Michèle Traoré and Dr. Yanick Kemayou are the co-founders of Kabakoo Academies. Over the past years, they gathered experience in building coalitions and attracting funds dedicated to pioneering "Highdigenous" learning, a novel, context-attuned educational model in Sub-Saharan Africa that fuses cutting-edge technology with endogenous knowledge systems.
Michèle, a winner of the 2025 Elevate Prize, leads Kabakoo’s operations with a focus on scalable social impact. Yanick, a distinguished alumnus of Paderborn University, earned his PhD in Economics here with distinction before teaching at the renowned Sorbonne University in Paris. Under their leadership, Kabakoo has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a "Global Pioneer for the Future of Learning" and has earned many awards.
Together, they have successfully secured funding and strategic collaborations from both public institutions such as the European Union and private ones such as the AI for Global Development Accelerator (The Agency Fund/Open AI).
Come and meet Michèle and Yanick as they share their experience, which might be of interest for social entrepreneurs as well as those interested in organizing learning and innovation in the informally dominated economies of the Global Majority.
Michèle and Yanick are currently visiting Paderborn University. They collaborate with Martin Schneider’s research team in researching and promoting Kabakoo’s learning experience.
For example, Kabakoo and Paderborn University organized Highdigenous Live! The Festival of Wondering in 2024. The festival was funded to a large extent by a grant from LWL Kulturstiftung and in 2025 was among the five major winners of the Westfalen Weser Kulturpreis 2025 .
