Building Oponeko

I spent eight years building software for other people's visions. Talent platforms, healthcare systems, learning apps, IoT backends. Good products, real users, work I'm proud of. Then I visited a school.

Not a special school. An ordinary Nigerian private school, the kind that educates most of the children in Lagos. The proprietor was a smart, serious woman running a serious institution. Her tools: four paper registers, a stack of receipt booklets, two exhausted spreadsheets, and a WhatsApp group with three hundred unread messages.

She wasn't behind because she didn't care. She was behind because nobody had built for her.

The gap nobody was closing

The software industry has spent two decades perfecting tools for offices: CRMs, ERPs, HR platforms, project trackers. Schools, especially African schools, got almost nothing. The systems that do exist were mostly designed for American or European institutions, priced in dollars, and assume infrastructure that isn't there.

Meanwhile the actual work of running a school (admissions, attendance, results, fees, communicating with hundreds of families) is one of the most information-dense jobs I've ever seen. It's all data. And nearly all of it lives on paper.

That's the gap Oponeko exists to close: the operating system for African schools, covering a student's journey from their first day to graduation.

Starting embarrassingly small

The engineer in me wanted to build the grand platform first: every module, every integration, beautiful dashboards. The founder I'm becoming knows better.

We started with the most boring, most painful thing: records and results. A student's file that doesn't get lost. Report cards that don't take a teacher's entire weekend. The first version of our results model was almost laughably simple:

interface TermResult {
  student: StudentRef;
  session: string; // "2025/2026"
  term: 1 | 2 | 3;
  scores: SubjectScore[]; // CA + exam per subject
  remarks: { teacher: string; head: string };
}

Simple, until you meet real schools. Some grade over 100, some over 70. Some weight continuous assessment at 30%, others at 40%. Some have three terms, some run semesters. Every school that onboards teaches us something the last one didn't. That accumulated knowledge is the product.

What I believe now

A few convictions have hardened since we started:

• Distribution is trust. Schools don't buy from ads; they buy from people they trust who've seen it work. Every happy school is the marketing.
• Offline is a feature, not an edge case. If the product dies when the network does, it isn't built for this market.
• The teacher is the user. If teachers hate it, the proprietor's signature means nothing. Software adoption in a school is a staffroom decision.

Where this goes

Oponeko today is a school management platform. Where it's going is bigger: once a school's information lives in one system, you can start answering questions that were never answerable before. Which students are drifting before they fail? Which classes need help? And eventually, carefully, what can AI do for a classroom of fifty students and one teacher?

That's the long game. It starts with replacing the paper register.