Built by Someone Who Lived the Problem
Axam isn't a product born in a boardroom. It was born in a classroom where the chalkboard was the only technology available.
Meet the Founder
The Story Behind Axam
Where It All Started
I grew up in Uganda, where I watched classmates walk hours to reach a school that had one textbook for forty students. I watched teachers try to plan lessons without being able to download a single resource. I watched talented kids lose interest — not because they lacked curiosity, but because the system had nothing left to give them.
Not only did I watch this life, I lived it. And that stayed with me through everything I built after.
14 Years Building Across East Africa
I co-founded Wazi Group Limited in 2010, during my second year of university. Over 14 years, I scaled it into a full-service enterprise across five East African countries — Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Rwanda.
We served over 300 clients, including UNICEF, PepsiCo, Mastercard, UNHCR, War Child, and Right to Play, delivering IT solutions, branding, marketing, supply chain management, and procurement. I led cross-functional teams across borders and time zones, and directed campaigns at every level — from multinational brands to a national presidential campaign in 2021.
"But that original question never left: what would it take to give every student access to a real education, regardless of whether they have internet?"
In 2024, I moved to New York to find out.
Education & Credentials
M.S. Data Analytics & Visualization
Yeshiva University, Katz School of Science and Health — Manhattan, NY (Graduating May 2026)
MITx MicroMasters in Statistics & Data Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
B.S. Information Systems
Makerere University — Academic Merit Scholarship
Currently serves as Graduate Data Analyst at the Sy Syms School of Business, managing multi-source alumni data pipelines across thousands of records. Also serves as President of the Katz African Students Association at Yeshiva University, representing over 1,720 graduate students across STEM disciplines including AI, Biotechnology, Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Data Analytics, Digital Marketing, Mathematics, and Physics.
Building AXAM
AXAM is where all of these threads converge. I built the entire RAG pipeline myself — scraping and deduplicating 7,617 MIT OpenCourseWare lecture transcripts, chunking them into 121,199 segments, embedding them with a multilingual model supporting 100+ languages, and deploying a quantized language model that generates accurate, sourced answers on consumer hardware in under two seconds.
No cloud. No API. No internet at any stage. The full transcript dataset was published on HuggingFace as an open resource for the research community.
NSF I-Corps Fellow
In 2025, I was selected as a National Science Foundation I-Corps Fellow — a competitive, federally funded program that trains researchers to translate technical work into ventures with real-world impact. As Entrepreneurial Lead, I completed intensive customer discovery with educators, school administrators, and NGOs across multiple countries.
The fellowship was a formal recognition by the U.S. government that this work has merit, innovation, and national significance.
MIT OpenCourseWare Connection
Since 2022, I've co-hosted the MIT OpenCourseWare "Open Learners" podcast, which has reached over 5 million listeners worldwide. The podcast amplifies stories of self-directed learners around the globe and serves as a primary outreach vehicle for MIT OCW's mission.
I've visited the MIT OCW team in Cambridge and collaborated closely with them on extending the reach of open education.
Beyond Technology
Before any of this, I spent 23 years making music and over 20 years in graphic design. Those aren't side notes — they shaped how I think about building products that feel human, that communicate clearly, and that respect the people using them.
I also created Laba Party, a Ugandan-themed party game, and I organize monthly AI discussion meetings that connect the Ugandan diaspora community to practical AI tools.
"I've sat in boardrooms with Fortune 500 executives and I've stood in classrooms where the chalkboard was the only technology available. The gap between those two realities is not inevitable. It's a design problem. And design problems have solutions."
— Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi
Get Involved
Join Us in Bridging the Divide
Whether you're an educator, developer, or supporter — there's a place for you in the Axam mission.