By Hope Nda

In Cameroon, where access to practical tech education is often limited, 24-year-old Idriss Djiofack Teledjieu is proffering a solution with Pynalis, a web-based platform designed to make coding education accessible to all.

Born and raised in Douala, Idriss’s journey from writing algorithms on paper in high school to building an innovative learning tool reflects his drive to address Cameroon’s tech education gap.

Idriss’s passion for technology took root during his high school years, but the experience was far from inspiring.

Back in Douala where he schooled, he said they were introduced to programming in a purely theoretical way (writing out code on paper).

He and his classmates rarely spent time on the computer and they rarely saw their codes run. Also, setting up coding environments—like installing integrated development environments (IDEs) or interpreters—was a major hurdle. This left most of them without practical skills or an understanding of programming’s potential.

“For the most part in our high schools, even those who got to do Computer Science, they end up never using computers,” he recalled.

Like many students, he felt disconnected, unaware of how programs worked or their real-world applications.

To stem this frustration, Idriss left Cameroon in December 2018 to study computer science in China, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2023.

He later pursued a Master’s in the United States, where he now works as a software engineer in Boston, Massachusetts. His experience abroad fueled Idriss’s dream of making technology more accessible to people back home in Cameroon.

“While living in China I found out a lot of things were being automated with applications and websites, which wasn’t the case in most places in Africa, specifically Cameroon. So I was always interested in building apps,” he said.

During his time in the US, he saw another challenge: “When I moved to the US I was trying to dig deeper into some of the issues that a lot of African students tend to have when they leave their home countries. They feel like everybody is ahead of them in terms of technology.”

Determined to bridge this gap, Idriss envisioned a solution: a platform that eliminates technical barriers and makes coding accessible to all—Pynalys was born.

“So I found out one of the issues is the fact that setting up the environment for people to start coding is a lot time consuming. So I thought why don’t we just have like a website where students can basically go to a website like Pynalis.com and they could have access to everything, no need to install anything, no need to do any prior-installation. You just sign up and start learning how to code. And that’s how I decided to build up Pynalis,” he said.

Pynalis: Coding Made Simple

Launched early this year after a successful testing phase with over 1,000 users from Cameroon and other African countries, Pynalis (www.pynalis.com) is a free, web-based platform focused on teaching Python, a versatile programming language.

Users sign up with an email or Google account and gain immediate access to a curated list of courses.

“You just sign up and start learning how to code,” Idriss explained.

The platform’s design prioritizes user experience and incorporates an AI chatbot to answer questions from learners and support their progress.

Pynalis also offers automated data analysis features and it is currently being developed to to perform tasks like financial data processing.

Idriss says his focus is on accessibility and he has ensured that the platform remains free for all users, except for a few programmes that would be paid for subsequently.

“For now, the platform is free and any individual can go into the platform, sign in and start learning. You don’t really need to be affiliated to any university,” he said.

The platform’s intuitive design has earned positive feedback from those who have tested it.

“So far most of the feedback we have gotten has been very positive feedback. Of course a lot of people want a lot of features to be added which is normal for an App released not long ago,” Idriss noted.

His team is working to enhance user-friendliness and add courses in other programming languages like C and C++ to complement the current Python curriculum.

A Vision For Schools And Beyond

Idriss’s ambitions extend beyond individual learners. He aims to integrate Pynalis into Cameroon’s education system by creating dedicated portals for schools.

“The goal is to ensure that every school has its own portal through which they can teach their students how to code,” he said.

By enabling schools to subscribe, Pynalis could provide students with structured, hands-on coding lessons, bypassing the limitations of paper-based learning.

This vision aligns with Idriss’s long-term mission to democratise tech education across Africa.

“The next move is going to be to add more features. Of course some features are most likely going to be paid… But the goal is to make the knowledge available to every individual across the country, across Africa,” he said.

Pynalis isn’t Idriss’s first venture into app development. In 2021, he built an e-commerce platform to connect Cameroonian consumers with Chinese suppliers.

Although it did not succeed due to logistical challenges, Idriss sees untapped potential in the sector. He thinks e-commerce is a virgin and quite an underdeveloped sector that needs to be tapped.

Idriss’s story is one of problem-solving and it offers a blueprint for young Africans.

His advice to Cameroon’s youth is that they should “keep believing in themselves and knowing that there’s always a solution for a problem or there’s a problem and the solution may just be hiding somewhere. So just being able to address some of these issues is going to help the country in some way. You don’t need to wait to be the next billionaire to be able to bring solutions to your community,” he said.