Nigeria’s Co-creation Hub (CcHUB) has announced its acquisition of eLimu, a leading EdTech firm and digital educational content provider in East Africa. This is part of the evolution of ccHub which continues to change its playbook, from a technology square to a consulting firm, and now a builder of digital empires. It has great digital properties in Kenya and Rwanda. This is the “Dangote of Digital” in the making, from your beautiful Nigeria.

From CcHub press release announcing the acquisition.

The goal of the acquisition is to transform eLimu into the Digital Education Platform arm of the company. eLimu will continue to focus on leveraging cutting edge technology to create interactive and engaging learning content customised to the African context which will be initiated using the existing apps. The acquisition will enable it to scale these apps beyond Kenya.

With an existing audience of approximately 500,000 teachers and learners (and COVID-19 accelerating the pace of growth of eLearning), eLimu is one of many players in the EdTech industry that has seen growth at unprecedented rates. This acquisition presents a significant opportunity for digitizing the learning experience and increased investment in innovation. 

eLimu (e-Limu.org) is one of the most talked-about EdTech firms in Africa and the leading digital educational content provider in East Africa. eLimu’s revision and literacy platforms make learning fun and engaging for curious children both at school and at home. By combining engaging content with proven pedagogies, eLimu has seen learning outcomes improve dramatically for over 500,000 learners to date.

The literacy apps for 6 and 7-year-olds include dozens of stories written by Kenyan teachers, illustrated by artists across East Africa, and read by voice actors and celebrities, such as Caroline Mutoko. Each story includes letter tracing, spelling and sentence making exercises. Together they form a scientifically-proven pedagogy called Reading to Learn, which has shown to improve progress in reading and writing 4x faster than traditional methods. The platform has been deployed in English, Swahili, Somali, and Lugbarati. An independent study in Dadaab refugee camp showed progress in reading fluency 3 times faster than the control group.

Update: someone from Kenya noted that e-Limu may be a sick company. We do not know. We leave that to the community to figure out. We just reported based on the press release shared by CcHub.

Prof, this your report is totally untrue. eLimu hasn’t paid staff in months. They were looking for an out. They were already collaborating with CcHub on a project so CcHub knew the situation and had already started poaching their staff. This ‘acquisition’ happened for next to nothing. They already let go of all staff and asked them to reapply. Dangote of Digital is an extremely untrue way to describe what just happened.

Congratulations Madam. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is largely and essentially the new director-general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). She will wear many crowns, among them, the first woman DG of WTO. This is good for Team Nigeria – we need more wins out of this nation.

Yes, it is not official but it is actually official! Yes, since she has won more votes than her competitor, she is the new DG. The official announcement while necessary does not change the fact that she is the new DG. It is on this premise that we write that Sister Ngozi is the new DG of WTO, The official protocol will happen but the outcome is known: Dr Okonjo-Iweala is the new boss.

Yes, while a game remains 2 minutes and home team is winning by by 7-2, it is fair to write that home team has won even though 2 minutes remain in the game. It is factually incorrect but contextually valid.

GE (General Electric) used to be the gold standard on the development of management systems and processes. At its zenith, GE was known as a factory where some of the finest business leaders were incubated, nurtured and prepared for leadership. With peerless business management and training systems, GE supplied a generation of CEOs to corporate America. The company pioneered and scaled many industrial age management systems and sold them across the world.  

One of those systems is the Six Sigma: Six Sigma was invented in Motorola, GE through its former leader, Jack Welch, popularized it when the company adopted it. As Toyota perfected its Kaizen and Japan pursued Total Quality Management, GE gave America management systems for growth and success. But that was the old GE; the present GE is sick. A new CEO, Larry Culp, is at work, to fix GE, which has crumbled from market cap of about $600 billion in its golden era to about $60 billion today

Few challenges in the business world are of the magnitude that Larry Culp faced when he took over as chairman and CEO of GE in 2018. The ailing multinational was a shadow of its former self, in the process of shrinking in market cap from $600 billion in its heyday to around $60 billion today, and shedding dozens of business units along the way. 

For a company that prides itself as a center of management system to collapse in this way is unfortunate. The implication is that GE may be out of sync with the tenets of modern business processes. The industrial age may be passing, and now it needs to learn what works. The strategic mistakes over the last ten years have been constant, and if GE does not stop making them, this iconic American company may go. 

But note one thing: the tribes of great managers have evolved; Amazon, Google and Nvidia offer better ones today than the descendants trained on the books of Six Sigma in GE. Yes, sometimes, you can be really good, doing bad things. GE had it bad: sold a financial service subsidiary, GE Capital, just as financial services were becoming the money that grows on trees. It also went big on centralized power plants through the acquisition of Alstom’s power and grid businesses, when the world was moving towards decentralized power via renewals. 

This is a huge lesson – if you are running in the wrong direction, you will lose. Yes, even if you execute well on the business playbooks, the end goal would be catastrophic since the thesis would be out of phase with markets. GE might have operated the businesses “well’ but the market-fit was not there, and accordingly, it missed the ability to fix the right market frictions.

The past is history, what matters is today. IBM has a market cap of about $98 billion while Microsoft, an old peer, is worth excess of $1.6 trillion today. Yes, Microsoft can buy IBM and still have $1.5 trillion remaining! That was a case study in my Grand Playbook of Business in Tekedia Mini-MBA – and it is worth reading. Has you management evolved for modern markets?

The GE’s Failing Management Factory