Welcome to our February Newsletter. Today, we share how we killed Kabakoo in January (again) through our pre-mortem exercise. This edition also brings updates on launching our WhatsApp-based Highdigenous Connection Model with over 1,400 young people in Bamako (Mali), and experimental findings on activation vs. engagement in digital learning. Last but not least, you get exclusive news not yet public: Kabakoo has been selected for the second cohort of the AI for Global Development Accelerator.

Our jam of the month is More Love by Pat Ndoye, a 1980s track from his “Funky Revolution” record. The brass section of the song, led by Roger Kom, a multi-instrumentalist who played quite a lot with Tony Allen, might sound familiar to the fans of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat.

What are we building?

Kabakoo designs and scales evidence-based pathways for West African youth, integrating AI, community, and cultural insights to foster the mindset and skills essential for building productive livelihoods and driving systemic change in informally dominated economies.

☀️ January 2026 Highlights

Over the past weeks, we have been meeting partners in Germany and continuing our academic exchanges at Paderborn University.

We led courses and guest lectures designed to engage students with questions rarely addressed in economics and management courses, including discussions examining informally dominated economies as a distinct form of capitalism, and how colonial-era power relations continue to shape human resource management and learning systems in Global Majority countries.

Kabakoo at the Uni Paderborn, Germany

We also delivered a guest lecture on Coalition Building and Fundraising for Social Entrepreneurship, sharing Kabakoo’s approach of building coalitions for system change across public institutions and private actors to scale a context-aware learning model under real-world constraints and technological shifts.

These academic alliances are paramount to Kabakoo’s work and anchor our work in research and academic rigor. This has materialized through joint research and projects such as Highdigenous Live! – The Festival of Wondering, a multidisciplinary academic festival that interrogates knowledge transfer structures between the Sahel and Europe. Funded to a large extent by LWL-Kulturstiftung, the festival was among the five major winners of the Westfalen Weser Cultural Award 2025, making it officially a Cultural Lighthouse (“Kulturelles Aushängeschild”) of the Westphalia region. Nicht schlecht. Oder?!

In January, we killed Kabakoo to make it stronger. Again.

Every 18 months, we stop everything and ask our entire team, from interns to founders, one question: “It’s twelve months from now and Kabakoo has closed down. What happened?”

In these structured pre-mortem sessions, every person in the organization can write as many post-its as they can imagine describing what they believe could kill us, one reason per post-it. We then discuss EACH post-it, and deliberate on the risks that matter most and on which we have the strongest agency. Each session is an open-ended meeting that can take as long as necessary.

We have done this three times since 2021, building a longitudinal dataset of organizational fear, doubts, and anticipation. In 2021, our team feared existential collapse: “no funding”, “incapacity to show the advantage of our model”… By 2026, our collective fears are precise: “WLS not delivered on time”, “not reaching 5,000 learners in Q3”… That shift from existential dread to execution-level precision is probably the clearest evidence we have of how far Kabakoo has matured as an operating organization.

Some post-its from our pre-mortem sessions.

One risk appears in all our pre-mortem exercises since 2021: founder dependency. We don’t hide this. In 2021, one post-it read “Michèle and Yanick decide to do something else”, in 2026, another one reads “health issues founders”. So the nature of that risk has fundamentally changed. In 2021, if we left, nothing survived. We had personally invested $151,000 in cash (all our savings) to build Kabakoo, a non-profit, before any external funding came. Today, our tech lead is an Amazon CTO Fellow who started as a Cohort 1 learner and now manages a Product Team of eight engineers and designers. We have a Partnerships Lead who used to lead one of the major agri-business companies in Mali. Day-to-day operations, product and tech development, and financial management are hence fully institutionalized. Our amazing Board provides governance and does their best to support us, as founders.

But team, we hear you 🙏🏿

Launching the Highdigenous Connection Model

As announced in our last newsletter, in January we were all set to launch the first iteration of our Highdigenous Connection Model, our new WhatsApp-based signature upskilling program designed to allow young informal workers and entrepreneurs in West Africa to increase their income and their social capital. For this launch, we took our learnings from the last months seriously and revamped our onboarding approach.

“Opération Missabougou”: trust, trust, and trust

As discussed in our 12/2025 update, a survey shows us that only 20% of young people in the vicinity of our main co-learning space in Bamako know about Kabakoo. To leverage hyperlocal trust dynamics, we hence focused our onboarding efforts on Missabougou and Yirimadio, the neighborhoods surrounding Kabakoo’s headquarters and main co-learning space in Bamako. The goal was to onboard 1,000 young people, and launch the pilot with 500 participants.

Our comprehensive Trust Survey taught us that in the domains of job, entrepreneurship, and upskilling, young people trust most their parents, close friends, and teachers. Instead of relying solely on digital outreach, we hence designed a two-week hybrid onboarding sprint, combining targeted social media content with an intensive in-person field campaign across streets, grins (institutionalized local meet-ups), and schools across the neighborhood. So Kabakoo peer-facilitators and learners went through these neighborhood spaces, recognizable by our signature black “Kabakoo ta vie” T-shirts. They even set up ephemeral maker-space installations in markets and engaged with parents and families who could see concretely what already exists within their own neighborhood.

The onboarding mechanic was simple: QR-code flyers opening directly into a WhatsApp bot, which instantly captured basic information (phone number, name, area of residence) and guided users into pre-registration.

Impressions from the hybrid onboarding sprint.

Early results and signals

By the end of the campaign, over 1,400 young people had pre-registered, meaning we interacted directly with even more across the field. Among them, more than 800 live in the targeted neighborhoods surrounding Kabakoo’s main co-learning space. Their profile is quite similar to the usual one of Kabakoo cohorts, while on gender distribution we managed to onboard only 33% women, below our usual benchmark of 40%.

Altogether, the new hybrid onboarding was so great that we wondered why we haven’t been systematically always doing it that way. The physical encounters were also user research opportunities to gather feedback. Our low brand awareness was confirmed, with many asking “How long have you been here?”, while others mention that they knew Kabakoo from the social media and that they were happy to see that we are “real.” Another one says: “My business is being a moto-taxi. I can go a month without WhatsApp, this isn’t for me.” So, even on WhatsApp, you can’t get everyone with your upskilling program.

The two-week onboarding sprint allows us to examine how activation translates into sustained participation, while observing how trust-building, peer pod dynamics, and AI-supported learning interact within a real and clearly delimited environment.

Activation vs Engagement in digital learning: what nudges can and cannot do

As WhatsApp becomes a central interface in the Kabakoo Learning Experience, we examined which communication channel more effectively drives learner activation and whether that effect extends to deeper engagement with learning materials.

Until recently, we primarily relied on in-app push notifications to inform learners about new activities including new courses, masterclasses, community events. Internal monitoring showed consistently low responsiveness, with average open rates below 4%. In contrast, recent WhatsApp campaigns achieved read rates averaging around 73%.

To investigate this, we conducted a randomized experiment on Kabakoo’s mobile learning platform. Onboarded learners were randomly assigned to receive behavioral nudges via either WhatsApp or in-app push notifications. The nudges consisted of short reminder prompts paired with a call-to-action directing them to specific in-app features such as course modules (Learning to Learn), community interactions (Club Live), and AI-based mentoring.

Nudges via WhatsApp and via the app

Over a period of four weeks, learners received a predefined sequence of nudges. The content and timing were identical across groups; only the delivery channel varied. This design allowed us to isolate the effect of nudge modality, independently of curriculum, facilitation, or learner profile. We tracked learner behavior over time, focusing on both activation and depth of engagement.

The findings show that learners receiving WhatsApp nudges were 15.6% more likely to activate, defined as completing at least two logins, compared to those receiving push notification nudges. WhatsApp hence performs significantly better as an activation trigger, reducing initial non-use and prompting entry into the Kabakoo platform.

However, the same experiment shows no statistically significant effect on deeper engagement. Session duration, time spent in the app, and content progression remained largely unchanged across groups. Descriptive patterns even suggest shorter, more task-oriented sessions among WhatsApp-activated learners: users responded to the prompt, completed a minimal action, and exited.

These patterns should not be interpreted causally for engagement depth. The experiment involved a modest sample (N = 271), sufficient to detect sizable effects on activation, but likely too small to reliably capture differences in engagement intensity, which varies widely across learners. As a result, null effects on time spent and session duration should be read cautiously and will be explored further through larger-scale testing.

Thanks to our rapid A/B testing capabilities which are embedded directly into our product workflows, we are able to test our upskilling systems and improve them based on evidence rather than assumptions. We will keep strengthening (and of course also stretching) that dual muscle.

Kabakoo Faces

(With over 35,125 registered learners, each month we spotlight a member of our vibrant community.)

Before Kabakoo, Soumaïla was studying civil engineering at the university while running a small phone repair business and helping his mother sell fish at Les Halles de Bamako, one of the city’s main markets. He discovered Kabakoo on social media and followed from a distance for some time, not fully engaging until university reality caught up with him. Everything changed when he finally decided to visit one of our co-learning spaces.

“At Kabakoo, I saw the difference right away. I knew I had found my solution.”

His first training at Kabakoo? A Machine Hacking program delivered in collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of Art, connecting Kabakoo learners in Bamako and students in Baltimore via Zoom, in pre-covid 2019! Step by step, Soumaïla trained from scratch, becoming one of Mali’s most trusted technical experts in 3D-printing and machine hacking. Don’t take our word for it, ask Kassim Barry, the director of MaliBa Poterie, Bamako’s largest ceramic production workshop, who was close to desperation because no one in Bamako was able to repair the broken electronics of his expensive Nabertherm kiln… Until Soumaila came along and fixed it.

Through Kabakoo, he moved from hustling without direction to setting clear goals. In his own words, this means he went “from spectator to actor of [his own] life”.

“Before, my friends saw me as just another young guy who liked football. Now, I’m a role model, and a Kabakoo ambassador in my neighborhood, encouraging other young people to learn and engage with technologies”

Find out his full story here.

Tea in Delhi? 🇮🇳

Next week, we will be traveling to Delhi to take part in the India AI Impact Summit. There, we will also participate at events marking the launch of the second cohort of the AI for Global Development Accelerator. Yes, you read it here first: Kabakoo is part of that cohort. The AI for Global Development Accelerator, organized by The Agency Fund, in partnership with OpenAI and the Center for Global Development, aims “to steward and fast-track the safe, responsive, high impact AI solutions that communities need.” Needless to say, this is our jam!

For us, this is both an exciting opportunity and a meaningful milestone. It reflects our journey with AI since 2019 (!!!), experimenting, questioning first principles, and building AI-enabled upskilling systems that stay grounded in real contexts. We’re looking forward to the conversations and the shared learnings.

Thank you for reading to the end! 💜🧡

Michèle & Yanick

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