EdTech
Affordable SaaS LMS for K-12 schools in French-speaking Africa - 4,000+ students per school, 25% boost in school community engagement, concept to launch in 16 weeks.
We built SEKOU, an affordable SaaS Learning Management System for K-12 schools in French-speaking African countries. Founded by Jennyfer Ngueno and Leonnel Noundou, French tech entrepreneurs with deep roots in the African education system, the platform replaces outdated manual workflows with automated attendance, fee management, multilingual support, and dedicated portals for parents, teachers, students, and administrators - with a multi-school architecture built to grow - delivered in 16 weeks.
Client
SEKOU
Industry
EdTech
Timeline
16 weeks
Team Size
8 engineers
Impact
Delivery timeline
Students supported
Community engagement
Delivery timeline: From concept to production launch with four user portals, automated workflows, and multi-school architecture.
Students supported: Platform architecture supports 4,000+ students per school with room to scale across institutions.
Community engagement: Increase in school community connections through real-time parent-teacher communication and digital report access.
“We needed a platform built for African schools, not adapted from a Western LMS. 1Raft understood that from the start - multilingual, offline-aware, and priced for our market. Sixteen weeks later, schools were onboarding.”
The Challenge
Schools across French-speaking Africa relied on paper-based systems for attendance, grade tracking, and communication. Manual paperwork consumed teacher time, introduced errors in student records, and made it impossible to generate real-time performance insights for administrators.
Fee collection and payroll were cumbersome and error-prone. Schools tracked payments in ledgers, parents had no visibility into outstanding balances, and administrators spent hours reconciling records that should have been automated.
No existing LMS solutions were tailored to local needs - most platforms were English-only, priced for Western schools, and assumed reliable internet infrastructure that many African schools lack. Multilingual support for French and local languages was essential, not optional.
Parent-teacher engagement was limited to in-person meetings and paper report cards. Parents had no way to monitor their child's attendance, grades, or school announcements in real time - creating a disconnect between home and school that affected student outcomes.
The founders needed a multi-school architecture from day one. The platform had to scale across different schools, each with their own configurations, fee structures, and academic calendars, without requiring custom deployments for each institution.
What We Built
Built automated workflows for attendance tracking, grade management, and fee collection that replace paper-based processes - saving teacher hours and eliminating manual reconciliation errors across every school on the platform.
Developed dedicated portals for four user roles - parents monitor attendance and grades, teachers manage classrooms and submit reports, students access assignments and results, and administrators oversee operations with real-time analytics dashboards.
Implemented multilingual support across the entire platform, so every interface, notification, and report is accessible in French and adaptable to local languages as the platform expands to new regions.
Designed a multi-school architecture where each institution operates independently with its own configurations, fee structures, and academic calendars - while the platform scales horizontally without custom deployments per school.
Related Work
Affordability, multilingual support, and tolerance for unreliable infrastructure are non-negotiable. The platform must work on low-bandwidth connections, support local languages alongside colonial languages (French, English, Portuguese), and price per-school rather than per-seat to match school budgets. Western LMS platforms fail in these markets because they assume reliable internet, English fluency, and enterprise pricing.
Next Step
One call with a founder. No sales team, no follow-up sequence. If we can't help, we'll say so.