He is one of the African entrepreneurs aiming to make a significant impact on the digital sector. His career highlights the rise of local initiatives focused on transforming access to training across the continent.

Chadian tech entrepreneur Valery Kagro (photo) is the co-founder and CEO of PayiSkoul, an education-focused neobank based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, dedicated to financing and digitizing the education sector.

Founded in 2024, PayiSkoul aims to simplify the payment of school and training fees by accommodating the financial constraints of students and their families. The platform offers a digital wallet linked to bank accounts and Visa cards, allowing users to pay for tuition, housing, and educational materials in installments. It also includes services such as educational cashback, micro-savings, and microcredit for student projects.

For partner institutions, PayiSkoul provides an automated dashboard for payment tracking, managing due dates, and sending reminders to streamline the relationship between schools and families.

Before PayiSkoul, Kagro launched Genoskul in 2020, an edtech startup offering remote learning, a tutoring service, and an intelligent assistant to answer user questions.

Kagro holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Ngaoundere in Cameroon, which he earned in 2019. He also holds a certificate in artificial intelligence from the Virtual University of Senegal and a data analysis certificate from OpenClassrooms.

His professional career began in 2019 with an internship in the IT department of Chad’s Public Treasury. In 2022, he joined the United Nations Development Programme in his home country as the technology lead for the Youth Innovation Program.

Between 2022 and 2024, he served as a technical manager at Izipay, a Cameroonian fintech company. Concurrently, he was the technology director for Allô’Bailleurs, an Ivorian platform connecting tenants and landlords, and the technical and coordination manager for Central Africa at DAWN, an edtech company based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Melchior Koba