instructional support for students across Nigeria.

Launched earlier this year, Class54’s mobile and web applications allow K-12 students prepare adequately for examinations by using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse their areas of weaknesses and suggests the proper steps to take to improve.

On the Class54 platform, available for Android, iOS and Windows desktop users, students can practice up to four subjects simultaneously, just like in the actual examination; see a robust and precise analysis of their performance and practice latest past questions up to 2022 JAMB and WAEC examinations.

Students can also access the summary of recommended novels, practice questions by their preferred topics or practice questions by how hard or easy they prefer it to be.

Instructions on each subject are presented with detailed explanation to every question, complete with clearly labelled diagrams. To boost adoption among target users across Nigeria, the applications have been optimized to work even with limited internet access.

In a statement, the promoters of the platform, Class54 Education Limited said the solution has become imperative in the face of increased lagging performance of candidates of the JAMB UTME in recent times, with barely 2% of the candidates scoring above 200 in the 2022 UTME exams conducted recently.

They said Class54 would successfully drive pass rate in UTME to 73.54%, up from the 21% national average as has been demonstrated in its first year of operation, thereby boosting admission rate into universities appreciably.

With access to the application remaining free for the first five questions in a subject year and full access at N1,500 for three months, an amount that is significantly cheaper compared to the cost of the printed past questions, Class54, it said, can become the best companion for everyone writing major examinations in Nigeria.

Speaking on the solution, Oluwasegun Ige, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer said, “We have built an amazing technology based on artificial intelligence which helps students improve their grades in a record time as they prepare for major examinations in Nigeria.

“Our technology tracks their progress and recommends the next-best action to take to get the best grades in their examinations. This has enabled us to raise the average pass rate for candidates who used the class54 App in the 2022 JAMB examination to 73.54%, up from the 21% national average just in our first year alone.”