DarajaAI

Inspiration

Every year, thousands of students in Senegal and francophone Africa face a critical question: what should I study, and how do I get there? With limited access to guidance counselors and fragmented information about scholarships, entrance exams, and career paths, many talented students make uninformed decisions that shape their entire future. As a student at École Polytechnique de Thiès myself, I lived this challenge firsthand.

What it does

DarajaAI is a conversational AI agent that acts as a personal academic advisor for French-speaking African students. It helps users:

• Choose the right field of study based on their profile
• Discover scholarships across Senegal, France, Morocco, Canada and China
• Prepare for competitive entrance exams (CPGE, EPT, CAMES)
• Write compelling motivation letters and application files
• Understand career prospects for each field

What makes DarajaAI unique is its cultural grounding — it understands the African reality: financial constraints, family expectations, and the local job market. It speaks French and understands Wolof.

How I built it

DarajaAI is built on ASI:One using the uAgents framework and the Agent Chat Protocol. The agent runs on Agentverse, making it accessible 24/7 without any local infrastructure. The ASI:One LLM powers the conversations with context-aware, multi-turn dialogue.

Challenges

The main challenge was making the agent feel truly African — not just a generic chatbot translated to French. Crafting a system prompt that reflects the Senegalese educational reality (EPT, ESP, UCAD, CAMES concours) required careful research and iteration.

What I learned

Building with ASI:One showed me how powerful agentic AI can be when grounded in a specific cultural and social context. The uAgents framework made deployment surprisingly fast.

What's next

• Add web search to fetch real-time scholarship deadlines
• Support more African languages (Pulaar, Diola)
• Build a dedicated mobile interface for low-connectivity environments

Built With

• agentverse
• asi:one
• openai
• python
• sdk
• uagents