Esseyi: reinventing post-baccalaureate guidance for young Africans

Faced with the challenges of post-baccalaureate guidance in French-speaking Africa, start-up Esseyi aims to revolutionize access to information for young people. Founded by Emeric Koda, Esseyi uses digital technology to connect students, schools and companies, and rethink the continent's educational future.

Esseyi is a start-up born in 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Co-founder Emeric Koda is taking advantage of this period to explore the projects he's passionate about. 

It then listed all the higher education courses available in French-speaking Africa on a web page, which shortly after its launch welcomed almost 10,000 visitors a month. 

"We realized that our training directory was being consulted 10,000 times a month without advertising, thanks to SEO alone," says Emeric. This traffic confirms the existence of a real problem of guidance for young people on the African continent. At the same time, schools and higher education establishments are struggling to recruit the right profiles.

Digital as an orientation lever

Five years later, this project is called Esseyi, an information, guidance and integration platform for African youth. 

For students, Esseyi offers information on university courses, visibility of schools and universities, and access to job offers.

For companies and institutions, Esseyi is a gateway to digitalization: "Even today, many schools still have non-digitalized administrative processes. With Esseyi, we're helping them to do just that, to promote the mobility and training of young people," explains co-founder Emeric. 

New milestones

Esseyi, which means "knowledge" in Akposso (a Togolese language), is today supported by an agile team based between Benin and France. Today, 90% of sales are generated on the African continent and over 10,000 training courses have been registered, with an active presence in Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Benin and Togo.

In the midst of an acceleration phase, Esseyi has launched a fund-raising drive, in particular to support strategic expansion in Mayotte. 

Esseyi is one of the three winners of the first promotion of yprlink, a challenge to accelerate the growth of start-ups in Africa. Yprlink is proposed by LAfricaMobile and Possible.Africa with the support of H7.