Gateway Academy Merges with Digital Frontiers to Strengthen Capacity Building Initiatives
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 1, 2020 - Gateway Academy, the digital learning platform for financial inclusion incubated by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), is merging with Digital Frontiers, a globally recognized non-profit that focuses on capacity building for the development community.
The merger will help strengthen financial inclusion training, widen the markets served, and consolidate Digital Frontiers’ position as a leading provider of online learning, which has grown in popularity and proven its critical importance during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the terms of the merger, effective July 1, 2020, Gateway Academy will be relaunched as Gateway within the Digital Frontiers Group. Gateway will combine the marketplace component that is the hallmark of Gateway Academy with Digital Frontier's extensive experience in digital learning design, hosting and course building. This new entity ultimately will provide an end-to-end solution for capacity building for organizations in the development space.
“Over the past five years, Gateway Academy has proven the value of online learning for financial service providers in Sub-Saharan Africa for inclusive finance, an achievement of which we are proud. Merging with Digital Frontiers, and relaunching as Gateway, will enable it to grow and respond to capacity building needs not only in inclusive finance, but also in other development topics related to the sustainable development goals. We look forward to continuing our highly productive partnership with Digital Frontiers as a content provider,” Greta Bull, CGAP CEO, said.
“We are excited to build upon the excellent work that Gateway Academy has already done,” said Gavin Krugel, Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Frontiers. “We have distinct yet complementary business models. Together, we will have greater reach and a richer offering at a lower cost base, making the business more impactful, effective and efficient.”
Housed at CGAP under a five-year grant from the Mastercard Foundation, Gateway Academy built an online marketplace for financial service providers focused on financial inclusion. Working directly with human resources and training staff within financial institutions, Gateway Academy identified capacity gaps in the market and partnered with top quality training service providers to digitize their existing content into engaging, compelling, and impactful online courses. During the grant period, Gateway Academy focused on delivering in seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Ghana.
Digital Frontiers develops and deploys skills training to build capacity in new professions needed to achieve the sustainable development goals, especially in low-and-middle income countries.
By combining CGAP’s and Digital Frontier’s shared vision of the importance of building capacity, Gateway will continue to grow and expand. In addition to building out the course offerings in the marketplace, Gateway will bring further efficiencies to the course design and development space. An expanded network of high-caliber training and content providers will benefit the range of institutions with which Gateway works.
For further information on Gateway, please visit www.gateway.academy.
About CGAP
CGAP is an independent think tank that works to empower poor people, especially women, to capture opportunities and build resilience through financial services. We test, learn and develop innovative solutions through practical research and active engagement with our partners on building responsible and inclusive financial systems that help move people out of poverty, protect their gains and advance global development goals. Housed at the World Bank, CGAP is supported by over 30 leading development organizations committed to making financial services meet the needs of poor people. For more information, visit https://CGAP.org.
CGAP Media Contact: Natalie Greenberg | ngreenberg@worldbank.org
About Digital Frontiers
Digital Frontiers is an African not-for-profit capacity building specialist, focused on building human capital aligned with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Digital Frontiers incorporates the Digital Frontiers Institute (DFI) and Gateway. DFI is a digital-first-but-blended school that delivers the teaching and administration of portfolios of courses to thousands of students in low-and-middle-income countries. Gateway provides capacity building as a service through transforming third party content into digital learning experiences and offering all the functions of administering a school, and teaching, as a service, while also being a course aggregator for training organisations through providing a market place filled with courses targeted at employers and individuals wanting to skill-up in all things SDG.
Digital Frontiers was founded in 2015 by David Porteous, Gavin Krugel and Ignacio Mas, with seed funding from Omidyar and has since had long-term funding partnerships with Mastercard Foundation, FSD Africa, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Flourish. Headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, Digital Frontiers has a distributed team in over 18 countries focused on supporting our student-base in the projects we deliver. For more information, visit https://digitalfrontiers.org/
Digital Frontiers Media Contact: Dale Ferreira | dale@digitalfrontiers.org