Every single year, more than 10 million young Africans struggle to enter the local job markets.
Less than 30% will end up in decent employment. The others will face unemployment, the precariousness of informal and non-decent jobs, or migration. Young Africans lucky enough to go to school graduate from high school, get a B.A., go for one or even two Masters; but very often end up with a PhD in informal surviving tactics, in smugglers’ trucks around the Sahara, in shameful camps in Libya, or even more tragically at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
Our co-founders, Yanick Kemayou and Michèle Traoré, were among the many leaving their home behind. While they have been fortunate enough to study and then work at prestigious institutions in China and Europe, the initial problem which pushed them into migration has kept bugging them. So they decided to tackle the problem. With a new form of learning. Empowering learners with the skills to steward thriving communities and ecosystems.
Building the world's first sustainability-focused EdTech
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Africa is young and has an education problem. 50% of youths of upper secondary school age in Africa are out of school. Even for those with access, quality and relevance of education are absent. In fact, there is a lack of competencies despite schooling, the infamous in-school-but-not-learning problem. This explains why going to school or even to university in Africa often does not increase one’s chances of making a decent living. 66 % of African youths are in mismatched jobs. This is not only a waste of potential and talent but also a cause for mass emigration; with the most fortunate leaving as African refugees abroad are on average more educated than their peers when they leave their home countries.
Africa is also the most vulnerable continent to climate change; 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in Africa.
Kabakoo believes that by fusing high-tech to indigenous knowledge, we can equip youths with skills to imagine and make emerge thriving ecosystems.
Across Africa, the human capital production function is broken. Because education is disconnected from the local contexts and knowledges.
We can close the gap by fusing state-of-art tech with local and indigenous knowledges. In addition to making learning work by connecting it to the local contexts, this will bring us further on the paths towards climate change mitigation, sustainability, and thriving ecosystems as indigenous knowledges are integrative and holistic by nature.
It’s time for resetting education for the world’s largest pool of youths.
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