Ryan Benitez // Meto
Increasing access to higher education for African students.
About the Founder
After his sophomore year at Princeton, Ryan spent a summer in Uganda teaching the SAT to three gifted Ugandan students. These students were smarter than many of Ryan’s Princeton peers, yet there was a good chance they would not get to go to university at all (and would instead spend their lives doing manual work in the informal economy). Ryan returned to Princeton, wrote his senior thesis on this topic, and then moved back to Uganda after graduation. He spent the next three years manually connecting African students to good-fit college and scholarship opportunities. After seeing a scalable way to do this work, he founded Meto in 2018.
About the Venture
Meto (“mee-tow,” Latin for “gather”) is an ed-tech nonprofit with a simple goal: increase access to higher education for African students, and do it at scale. Meto is a two-sided online marketplace where students find seats (and scholarships) at universities just down the road from their home and at universities oceans away.
Redemptive Opportunity
Africa is the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continent — there are currently 80 million Africans who are college-aged. However, only 1 in 10 is actually in college. The current system by which African students connect to colleges is offline, inefficient, and inequitable, and low-income students fare the worst. Meto is an online platform that efficiently, scalably connects African students to educational opportunities.
