So far schools in Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, UAE, Saudi, Bahrain, and Kuwait, Morocco, Libya, Qatar are shut for at least two more weeks to a month (schools in Oman, Tunisia remain open), as COVID-19 locks down cities and countries whole.
We aggregated education tech companies from across MENA in a reference chart to help teachers, school management, parents and professionals with their remote-learning efforts and maximize their time.
We only covered products produced in the Middle East and North Africa in this table, I’m sure many use Coursera, EdX, Khan Academy, etc, however these platforms get enough coverage as is and do not necessarily cover the needs of the average student, teacher and parent that has to home-school and remote-teach over the next few month.
The most important note is that Arabic remains the dominant language of education in MENA and the most language parents and majority of professionals are comfortable with. While Dubai-dwellers, and workers in tech may feel otherwise, these are services that are currently needed by every household across MENA as a necessity and that forces us into the reality: Arabic is vital for mass, inclusive and equal reach.
Interesting observation:
- All Academic Distance Learning solutions in MENA are primarily in Arabic.
- 80% of Professional Distance Learning Solutions are in Arabic, the rest are English first.
- 9 of Distance Learning Platforms, Academic and Professional, are funded by governments in the UAE, Saudi, Oman & Jordan.
- All Early Learning Content is Arabic first, and 50% provide English content as well.
- 75% of all services are available in Arabic, while 49% of services are provided in English.
- Most of the solutions and services are headquartered in Saudi (22) and the UAE (21) of a total of 85 services listed
- 69% of solutions are geared toward empowering the Education sector (Academic Distance Learning, Teaching and Tutoring tools, eLearning infrastructure)
*this chart is compiled through hours of online research and some online recommendations, we are likely to be missing some services especially in Early Learning Content as that’s a space that publishing houses are increasingly involved in. We have also not included platforms that are no longer active and ones that are based heavily outside the region (UK is a popular HQ for Edtech companies it seems).
If you have questions about the graph feel free to tweet me or farah.
