By 2030, 42 per cent of the world’s young people will live in Africa. Fewer than a quarter of them take a science path. SUKU works at the point where that is decided.
What SUKU is
SUKU is a learning platform for students in Première, Terminale and Prépa concours in Cameroon - the years before the final exams. It is bilingual in French and English, matching the country’s education system.
The platform has three parts:
- Practice assessments in mathematics, physics and chemistry, with questions modelled on the actual exams.
- Feedback on every answer, so a mistake becomes an explanation rather than just a mark.
- The SUKU Science Olympiad, a nationwide competition with a leaderboard and prize money.
Why olympiads
The competition is not an add-on. It is the core - and the reason the project counts as research.
Education is deprioritised in many families not for lack of interest but because existential pressure works against it. Where daily survival comes first, education is a long-term, uncertain investment with no short-term relief.
SUKU’s approach starts exactly there: it transfers elements of sports betting, popular in Cameroon, onto education. School performance is what counts, and those who win are rewarded financially. That turns education from a long-term value into a short-term, tangible benefit - for the children and for their parents.
Whether it works was an open question. It could also go wrong: the incentive being misused, children coming under pressure, children without a reward being treated worse. So the work is studied as it is built - through surveys, feedback rounds and conversations with local partners.
This work is certified as a research and development project by the German Research Allowance Certification Body.
Why we do it
A large part of our engineering team is in Douala. People who build software there went through this education system themselves and know the points where talent is lost - not from a study but from their own school years and those of siblings and friends.
That is the difference between a project about Cameroon and one from Cameroon.
Status
The platform is running and being trialled at schools across the country; the olympiads are under way. How many schools, participants and editions there are by now is on the project site - there it is current, here it would be stale by the time you read it.
