The Ivorian entrepreneur Christelle Hien Kouame (pictured) won the 2021 Challenge App Africa with her edtech solution “Prenez les feuilles”. The solution is an educational platform for students in Côte d'Ivoire.

To make her idea a reality, the marketing and communications engineer invested funds from her communications agency to develop the solution and, once that was done, she officially presented it to the Ivorian Ministry of Education. The solution was then validated and made available to students, for homework and exams.

Later, Christelle Hien Kouame bettered her offer by including new learning tools to challenge students. "We then integrated three other components to our platform: motivation through rewards by offering gifts for quizzes and exercises completed correctly within a given timeframe, career guidance by talking about jobs with different career paths, and finally short podcasts about general knowledge broadcast via the WhatsApp channel," she said.

Through her startup, Christelle Hien Kouame wants to improve the national success rate. In addition to its educational role, the platform helps students who do not have all the textbooks, to have access to lessons on different subjects directly on their mobile phones. The objective of "Prenez les feuilles" is to give access to school programs to as many people as possible. The app is also intended to be the best tool for preparing for school exams.

In 2019, the edtech company Eneza Education bought the project. As one success leads to another, Christelle Hien Kouame won the 6th edition of the Challenge App Africa organized by the media RFI and France24 in 2021. The prize is worth €15,000.

Today, 6,000 students regularly use the online platform, and the app version launched in early March already has almost 2,000 downloads. Christelle Hien Kouame aims to reach students outside her country. She is already planning an expansion strategy, starting with Senegal by 2025.

Aïsha Moyouzame