The challenges to EdTech adoption in low-resourced environments are consistent, sticky and ever-present, and for everyone dreaming of tech completely ‘reinventing’ education in Pakistan, here’s the big takeaway: there is a long, long way to go for that to become a possibility.

How do you become financially self-reliant when your startup is a social enterprise catering to a low-income target market in a low-income country where people have very, very limited capacity to pay? You play Robin Hood, of course. That’s the path we’re trying at Beaj Education to keep us afloat until we can scale in the Pakistani market.

Community-led product development (just like community-led anything, really) sounds fantastic in theory. In practice, however, building and sustaining a digital community in a low-resourced setting, to get to know potential customers and understand pain points, is harder than it sounds. Here are some key takeaways from the Beaj Education experience of running a Whatsapp community for a 12-week program for Teacher Leaders from low-cost schools across Pakistan..

Deep, nuanced understanding of local ground realities is vital to success when introducing any innovation into old, rigid systems with little documentation. “Tribal Knowledge Networks” can help unlock this. While we’re seeing an increase in such communities globally, in the context of EdTech in Pakistan, these need to be built and nurtured, bringing together three kinds of expertise: education specialists, technology experts and people with deep knowledge of the traditional system. The question is, can we build knowledge communities that are genuinely accessible, inclusive and efficient?

Beaj Education came into being with a clear mission: help young people in Pakistan build real-world skills to succeed in the 21st century (skills that schools often don’t teach, unfortunately). To figure out where to begin, we asked over 300 people what skill(s) they thought they lacked that held them back in life. The resounding response of over 90% was: “forget everything else, just teach us how to speak in English.”

Here’s the tragedy of the private education sector in Pakistan, which serves ~40% of all enrolled kids: there is *zero incentive* to improve education quality, and negative incentive to upskill teachers. As teachers gain more training and experience, they ask for higher salaries or quit. Higher salaries don’t make business sense as they cut into low-cost school owners’ already meagre profit margins and can’t be passed onto parents, because parents are already paying as much as they possibly can.