Our story

I built this for three children at my kitchen table. It turned out there were a few million more.

By the founder of Study Hub · Nairobi · November 2026

My three children are in primary and junior school. Like every Kenyan parent I know, I watched the CBC arrive in our house as a set of words — strands, sub-strands, competencies, "exceeding expectations" — and a set of books that do not quite explain themselves. The curriculum is good; I believe that more now than when I started. But it came with no way for a child, at home, on an ordinary Tuesday evening, to find out what she understands and what she does not, and to do something about it before the next test does it for her.

So in August this year I wrote down, as carefully as I could, what I thought the answer should be. Fifty requirements, in a long document nobody but me had read. I am not a programmer. But it is 2026, and I found that a parent with a clear idea and an unreasonable amount of stubbornness can now build the thing himself — with AI doing the typing, and a human deciding every single thing that matters. Within two days there was a working site, with the whole Kenyan curriculum laid out inside it, and my own three children as its first and only users. It had four lessons.

Today it has more than a thousand lessons and more than twenty thousand questions, across every learning area the CBC asks for from Grade 3 to Grade 9, in English and Kiswahili. Every one of them has been read and approved by a person before any child saw it. That sentence is the most important one on this page, so let me say what it cost.

The rule I would not break

It is very easy, in 2026, to generate lessons. It is very hard to generate lessons a child should be allowed to read. Early on I decided the one rule Study Hub would be built around: nothing reaches a child unread. Not a lesson, not a quiz question, not a diagram. A machine may draft; a person approves; and every night a second examiner goes back over the whole library and raises anything doubtful for a person to settle. If a question is in doubt, it comes off the shelf until it is not.

For most of September and October that person was me. I read more Grade 5 Kiswahili grammar and Grade 8 Integrated Science than I ever expected to — late at night and before dawn, after work and between my own children's homework. I withdrew lessons that were fluent and wrong. I learned that a question can be beautifully written and have the wrong answer marked, and that the only way to catch it is to solve it again yourself. Some nights I approved many and some nights none, because the last deserved the same reading as the first. The slow way was the only way I could put in front of someone else's child.

What I refused to build

Three things, each of which would have made Study Hub grow faster. No ads, ever — nothing is sold to your child and nothing about your child is sold. No streaks, no leaderboards, no guilt — the research on children's learning is clear that these move engagement, not understanding, and I did not build this to make a ten-year-old anxious about a flame icon. And no chat with an AI for children until it can be made as safe as a lesson: a child here reads what a person approved, and asks a parent or a teacher the rest.

Why it is cheap, and why that is the point

I named it shule — school — because that is what it is, and gave it the address shule.world because of where I want it to go. But the ambition starts at home. A Kenyan family should not need a private tutor to find out whether their child understood this week's fractions. Study Hub is free for every family that joins this holiday. When passes begin in January, the families who joined first will pay the least, and the whole curriculum will cost a family less than one afternoon of tuition a month. It runs on the phone you already have, on the connection you already have.

And there is a promise underneath the price, which I am building the company around rather than printing on a page: no child will be turned away for want of money. Where a family cannot pay, a partner, a donor or a friend will. I have met too many of those children already to build it any other way.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. A child in Karen and a child in Kibera sit the same national assessment. Until now they have not had the same library. For the first time, the cost of giving them one is close to nothing — the lesson that was read and approved once can be read by a million children for the price of the electricity. I want a child in Kisumu, in Garissa, in Kibera and in Karen to open the same page and be met by the same care. Then a child in Kampala and Kigali. That is the world in the name. The order is Kenya first, and it is Kenya first because that is where my children are, and because I will not sell anyone a promise I have not watched work at my own table.

Founding Families

The families who join in November carry Study Hub furthest: you are the ones who will tell me what is wrong, what is missing and what your child came back to. So you get the most — free until Term 2 opens in April, and the founding discount for your first year. If you are a teacher who wants to review or write with us, or a head teacher who wants your school's families counted as yours, the door is the same one.

Karibu. Come and see what your child already knows.

— The founder
Study Hub · Nairobi