Kinlo Ephriam Tangiri

Kinlo comes from a remote part of northwest Cameroon where basic amenities such as roads, clean water, electricity, health care, and education are lacking. Growing up, long treks were required just to attend primary school, and many of Kinlo’s friends eventually dropped out of education to get married early or become subsistence farmers. Despite the pressure to follow a similar path, Kinlo was determined to succeed and pursue higher education no matter what the obstacles. After many struggles and relocations in his high school years, and extreme difficulty in finding scholarships to fund his higher education, Kinlo was finally accepted into Jacobs University (now known as Constructor University) in 2022 to study computer science as a major, data science as a minor, and global Africa as an elective course. 

Although Kinlo had created mathematics resources for younger students while still in school, it was after graduating from high school that he was inspired to take this a step further. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, Kinlo was forced to spend a year at home, which led him to create an online educational platform – the Kinlo Ephriam Tangiri Academy (KET Academy). Despite not having a background in computer science at the beginning, his passion for education and community engagement led him to build an e-learning platform from scratch, using free resources like YouTube and freeCodeCamp to teach himself along the way.  

In 2021, he launched the first version of the platform, and since then, interested students have been able to utilize its content to achieve their academic goals. KET Academy has proven to be an invaluable platform for students (especially student ambassadors) to build their skills in domains like communication, teamwork, leadership and problem solving. KET ambassadors are also making a real impact on students by offering guidance, support and resources on a vast range of topics including mathematics, ICT, biology, physics, and commercial studies. Through this collective effort, KET Academy is currently working directly with 700 students, but has had over 66,000 views on YouTube and has reached more than 1,500 students in total through its WhatsApp community. 

As Kinlo continues to pursue his education in computer science and data science, his goal is to expand the reach of KET Academy and bring more innovation into the educational system in Cameroon, Africa and the world at large. In 2019, he represented Cameroon as the sole delegate at the Youth by Youth global learning festival, which brought together over 800 educational enthusiasts from 80 countries to discuss how young people can reshape, reimagine, and reinvent education. If Kinlo wins the Global Student Prize 2023, he plans to establish a digital resource center in Yaoundé, train selected young ambassadors on how to help their peers through digital mentorship, launch national competitions in various educational domains, and send 50 girls and 50 boys to primary and secondary schools in the northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon, where over 980,000 students have dropped out of school.