Part of our work is research in the legal sense: we build things nobody knows will work when we start. That this counts as research rather than merely demanding engineering has been examined and certified by the German Research Allowance Certification Body.
What the BSFZ examines
The Bescheinigungsstelle Forschungszulage (BSFZ) acts under statutory delegation on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space. It is run by a consortium of VDI Technologiezentrum, AiF Projekt GmbH and DLR Projektträger.
It examines whether a project meets the conditions of the Research Allowance Act. Three criteria have to hold together:
- Novelty - the project aims at new knowledge, measured not against what the company happens to know but against the state of the art.
- Uncertainty - the outcome is scientifically or technically uncertain at the outset. If you know it will work, you are not researching.
- Systematic approach - the work follows a planned method rather than trial and error.
One thing matters for reading the seal correctly: the certificate applies per project, not to the company as a whole. It states that a particular project is research - not that everything we do is.
Equally important: the BSFZ rules only on the substance. It does not determine any funding amount; the tax office does that in a second step.
The certified project
What is certified is the development of an innovative education concept in Cameroon that combines schooling with incentives - the work SUKU grows out of.
The starting point: education is held to be the key to individual and social development, yet in many countries of the global South parents do not treat it as urgent. The reason is rarely lack of interest but existential pressure. For many families daily survival comes first, and education looks like a long-term, uncertain investment with no short-term relief. The lower the income, the more education is under-represented - a cycle that reinforces itself.
What is new about it
The core of the project is to transfer elements of sports betting, popular in Cameroon, onto education: a competitive incentive system in which school performance is what counts and winners are rewarded financially. That turns education from a long-term value into a short-term, tangible benefit - for the children and for their parents.
No comparable concept or platform existed before. That is the novelty the certificate establishes.
What was uncertain about it
It is research because the outcome was open. The application names three risks - and the BSFZ accepted them as sufficient:
- Acceptance by parents. Whether a financial incentive actually changes how education is perceived could not be known in advance.
- Misuse. The risk that children are pressured, or even kept from school, in order to obtain the reward.
- Social pressure. Children who receive no reward could be treated worse by their parents - which would defeat the project’s own purpose.
On top of that the technical side: power and network outages in some regions disrupt not only digital payments but project communication as a whole.
How it is tested
Not from a desk. The plan provides for surveys, tests and feedback rounds with children and parents, conversations with local partners on the ground, and a final test phase with around 100 students measuring frequency and duration of use as well as acceptance.
Status
The platform is running and being trialled at schools in Cameroon. Current figures on participants and editions are on the project site - there they are current; here they would be stale by the time you read them.
