Rafiki AI — KLCI's WhatsApp Generative-AI Career Counsellor for Underserved and Displaced Nigerian Youth

Kayode Alabi Leadership and Career Initiative (KLCI Africa), a Lagos-based nonprofit founded in 2017, works on career development for underserved young people. In February 2025 it was selected for the AWS Education Equity Initiative, receiving $51,000 in cloud credits, to build Rafiki AI ('friend' in Swahili) -- a free WhatsApp-based generative-AI career advisor.

Rafiki AI aims to answer career questions, review CVs and generate application materials for underserved and displaced African youth in 56+ languages, using voice interaction to reach users with low literacy or without a smartphone via a 'Rafiki AI Champions' access-point network.

Rafiki AI runs on Amazon Bedrock with Amazon EC2, RDS, S3 and Route 53, and uses Amazon Transcribe and Polly for voice interaction. It launched in April 2025, and in February 2026 KLCI added Rafiki X, a web extension with CV uploads, voice prompts and persistent memory. A secondary strand trained 2,716 students, 27 school leaders and 70 teachers as multipliers.

Within three days of launch, Rafiki reached 1,200 users across 22 countries, spreading organically through student and refugee networks. Nine months after launch it had reached over 9,300 users in 60+ countries (about 90% in Nigeria), exchanged over 82,500 messages and answered nearly 40,000 career-related queries with zero marketing spend, according to consistent reporting by Vanguard, BusinessDay NG and ThisDay.

These are usage and reach metrics self-reported by KLCI and its AWS partner, not an independent, controlled evaluation of learning or career outcomes -- no randomised or quasi-experimental study of Rafiki AI's effect on employment, further education or income has been published.