Favour Chukwuedo: From Feature Phones to AI-Powered Inclusion, the Next Frontier of Nigerian EdTech

When Favour Chukwuedo talks about education in Nigeria, he doesn’t start with smartphones, platforms, or silicon. He starts with a child in a rural community, holding a basic feature phone, the kind Nigerians call a Palasa, and trying to learn.

That image drove the creation of DigiLearns, the SMS and USSD-based learning platform Chukwuedo co-founded that has since grown to reach over a million active users across Nigeria’s 774 local governments. But as DigiLearns scaled, Chukwuedo found himself staring at a second, harder problem. One that access alone could not solve.

Building for the Bottom of the Pyramid

DigiLearns was not a product of comfort. It was born as a response to the educational disruption of COVID-19, built to reach children who had no internet and no smartphones, but still had a phone that could receive a text or dial a USSD code. The African Union named it one of Africa’s top education innovations for 2020, and it drew backing from institutions including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, One Young World, the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, and the Global Changemakers Foundation.

Today, DigiLearns claims over 1.1 million active users, more than 3.5 million learning sessions, and presence across all 774 local governments in Nigeria. Its AI-driven adaptive learning system delivers personalised educational content through SMS, USSD, WhatsApp, Telegram, and web platforms, while reporting 90 percent lower cost per student compared to traditional methods. For many EdTech founders, those numbers would represent a destination. For Chukwuedo, they exposed a new starting point.

The Gap Behind the Gap

Scaling DigiLearns meant sitting with data, and data tells uncomfortable stories. As the platform pushed learning deeper into underserved communities, Chukwuedo began noticing patterns that pointed to a category of learner the broader system had quietly abandoned: children with autism, ADHD, and other neurodevelopmental conditions who were receiving no meaningful, trackable intervention whatsoever.

This is not a small oversight. In Nigeria, it is estimated that roughly 930 individuals per 100,000 were living with autism or autism spectrum disorder as of 2021, though experts caution that the absence of reliable national data means true prevalence is likely understated. Nigeria is, in fact, ranked among the top ten countries globally for the highest prevalence of children with specific developmental disabilities under five years of age, and research on autism from sub-Saharan Africa accounts for barely one percent of the global literature.

The numbers alone do not capture what Chukwuedo encountered. In Nigeria, despite legislative provisions, the intersection of early childhood development and neurodevelopmental conditions remains poorly addressed. Early diagnosis, intervention, and inclusive education are underdeveloped, resulting in the exclusion of children with neurodevelopmental conditions from formal education during their most formative years.

Research in one Nigerian teaching hospital found that among autistic children seen at the clinic, only about 35 percent were in mainstream schools. The rest were either in special education settings or not in school at all.

For Chukwuedo, the pattern was clear. The problem was not just access. It was the absence of any infrastructure to track whether neurodiverse children were actually learning, or regressing, once education theoretically reached them.

Entering with CogniQuest

That realisation led to CogniQuest, an AI-powered platform designed to help parents and supporters of neurodiverse learners track real cognitive progress, detect regression early, and connect with verified educators. The platform tracks cognitive progress across ten developmental domains, spots regression early, closes learning gaps, and is aligned with Nigeria’s NERDC curriculum. It is free to start.

The philosophy behind CogniQuest reflects the same instinct that drove DigiLearns: don’t build for the well-resourced. Build for the people who have no other option and no other advocate. In Nigeria, that is largely the parent of a neurodiverse child navigating a system where due to the lack of consistent national data, budgetary allocations and policy interventions often fail to reflect the real needs of affected individuals and communities.

The platform is not trying to replace therapists or special educators. It is trying to give parents the vocabulary, the data, and the tools to have better conversations with whoever is supporting their child, and to notice sooner when something is going wrong.

The Architecture of the Idea

Chukwuedo’s journey from SMS-based learning to AI-powered inclusion is not a pivot. It is a logical progression. DigiLearns taught him that getting content to a child is only the first layer of the problem. The second layer is whether the child can genuinely access and process it. Neurodiverse learners, particularly those with autism and ADHD, often struggle not because the content is absent, but because it is delivered in formats that do not account for how their brains work, and because no one is monitoring whether the approach is actually working.

In many parts of Africa, children with learning differences are frequently left behind, mislabelled as “slow learners,” or in extreme cases, hidden away due to shame, in part because education systems are ill-equipped to support neurodiverse students, teachers often lack training in special needs education, and schools may not have the necessary resources. CogniQuest is attempting to change that dynamic at the family level, empowering parents to become informed advocates before a school or a system catches up.

Chukwuedo is also described as an award-winning EdTech entrepreneur and community ecosystem builder with a focus on the Sustainable Development Goals, and the arc of his work reflects that orientation. DigiLearns addressed SDG 4’s goal of quality education for all. CogniQuest is drilling into the inclusion layer that most EdTech platforms treat as optional.

What the Story Really Tells

There is a broader pattern in what Chukwuedo is building. Nigerian EdTech has spent most of its recent history solving for access, a legitimate and urgent challenge in a country where millions of children are still out of school, or learning on inadequate infrastructure. But access and outcomes are not the same thing. You can get a child into a learning environment and still fail them completely if the environment is not designed for how they learn.

CogniQuest sits at the intersection of three underpublicised conversations in African tech: the shift from access to effectiveness, the growing potential of AI for personalised and adaptive learning, and the almost total absence of structured support systems for neurodiverse children in Nigeria. No national tracking exists. No public registry of progress. Very little data. In that vacuum, a founder who has spent years building for the most overlooked corners of the education system is now trying to build the infrastructure that should have existed all along.

Whether CogniQuest scales into a national platform, integrates with public health systems, or remains a critical tool for thousands of families, the framing it introduces matters. Neurodiverse children in Nigeria are not edge cases. They are an undercounted, underserved population that the system has not yet decided to see. Favour Chukwuedo has decided to see them.

Favour Chukwuedo is the founder and CTO of DigiLearns, Nigeria’s AI-powered multi-channel learning platform serving over one million active users, and the founder of CogniQuest, an AI-powered platform helping parents of neurodiverse learners track cognitive progress and detect regression early. He is an award-winning EdTech entrepreneur, tech community builder, and SDG advocate. He is currently pursuing an MBA at Valar Institute.