How is your month going? We hope that the heat waves in Bamako announcing the hot temperatures for the coming dry season got to your side of the planet. In any case, here is some sun and the latest news from Kabakoo in Mali.

🎶 The depths of "Timbuktu Fasso" by Amine Bouhafa and Fatoumata Diawara set the rhythm during the month of March, where the blue sky met the ochre of the Sahel...🎶

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.

Highlights from last month (March 2024)

Our Mentor AI became bilingual on March 25th. Our learners can now interact with it vocally in Bamanankan (a language widely spoken in West African countries such as Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso). After a little more than a week, we recorded a total of 1,420 exchanges with the mentor. We are quite intrigued that the usage of the voice-based Bamanankan version of the AI mentor is well below the written version in French. Maybe it’s just too new in the community? Maybe we did not advertise it well? Maybe we misunderstood the needs of our community? This is quite interesting, and we will keep you posted as we learn more on the matter.

We are really coming out of stealth mode, at least as our relationships with governmental bodies are concerned. Kabakoo was present at the Bamako town hall, invited by the capital city council, alongside the major actors of the education and vocational training sector in Mali. During this exchange in the Cadre Régional de Gestion Partenariale de la Formation Professionnelle et Technique pour l'Emploi (CRGP/FPE), we were able to present our model, results and future plans to the main stakeholders of the Malian education sector. This underlines our commitment to build and nurture long-term relationships with official bodies.

We ran a follow-up survey for a cohort of learners who went through our program in 2022 and a comparable control group that we have been following since the application process of that cohort. 18 months post-training, we still see some decent and promising results.

Our net promoter score even increased to a staggering 81! So, the least we can say is that the learners seem to see some value in the training; and apparently the value seems to be even clearer for them after a while. What are your hypothesis to explain this? We are looking forward to your answers!

Next, we can share that the growth mindset increase induced by our intervention seems to be persistent. The learners still have a significantly higher growth mindset that the control group.

Finally, a higher proportion of learners are receiving works related to their training at Kabakoo. Almost half of them declared getting paid for the works.

The final highlight for this newsletter: We are thrilled to welcome Amine as Learning Engineer to the Kabakoo team. With his background in multimedia instructional engineering, Amine is a long-awaited addition to our team.

A quick anecdote: The learning manager position has always been staffed at Kabakoo, since the very beginning. Even when Kabakoo was still a 2 people shop. But it was just Yanick “anonymously” interacting with the community as the learning manager, via a dedicated email-address. It took a good while for the community to realize that Yanick was behind the “Learning Manager” account, sending projects, reminders, feedback, and so on. There is now a running joke among the community that Kabakoo used to have a highly effective and dedicated learning manager that no one ever met. 😃

How you can help

Our co-founder and chief learning officer, Yanick, will be speaking at a convening on leveraging personal agency for international development at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC, April 30th & May 1st. So if you are around and would like to discuss our work, let’s meet. If you know people in DC, he should meet, thank you in advance for your warm intros.

Kabakoo Faces

(With over 30,000 registered learners, each month we spotlight a member of our vibrant community.)

Before joining the Kabakoo community, Ibrahim was asking himself a lot of questions, particularly about the quality of the service he should provide to his customers, how to satisfy them and how to keep his service commitment to his customers. For him, “the road wasn't just clear enough”. Thanks to the training he received during his time at Kabakoo, including the visualisation module, he was able to set himself a 30-day objective, which he actually achieved in a week. His self-imposed challenge was determining what his offer should be. In his own words here (video link): “By the end of the week, I had cleared my self-doubts and I gained a clear idea of how I was going to serve my customers.”

That’s the end. Thank you for having read this newsletter ! 💜🧡

Michèle & Yanick

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