Writing & research

We think and build in public

We publish a monthly update with data and failures included, essays in outside venues, and peer-reviewed research. When EY benchmarked nine organizations worldwide for a university innovation hub in Togo, its consultants never contacted Kabakoo. They worked from what we publish.

A Kabakoo learner works on a laptop at a wooden table outdoors, next to a terracotta water pot.
Ithiel, Product Designer at Kabakoo. Started his journey as learner.
Essays

The AI worked. Did it work for the learner?

Venue
All things highdigenous (Substack) | Yanick Kemayou | August 2026
What it argues
How Kabakoo evaluates AI from model performance to human flourishing, across the four-level framework built by the Agency Fund and the Center for Global Development. 
One line
"The AI had done its job very well. But the learner stopped."
Read
kabakoo.substack.com

The workers are plenty, but we are not seeing them

Venue
All things highdigenous (Substack) | Yanick Kemayou | July 2026
What it argues
A reply to economist Daniel Björkegren: informally dominated economies are not short of knowledge workers to augment with AI. The tailor pricing  and producing a garment from a photo, the shop owner running a mental map of her neighborhood's cash flow, and the farmer reading the rains are doing judgment-intensive work the usual categories were never designed to count.
One line
"The intelligence is plenty. The knowledge workers in informally dominated economies are plenty. What has been scarce is the willingness to see them."
Read
kabakoo.substack.com

It's the mindset, …

Venue
AGENCY, the Agency Fund's publication | Yanick Kemayou | April 2026
What it argues
A personal essay on agency, from the 1994 CFA franc devaluation that halved his father's earning power overnight to the data Kabakoo now holds: in thousands of learner video diaries, psychosocial barriers are named as often as financial ones, and explored far more deeply.
One line
"The binding constraint is not financial. It's psychological."
Read
theagencyfund.substack.com

Harnessing behavioral insights for Bamako.ai

Venue
Kabakoo (Substack) | Yanick Kemayou | August 2024
What it argues
A four-variant WhatsApp messaging experiment for Kabakoo's flagship festival: tangibility and identity framing beat urgency, and the winning message went on to power the campaign.
One line
"As an evidence-guided organization, we did what we do best: we designed a quick and dirty experiment."
Read
kabakoo.substack.com
The AI build log

Engineering notes from Kabakoo Product Squad. Each page keeps its original date; numbers are as of that date.

Before Training, the Data!

Venue
Kabakoo blog | February 2025
What it shows
How the Bamanankan dataset behind the voice Mentor was built: phrases drawn from real AI Mentor conversations, native-speaker translation on a purpose-built platform, supervisor validation loops, and recording protocols.
One line
"We capped translations at 100 sentences per translator per day, after noticing that accuracy declined when translators worked on too many batches in a single session."
Read
kabakoo.africa/news/before-training-the-data

What We've Learned of Building Our WhatsApp Support Agent

Venue
Kabakoo blog | November 2024
What it shows
Why chunking decides whether a RAG support agent survives contact with real users, written after two cohort launches sent thousands of applicants to one WhatsApp number.
One line
"Within the first three days of launch, our agent on WhatsApp responded to about 1,600 queries daily."
Read
kabakoo.africa/news/what-weve-learned-of-building-our-whatsapp-support-agent

Kabakoo AI System: Transforming Digital Learning in West Africa

Venue
Kabakoo blog | September 2025
What it shows
The system's evolution in one arc: community image-labeling work in 2020, a first text version on an external chat app, an in-house chat application, then voice.
One line
"A major breakthrough came with the introduction of voice interaction in Bamanankan, enabling greater accessibility for learners who prefer oral communication."
Read
kabakoo.africa/news/kabakoo-ai-system-transforming-digital-learning-in-west-africa
Peer-reviewed and academic

Highdigenous pedagogy: aesthetic engagement as epistemological bridge in African learning communities

Status
Under review at the International Journal of Educational Development; public preprint on SocArxiv
What it studies
504 portfolio entries and task reflections from 122 Bamako learners (2023–2025). A stable discourse cluster in which cultural and technical vocabulary systematically co-occur emerges across 50 random seeds; 84% of it comes from project modules without any aesthetic prompt.
One line
"The problem might not be that African youth lack skills; it is that dominant frameworks fail to recognize the epistemological resources they articulate when given pedagogical room."

From obstacle to opportunity: how growth mindsets foster employability & entrepreneurship in Mali

Status
Published: Islam, Herdejürgen, Kemayou, Kabst & Schneider, Academy of Management Proceedings (2023)
What it studies
The pilot randomized controlled trial of Kabakoo's program, run while the organization operated on a budget below $300,000. Significant effects on growth mindset and optimism.
Read
DOI 10.5465/AMPROC.2023.19425abstract

Highdigenous Live! Das Festival des Staunens

Venue
Book chapter (in German) | Kemayou, Klingmann, Schneider & Schönhärl
What it documents
The 2024 festival held simultaneously in Paderborn and Bamako. When German visas were denied to Malian experts, including the restorer of Timbuktu's UNESCO World Heritage, the team pivoted within 72 hours to VR and 360° livestreams. The festival won recognition in the Westfalen Weser Kulturpreis 2025.
One line
"Wissen und Expert:innen aus Bamako wanderten in Echtzeit nach Paderborn und zurück, ganz ohne Visum." (Knowledge and experts from Bamako traveled to Paderborn and back in real time, without any visa.)

The monthly update

Three years of showing our work

Since 2022, Kabakoo has published a monthly update with the experiments, the numbers, the wins and the failures (aka learnings).

Read and subscribe on Substack

"Working this openly means instrumenting ourselves to be embarrassed on a schedule, then doing it again next month."