Meet the 22-year-old who decided Egypt’s entrepreneurship gap starts in middle school

💻 Building a new generation of creative thinkers is getting harder, not easier. As AI handles more of the execution, and information arrives faster than it can be processed, the question of how young people actually learn to think — and build — has become more pressing. EnterpriseAM spoke with Ahmed El Bakry (LinkedIn), a 22-year-old founder who is trying to answer that question.

His platform, Takumi, trains young people in the fundamentals of finding a business idea, testing it, and launching it from scratch with minimal resources — using AI not as a shortcut, but as infrastructure for identifying and developing the next generation of founders.

The road to design thinking

El Bakry showed an entrepreneurial instinct from childhood. At nine years old, noticing the absence of computer repair shops in his neighborhood, he taught himself how to fix his own machine to avoid traveling far for help — and quickly expanded his services to his neighbors. El Bakry continued experimenting across different fields and freelancing through platforms like Khamsat through secondary school. Before enrolling in university, the spark that ignited his passion came when he attended a design thinking workshop.

The workshop revealed a new side to his personality: a deep desire to leave a lasting impact and help others. His passion for design thinking grew to the point where he became a trainer himself, running gratis workshops to share the methodology with others.

Takumi’s vision

Takumi was born from El Bakry’s observation of a persistent gap among his own generation and younger ones: the absence of structured thinking and an inability to use available resources to build something. Takumi’s core mission became instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in children and young people from an early age.

Takumi’s philosophy rests on several pillars, the most important being experiential learning. “Entrepreneurship cannot be taught through conventional theoretical courses,” El Bakry says, “it’s a journey that must be lived, one that requires students to take risks, try bold ideas, make mistakes, and learn through doing.”

Guided independence: Takumi’s mentors provide a broad framework by guiding students from a distance, while giving them the freedom to make mistakes and experience failure themselves before reflecting on it and correcting course together. Students also learn how to build and launch their ideas using readily available tools at no cost rather than waiting for external funding or investment to get started.

Building people: “Traditional accelerators tend to focus on already-formed teams that can demonstrate early proof of concept and quick financial returns, often neglecting the human development element,” El Bakry argues. Takumi, by contrast, focuses on teaching the skill of building a real product that solves actual customer problems and generates revenue directly from users — rather than chasing venture capital.

“AI makes building easier, but it does not create judgment,” he says. “It cannot replace an honest conversation with a customer. It cannot decide whether a problem truly matters, and it cannot take responsibility for what should happen after the evidence challenges your assumptions,” El Bakry adds.

Takumi primarily targets middle and secondary school students under 18 — a group Egyptian society often dismisses as children, El Bakry says. While Takumi’s programs attract participants up to the age of 45, the primary focus remains on those under 22.

What Takumi actually offers

The platform provides a structured and flexible learning track that includes the Buildathon — a pro bono, ongoing program held every Friday for young people across the Arab world, both online and in person. The platform also offers three-day intensive camps where students learn how to identify problems and validate whether their ideas meet a market need. Those who want to continue after the camp join a six-week program focused on refining their final product and attracting real users to test their services.

What sets it apart? Takumi differentiates itself by offering a fully interactive, outcome-focused experience backed by a network of local and international mentors such as Sam Marchent, investor, entrepreneur, and venture partner at Dubai-based 21 Ventures.

In an age of short attention spans: The old model built on long recorded video lectures no longer works with the new generation, “which is characterized by shorter attention spans and needs concise, experiential, gamified learning,” El Bakry says. Takumi has successfully applied this interactive model with both international and public school students.

Building partnerships

The Replit partnership: In his search for a powerful but accessible coding tool, El Bakry partnered with US-based Replit. Given that Replit’s Jordanian founder is committed to empowering Arab youth, the company agreed to provide Takumi students with credits to build and host their web projects at no cost. El Bakry also personally serves as Replit’s ambassador in the Arab world.

The platform also partnered with local software development firm Growth Labs, giving it access to an integrated technology infrastructure to manage, track, and accelerate student ideas, applications, and sessions. Access to this system saved Takumi EGP mns it would otherwise have spent building a proprietary management system from scratch. This is alongside partnerships with institutions including Nile University, Career 180, iSpark, and StartHub Egypt, among others, according to the founder.

The challenges ahead

Takumi operates as a fully self-funded company. Without external capital, El Bakry has kept expenses to a minimum by working with interns who are passionate about learning, using freelancers rather than full-time hires, and covering operating costs directly from the company’s modest revenues.

There are cultural challenges too: “One of the main challenges is the lack of professionalism and awareness of entrepreneurship’s value among administrative staff at international schools in Egypt,” El Bakry says. Despite those administrative obstacles, Takumi has successfully partnered with two international schools, including Core West in Sheikh Zayed, where they ran a workshop that helped students conceptualize, develop, and successfully pitch business ideas.

Structural constraints: Egypt’s current startup ecosystem lacks integrated support to connect innovative edtech startups with schools and ministries, the founder tells us. The sector also takes longer to generate gains and returns compared to fintech — often requiring years of sustained building before significant revenue materializes, he adds.

What the future looks like in the age of AI

AI will completely redefine the education process, marking the end of the traditional model of standardized courses, assignments, and exams in favor of highly personalized skills that meet specific needs, El Bakry argues. The top priority today must be training students in critical and analytical thinking and creative problem-solving so they are equipped to direct and control the machines available to them.

On future goals, El Bakry aspires for Takumi to become the leading platform in Egypt and the Middle East for entrepreneurship skills integrated with AI and income generation, alongside expanding globally to reach Arab youth and diaspora communities in Europe and beyond. He also aims to build a network of platform ambassadors to coordinate in-person events in target Arab markets such as the UAE, allowing Takumi to expand without the heavy overhead of establishing formal offices in each country — with the core system remaining entirely online.