Edu-Game closes Namibia’s gaming gap

A new approach to learning is changing how Namibian children and young people study.

The innovation comes from Edu-Game Namibia, an organisation founded in 2022 to bring games and animation into schools. The company designs video games, teaches coding and creates animations to make school subjects easier to understand.

Edu-Game Namibia is led by its two co-founders, chief executive Tutaleni Ilonga and chief technology officer Vaughan Weiss.

They are joined by Mutaleni ya Toivo, who manages public relations and international partnerships, as well as Chubo Zeko, who leads game development as the team’s main coder. Supporting them is a teaching staff made up of four full-time tutors and two part-time tutors who run the academy’s daily lessons and programmes.

“Edu-Game Namibia is an innovation hub built around one big idea: to gamify and animate education and, in the process, build a sustainable game development and animation industry in Namibia and eventually across Africa,” Ilonga told Careers.

He added that the idea to start Edu-Game Namibia came from both personal struggles and gaps in Namibia’s gaming sector.

“Africa’s gaming sector generated roughly US$1.8 billion in 2024, yet Namibia had no ecosystem participating in that growth. Edu-Game Namibia set out to fill that gap,” he said.

The organisation’s milestones show how far it has come. "We have grown from five students in 2022 to 74 today, from two employees to 12, and from a single laptop to 14,” Ilonga said. 

Ilonga said that three success stories show the impact of Edu-Game Namibia. “One of our students, just 13 years old, won N$2 000 at the MTC Innovation Event for pitching how Namibian companies can use virtual reality in marketing."

Another Edu-Game student, Tadiwa, presented cybersecurity research at the Namibia International Cybersecurity Conference.

"We have also seen students transform academically and personally, like one who went from struggling with grades to publishing his own comic book and becoming a leader by age 15,” Ilonga added.