Rafiki AI — KLCI's WhatsApp Generative-AI Career Advisor for Underserved African Youth

Youth unemployment and underemployment are acute across much of Africa, and formal career-guidance counsellors are scarce in low-income and displaced communities. The Kayode Alabi Leadership and Career Initiative (KLCI), a Lagos-based nonprofit founded in 2017, built Rafiki AI to put career guidance directly into a channel young people already use: WhatsApp.

Launched in April 2025, Rafiki AI walks each user through KLCI's Interest, Strength, Limitation and Purpose (ISLP) framework in a WhatsApp conversation, producing a personalised career pathway in under two minutes, and remains free to use.

Rafiki AI runs on Amazon Bedrock, with Amazon Transcribe and Polly for voice input/output. Development was supported by roughly $51,000 in AWS Education Equity Initiative cloud credits. In February 2026 KLCI launched 'Rafiki X', a web extension adding CV feedback, application-story generation and conversation memory.

Reach scaled quickly: 1,200 users across 22 countries within 3 days of launch, growing to 9,339 users across 60+ countries nine months later, with close to 40,000 career queries and over 82,500 messages exchanged. About 90% of users are in Nigeria, but the service has also reached refugee settlements and rural communities in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Yemen and beyond, in more than 50 languages.

The available public evidence is usage and engagement data, not an independent outcomes evaluation: there is no published data yet on whether Rafiki AI users go on to secure jobs, training or income gains at higher rates than non-users, and KLCI's own estimates of monetary value created are self-reported modelled projections rather than measured results.