- When Regulators Step in to do Business
Sometimes, the most interesting business stories are not about businesses that failed.
They are about businesses that were actually working.
The introduction of Free Senior High School created a problem that was almost predictable. Student numbers increased significantly, and schools suddenly had to deal with much larger volumes of admissions, enrolment, student records and administration.
Reporting day became particularly chaotic.
Parents and students queued for hours, especially at boarding schools. Schools would subsequently struggle with the sheer volume of paperwork and the management of academic, disciplinary and other student records.
Most schools knew digital solutions could solve the problem, but had not budget lines to deal with that.
And the Ghanaian techepreneurs saw it.
Companies such as Saprosoft Solutions, SHSDesk and 2ndCycleGh(from BoldTech ICT Solutions) developed digital platforms to help second-cycle institutions manage admissions and enrolment.
What is interesting is not just that they built the technology.
They figured out a business model around it.
The schools could access the systems with zero investment. Prospective students would contribute to the management of the system by purchasing.
A relatively simple model, but it worked.
And as the market developed, the businesses did not remain where they started.
Admission and enrolment systems began evolving into much broader school management platforms. They started handling academic records, student administration and other school-level processes. In some cases, the voucher sales even became a small source in funds for beneficiary schools. The open nature of the model meant it was always open to new entrants.
So…
Competition helped drive evolution.
Companies had to improve their products because schools had alternatives.
More schools came on board.
More features were introduced.
Businesses grew.
People were employed.
And, perhaps most importantly, a technology ecosystem was beginning to emerge around a problem created by the rapid expansion of secondary education.
As of last academic year more than 500 of Ghana’s little over 1,000 second-cycle institutions had reportedly subscribed to one or another of these platforms.
Think about that for a moment.
This was not a government programme.
It was not a donor-funded pilot.
It was a market that had emerged around a genuine problem, with private companies investing their own resources to build solutions and schools adopting the ones they found useful.
There was innovation.
There was competition.
There was revenue.
There were jobs.
And there was room for the businesses to grow.
Then came government.
This year, the Ghana Education Service decided to go a step further than just placing students it went into the admissions and enrolment system market.
All prospective students would now have to purchase their GHS30 voucher from the same company for registration into their schools.
The state had essentially created a monopoly for a previous non participant in the space.
The about eight competing platforms that had been operating in this space were effectively shut down.
A new system, it was announced, had been developed but the identity of the contractor and details of how the contract was awarded have not been publicly disclosed. Plus, the new system was intended to do what some techreneurs were already doing.
And this is where I think we need to pause.
Because the issue is bigger than whether the new system works. Or better.
It is about what happens to a market when government agencies decide to dive in.
What happens to the companies that invested in building the market?
What happens to the people they employed?
What happens to the data accumulated over the years?
And what happens to the incentive for the next Ghanaian entrepreneur to look at a problem in the public sector and think, I can build a business around solving this?
There are also questions around the new arrangement that deserve answers.
How was the contractor procured?
Who is the contractor?
How is existing school and student data being migrated?
What happens to the data held by the previous platforms?
Were schools consulted before the switch?
These are not insignificant questions.
GES has, over the years, seen various technology systems introduced and subsequently disappear, sometimes along with years of school and student data. Changes in leadership often mean changes in systems.
That is not a sustainable approach to digital transformation.
Government certainly has a role to play.
But perhaps that role should be different.
Government can set the standards.
It can establish the national architecture.
It can build and manage the central database and determine the information that schools need to submit.
It can enforce data protection, interoperability and security requirements.
But the applications sitting on top of that infrastructure do not necessarily have to be built and operated by government or government appointed companies.
There is a strong case for allowing private-sector companies to compete to provide those solutions.
Let them compete for schools.
Let them innovate.
Let schools choose.
Let the better products survive.
And let the market create the jobs.
This is particularly important because there is real money involved.
About 600,000 graduates have been placed into second-cycle institutions this year. If each student purchases a GHS30 voucher to access the admission system, that is approximately GHS18 million in voucher payments, assuming one voucher only per student.
That is not a small market.
And it is worth remembering that there were already Ghanaian businesses participating in that market.
They were not waiting for government to create the opportunity.
They had identified the problem, invested in solutions, built relationships with schools, created revenue models and grown their businesses.
It should also ask what kind of digital economy we want to build.
Do we want Ghanaian entrepreneurs to identify problems in education, healthcare, agriculture and other sectors and build businesses around solving them?
Or do we want those opportunities to eventually be scrapped off by centralised government systems?
There is an important distinction between government providing digital infrastructure and government becoming a provider.
The first can create an ecosystem.
The second can crowd it out.
We seem to prefer the second.
Maybe at the moment the big shots in the education space are too busy dealing with this year’s placement challenges to worry about what happens five or ten years from now but this is the best time to also have the conversation.
Do we really want the private-sector ecosystem to grow?
You can reach the writer on ken@boldtechgh.com
