Anthology Helps Nigeria Transform Online Learning at Universities Using AWS ISV Accelerate Program

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund is helping millions of university students across Nigeria improve their educational outcomes using Blackboard Learn by Anthology, an AWS Partner. Using resources available to participants in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, Anthology won the deal, gaining rapid on-site sales assistance and technical support to drive customer engagement.

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) is a body created by the Federal Government of Nigeria to develop the infrastructure of the country’s universities, polytechnics, and colleges. In 2022, the organization allocated NGN100 million ($131 million) to invest in educational technology and make online learning available to university students throughout Nigeria’s six regions.

TETFund looked for a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) to facilitate its online learning plan. The organization wanted a solution that was simple to manage and could run customized learning programs for individual university departments. It also wanted an LMS that ensured students could access content offline when necessary and included full training and support.

As part of its search, TETFund looked at Blackboard Learn by Anthology, an AWS Partner, and worked with PGM, an Anthology channel partner in Nigeria. PGM gave TETFund confidence, highlighting Anthology's strong presence in Africa, its local knowledge of the education market, and the advanced capabilities of its solution, which uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon QuickSight.

During the engagement, the Anthology sales teams received AWS sales and technical support through the AWS ISV Accelerate Program. The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a co-sell program that helps participating partners drive new business and accelerate sales cycles by connecting participating independent software vendors (ISV) with the AWS Sales organization. Remembers Nicolas Albouze, regional vice-president for Africa at Anthology, “The moment TETFund had some questions around cloud security, the AWS team immediately provided me with all the documentation I needed to give the stakeholders what they required. It was extremely helpful.”

In addition, the AWS team provided marketing funds and technical assistance within days of a deal being announced and a date set for a launch event to be attended by more than 300 Nigerian officials. Comments Albouze, “It showed AWS was a true long-term partner that would support us throughout the journey.”

Anthology is using the AWS ISV Accelerate Program to support multiple engagements just like TETFund. Ileana Rodriguez, senior director for strategic partnerships at Anthology, says, “The program is huge for us because it gives us visibility with AWS field sellers globally.” Leads often come in from AWS sales based on conversations they have with AWS customers. Rodriguez adds, “It gives our sales team the opportunity to sit down with AWS and AWS customers to talk through Blackboard [Learn] as an online learning platform.” Anthology has seen an increase of 43 percent in the number of co-sell launched opportunities from AWS ISV Accelerate since January 2023.

Albouze states, “We are seeing ever more chances for growth across Africa as governments seek to launch online learning initiatives to drive educational and economic development.”

Today, 84 universities across Nigeria, which has the African continent’s largest economy, are providing more than 1 million students with customized online learning programs using easy-to-manage Blackboard Learn. Eventually, more than 254 universities will use the AWS-based Blackboard Learn solution to help more than 2.2 million students improve their educational outcomes. Sonny Echono, executive secretary of TETFund, says, “Online learning remains critical to our collective success and to further enrich teaching, learning, and research in all 253 of our beneficiary institutions.”