Project · 2024/252024/25Digital service

SUGAR Companion

One Notion workspace gives new teaching teams every SUGAR tool, task and owner

Support. Structure. Sustainability.

Corporate partner GIZ Visit website ↗Cohort 2024/25Theme Education & society

Key fact: 25Prototypes tested over the year
Team: 8 master students
Universities: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Hasso Plattner Institute Strathmore University
Disciplines: Data Science · Digital Health · Industrial Engineering · Information Systems

The project · from brief to prototype

What happened, step by step.

Challenge

With GIZ support, the team explored how to bring Africa, starting with Kenya, into the SUGAR Network. Kenyan lecturers carry heavy teaching loads, while templates, schedules and contacts sit scattered across Slack, drives and memory.

What the team learned

Newly onboarded teaching teams feel overwhelmed and stressed: responsibilities and deadlines arrive through scattered channels, key roles are unclear, and there is no single structured place to start from.

What they built

A Notion workspace with four pillars: a Daily Dashboard with AI search, a week-by-week Task Compass, a Knowledge Hub of guides and templates, and a Kanban-style Responsibility Map that shows who owns which task.

How it evolved

Step 1SUGAR Verse, an online course tested with 17 people, showed that SUGAR is learnt by doing, not memorising.
Step 2Three company partners doubted SUGAR Team 2.0, fearing extra time, cost and communication overhead.
Step 3Fitbot, a Telegram pre-screening bot tested in Kenya, needed clearer questions and fits better on the website.

Results

Two visits to Kenya, more than 40 stakeholders interviewed and 25 prototypes tested.
At the SUGAR Expo, untrained newcomers found a method definition and set a weekly goal in under four minutes.
Experienced coaches said the network now has one canonical source for methods and templates.

Impact

The team is handing the Companion over to the network and recommends growing it into a full platform. For Kenya, it advises long-term funding and anchoring SUGAR at Strathmore University.

In their words

It is about feeling it, struggling with it, and finally making it work in the real world.

Teaching team member, Europe

Full project text

The team’s original texts from the project page.

A website to ease the onboarding experience for all SUGAR stakeholders, particularly teaching teams and the SUGAR Network, by centralizing information and streamlining critical processes.

Challenge

Trying to join the SUGAR Network without a map feels like being dropped into a busy Nairobi intersection with no signs. Kenyan lecturers juggle heavy teaching loads and minimal administrative support; vital templates, schedules and contacts are scattered across Slack threads, Google Drives and fading institutional memories. New teaching team\s burn precious weeks hunting for basics instead of coaching students, and knowledge walks out the door whenever staff rotate. Without a single structured workspace, onboarding stalls, quality slips and Africa’s entry into SUGAR risks losing momentum.

Solution

Meet the SUGAR Companion, a Notion workspace that puts every tool for a successful SUGAR project at Kenyan universities in one intuitive hub. A Daily Dashboard surfaces upcoming milestones and next best actions, while the Task Compass walks faculty and students step‐by‐step through the design‐thinking phases. A searchable Knowledge Hub, powered by an AI assistant, condenses global SUGAR best practice into bite size guides and templates. Finally, the Responsibility Map locks down who does what, preventing hand offs from slipping. Together, these pillars cut onboarding time, safeguard know how and free coaches to focus on breakthrough innovation.

Impact

For Kenyan Teaching Teams, the Companion turns onboarding from a multi‐week scavenger hunt into a guided sprint: everything lives in one place, ensuring every deliverable lands on time. Students feel the difference through better prepared mentors and clearer project scaffolding. For the SUGAR Network, the workspace becomes a replicable, quality controlled entry kit that accelerates expansion into Africa and later on to other universities while protecting the brand’s global standards and intellectual assets.

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