September on our side of the planet has been rainy with a refreshing breeze… perfect weather in the Sahel 😎.

As we hope fall has started well for you, we’re sending the latest updates from Kabakoo.

This September, we’ve been immersed in the vibrant blend of groovy beats and heartfelt lyrics from M’Lynn’s “Fade Away.” The song’s engaging soundscape has been the backdrop to many moments of our month.

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 scarce formal jobs.

☀️ September 2024 Highlights

Our app’s onboarding process, introduced roughly three months ago, continues to show positive results. We’ve consistently maintained a 50% activation rate for new accounts, a significant improvement from the previous rate of below 20%. This success stems from our clearer, more user-friendly onboarding flow. “Activation” in this context means that new users have successfully engaged with the Kabakoo AI Mentor by sending a message.

For more details on this improvement, you can refer to our June 2024 newsletter, where we first reported on this encouraging trend. We’re committed to continually enhancing user experience and engagement on our platform.

Focusing on locally relevant expertise even more

As announced in our last newsletter, we’ve updated our signature Digital Makers training program to focus on three key sectors: cultural and creative industries, construction, and agri-food business. This targeted approach aims to provide our learners with practical, locally relevant digital skills tailored to these specific industries. Furthermore, we aim at leveraging path dependence by updating our application process and even our wording to match the ones used by local conventional educational institutions.

Curious about how this works in practice? Check out our Agribusiness Digital Makers track brochure here. The small hack seems to have worked, and the results so far are encouraging — our support is receiving specific training-related questions, and we’re seeing significant differences in applicant numbers across tracks, with some attracting more than double the applicants of others. We’re excited to share the final figures in our next newsletter once the application process concludes.

Looking at the Kabakoo behavioral index

Measuring changes in livelihood quality is challenging in informally dominated contexts (lack of reliable data, heterogeneity of activities…). Drawing from existing literature, discussions with researchers, and insights from our own monitoring, we developed the Kabakoo Behavioral Index, a six-item index to measure the depth of Kabakoo’s impact on our learners’ lives. Shout out here to Richard Sedlmayr and Catherine Thomas for their valuable input during our discussions on this topic back in March 2023.

As shown below, our latest round of survey results reveals mixed outcomes. Our aim here is to identify hopeful, future-oriented behaviors and understand how (or if) these change over time. The changes in investment in productive assets and gained income are statistically significant at the 10% level, while the others are not. T0 represents the baseline (before training), and T1 represents the first survey round after training.

The six items are:

• Have you helped or supported anyone in your family or circle financially in the last four weeks?
• Has anyone around you or in your family thanked you in the last four weeks for advice you’ve given them?
• Have you bought or invested in anything to improve your professional life in the near future?
• Have you set money aside as savings in the last four weeks? If yes, how much have you saved in the last four weeks?
• Have you earned money by offering your services to people or companies in the last four weeks?
• Have you earned money as an employee of any person or company in the last four weeks?

We remain dedicated to refining our measurement approach and collaborating with researchers and ecosystem partners to enhance our understanding of livelihood changes in challenging contexts. To this end, we will continue to iterate on our measurement methodologies while improving our intervention, keep sharing our insights, and continue to provide our data to academics for public research.

Making progress in the digitization of vocational training in Mali

We’re making significant progress in digitizing vocational training in Mali through our partnership with the Vocational Training Center of Missabougou (CFPM) in Bamako. This project, which began in February 2024, involves creating a comprehensive digital platform, digitizing key training programs (market gardening, poultry farming, and food processing), and creating an introductory digital skills module for use across multiple TVET centers in Mali.

While we’ve completed the instructional design for over 120 mini-modules, we’ve encountered some delays. We underestimated the time required for administrative processes and approvals. What we anticipated would move at our usual startup pace has been slowed by extended waiting periods for feedback, sometimes up to two months for a single step. This experience has taught us the importance of building in more time for such processes in future projects involving public institutions. Despite these challenges, we’re excited about the potential impact of this work, not just for CFPM but potentially for vocational training centers across Mali.

Below is a quick video to give you some impressions of our work with the TVET center.

This partnership represents a significant step towards our scaling strategy. As some of you already know, we are pursuing two main paths towards scale: collaborating with public and private educational institutions, and forging national-level partnerships with governmental bodies. Our work with the Vocational Training Center of Missabougou (CFPM) in Bamako exemplifies the first approach. If successful, we aim to extend this digital solution to other vocational training centers across Mali.

Kabakoo Faces

(With over 34 600 registered learners, each month we spotlight a member of our vibrant community.)

Karamoko’s story exemplifies the power of serendipity and determination. Once a typical student whiling away time at the common tea gatherings in Segou, a second-tier city in Mali, Karamoko’s life took an unexpected turn when he stumbled upon Kabakoo through a simple app search on his phone.

Working today as an operational manager, Karamoko’s journey showcases how one's inherent potential, when met with the right platform, can blossom into remarkable personal and professional growth. His journey from confused youth to purposeful professional is a real-world example of how the right opportunity, coupled with personal drive, can radically alter one’s trajectory in life.

Thanks for reading to the end 💜🧡

Michèle & Yanick

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