Welcome to our February newsletter! A little late this month. So let’s get straight to business. Well, not really. Music and good vibes first.

🎶 Our song of the month is You can Do it by Slim Ali and the Hodi Boys; an infectious blend of West-African Highlife with East-African disco from the 1970s. No wonder it’s still a Pan-African classic.

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 lives in a context of scarce formal jobs.

☀️ January 2025 Highlights

2025 got off to a flying start at Kabakoo. Our co-founder and CEO, Michèle, is a 2025 Elevate Prize winner! From the sands of Timbuktu to New York’s billboards: Michèle’s face has lit up Times Square! We are excited to embrace this opportunity to make the “Highdigenous” famous! Our gratitude goes to our incredible community, partners, mentors, and supporters who share our vision and made all of this possible. Being awarded this prestigious prize is a motivation for our whole team to keep iterating and build on our learnings to meaningfully improve the lives of one million youth by 2030.

Another win comes from our work at the intersection of augmented reality (AR), construction, and upskilling: We won the lifestyle and culture award in the Niantic Studio Real-World Gaming Challenge (Niantic, one of the leaders in AR technology, is the organization behind cultural phenomena such as Pokémon Go). Our successful AR experience takes the player on a journey through the architecture of the Djenné Mosque, the world’s largest adobe building, showcasing the techniques and the knowledge embedded in the building.

Agentic AI feedback in the Kabakoo app

In addition to the AI agent responding to queries via our WhatsApp hotline (read our update 11/2024), the AI-agent in our app is helping us to evaluate the entries made by the learners in their portfolio. We recently took a look at task validation patterns through our AI mentor to identify key learning challenges and opportunities for improvement. By analyzing how learners engage with tasks, we gained valuable insights into common obstacles they face and areas where additional support might be needed.

Out of 800 tasks evaluated by the AI Agent in the Kabakoo app:

• 73.38% were validated (587 tasks): This might point toward a strong engagement by the learners as validation means that the AI agent confirmed these submissions met all required criteria.
• 26.63% were rejected (213 tasks): In this case, the AI agent would point at room for growth and learning by providing specific feedback for improvement to the learner.

Our gamification system actively drives learner engagement through immediate recognition and rewards. By awarding Kabakooins, our virtual tokens, we create a motivating feedback loop that encourages consistent participation and task completion. Even when tasks aren’t validated, learners earn something (average 2 Kabakooins) because we believe in celebrating the courage to try! Validated tasks receive an average of 4 Kabakooins, with exceptional submissions earning up to 5 Kabakooins. 🎉

These insights help us understand our learners’ journey and drive continuous improvement. Also, we have added peer review opportunities alongside gamification elements to foster collaboration and motivation. Our hybrid approach of AI mentorship and community engagement is vital to our scaling strategy as we aim to deliver high-quality, consistent learning experiences to more people while keeping the personal touch that makes Kabakoo unique.

Optimizing the WhatsApp AI support

Since launching our AI support on WhatsApp in October 2024, we had handled over 26,000 support requests, with October 2024 being our peak month. This surge aligned with new learning cohort onboarding and platform updates.

An analysis of user requests reveals two main themes:

• Training & education: Over 79% of requests are inquiries about our upskilling programs, showing strong alignment with our core mission.
• Platform navigation & technical issues: Roughly 15% of requests are about guidance on using the Kabakoo app efficiently, particularly for portfolio entries and project documentation (technical issues and other complaints).

How well is our AI-bot on WhatsApp responding?

To evaluate the quality of our support, we analyzed responses based on five key criteria: relevance, accuracy, completeness, conciseness, and coherence.

• 69.4% of responses received a top score for coherence, meaning they were clear and stayed on point.
• 63.9% scored 5 for relevance, showing strong alignment with learner needs.
• Accuracy is at 61.7%, though we still see room for improvement

Completeness (51.7%) and conciseness (34.5%) are key areas for improvement; we have to work on ensuring responses are both thorough and to the point.

Understanding these trends allows us to enhance our support framework. We will enhance completeness by ensuring that responses fully address learner needs, maintain high accuracy by reducing factual inconsistencies, and optimizing conciseness by balancing detailed guidance with efficiency. To achieve this, we are advancing our multi-agent AI approach by combining AI agents that collaborate to optimize prompts, deliver comprehensive responses, and maintain clear, concise communication. Moreover, following the evaluation procedures discussed by Yang et al. (2024), we plan to survey the rate at which learners utilize suggestions provided by our AI bot and also the rating of how likely a user would recommend the system to a friend.

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EU Ambassador in Mali explores Kabakoo’s vision and impact

We were delighted to welcome the newly appointed European Union Ambassador to Mali, Thomas Eckert. We often receive visits from officials at Kabakoo, but we rarely share about them in our newsletters. This visit was special. The new ambassador not only spent almost an entire morning with us. During his visit, we also presented the results from our recent survey exploring trust and influence in the sectors of education, training, and entrepreneurship among the Malian youth. We had a really open, frank and engaging discussion on the importance of data-driven approaches to understanding the youth and the necessity of aligning interventions with local economic opportunities. Of course, we also discussed an exciting new collaboration with the EU in Mali. More details on this venture will follow in upcoming newsletters.

Kabakoo Faces

(With over 34 821 registered learners, each month we spotlight a member of our vibrant community.)

Salamata joined our programs right after high school. Through her journey in regenerative architecture and construction with Kabakoo, Salamata developed essential life skills that transformed her trajectory. “I discovered that I am capable of pushing myself to the limit and seeing things through.” Catch her story here!

Salamata’s journey with Kabakoo illustrates how our Learning Experience fosters personal agency, strengthens relationships, and ignites a lifelong passion for learning.

Thank you for reading to the end! And yes, YOU CAN DO IT!💜🧡

Michèle & Yanick

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