Getting quality education is expensive. 

The cost of sending a child to a private school from grade R to grade 12 in South-Africa is roughly R3.7 million which is approximately a quarter of a million Euro. But when you compare this amount to approximately 80,000€ reported to be spent on a child in Finland per year, which is mainly a public education system and consistently one of the best education systems you can get in the world, we can conclude again that getting a good education is not going to be cheap. It’s a fact we need to admit so we can focus more on what’s needed to make it more affordable: Exploring new business models.

Today, during a group of South African entrepreneurs’ visit to Microsoft fluxin Helsinki, Finland, this was further validated.

So why is education expensive? It’s the cost of training and hiring good teachers, building infrastructure, equipping schools with modern equipments among many other things.

So how do we make education cheap with new business models?

There are many we can experiment with and a brilliant idea came from one attending Finnish designer which I find fascinating.

Get local and mobile international entrepreneurs to share resources with schools.

This will be the subject of my next post where we can take a closer look into how this can work in practice.