Greetings from Lomé, Togo.

We are currently in Lomé for an exploration sprint, following our visit here last May. But this time, we came en force! The whole leadership of Kabakoo, plus 60% of the team are currently in Lomé, coding, working on new learning paths, analyzing data, and establishing new partnerships.

But of course, we also are exploring Togolese food, beaches, and music.

No wonder then that our jam of the month is an oldie (quite nerdy) Togolese tune, by Houwenema and Mola from Pagouda, in the Kara region, Northern Togo. It’s a song about one of the founding myths of the country. No need to understand the Kabiye language to be captivated by the storytelling.

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.

☀️ October 2025 Highlights

What drives learning completion at Kabakoo?

To deepen our understanding of what sustains learner engagement at Kabakoo, we carried out a detailed analysis of completion patterns across two recent cohorts. The study represents active learners between June 2023 and June 2024, giving us an evidence-based look at how different life contexts shape learning persistence.

To measure actual learning engagement, we built a Learning Completion Score combining four dimensions of Kabakoo’s model: Submitting assignments via selfie videos (40%), participating in in-person activities (15%), sending text and audio messages to the AI Mentor (15%), completing portfolio tasks (30%). Each component underwent a log-transformation to minimize distortion from extreme values, followed by normalization to scale the final score from 0 (no engagement) to 1 (full completion). This ensures a balanced measure of learners’ progress.

Educational background and age: stable patterns, with a few signals

Completion rates remain stable across age groups, with learners under 30 showing the strongest engagement. The 21–29 segment, representing about 42% of the sample, forms the core of active participants.

Learners who recently left the school system (0–1 year) show higher completion (>0.5).

However, participants who have been out of school for more than four years still maintain strong motivation and stable average completion (0.47–0.5), suggesting that the Kabakoo Learning Experience might help re-activate learning habits even after long breaks.

Moreover, completion tend to vary little by diploma level, showing that our model works across educational backgrounds.

Family context and environment: socioeconomic background matters

Learners from families anchored in informal or autonomous economic activity show the highest completion: Mothers who are ‘aides familiales’ (home attendants) or independent workers (roughly 45%), and fathers who are employees, independent workers, or unemployed. These profiles are associated with stronger engagement (0.49–0.53).

By contrast, learners with parents in more institutional or managerial jobs show lower completion. We wonder if this is an evidence of the overoptimism that has been discussed in the literature. Duflo et al. (2021) and Kiss et al. (2023), for instance, reports how young job-seekers in African contexts hold overly optimistic beliefs about their likelihood of finding a job or the expected return from formal schooling. We posit that this might be the dynamics we are observing, since it seems credible to us thatoffsprings from parents with managerial positions might be more prone to that overoptimism than youth from less privileged backgrounds.

Top 10% vs. Bottom 10%: two different learner profiles

By comparing the highest-completing learners (>0.764) with the lowest (<0.305), a clear pattern emerges:

The Top 10% tend to be:

• Younger (21–24)
• Recently out of school
• Children of parents working in hands-on or informal roles
• Living in households with shared responsibilities
• Part of small but inspiring social networks (2–5 “successful people”)
• Commuting 15–60 minutes to the nearest Kabakoo co-learning hub

The Bottom 10% tend to be:

• Slightly older and longer out of school
• Children of more institutional or managerial parents
• Living in more vertical family structures
• With larger number of known successful people
• Less geographically mobile and sometimes farther from a Kabakoo co-learning hub

These contrasts help us refine both our targeting and learner-support strategies. Engagement seems to be less shaped by formal education or academic aspirations, and more by life context, household structure, and everyday economic realities.

TabliCool: Making an ancient tech… cool !

After sharing the story of Le Nid de Bamako and the AI-generated Donsoya animation movies, we continue to explore the gems from Bamako.ai Season 3. Another illustration of the Highdigenous approach to productivity and innovation took shape via another collaboration between master artisans and Kabakoo learners: the TabliCool.

The TabliCool reimagines the traditional “desert fridge” (zeer), a low-tech, climate-adaptive solution that has served Sahelian communities for generations. This new product is the result of weeks of shared learning and work during a bootcamp that brought Kabakoo learners and master artisans together. Potters, carpenters, and builders blended their know-how, reinterpreting centuries-old pot-making techniques through the lens of design thinking and highdigenous upskilling.

Among the artisans who gave life to the TabliCool was Kadidia Nienta, a master potter from Mopti in Central Mali, who has represented Mali on international stages. Beside her worked Drissa Camara, whose grandmother Assitan Doumbia, another master potter, has also being part of the Kabakoo community since 2021. Completing the team was Abdoul Dembélé, a carpenter and a trainer at the CFPM TVET Center, where we recently collaborated with staff and trainers to digitize their tracks in market gardening, poultry farming, and agrifood processing.

TabliCool: The Highdigenous Desert Fridge

The TabliCool is at the same time functional, keeping food cool without electricity, and a design piece. Its practical design combines clay and wood, creating a functional object that is both effective and aesthetically striking. It demonstrates how accessible materials and collective creativity can converge into affordable, replicable solutions for everyday life.

This project also points toward broader adoption of regenerative practices such as earth construction and evaporative cooling, tools that communities can leverage to build climate resilience from within, while augmenting productivity and creating economic value.

Kabakoo Faces

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

Before joining Kabakoo, Sabéré often felt lost. He spent most of his time at home or at the grin (an informal discussion group with friends), unsure of how to contribute to his community.

Things shifted when he decided to join Kabakoo. With a bachelor degree in geography but a strong attraction for hands-on work, Sabéré found in Kabakoo a place where he could learn differently and explore any subject that interested him. He made his path through microelectronics, deepened his interest in regenerative agriculture, and is now also a mentor in the Kabakoo community.

Living near a large waste site, he had long been concerned by waste management. At Kabakoo, he continued exploring solutions to this problem, strengthening his habit of “seeing a problem and looking for how to solve it.” Discover his story in this short video.

Today, Sabéré, affectionately called Tonton Sab (Uncle Sab) by colleagues and learners, is the person who keeps things running and solves most logistical challenges across the main Kabakoo co-learning space in Bamako.

He recalls feeling underestimated, especially before he had a clear direction, today he helps others find their own paths and feels more confident in his place within the community.

Sprint Mode activated in Lomé ! 🇹🇬

As mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, we are currently in Lomé, Togo, where the Kabakoo crew has coasted for an intensive sprint. For the next weeks, we will be fully focused on pushing forward the next phase of our AI-enhanced WhatsApp learning platform and making meaningful connections towards our regional expansion.

If you are in Lomé, or you know people we should meet, please reach out, we’d be happy to connect.

Thank you for reading to the end! 💜🧡

Michèle & Yanick

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