Efiwe is one of 12 startups selected into the 2026 cohort of the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship in Nigeria, implemented by Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB) in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. The Fellowship comes with $100,000 in equity-free funding and 12 months of intensive support.
When we launched Efiwe in August 2025, we started from a simple conviction: talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Millions of young people across Africa and other emerging markets have a smartphone in their hand and no realistic path into a technology career. No laptop. No reliable internet. No coding education in their mother tongue. No way to prove a skill to an employer even after they have learned it.
Efiwe was built to remove every one of those barriers. Today, more than 16,000 learners across 150 countries are learning to code on Efiwe, entirely on their phones, fully offline after a single page load, in any of 246 languages, including sign language.
Being selected into the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship is a validation of that mission by two institutions that have spent years investing in exactly this kind of work.
What the Fellowship provides
The Fellowship is not a grant with a logo attached. It is a structured, multi-year engagement:
- $100,000 in equity-free funding, disbursed in five milestone-linked installments across the program.
- A 12-month intensive incubation program, followed by a 6-month post-incubation phase and two years of impact assessment, running through December 2028.
- 1:1 access to experts across learning science, product design, growth, talent, and venture analysis.
- Distribution support, with CcHUB working directly with schools and governments to open market access.
- Investment readiness support, positioning cohort startups to raise a follow-on round of $250,000 to $1,000,000.
- A community of practice with 11 other founders building inclusive EdTech across Nigeria.
The Fellowship’s focus areas map almost exactly onto the problems Efiwe was built to solve: learners with disabilities, underserved rural communities, young girls and women, and education and skills data. Its stated goal is to support and amplify the impact of over 12 inclusive EdTech startups in Nigeria by December 2028.
How we got here
The selection process ran for three months and was, by design, difficult.
April 2026: Application. We submitted an Expression of Interest and a full application. Applications closed on 15 April, and the review process began immediately.
Late April: Product assessment. Our solution progressed to a deeper product-level review. The CcHUB team requested live demo credentials so they could evaluate the actual user experience, how the product behaves in a real-world setting, and its alignment with learning outcomes and inclusivity. We provided two accounts: an individual learner account and a group admin account, along with a step-by-step evaluation guide covering the AI tutor, offline capability, the 246-language layer, Voice-to-Code, Sign-to-Code, Read Aloud, Battery Saver Mode, AR Preview, verifiable QR certificates, and our WhatsApp, Messenger, and SMS learning channels.
June 2026: Interview and due diligence. This was the most rigorous part. The due diligence covered our operational presence in Nigeria, our cap table, management team composition, and traction. We submitted incorporation documents for both Efiwe AI Nigeria Limited and its Indian subsidiary, director identification, litigation declarations, shareholder documentation, 12 months of customer analytics, month-on-month revenue data, bank statements, our customer list, and a full inventory of intellectual property assets.
The team then went further and asked us to substantiate every revenue figure we had reported: the specific sources, the specific paying customers, and the specific amounts each had paid. We provided a full line-item breakdown across our four revenue streams, from our institutional customers in India and Nigeria down to the 211 individual learners who had made voluntary purchases. Efiwe’s core platform is and remains 100% free, so every naira and rupee of that revenue came from someone choosing to pay for an optional extra.
Mid-June: Strategy interrogation. The final round was a set of hard questions about our content roadmap, our long-term vision, our partnership model, and what success looks like beyond coding proficiency. We answered with our 18-month roadmap (PHP, SQL, React, and Prompt Engineering, then a Digital Foundations track and shared-device infrastructure, then tech-adjacent specializations and an Employability Track), and with evidence from our Teach For Nigeria pilot and our Uttarakhand program report.
We told them plainly what we are not: we are not building a general-purpose K-12 learning platform. We are building the most context-relevant pipeline from zero digital knowledge to economic mobility for smartphone users in emerging markets. Every content decision passes one test: does it create a measurable step toward employment for a learner on a smartphone in an emerging market?
20 July 2026: Selection. We received confirmation that Efiwe had been selected as one of 12 startups in the 2026 cohort, and the cohort met in person at the Kick-Off Event in Lagos on 30 July.
What this changes
The funding and support arrive at a deliberate moment. Our roadmap for the next 12 months is already set, and this Fellowship accelerates all of it:
- Completing our advanced technical stack with PHP, React, and Prompt Engineering modules, the top requests from our learners and our Teach For Nigeria pilot Fellows.
- Launching a Digital Foundations track for learners encountering structured digital learning for the first time.
- Scaling institutional delivery across Teach For Nigeria’s network and our Lagos State Education District IV partnership, and expanding into Ghana and Kenya.
- Building out the Micro-Internship Pipeline, connecting our top-performing adult learners to live, market-facing projects so that a certificate becomes a portfolio and a portfolio becomes a hiring conversation.
Our target is straightforward: past 50,000 active learners by December 2026, employer-facing placement pipelines across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana by December 2027, and a 30% transition rate of active adult learners into paid digital work within 36 months.
Our thanks to the entire CcHUB programs and due diligence teams, and to the Mastercard Foundation, for the seriousness they brought to this process and for the confidence they have placed in us.
Thank you also to our Teach For Nigeria Fellows, our school partners in Lagos, Ogun State, and Uttarakhand, and above all to the 16,000+ learners who open Efiwe on a shared Android phone and decide that today is the day they learn something that changes their trajectory. You are the reason any of this exists.
We are just getting started.
Start or continue learning, free at efiwe.com.
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