A boy who herded goats in Mwanza grew up to build an app that has unlocked over 7,000 scholarships for African students. Now the whole continent wants to know his story.
Before the engagement ceremony at Intonna Farm. Before the Forbes Africa list. Before the Queen’s Award. Before the 7,000 scholarships. Before any of it, there was a boy in Mwanza, a rock city on the shores of Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania, herding goats and working around rice plantations, raised by his grandmother, with no clear path to anything the world would later call remarkable.
That boy is Isaiah Yunke. And the platform he built from that starting point, SomaApp, is now the reason an entire continent is searching his name.
The Problem SomaApp Was Built to Solve
Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship funding goes unclaimed across Africa. Not because students are unqualified. Not because the opportunities do not exist. Simply because the students who need them most never find out they are available.
Yunke identified this gap in 2016 after his own experience navigating the frustrating, fragmented world of scholarship information as a young Tanzanian student. He had attended the World Forum for Democracy at the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014, where he listened to American economist Jeremy Rifkin speak on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The experience, he later said, lit a fuse. If digital technology was reshaping everything else, why wasn’t it fixing this?
In 2016, he founded Somaapps Technologies and built SomaApp: a mobile platform that centralises scholarship listings and uses profile-driven matching to surface relevant opportunities based on a student’s academic background, location, interests, and eligibility. It sends deadline notifications. It provides sample winning essays from past recipients. It walks students through the application process step by step.
What It Has Achieved
When the beta version launched in February 2017, the early results were immediate. Within the first two years, more than 2,000 students were using SomaApp daily. By that stage, 450 scholarships worth over $850,000 a year had already been won by students in Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda alone.
Today, SomaApp has connected over 7,000 Africans to scholarships abroad. The platform has expanded across the continent, serving students from dozens of countries who now have access to opportunities that would previously have passed them by without a trace. Yunke has also built in a giving component: 10 percent of SomaApp’s profits go directly toward funding scholarships for Tanzanian students at local universities.
The Man Behind the App
Yunke, now 36, was born and raised in Mwanza. His path to global recognition began early. At just 17, he was selected by UNICEF as the Africa Youth Ambassador and delivered remarks at the G8 Summit in Berlin in 2007 — becoming the first African to speak on child rights advocacy at the summit. The boy from the Lake Victoria shoreline was standing in front of the world’s most powerful leaders.
In 2018, Queen Elizabeth II presented him with the Queen’s Young Leaders Award for his tech-driven social impact. In 2019, he was named an Ashoka Fellow — one of the world’s most respected recognitions for social entrepreneurs — and appeared on the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 list. That same year, Avance Media named him among Tanzania’s 50 Most Influential Young People. He is also an alumnus of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program.
Why This Story Matters Beyond the Engagement
The engagement to Charlene Ruto has brought Isaiah Yunke into the spotlight. But SomaApp’s story is bigger than any wedding. It is a case study in what African tech entrepreneurship looks like when it is built not to chase Western venture capital but to solve a real, local problem with precision.
The infrastructure Yunke built — clean data pipelines, user-centric design, scalable cloud services, AI-enriched matching tools — is the same foundation that powers the next generation of African edtech. He didn’t build SomaApp to become famous. He built it because he remembered what it felt like to have potential that the system could not see.
From herding goats on the shores of Lake Victoria to addressing the G8 at 17, to building a platform that has changed the lives of 7,000 young Africans, to becoming the man who will stand beside Kenya’s First Daughter — Isaiah Yunke’s story is the kind that Africa needs to tell more often, and more loudly.
SomaApp is available on Android and iOS. African students can access it at somaapp.com.
Congratulations to Isaiah and Charlene. ❤️
📌 Related Articles:
