My friend “S” is a tuition teacher. She deals with all the challenges of long hours, demanding parents, curriculum changes, different paces of learning for students, and these are often issues that aren’t pushed to the forefront of discussion and that she often discovers midway into teaching the student. As a human being, just like you and me, this is fuel for burnout.

In one of my earlier coffee chats with her, we were working on an app for her to bring across her expertise to larger groups and to have a more efficient way to work with parents and students. It’s definitely an interesting space to be in, and we were even down to brainstorming if we could use existing infrastructure, such as Google Classrooms, to complement the existing app and how to best match the syllabus to each student’s pace.

Education gaps in SEA

We thought of the problems we face with education in Singapore, which is finding affordable tuition for the lower to middle class and also an overly strong emphasis on memorisation, rote learning, content drilling and rigorous examinations and saw that all of these systems leave students unprepared for eventual technological disruptions in the world.

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Nonetheless, this is still very different from that of our neighbours, be it due to geography or population size. There, on-demand learning resources, affordable course subscriptions, proper direction, and teaching “how to learn” become even more important.

If you were a student in rural Indonesia, the reality of your classroom would be worn wooden desks, a blackboard at the front with chalk dust clinging to its edges, and the hot sun streaming in through open windows. Distracting sounds of roosters crowing and motorbikes passing might bite at your thoughts. And maybe you’ve got to till the fields today, or go home and care for your siblings, and have no time (or limited energy) to flip a book.

One way these barriers are being addressed is through Indonesia’s fast-growing edutech sector. Platforms like Ruangguru, which began by targeting students outside the big cities, have shown what’s possible when design is tailored to local realities. They work on low-bandwidth connections, allow offline access, and blend live tutoring with gamified learning tools to make studying more engaging for first-time digital learners.

The results suggest that access paired with thoughtful design can move the needle. Independent evaluations found that students using Ruangguru improved test performance across core subjects like maths, Indonesian, and English. More importantly, over 70 per cent of its users came from outside urban centres—precisely the communities that traditional tuition rarely reached.

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The promise of AI in education

To truly close education gaps in SouthEast Asia, these statements have to continue to be addressed. Teachers lack time to create strong syllabuses while public facilities and teaching standards are often not well maintained in the Philippines, at some ends a gender and religious divide causes differences in education level in Indonesia, and we are still dealing with a pandemic learning loss rate and high dropout rates in Malaysia.

The space calls for more tailored solutions to fit each student profile, which manual labor cannot fully replicate, and maybe this is where AI based learning solutions can step in to fill the gap. A solution that goes beyond a conventional chatbot could seamlessly blend AI to feel personable, supportive and guiding a student with the right principles, while being accountable to the educators’ needs, would be a perfect solution to see in this market. What would you fund to make edutech sustainable?

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