About Us

I am Susana Bokobo, founder of Bokobokids Village.

My story begins, like so many others, with a coffee with a friend. Back in 2017, my friend Silvia wanted a special gift for her partner’s granddaughter, and she told me: “You write. Write a story about it. I had published my first novel, but writing a story was different. I accepted the challenge, I documented myself, I studied, I asked her to tell me the qualities of this girl and that’s how the first story was born. But the gift couldn’t just be a computer text, so I looked for an illustrator, a printer and ta-chán! Silvia was delighted and so was the girl! I liked the experience so much that I wrote many more stories for the sons, daughters and nephews of friends.

You may be wondering what this has to do with Bokobokids. A little patience. All good stories take time. A few months before the pandemic, I had created Bokobo Art, a community of emerging artists to help us with our creative projects. And the pandemic came. The platform went bankrupt. But magic happened. Many of the team members had young children and were bored of wasting time scouring the internet for educational entertainment for their kids. Bokobokids was born. I put all the stories – mine and my brother Pol’s – into digital format, we added audios and videos and created a membership. We created a safe space for boys and girls, with stories to read, audios and videos of fun and educational activities that would spark their creativity and get them off the screen. With Bokobokids, we were a finalist in the 50+ undertakes competition, among more than 400 projects. We had about 2,000 visits a month and about 50 members… but something wasn’t working. When the ‘lockdown’ ended, nobody wanted screens, especially not for their children.

When the lockdown ended, I had my moment of awakening. I began to explore my identity as an African in Europe with a mentor and to improve my strategic and entrepreneurial skills with a programme. The seed I had inside me suddenly began to germinate, filling my whole body and exploding in the form of depression. I realised that I was living a double life. Yes, on the outside I was a lawyer, with a doctorate in tax law and a brilliant professional career: university professor, consultant at the Institute of Fiscal Studies in Spain, lawyer at the Supreme Court of Spain, deputy director of a large multinational, thanks to which I have been and worked for the UN, the IMF and the OECD. I have travelled and met people from all five continents. And inside I just wanted to create, to have my own project, to help make the world a better place. And I began to combine my super demanding professional career with my other self. Hence the novel, the stories, Bokobo Art, Bokobo Foundation, Bokobo Academy and Bokobokids.

Meanwhile, I began to investigate my identity as an African in Spain with a mentor, Sissi Johnson, and to improve my strategic and entrepreneurial skills with Rubén Turienzo’s Power Plan program.

And Reina-Flor appeared. She contacted me on LinkedIn. And she told me her story: four-time Olympian, 10-time French champion in hurdles, one of the best French athletes. When she retired she studied marketing and communication and began mentoring child athletes. Her story is one of struggle, perseverance, successes and failures, but, above all, a story of hope. With Reina Flor I confronted my roots again. From the thousands of conversations we had, the idea arose that Bokobokids could not be just any storytelling platform but rather a storytelling platform to value African heritage and the pride of belonging to that beautiful continent.

We realised from our own experience and from our research that there is a burning desire and need for people of African descent to change the narrative, and we also realised that there is a huge lack of knowledge about all things African, especially in Europe. This negative and derogatory narrative that makes our children reject everything that comes from this continent as inferior, even themselves, their bodies and the “African” way of thinking. In addition, Reina Flor, with all her experience as a top athlete, has developed a holistic health programme for child athletes based on 5 pillars: physical, mental, nutritional, creativity and abundance. We have incorporated these 5 pillars into Bokobokids.

Reina one day said: you have to meet Wakanyi. We met and our souls connected instantly.

Wakanyi is an author of short stories, an academic, an expert in ancient wisdom, especially in African Ancient wisdom, and a student of the Ubuntu concept, I am because you are. A humanistic concept that exists in different forms in all ancestral cultures, but the term that has penetrated the mainstream has its origins in South Africa. Wakanyi has spent half of her life in Africa and the other half of it in different parts of the world, she is a global woman. When we told Wakanyi about Bokobokids she fell in love with the project, because it was also absolutely aligned with her life project: African folktales, which consists of collecting those stories from the oral tradition and bringing them to the present to make a better future.

With Wakanyi, Bokobokids not only tells “African” stories, Bokobokids becomes a storyteller in the African way, we collect the stories of our ancestors and adapt them to our time. These stories distill wisdom, the wisdom of Ubuntu in practice.

If our essence is oral wisdom, we could not stay on an online platform. Neither we nor our people could, nor did we want to. We started timidly doing events in conjunction with “Hurricane” Ioanna in Geneva and now we have events in 5 countries and increasing. And thus our Village concept was born.

More people, more souls and more hearts have joined the team: Juan Carlos and his Climbspot team in Spain, our first investors who help us with the MVP and organize all our internal processes; Phoebe, from Suriname, our young finance graduate with a generous heart and a marvelously organized and creative mind at the same time, lives in Holland; Thandeka, from South Africa, a pure soul living in Holland who just had our first Bokobokids baby, environmentalist, network lover and content creator; Esther in Sweden, our ambassador in Scandinavia; Gerard our IT guy in France and Leroy creative and logistics director for events with The African Designer between Holland and the UK; our youngest Vera who is studying high school in Japan, creator of Boki.

Do you want to join us? Contact us and be part of this global family.