About SankoLabs
Go Back
and Get It
SankoLabs is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit equipping young Africans with the digital skills, AI fluency, and professional identity to compete anywhere in the world. We start in Ghana and Nigeria, because that is where we are from.
Our Story
Why We Call It SankoLabs
Sankofa is a word from the Akan language of Ghana. It means: "go back and get it." It is represented by a bird flying forward with its head turned back, lifting an egg from behind it. The bird is moving ahead. It is simply refusing to leave anything of value behind.
That image is a complete argument about how progress works. It rejects the idea that moving forward requires discarding where you came from, and it rejects the idea that honoring the past means standing still. You go back deliberately, you take what is worth carrying, and you keep moving.
We chose the name because it describes what we are actually asking of students. Africa's young people carry centuries of ingenuity, community, and resilience. None of that needs to be traded away to work with AI tools, design software, or a distributed team eight time zones away. The inheritance and the toolset belong in the same hands.
The “Labs” is equally deliberate. A lab is a place where things are attempted, measured, and revised. Not a classroom, where knowledge is transferred and the transfer is the end of it. A launchpad.
Home, Not a Market
We are asked regularly why we started in Ghana and Nigeria. The question assumes there was a selection process: a comparison of markets, a scan for the most favorable conditions, a decision arrived at from the outside.
There was no such process. Peter is Ghanaian. Michael grew up in Nigeria. These are not two territories that scored well on an analysis. They are the two places we are from.
That distinction changes the work in ways that are easy to underestimate. We are not interpreting these countries from a distance or building a program around assumptions we have never had to live with. We know what the data costs. We know which infrastructure holds and which does not. We know the specific gap between what a bright 17 year old in Accra or Lagos can already do and what a global employer will recognize, because we have stood on both sides of it.
“We didn't choose Ghana and Nigeria because of market research. We chose them because they are home.”
The SankoLabs Founders
Our History
How We Got Here
SankoLabs is a young organization. This is the full record so far.
May 2026
SankoLabs Is Incorporated
SankoLabs was incorporated as a Texas nonprofit corporation, file number 806584989.
July 2026
501(c)(3) Determination
The Internal Revenue Service issued our 501(c)(3) determination, EIN 42-2414788, effective retroactively to May 5, 2026.
August 2026
The First Cohort Begins
Our first cohort begins, moving SankoLabs from a filed set of documents into a program with students in it.
Our Belief
One Sentence, and Everything Follows From It
“Africa does not have a talent shortage. It has a readiness gap.”
Our Belief
If you accept the first sentence, the second one becomes the work. Talent is not concentrated in the places that happen to hire the most of it. The distribution of capability is not the problem. The distribution of access, preparation, and recognition is, and unlike raw ability, those three things can be built.
Our Team
Built by Africans.
For Africa.
Michael
Co-Founder and CEO
Grew up in Nigeria · Fort Worth, Texas
Michael grew up in Nigeria and is now based in Fort Worth, Texas. He spent his career building technology products used by enterprises and developers around the world, which is where the founding conviction came from: the talent he kept meeting at home was not less capable than the talent being hired abroad. It was less prepared for the specific way global work gets done.
That distinction is the whole thesis. Africa does not have a talent shortage. It has a readiness gap, and readiness is a missing infrastructure layer rather than a missing aptitude. SankoLabs exists to build that layer, starting with students young enough that it changes the shape of the career rather than patching it later.
Peter Sey
Co-Founder and COO
Ghanaian · Pocatello, Idaho
Peter Sey is Ghanaian and is now based in Pocatello, Idaho. His career spans consulting, technology delivery, and organizational leadership, the disciplines that decide whether a program actually runs on the ground or only reads well on paper.
He co-founded SankoLabs around a belief he carries personally: the right preparation at the right time changes everything that follows it. He owns the operational side of that promise, the curriculum delivery, the assessment rigor, and the standards a SankoLabs credential has to mean.
The Moment
Why Now
The global economy is shifting toward distributed talent. Africa’s moment is here. SankoLabs exists to make sure young Africans are ready for it.
Global outsourcing market by 2030
Grand View Research
Global talent frontier for remote work
Deloitte 2025
Building the pipeline at the high school level
Until now.