SomoTech Africa and Cyberiad Labs partner to train Kenyan teachers in AI, so they can bring it to their classrooms

RALEIGH, N.C., and KILIFI, Kenya, 20 October 2026. Cyberiad Labs and SomoTech Africa today announced a partnership that gives SomoTech Africa’s teachers and learners free places in Cyberiad Labs’ classes. It starts with 250 places in the class that opens on Monday 2 November 2026, and continues in future classes. The course, Introduction to AI and LLMs, is online, part-time and four weeks long.

SomoTech Africa is a Kenyan non-profit founded in 2024 by Chrisphine Okoth Ogallo, a mathematics and geography teacher. It started in a classroom. As a student teacher in rural Kilifi County, Chrisphine was asked to teach computer science and coding, which Kenya’s new curriculum expects schools to offer, in schools that had almost no computers. In one school where he volunteered, more than 1,000 learners shared two laptops. His first answer was to train the teachers.

Since then, in Kilifi County, SomoTech Africa has trained 700 teachers, reached 1,600 children through AI programmes run with their parents, and trained 400 young people to build with AI, with support from Goodwall and the NextGen AI Alliance, and laptops donated by HP. It works with 20 partner schools in Kilifi and Homa Bay. It built Somiqo, a free learning platform for Kenyan schools that works without internet, and opened the Somiqo Hub in Kilifi Town, where every session, device and mentor hour is free. Cyberiad Labs teaches people to work with AI while keeping their own judgment and their own voice. Its first class opened on 14 September with 1,005 learners from 51 countries, 95% of them in Africa, and Kenya is its second-largest group after Nigeria.

SomoTech Africa’s places come on top of the public ones. The public seats of the November class are already taken.

“Nobody passes on what they learn to more people than a teacher,” said Julien Barbier, co-founder of Cyberiad Labs. “When one teacher learns how AI works, and where it goes wrong, every classroom they teach in for years learns it too. The first thing Chrisphine did, in a school without a computer, was train the teachers. We said we would reach 1,000,000 learners by 2030 through partners. SomoTech Africa’s teachers will bring what they learn, how these tools work and where they go wrong, into staff rooms and classrooms in Kilifi and Homa Bay that we could never reach from North Carolina.”

SomoTech Africa works in the places it says other digital programmes skip: rural Kilifi and Homa Bay, and outreach counties with weak or no mobile coverage. Cyberiad Labs’ course was built for the same conditions. A learner only needs a phone or a computer to join. On the first day, every learner installs a small free AI model that runs on their own device, so they can keep using AI at no cost, even when the connection drops. A teacher in a school with no reliable internet can still use it to prepare a lesson or check an exercise. From the first week, learners see that it can be wrong, and learn to check what it says before they use it. For a teacher, that is the difference between handing AI’s mistakes to a class and teaching a class to catch them.

“AI should not replace teachers. It should support them, take some of the workload off them, and give them more time for what matters most: teaching, guiding and encouraging their learners,” said Chrisphine Okoth Ogallo, founder and CEO of SomoTech Africa. “No teacher should be left behind because of where they teach. With Cyberiad Labs, our teachers will learn how AI really works, so they can use it with confidence and pass it on to every learner in their classroom.”

The partnership starts with the class that opens on Monday 2 November 2026. SomoTech Africa’s teachers and learners register through a link Cyberiad Labs sends them. This is Cyberiad Labs’ fifth education partnership, and its third in Kenya, after the Mandela AI Hub Foundation and Nguvu-TEACH. Other non-profits and foundations that don’t charge their learners can ask for free places of their own at julien@cyberiadlabs.com.

About Cyberiad Labs

Cyberiad Labs teaches people to work with AI without handing it their thinking. Those skills help people keep a job or find one, and help organisations keep up 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://cyberiadlabs.com

Mission: https://cyberiadlabs.com/mission.html

Partners: https://cyberiadlabs.com/partners.html

About SomoTech Africa

SomoTech Africa is a Kenyan non-profit founded in 2024 that brings offline-first digital learning, AI and coding training, climate action, scholarships and mentorship to underserved communities. Its partner schools and Somiqo Hubs are in Kilifi and Homa Bay counties, with outreach and training in Samburu, West Pokot, Lamu and Mombasa. Its Somiqo platform delivers Kenya’s Competency-Based Curriculum, including computer science, to schools with little or no internet, and is free for schools. Learners with disabilities are designed for from the start, not added later. https://somotechafrica.org

Contact information

Julien Barbier, co-founder, Cyberiad Labs, julien@cyberiadlabs.com

Chrisphine Okoth Ogallo, founder and CEO, SomoTech Africa, info@somotechafrica.org

Sources

• Techweez, “Meet the Computer Science Teacher Building a Path to Kenya’s AI Future”, 12 August 2026 (the two laptops for 1,000 learners, teacher training, Goodwall, the NextGen AI Alliance and HP).
• SomoTech Africa, “About” (founding in 2024, the CBC computer science gap, counties).
• SomoTech Africa, “Somiqo Hub and Learning App” (Somiqo Hub, free sessions, offline platform).
• SomoTech Africa, “home page” (focus and outreach counties).