Open Class: The Edtech Startup Helping Zimbabwean Parents Navigate The School Maze

If you’re a parent like me, you’ve asked yourself these questions a lot of times now: Which school should I send my child to? Is this school worth the fees? What are other parents saying about it? Kunodzidzwa here?

Unfortunately, finding reliable, up-to-date, and unbiased information on schools in Zimbabwe is harder than it should be. And so it’s trial and error for most of us, moving kids from one school to another, disrupting their education and socialisation in the process.

This is where Open Class a local edtech startup, has stepped in. They are helping parents navigate this frustrating school maze and also building tools for the education sector itself.

Open Class is building what many parents in Zimbabwe have long needed — a central platform to explore schools, compare options, and make better-informed decisions about their children’s education. Think of it as a blend between a school directory, a parents’ community group, and a media platform focused on Zimbabwean education.

An beyond this, they also building tools for the education sector itself – like a school management system to help school administrators run their schools, a teacher location swap facilitation tool for teachers who want to move from one town to another. They also have tutor a marketplace where private tutors can find students — and vice versa.

The power of community groups

Personally, how I discovered Open Class was through WhatsApp. Someone forwarded a PDF document that had a directory of boarding school options in Zimbabwe. From the information there I found Open Class has a massive community of parents and teachers on Facebook and WhatsApp groups.

Over the years, Open Class has cultivated active groups where parents can connect with each other, share real-world experiences, ask questions, and get peer-to-peer advice on schools. One parent, recently shared their child’s experience with bullying at a boarding school and how as a family they resolved the issue.

School fees are expensive, options are confusing, and it’s hard to separate marketing fluff from actual school performance. It should not be like this, getting a good education for your child should not feel like playing lotto. That’s why it’s encouraging to see a local platform doing something about it. And yes, using their platforms, you do get a sense the people behind it care about education and helping parents.

The platform is not perfect. Sometimes you feel you could get more refined information – maybe some AI tools that digest all this information they have into simple advice based on parent needs. But it definitely feels better getting some usable information at least.