When people picture EdTech working, they tend to picture a child holding a tablet. A learner-facing app, glowing screen, instant feedback.
It’s a compelling image, and it’s also the wrong starting point, writes Nonku Nyathi, partnerships and ecosystem head at Injini.
On World Literacy Day, marked annually on 8 September, it’s worth asking a different question: not which app will fix literacy, but who is best placed to put any tool to good use in the first place. In South Africa’s classrooms, the answer is almost always the same person. It’s the teacher.
This isn’t a small distinction but the difference between an intervention that scales and one that stalls the moment the pilot funding runs out.
The scale of the problem is well documented. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study found that 81% of South African Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning, a result that shocked the sector. What gets far less attention is a second, quieter crisis sitting just behind the first – a widening gap between how much technology has been deployed in South African schools and how confident, supported and equipped teachers actually feel using it.
Where deployment outpaces adoption
Across the continent, this gap shows up in strikingly similar ways. Kenya’s national digital literacy programme has put more than a million tablets into classrooms since 2016, yet a meaningful share sit idle, held back less by broken hardware than by teachers who were never given the confidence or the time to build the devices into their lessons. Rwanda’s Smart Classroom rollout tells a related story: even in standout schools, strong infrastructure doesn’t automatically translate into strong pedagogy.
South African researchers are reaching a similar conclusion from a different angle. A recent Human Sciences Research Council study into digital maths learning found that EdTech only closes gaps, rather than widening them, when teacher capacity, language and classroom realities are treated as design constraints from the outset, not retrofitted afterwards. Technology, in other words, is not a substitute for a well-trained teacher. At best, it’s an extension of one.
This is the uncomfortable truth the sector needs to sit with: procurement is not adoption and access is not literacy. A school can have a device on every desk and still fail to move the needle on reading outcomes if the person at the front of the room hasn’t been given the training, the time or the institutional backing to use those tools with intent.
Freeing teachers to teach
Where digital tools genuinely earn their place is less glamorous than the tablet-in-hand image suggests. It’s in the administrative load that quietly eats into a teacher’s day: attendance capturing, marking, progress tracking and report compilation, among others. Automate enough of that, and something valuable opens up on the other side – time for the kind of targeted, small-group reading intervention that research consistently shows moves the needle for struggling readers, the model popularised globally as Teaching at the Right Level, which groups learners by demonstrated ability rather than age or grade.
It doesn’t require the newest technology. Rather, it requires a teacher who has the mental bandwidth, emotional resilience, the right information and the confidence to identify which five children in a class of 40 need to spend 20 minutes on phonics rather than the next chapter in the textbook.
Research on classroom learning materials suggests that simple, well-designed resources such as worksheets can be highly effective when they are aligned to learning objectives and used by a properly supported teacher. The point is not that analogue tools are inherently better than digital ones, but that the quality of the teaching and how a tool is used matter more than its technological sophistication. The tools that matter most are frequently the ones that give teachers back their time, not the ones that try to replace their judgement.
Teacher first, tech second
A product built for the South African classroom has to earn its place at the teacher’s side, not simply arrive at the learner’s desk and expect to be adopted. That means investing as seriously in teacher onboarding, ongoing professional development and change management as founders invest in the underlying technology itself. It means building for low-bandwidth, multilingual, under-resourced classrooms as the default, not the exception.
We’ve watched founders discover, sometimes the hard way, that the products that stick in South African schools are rarely the most sophisticated ones. They’re the ones a Grade 4 teacher in Mthatha or Mitchells Plain can pick up on a Monday morning with minimal support and use to make a real decision about which child needs help that week.
This World Literacy Day, the sector’s attention should move a step further back from the classroom, toward the people who make every intervention work or fail. If South Africa is serious about reversing its literacy trajectory, digital fluency among teachers cannot be an afterthought bolted onto an app rollout. It has to be the starting point. Equip the teacher properly, and the technology has a fighting chance of mattering. Skip that step, and even the best-designed app is just another device gathering dust in a drawer.