Two Harvard grads went to Africa to fix education -- and turn a profit. Let's see how it's going.
In the early days of the era of Silicon Valley disruption, two Harvard University graduates cooked up a bold idea for a business. What if they could go to Africa and slash costs for teachers by relying on technology? If all a teacher had to do was read a lesson directly from a tablet, could costs be cut low enough that you could scale it into a multi-billion-dollar business?
This week, Neha Wadekar and I took a close look at how this experiment has gone, now that it’s nearly 15 years old and reaches hundreds of thousands of young children across Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, and India.
What I’m particularly proud of is that the resulting article weaves together two of our strengths at The Intercept. First is the delicate, on-the-ground reporting in Kenya that takes you inside the ramshackle Bridge schoolhouses in the Mukuru Kwa Reuben section of the Nairobi slums. Along the way, we uncovered details of rampant sexual assault. But the story doesn’t end there. The climate that led to the abuse was financed by some of the biggest do-gooder names in the global poverty game, including the World Bank, the UK’s development bank, and the for-profit arms of outfits like Chan Zuckerberg Education, linked to Mark Zuckerberg; Gates Frontier, tied to Bill Gates; and Imaginable Futures, linked to eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, a major funder of The Intercept.
International financial institutions and investors have come under heavy pressure in recent years to take responsibility for what is euphemistically referred to as the “negative externalities” associated with their investments. Our story digs into the Beltway machinations inside institutions like the World Bank that have enabled these types of crimes to go unchecked.
The story also doubles as a parable for our era. If anybody ever asks you to define “neoliberalism,” send them this piece.
The full story is here, and it’s worth the click just to see the photos Brian Otieno took for us.
An ironic sidenote: The firm that is the subject of the article, Bridge International Academies, threatened us with a lawsuit early in the reporting. The company is financed in part by an Omidyar entity, and Omidyar also funds the Press Freedom Defense Fund, which backs outlets like The Intercept in the case of litigation. So an Omidyar-funded company would be suing an Omidyar-funded news outlet backed by an Omidyar-funded press freedom defense fund. (Omidyar is actually drawing down his funding of The Intercept as we go independent, but he’s still a significant donor today.)
At the same time that Bridge was making these legal threats, I was reporting a story on billionaire Peter Thiel, who famously bankrupted Gawker as revenge for a story about him – a legacy that puts other legal threats in perspective.
Here is that story. After we published it, Peter Thiel was trending on Twitter, and the story has gone viral, but the number of journalists and pundits who’ve commented on it has been conspicuously tiny. Not that I can blame them. I expect it to be the first of several, and if you know anybody I should talk to for future Thiel stories, please send them my way.
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