Afopezi Anua-Gueleh Moses

As a young person, Afopezi suffered many disruptions to his education due to war and political unrest. However, his parents always emphasized to him the importance of investing in education – and as a student he has turned his unwavering passion for tech into a platform that will equalize education in both Cameroon and Africa as a whole.  

Afopezi is the creator of an app called Skolarr – an AI-powered, personalized bilingual educational app whose purpose is to provide accessible and affordable educational content to all African students through the use of mobile technology. In its original form, Skolarr was to provide free educational content such as videos, study notes and past examination papers to students in regions where education had been disrupted, permitting them to follow up with lectures from the comfort of their homes. Today, it also has a built-in AI chatbot helping not only students from Afopezi’s region, but also others across Cameroon and other sub-Saharan countries.  

Using the chatbot, students can find practice problems, study guides, videos, class notes and step-by-step explanations for every subject they are studying – from economics to literature, biology to history, accounting to psychology. Courses on machine learning and programming in Java, Python and Dart are also available. Over 3000 students register yearly on the platform, and since 2019 Skolarr has made learning accessible to over 100,000 students (10,000+ of whom are internally displaced persons due to sociopolitical upheavals); 94 per cent of accounts are active users, a clear indication that the app really is reaching the communities that need it. Skolarr has also successfully trained over 3,000 teachers on the tech skills they need in order to teach students in their respective schools. 

Afopezi’s work has been rewarded with a huge amount of recognition. He is the winner of the national Youth Connekt Cluster Challenge competition (2021 and 2022); regional winner of the MTN Yellow Digital Talent competition (2023); national winner of the MTN Yellow Digital Talent inter-university Hackathon (2023); and national winner of Cameroon’s Campus Hackathon (2023). With the Global Student Prize funds, Afopezi would expand the Skolarr project to other African countries experiencing sociopolitical crises (as well as more underserved communities in Cameroon) to help support student learning and complement what is happening in the classroom. Specifically, Skolarr would roll out its app to all countries still facing difficulties, drive the marketing of the app in all targeted market segments throughout Africa, set up Skolarr centres in strategic locations, and fund training for the Skolarr team.