Force of nature
An Azeri chemistry teacher is building science content for the post-Soviet world. From Puerto Rico.
Sakina Hasanova spends the first minute of a video call settling a question about her backdrop. The lush green wall behind her looks suspiciously like a Zoom filter. “It’s actually nature,” she clarifies. The phrase doubles as a brand. Tabiat, her edtech start-up due to launch later this year, is Azerbaijani for “nature”.
Tabiat will sell video lessons in Azerbaijani on seventh-grade chemistry at 10–15 US dollars a course, aimed at parents and teachers in roughly equal measure. Sekina, born in Baku, trained as a biology teacher, switched to chemistry, and started tutoring at 18 as the assistant to one of the capital’s well-known private chemistry instructors. After eight years she won a full scholarship for a master’s in comparative education at a Chinese university, where her 2018 thesis examined how technology was reshaping the work of private tutors. Her husband, met along the way, is from Puerto Rico. The couple moved there 18 months ago.
Azerbaijan’s appetite for private tutoring is among the deepest in the post-Soviet world. A 2006 Open Society Institute study, still cited, found that 93 per cent of secondary-school pupils received some form of shadow education. PISA results released in December 2023 explain why parents pay. Even sampling only Baku schools (the country exempts the regions), 15-year-olds scored 380 in science against an OECD average of 485, a drop of 18 points on 2018. Just one per cent reached top-performer level in mathematics. Principals reporting teacher shortages went from 43 per cent to 59 per cent. The cracks have been papered over, expensively, by tutors.
Sekina diagnoses the syndrome bluntly. “When you’re preparing students for exams, you’re really stuck in the framework,” she says. “There’s only learning by heart. You don’t have time to do extra stuff.” She felt this acutely after the pandemic stranded her back in Baku (“99 per cent I was going to China, but there’s that one per cent where the world collapses, and that was the case”) and she joined ADA University’s English-language high school in 2021. Her ADA pupils could absorb chemistry through English-language YouTube. Children studying in Azerbaijani had no equivalent. Tabiat, conceived at the end of 2023 through Baku’s Sabah Hub incubator, is designed to fix that.
Production has been bumpier than the pitch deck suggested. Four teachers were filmed across 2024. The curriculum was then overhauled (an improvement, she concedes) and most of it had to be re-recorded. The team thinned out. Sekina learnt video editing herself. A developer, with a friend who also writes code, is now building the site. Funding has come from her own pocket; the team works on a volunteer basis. Some Azerbaijani programmes she has applied to have told her, she says, that she must be physically in Baku to be eligible, which she finds absurd. “My team is there. The developer is there. They could go to the meetings.”
The personal-brand premium
Sekina has been able to absorb the funding gap because she runs a second business: herself. Her Azerbaijani-language education blog, with its associated teacher-training programmes, mentorships and consultancies, has been profitable from early on. She ran what she believes were Azerbaijan’s first AI workshops for teachers back in 2024, before most of her audience had used a chatbot. “Many businesses fail because they don’t first build the brand and then build the business,” she argues. “When you have personal branding, people follow you. And then they buy.”
Female founders in Azerbaijan have particular reason to take the point. According to the country’s Small and Medium Business Development Agency, 23.3 per cent of individual entrepreneurs were women at the start of 2025, and women hold just 31 per cent of jobs in ICT. Sekina was raised by a working single mother. The expectations stacked on her, she says, have been additive rather than substitutive: first be a mother and run a household, then be educated, then earn money, then earn good money. “It’s all on your shoulders. You’re overwhelmed.”
