Stellagy: using crowdfunding to bridge Africa’s educational gap

Around the world, governments and businesses are facing an ever complicating conundrum: high levels of youth unemployment and a shortage of job seekers with relevant critical skills. Many countries especially in the developing world still consider affordability to be the primary inhibitor to education.

Improving the quality of education by making it more relevant to users, as well as finding creative means of addressing the affordability challenge, is highlighted as the primary keys to successfully addressing this challenge.

A recent study by McKinsey & Company highlights that in South Africa, the unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds is at a jaw dropping 51%, with the overall unemployment rate sitting at nearly 25%. In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the gap between the haves and the have-nots, has reached 30 year highs and continues to rise.

South Africa is no exception to this alarming phenomenon as the gap continues to grow ever wider, with at least half of its 51 million strong population living beneath the poverty line. Although South Africa has nearly the largest economy on the continent, holding more than 10% of Africa’s wealth, it frighteningly also has the highest unemployment rate on the continent.

Stellagy is a technology-powered education company that looks to be launching an offensive at the heart of this problem by focussing on supporting the enablement and improvement of education in Africa.

By using crowdfunding in education, its goal is to harness the power of technology to support their users’ educational ambitions. A means to make private dreams a reality through collective action. Think LinkedIn + Kickstarter for education in Africa.

According to Rudeon Snell, Stellagy’s founder, “our goal is to establish a purpose driven online network, aimed at advancing education throughout Africa and our first goal is addressing the challenge of affordability.

When asked for more information on how it works, Rudeon had the following to say, “Stellagy’s value is in the power of connections. Connecting those who have with those who do not through a technology medium focussed on a achieving a prime directive; a quality accessible and affordable education for its users.”

The central theme of the site flows around “journeys”. Users create journey’s to illustrate the goals they wish to fulfil; be they personal goals (directly raising funds for their education) ; Institutional goals (raising funding for academic or scientific research); community goals (raising funds for improving local community schools or new school programs) or organisational goals (new books in the library at a school). These journeys are the lifeblood of the site which connect users.

Would be benefactors and donors view these journeys and then can choose to part fund the ones which resonate with them the most! The great thing about the Stellagy concept is that users can both create and fund journeys and any point. This means that everyone is empowered to help the entire community – the true African spirit of Ubuntu is realised through this line of thinking.