Let’s build the future of learning in Africa, together
Join us as we partner with the Mastercard Foundation to shape the future of education through cutting-edge technology solutions that improve learning outcomes.
How we’re making a difference by the numbers
A partnership designed for African EdTech Growth
iHUB and Mastercard Foundation are partnering to empower EdTech startups who are building tools that enhance learning outcomes and accelerate access to equitable and quality education for Africa’s next generation.
We support Edtech Startups that:
Expand access to quality education
Enhance teacher and trainer effectiveness
Foster learner engagement through innovation
Create scalable and sustainable impact in learning outcomes
Support we offer
Product
Aligning tech solutions with real-world educational needs.
Distribution
Strategies to reach learners and build loyal user bases.
Funding
Crafting the narrative and metrics that attract follow-on capital.
Talent
Expert guidance on Human Resources and Safeguarding to build resilient, ethical organizations.
Our portfolio
We back Africa’s boldest EdTech startups, innovators transforming learning through technology, community, and impact. Supported by the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship, our portfolio showcases startups turning ideas into scalable solutions that reach learners, attract capital, and drive measurable change.
Shaping the
Future of Learning
We accelerate the next generation of African EdTech leaders through equity-free funding, expert support, and a thriving community. Together with The Mastercard Foundation, we are scaling startups that redefine how learning happens across the continent.
James Ong'ang'a
Founder - LoHo Learning
“When I reflect on the beginning of my journey as a Mastercard Foundation Fellow, I’m reminded of how far we’ve come. At the start, LoHo Learning wasn’t quite a startup yet. We had no website, yes, really, and all our operations were still embedded within Longhorn Publishers. I vividly recall joining our first call and seeing the impressive traction numbers from my peers.”
Lemwel Kinyanzwii
CEO - Smart Brains Kenya
“The accomplishment we are proud of was our ability to purchase laptops in bulk-an incredible milestone for us.These laptops have enabled us to create more structured and effective learning environments where our team can better guide and help the students throughout their coding and Robotics journey.”
Alex Kamange
CEO- FUNDIS
”Prior to the Fellowship, we could only do the pre-learning/pre-matching assessment physically which was tedious and resource consuming. The fellowship enabled our digitalizing the process which has enabled our scaling from 4 to 38 counties.”
Kinyanjui Njoroge
Co-Founder -Kuze AI
“The Fellowship helped us rethink our design through user research and mentorship, simplifying our interfaces, improving the teacher dashboard, and making learner data easier to act on.
Most importantly, they helped us better understand the realities of teachers in public schools and underserved communities.”
Georgine Auma
Founder & Director at eKitabu Studio KSL
”Through targeted mentoring from the Investment Team, we built our data room from scratch, defined key metrics, and learned how to present our progress with clarity and credibility. We got a strategic shift in mindset, from building for impact to building for scale and sustainability.”
Christine Wambui
CEO - SomaChat
“Through mentoring and user research support, we were able to redesign our product features and learning pathways to promote engagement, retention, and meaningful learning outcomes. This shift significantly improved how we build, test, and iterate our product to better serve learners.”
Emma Thuguri
CEO- Recess
“Before joining iHUB and the MasterCard Foundation EdTech program, our main challenges in product development at Recess was designing a product that parents and teachers could intuitively adopt and love.”
Tanyella Allison
Co- Founder - NABU
“The Fellowship helped us explore new and sustainable revenue models for NABU. We began piloting licensing agreements, forming paid content creation partnerships, and packaging our library and teacher training resources into a literacy solution for schools. These efforts are key to our long-term goal of building a financially resilient organization that can scale impact.”
William Nguru
Founder - Kurasa
“I’m very proud of the realization we got from the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship in engaging our users when building our product. We were able to grow user engagement 30% up and continue to monitor utilization as our northstar towards our stated vision and mission”
Lilian Kawira
CEO & Founder - Uptyke
”We were able to identify where we were failing and how to fix it in real time and we worked tirelessly to deploy content that actually made sense to our target audience. We embedded curriculum designs, learning science, tech aspect and tested it out with our relevant stakeholders until we were confident with our product for launching.”
Evans Rotich
CEO- Dals Learning
“We were able to develop and submit to KICD all the 10 learning areas for Grade 8 content for curation. The support teams helped us during the product development to incoporate learning science principles into the designs. The support largely came from the product team, learning science and safe guarding teams.”
Lewis Njoroge
Founder -Ultratude/Mzizi ERP
Alumni in the news
About Us
Mastercard Foundation
The Mastercard Foundation is a registered Canadian charity and one of the largest foundations in the world.
It works with visionary organizations to advance education and financial inclusion to enable young people in Africa and Indigenous youth in Canada to access dignified and fulfilling work.
iHUB
We are a leading pan-African creative and innovation ecosystem enabler.
Our vision is to accelerate the application of social capital and technology for economic prosperity across Africa.
