The challenge
Lingala is the lingua franca of Kinshasa and one of Africa's most widely spoken languages, but a diaspora heritage learner or a professional heading to Central Africa will search Duolingo and Rosetta Stone in vain. Serving them properly means building three products at once: the game mechanics of a Duolingo, the video course depth of a Udemy, and a conversation partner who never sleeps — in a market where the interface itself must work in both English and French.
Our solution
We built all three on one platform. Yekola, the gamified path, moves learners through CEFR-tagged units with eight exercise types — listen-and-type, speak-and-repeat, word banks, matched pairs — driven by XP, streaks and a hearts system, with separate learning trees for English and French speakers. Self-paced video courses stream in adaptive HLS through an AWS MediaConvert pipeline and CloudFront. And Mina, an OpenAI-powered tutor, offers conversation practice, grammar explanations and cultural context around the clock. A trilingual Lingala–English–French dictionary with audio pronunciation ties it together, and the team runs everything — course authoring, the Yekola tree builder, blog, analytics, support — from a built-in admin CMS. Docker on AWS App Runner keeps the whole platform under $60 a month.
Results
Lingala.cd is live: a language spoken by tens of millions finally has a modern home online. Learners start with a 3-day trial and move through gamified microlessons, streamed video courses and round-the-clock AI conversation — while the whole platform runs on less than $60 a month of infrastructure.
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