Why We're Building Skoolbox for African Schools

Skoolbox didn’t start in a boardroom or a pitch deck. It started when I took over Firm Foundation and Dominion Academy, the school my parents founded, and that my mother ran until she passed away on October 22nd, 2025.

I’m a software engineer by profession. I was not a school administrator. But suddenly I was responsible for one, thrown into the unfamiliar world of school management, trying to turn around the fortunes of a place my family had built. And the deeper I got, the clearer the real problem became: it wasn’t buildings, and it wasn’t the will to teach. It was access to quality. Great teaching costs money that many schools don’t have, and the students in those schools pay the price for a gap they didn’t create.

That’s the problem I couldn’t stop thinking about. And as an engineer, I kept asking the same question: could technology close it?

Skoolbox is my answer.

An uneven playing field is the real problem.

A child’s future shouldn’t be decided by whether their school could afford to hire the best teachers. But too often, it is. Schools with resources attract qualified staff. Schools without them fall behind — and their students go on to compete for the same exams, the same universities, and the same jobs as everyone else, having been given far less to work with.

I’ve now seen that gap from the inside, as the person responsible for a school living on the wrong side of it. Skoolbox exists to level that ground: to give every classroom access to strong, consistent teaching support, regardless of what the school can afford.

Why it has to work offline, and on the devices schools already have

Most education technology assumes fast internet and modern devices. The schools that need help the most have neither. Building a tool that depends on both would recreate the same divide in software.

So we made two decisions non-negotiable from day one. Skoolbox works offline, and it works on low-end devices. The AI at its core runs on the device itself: no expensive data, no dropped connection at the moment a lesson depends on it, no requirement to buy new hardware first. If a school has a modest device and no reliable internet, Skoolbox still works. That’s the whole point.

A co-tutor for teachers and students

Skoolbox is an AI school tutor that works as a co-tutor supporting teachers and pupils at the same time. For a teacher, especially one stretched across too many students or teaching outside their strongest subject, it’s an assistant that helps prepare and deliver lessons. For a student, it’s a patient tutor available for the hours no teacher can be.

This matters to me personally. The goal was never to replace teachers; the school my parents built was built on its teachers. The goal is to multiply what a limited teaching staff can do, so that a shortage of qualified teachers no longer means a shortage of quality learning.

Where we are now

Skoolbox is in active development. I’m building it the way I wish it had existed when I first walked into that office and had to figure out how to give our students a fair chance at a genuinely AI-powered platform, working offline, on the devices schools already own, aimed squarely at the quality gap that money usually decides.

This began as one family’s school and one engineer’s problem to solve. But the gap it addresses isn’t ours alone. Across the continent, countless schools are doing their best with too little, and their students deserve to compete on level ground.

That’s why I started Skoolbox. And that’s what we’re building it to do.

Learn more about Skoolbox at skoolbox.xyz.