In 2016, when war broke out in Cameroon’s two English-speaking areas, the Northwest and Southwest, Mbah Javis was a senior in high school in Batibo, Momo Division. His school was only one of the many organisations and companies that were destroyed by the conflict.
Due to clashes between the Cameroon military and separatist fighters, Mbah, who was one year away from taking the Cameroon General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level, was forced to stay at home for two years.
“There were no signs of classes resuming in Batibo, so I moved to Bamenda, the Northwest regional capital, which was relatively calm. I enrolled in Government Bilingual High School Ntamulung, where I obtained my GCE O’Level and GCE Advanced Level,” Mbah explained.
The 20-year-old was later permitted to enrol in a computer science programme at the University of Buea in the Southwest and began exploring options for resolving the issue he had in 2016.
Dimoly, an AI study asistance app, is the outcome.
“My motivation to build Dimoly came from my experience. I couldn’t go to school every day due to insecurities. At the moment, the situation is not any better, and a lot of students are unable to go to school and attend classes, so I was prompted to build something that students can use from anywhere at any time to study and prepare for exams,” said Mbah.
The terms didactic and moly are the two words that make up the startup’s name. Moly is a magical plant in Greek mythology, and didactic refers to teaching methods intended to make learning easy for people. Mbah combined the two to come up with the moniker Dimoly for his firm.
“This means the app is designed to teach people in a way that will make them understand things like magic,” said Mbah.
Mbah claims that if a user asks a question with sufficient details, such as the precise subject or issue the query is related to, Dimoly can deliver correct replies.
“So basically, the more information the user provides, the clearer the answer the AI assistant gives,” he said.
Mbah started teaching himself C++ programming when he was fourteen years old. Six years later, he has worked as a software engineer for a number of businesses in Cameroon and overseas, creating software products mostly for mobile and the web, some of which have artificial intelligence features.
Mbah finished in the top three of Africa’s yearly Google Code programming competition in 2019/2020. He was one of the winners of the Cameroon ICT Innovation Week competition in 2022, which was run by the country’s ministry of post and telecommunications.
He built Dimoly over the course of four months.
Since the war is still going on, the Cameroonian government frequently places pupils from schools with questionable security in housing facilities with guaranteed protection for national exams.
This implies that a student can still prepare with Dimoly, even if they are unable to attend classes.
“After downloading the app from the Google Play Store, a student needs an email account to complete their registration before using it,” said Mbah.
“Currently, the app has over 6300 registered users. The feedback from them has been great. They say they enjoy using it a lot,” added Mbah.
Story Credit: Njodzeka Danhatu for bird story agency
