South African EdTech Week 2025 ran from 28 to 30 October at UVU Africa's Brickfield Canvas in Cape Town, in its fourth year, convened by Injini in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and UVU Africa. Sheen exhibited.

The theme was the argument

The 2025 theme was "Building EdTech Readiness in Under-Resourced Contexts", and it is a more pointed statement than a conference theme usually is. The premise: educational technology can close real gaps in South African schooling, but impact requires going well beyond access. Schools, teachers and learners have to be ready to adopt and integrate the tools meaningfully — which means evidence, capacity building and ecosystem support, not just devices arriving.

That is a useful thing for a room full of edtech companies to have to sit with. It is also, more or less, the lesson we had been learning the hard way in school partnerships all year.

What readiness looks like from the hardware end

Our stand was hands-on, as usual — the boards out, builds running, and visitors expected to pick things up. But the conversations at an event like this are not the ones you have at a school expo. Educators, funders, founders and department staff ask about the parts that are not on the poster:

• What happens when it breaks? In an under-resourced school, an unrepairable kit is a permanent loss, not an inconvenience.
• What does it need to run? Bandwidth, devices, electricity and IT permissions are real constraints, and a tool that assumes all four is a tool for well-resourced schools only.
• Who teaches it? Not "is there training", but: how many hours, who pays for them, and what happens when that teacher leaves.
• What is the evidence? Honest answers here are short, and the field is better for people asking.

Why we exhibit at events like this

The commercial case for exhibiting at an edtech week is modest. The real reason is that it is one of the few places where the people building tools, the people funding them and the people who have to live with them are in the same building for three days.

Sheen sits in an unusual position in that room: we make the hardware, write the curriculum and run classrooms ourselves. That means when someone describes a failure mode, we can usually say whether we have hit it — and when we have not, we generally hear about it before the end of the day.

Read our longer-form thinking on this in Insights, or see how our school programmes handle training and support.