Ghana’s TechBees Academy learners get free places in Cyberiad Labs’ AI course
Felix Fleku, an ICT teacher, gave free classes to young people in a village in rural Ghana and now wants to do the same in Accra. The first 100 TechBees Academy learners, in that village and in Accra, start Cyberiad Labs’ AI course on Monday 2 November.
RALEIGH, N.C., and ACCRA, Ghana, 26 October 2026. Cyberiad Labs and Edubyte Africa today announced a partnership that gives the learners of TechBees Academy, Edubyte Africa’s youth coding initiative, free places in Cyberiad Labs’ classes. It starts with 100 places in the class that opens on Monday 2 November 2026, with more in future classes. The course, Introduction to AI and LLMs (large language models, the kind of AI behind chat apps like ChatGPT), is online, part-time and four weeks long.
TechBees Academy’s places come on top of the public ones, which are full for every class until the end of 2026. The places are for the young people TechBees teaches free of charge in the village where Felix Fleku started, and for those it will teach in Accra. Edubyte Africa is Cyberiad Labs’ first partner based in Ghana.
Edubyte Africa is a technology company based in Accra. It builds software for schools and businesses, including EduVet, which helps teachers in Ghana’s basic schools prepare lesson notes that follow the national curriculum and submit them to their headteacher for review. TechBees Academy gives young people hands-on software development training and bootcamps across Ghana.
Felix Fleku, founder of Edubyte Africa, is an ICT teacher. Through the TechBees Foundation he taught young people programming for free in rural Ghana. He has since moved to Accra, and his free classes there start with this partnership, through TechBees Academy.
“Free classes reach the people who need them most through teachers like Felix,” said Julien Barbier, co-founder of Cyberiad Labs. “Edubyte Africa builds software that keeps working when the internet goes down, and we built our course the same way. A learner in a village with a weak signal should get the same course as a learner in Accra.”
Felix Fleku’s first classes were on the less connected side of Ghana’s digital divide. World Bank economists who analysed Ghana’s 2021 census found that in 2021, 80% of people in urban areas used the internet, compared with 54% in rural areas, and that the gap had widened since 2010.
“In rural Ghana, I saw how much young people can do once someone gives them a chance to learn,” said Felix Fleku, founder of Edubyte Africa. “Now I want to give young people in Accra the same chance. AI is changing what they need to know: how it works, how to use it well and when not to trust it. With Cyberiad Labs, our learners get all of that for free, and they can learn on a phone or a computer.”
Cyberiad Labs’ Introduction to AI and LLMs teaches what AI is, how it works and where it fails. A learner only needs a phone or a computer to join. The course is in English, written in plain words, and every chapter has a player that reads it out loud. On the first day, learners install a free AI model that runs on their own device, even when the internet drops. In the first week, they see that the system answering so confidently is a program predicting text, one small piece at a time, and that it can be wrong. Throughout the course, they practise checking its answers, asking for its sources and verifying them, and deciding for themselves when to rely on it. Cyberiad Labs’ first class opened on 14 September with 1,005 learners from 51 countries, 95% of them in Africa. Its learners have rated the sessions 4.8 out of 5 on average.
“I did my whole software engineering programme on an Android tablet, so I know how far you can go without a computer,” said Youssef Charif Hamidi, co-founder of Cyberiad Labs. “We wrote our course for phones first. If a learner’s phone cannot run the AI model, they do that part with a classmate, so nobody has to buy a new phone to take part.”
TechBees Academy’s learners register with a code Edubyte Africa gives them, and the course is free for them. This is the eighth education partnership Cyberiad Labs has announced.
About Cyberiad Labs
Cyberiad Labs teaches people to work with AI without letting it think for them. Those skills help people keep a job or find one, and help organisations adapt as AI changes their work. It teaches learners directly, and works with schools, universities, companies, NGOs and governments.
Julien Barbier co-founded Holberton School, a software engineering school with no teachers, no lectures and no upfront tuition. It grew from one campus in San Francisco to 32 worldwide before it was acquired. He then led product and growth at ALX across its software engineering and applied AI programmes, where the number of learners went from a few thousand to more than 1.6 million. Before Holberton, he was the first head of marketing, growth and community at Docker.
Youssef Charif Hamidi is a full-stack engineer. He learned to code on Julien’s 12-month ALX software engineering programme. He finished it on an Android tablet, because cerebral palsy limits him to about two words a minute on a computer keyboard. Previously, he built MathVellum, a maths editor for people who cannot hold a pen.
Home: https://www.cyberiadlabs.com
About Edubyte Africa
Edubyte Africa, through its TechBees Academy initiative, is dedicated to empowering Africa’s next generation by delivering accessible, tech-driven educational solutions, digital literacy, and innovative IT training programs to bridge the digital skills gap and foster future-ready talent. https://www.edubyteafrica.com
Contact information
Julien Barbier, co-founder, Cyberiad Labs, julien@cyberiadlabs.com
Felix Fleku, founder, Edubyte Africa, info@edubyteafrica.com
Sources
- World Bank Blogs, “Ten Facts About Digital Technology Adoption in Ghana”, by Andrew Dabalen and Justice Tei Mensah, 3 July 2023.