Rethink Education, a New York-based impact venture capital firm focused on education, invested in Saudi Arabia-based edtech business Aanaab to empower teachers.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, like many others, struggles to train and upskill teachers and school leaders. Many regional education solutions focus on kids, curriculum, or resources and ignore instructors. Without competition, Aanaab recognised the chance to establish a comprehensive teacher professional development solution to solve this difficulty in a $4 billion market.
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Born in 2019, the digital training platform offers Arabic-language courses, licencing, and credentials for K-12 teachers and educators to improve their careers.
“Upskilling teachers is something we’re passionate about because it changes the lives of students around the world,” says Mounira Jamjoom, Aanaab CEO and co-founder. “We can all remember a teacher who had a positive impact on our learning. Even in classrooms that have limited access to resources, a good teacher can still facilitate effective and impactful learning.”
Over 200,000 instructors and 250 schools in 10 MENA countries use Aanaab. Asynchronous and synchronous courses are accredited and use data to track teachers’ professional progress through a dashboard.
Aanaab’s content structure covers six categories, including instructors’ subject knowledge, assessment, and pedagogical skills, student support and welfare, and education technology. The portal offers school leader and Saudi Arabian teacher licencing test preparation courses.
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Aanaab creates its own material and partners with foreign organisations to offer the newest professional development courses. For instance, the company has launched courses to help teachers teach coding and comprehend AI concepts and how to use them in education.
Aanaab is the first Saudi Arabia-based edtech company to get funding from an international edtech venture capital fund and one of the few in the broader MENA region. Over the past year, Rethink Education has closely monitored MENA entrepreneurship and innovation and will continue to assess potential.
About Aanaab
Aanaab is an electronic educational platform offering specialised professional development courses for teachers and educators taught by distinguished academics and teachers from around the world who are passionate about expanding the circle of beneficiaries of their teaching-specialized scientific and knowledge stock.
