Sankofa:
Finance Heroes
A financial-literacy adventure for ages 7–25. You start with a single cowrie, take your first job, and learn by doing how money actually works: earning, saving, tax, investing, debt, and building businesses that pay you while you sleep.
Learning that doesn’t feel like learning.
Schools across the continent do not teach money. Sankofa does it the way a young person will actually sit through: as a game they choose to play.
The player journeys across five African lands and fifteen levels. Each level is a short, playable trial built around one real money decision with real consequences, played safely, so a wrong choice teaches rather than punishes. Learn the idea, prove it in the trial, and climb the wealth ladder from Umu the starter to Emperor.
Time moves on its own. Wages arrive, rent and food and tax go out, and a monthly statement keeps the player honest about the gap between what they earned and what they kept.
Sankofa is Akan for “go back and get it”: the wisdom of learning from the past to build a better future.
What it looks like.
Six things they learn by doing.
Earn
Take jobs, work extra shifts, and eventually run a business instead of only working in one.
Grow
Plant money in the Treasury and watch compounding do the work across in-game years.
Learn
Bite-size lessons in four stages, from what money is to how a fortune is kept.
Own
Buy assets that pay weekly, upgrade them, and spot the liabilities that quietly drain a balance.
Live the clock
Wages, rent, food and tax flow on their own, and a monthly statement shows what survived.
Compare
Measure progress against friends, and against the real published rich list.
A generation the size of a continent.
We built Sankofa for young people between 7 and 25, in Nigeria first, then across the continent and the diaspora. They are the reason it works the way it does: phone-first, playable with no connection, and light enough for the handsets and data plans people actually have rather than the ones we would prefer they had.
Africa has the youngest population on earth: roughly 1.5 billion people at a median age of about nineteen, with close to six in ten of them under twenty-five. Nigeria alone is more than 230 million, at a median age of eighteen.
That is some 900 million young Africans who will earn, save, hire and invest across this continent for the next fifty years. Most of them are in school right now.
Almost none of them are being taught how money works. It is on no syllabus we know of. What a young person learns instead, they learn by watching, and by making expensive mistakes with money they could not afford to lose.
That gap is not neutral. A bad financial decision costs roughly the same anywhere in the world. It simply hurts far more where there is less room to absorb it.
Two things we believe.
It has to be chosen
Nobody finishes a lesson they were made to sit through. A game is something a young person picks up on their own, comes back to, and tells their friends about. That is the only reason the teaching lands.
Early is worth more
Money habits compound the same way money does. Reaching someone at fourteen, before the first salary and the first debt, is worth more than reaching them at forty with a warning.
unimi studios.
Sankofa is made by UNIMI STUDIOS LIMITED (RC 9810682), a Nigerian company and a subsidiary of DANDENGRP LIMITED (RC 9465979), Lagos, Nigeria. About the studio →
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