🎶For Bamako.ai, we have created an entire album of 18 songs to be the soundtracks of our month. Each song was conceived, written, produced and mastered by AI tools. The Kabakoo Community’s top pick: On va jusqu’au bout (A daan) a powerful anthem that energized us throughout the month, even on the gloomiest days.🎶

Please do not hesitate to tell us what you think 😉

What are we building?

Kabakoo is a community-driven upskilling platform designed to allow young people in West Africa to develop the mindset and the skills needed to improve their life in a context of missing formal jobs.

☀️ May 2024 Highlights ☀️

• We are adding some Naija to the Kabakoo soup 🇳🇬! We are happy to have welcomed Micheal Nwankwo from Lagos into the Kabakoo team. Micheal is joining us as XR developer and designer in the aim to bring our intervention to another level by leveraging XR to improve learner engagement. So, watch out as we will test, fail, learn and iterate with XR (mostly AR) in the coming months! With Micheal addition to the team, we have reached 10 African nationalities in our small but mighty team. Pan-African talents bottled up to serve the African Youth! (what else) 🌍
  
• Bamako.ai season 2 rolled upon us! And we rode that wave! From May 29th till June 2nd, Kabakoo transformed the Centre International de Conférence de Bamako (CICB) into a living image of the Kabakoo vision. With the theme “Décoloniser pour Innover” (decolonize to innovate), the CICB vibrated with the Highdigenous, our unique model that blends cutting-edge technology with the rich tapestry of our ancestral knowledges. Through the lens of art, augmented reality, architecture, craftsmanship, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, we showed to the almost 4000 on-site visitors the potential of creating lasting value by fusing the emerging tech and the indigenous to innovate.
  
  Bamako.ai was unique. Really. Where else do you see the pioneer of agroecology in the Sahel sharing the same stage with one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI; or a top contemporary painter sharing the stage with a National Director for Digital Economy, or again the architect who has restored the World Heritage Sites in Timbuktu sharing the stage with a Bay area software engineer. All things highdigenous! 😉
  
• While we have some indirect evidence of the importance of culture for learning tech-related topics (based, for instance, on the works by Ron Eglash and other researchers investigating the tech-indigenous-nexus), we haven’t yet focused our experiments on quantifying the highdigenous approach. We took advantage of Bamako.ai to run a quick pre- and post-survey among the participants of the event. We wanted to test whether participating in Bamako.ai can be seen as a light-touch intervention towards the use of culturally-situated tech for enhanced agency. While we were expecting everything to go up (what else), the results are more interesting than our pre-analysis expectations (what else).
  
  As you can see in the chart below, people who participated in Bamako.ai tend to witness a decrease in their belief in their capacity to realize innovative projects and also in their belief in their use of cultural knowledge to innovate. On the other hand, there seems to be an increase in their motivation to learn how to bring together high-tech and local knowledges and in their trust in themselves to innovate.

Our explanation: Maybe attending Bamako.ai was eye-opening in the sense that the participants realized their limits with respect to innovation and cultural knowledge. So, the inherent potentials of using culture to innovate basically went from unknown unknowns to know unknowns, hence the increased motivation to learn about the integration of emerging tech and endogenous knowledges. The basso continuo from the feedback we collected from the participants indeed seems to vibrate around their surprise about the innovative potential of endogenous knowledges (see, for instance, here and here).

• As you can see below, when asking participants which part of Bamako.ai had the most impact on their self-confidence, cultural and artistic activities come first, while hackathon comes last! Needless to say, this was another surprise to us. It might point to the relevance of cultural-attuned storytelling even in the context of tech upskilling.

• Last but not least, our post-Bamako.ai survey reveals a net promoter score of 57. We were a bit disappointed when we saw the results of the analysis, as our training programs usually have NPS above 70. Although we were clear that attending Bamako.ai is not comparable to attending one of our cohort-based programs, we were quite confident as we put a similar amount of dedication and organization into Bamako.ai (what else). While trying to make sense of that result, we learnt that the NPS of large events is typically around 53 (source: Eventbrite). So, 57 is lower than our usual NPS. But apparently slightly over the industry average for large events.

• Kabakoo Faces
• (With over 31 000 registered learners, each month we spotlight a member of our vibrant community.)
• This month we do not celebrate a specific member of our community. We celebrate the community. We celebrate our staff who gave it all to make Bamako.ai a huge success, our navigators (aka peer-facilitators) who stepped up and showed us that we can really count on them. One nation under a groove (what else).

The Kabakoo staff and our navigators (peer-facilitators) from our learning community.

🥳 Shoutouts ✋🏿

Bamako.ai has been a time of laughter, extreme fatigue, joy, positive energy, limits being pushed, and realization of a vision. Many thanks to all the Kabakoo Community, our partners, allies, supporters, and everyone who took part in making Bamako.ai, season 2 happen. As we love to say at Kabakoo, “c’est toujours le début du commencement”. 🙏🏿

With love and gratitude, from Bamako (what…)🧡💜

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