Giiyo STEM Club - Olive Bilingual School Bonaberi

There is a school in Bonaberi, Douala, where something quietly extraordinary is happening. No press conference nor ribbon cutting. Just eighteen students, three facilitators, a projector and a question that most adults never think to ask teenagers: What problem in your world do you want to solve?

This is the Giiyo STEM Club. And on Monday 6th April 2026, it officially began.

The Partnership That Made It Possible

Before the first student walked into a session, there was a conversation. Giiyo Tech had been looking for a school that understood what this kind of program actually requires: trust, space, and a belief that students are capable of more than most people give them credit for.

They found that in Olive Bilingual School, Bonaberi.

The school's Managing Director, Mr Marcel, signed a partnership with Giiyo Tech to host the Giiyo STEM Club as a structured, extracurricular program running for eight weeks. The agreement was simple: Giiyo Tech brings the curriculum, the facilitators, and the equipment. Olive Bilingual School opens its doors and trusts its students to show up.

Mr Marcel trusted us. That is not a small thing. When an institution hands you their students and says "go ahead, do something meaningful with this time," you feel the weight of that. You plan harder. You show up earlier. You do not waste a minute.

The partnership was signed. Monday was set. Eighteen students — selected from a pool of over eighty who submitted interest forms — were waiting.

Day One: The Innovator's Eye — Monday 6th April

If you were expecting a classroom, a whiteboard, and a teacher talking at students for two hours — you came to the wrong program.

Day one of the Giiyo STEM Club was led by Joseph Mermoz Dzubang, mechatronics engineer and founder of SIZO Earth and Tomorrow, a man who does not believe in passive learning and makes that very clear within the first five minutes of meeting him.

The session was called The Innovator's Eye. And it started not inside a classroom, but outside.

Students were sent out into the school compound with one task: look. Not casually look the way you do when you are walking to class and thinking about lunch. Really look. Find something broken. Find something inefficient. Find something that does not exist yet but should. Find a problem that is close enough to you that you actually have the power to do something about it.

This matters more than it sounds. One of the biggest traps in innovation is spending energy on problems you cannot touch. Mermoz put it bluntly to the students: if you have no power over a problem, your solution dies before it starts. Start with what is closest. Start with what you can see right now.

When students came back inside, the debrief was alive. Trees providing natural shade that could be structured better. Transportation systems that generate more noise than solutions. Infrastructure that solves one problem and accidentally creates three more. Eighteen teenagers who had, an hour earlier, been sitting quietly in a school uniform, were now arguing about systems thinking and unintended consequences.

By the end of Day one, Mermoz had given them homework: brainstorm a real problem in their community that they want to solve. Not a big global problem that makes for a good Instagram caption. A real problem. One they have power over. One that matters.

They left with their notebooks and something harder to write down — a different way of seeing.

Day Two: Digital Literacy 101 — Wednesday 8th April

Two days later, the students were back. This time, the session was led by Maureen herself.

Digital Literacy 101 sounds like the kind of class that makes teenagers subtly reach for their phones. It is not.

It started with a question that went up on the projector in silence:

When you sent your last WhatsApp message — where did it go before it reached the other person?

Silence. Then guesses. Then Maureen drew it out — the phone, the network, the servers, the other phone — and watched the room change. That moment when something you have done ten thousand times becomes suddenly, genuinely interesting. That is the moment a good teacher lives for.

The session moved fast. How the internet actually works — not the polished explanation on a school textbook, but the real version, the one involving 1.3 million kilometres of cables sitting on the ocean floor. What apps actually do with your data. What a digital footprint is and why the internet does not forget. Why the password you have been using since Form Two is a disaster waiting to happen.

And then the game.

Scam or Safe is exactly what it sounds like. Maureen read a scenario. Groups had thirty seconds to discuss. Then every group held up their card at the same time — SCAM or SAFE. Points were awarded. Arguments were made. The room was loud in the best way.

Ten scenarios. Everything from fake MTN data bundle messages to suspicious Instagram DMs to a classmate sharing someone's private photo in the class WhatsApp group. Students who had never thought twice about clicking a link were suddenly interrogating everything. That is the goal.

The second half of the session introduced the Digital Safety Booklet — the real output that these students are building together. Each group has been assigned a topic from the digital literacy session: online scams, cyberbullying, or digital footprints. They will research, write, and design three pages each. The booklet will be printed and handed to Olive Bilingual School to use with students long after this cohort finishes the program.

Before the session closed, students got their first look at Canva. Accounts were created. Interfaces were explored. Nobody designed anything yet. But they left knowing that on Friday, they would.

Day Three: Graphic Design — Friday 10th April

Today, the building begins.

Wilco van de Burgwal — industrial engineer from Germany, Giiyo Tech facilitator, and a person with extremely strong opinions about bad typography — leads the third session.

Students will spend three hours learning what graphic design actually is, why it matters, and how to do it. Not as a school subject. As a skill. One that every student in that room can use for the rest of their life regardless of what career they choose — because the ability to communicate visually, to make information clear and compelling, is not a design skill. It is a human skill.

The session starts with something simple and devastating: two versions of the same page, side by side. One designed well, one designed terribly. Students are asked to identify what is different. They always can. The eye knows. The job of the session is to give them the language and the tools to act on what the eye already knows.

Typography. Color theory. The 60/30/10 rule. White space. Alignment. Font pairing. Best practices. All of it is taught in the context of a real project — because the second half of the session is not practice. It is production.

The full class builds the booklet cover together. Then each group splits off and designs their three pages. By the end of the day, the Digital Safety Booklet will exist in draft form. Eighteen students will have made something real.

What Comes Next — Eight Weeks, One Summit

This is only the beginning.

The Giiyo STEM Club at Olive Bilingual School runs for eight weeks. In the sessions ahead, students will go deeper — into robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D design, coding, and real project development. Wilco will run a multi-day robotics workshop. Students will move from observing problems to building solutions.

Every session builds toward one moment: the Kids Innovation and Technology Summit on Saturday 16th June 2026. This is where the cohort presents what they have built to an audience of parents, educators, and community members. It is not a school recital. It is a showcase. The students will stand up and show what eight weeks of real, hands-on STEM education produces when you stop underestimating young people.

Three groups. Three colour-coded teams. Green, red, and orange — the colours of Giiyo Tech. On Summit day, they will wear those colours. Everything has been building toward that moment since day one.

Why This Matters

Cameroon has no shortage of smart, curious, creative young people. What it has a shortage of is programs that treat those young people as builders rather than consumers. Programs that say: you do not need to wait until you are older, or richer, or living somewhere else. You can start now. With what you have. Where you are.

That is the ideology behind the Giiyo STEM Club. The name Giiyo comes from the Limbum language of the Northwest Region of Cameroon and it means do yours. Not someone else's path. Yours.

Olive Bilingual School opened its doors and trusted us with eighteen students. We take that seriously. These students showed up, submitted their forms, had their parents sign consent, and walked into a room where nobody was going to talk at them for an hour and call it education.

They came to build. And they are building.

Follow the Journey

The Giiyo STEM Club sessions run through to the Kids Innovation and Technology Summit on 16th June 2026 in Douala.

If you are an educator, a parent, a company, or an individual who believes in what this program is doing — we would love to hear from you. Giiyo Tech operates on a clear mission and a shoestring budget. Every form of support, collaboration, or partnership matters more than you know.

Reach out at hello@giiyotech.com or follow the journey at giiyotech.com.

The next few weeks are going to show you exactly why this matters.