Empowering underserved youth with AI career support: KLCI’s journey on AWS

Approximately 121 million young Africans between the ages of 15 and 35 are either unemployed or categorized as not in education, employment, or training (NEET). The formal sector provides less than 20% of youth employment on the continent. Each year, over 10 million young people enter the African labor market, but current growth patterns generate only around 3 million formal jobs. For many of these young people, the path from education to employment is unclear not because they lack ambition, but because they lack access to career guidance.

In Nigeria alone, 93% of schools lack dedicated career counselors. Professional coaching costs from $50 to $350 per session, far beyond what most underserved youth can afford. Traditional approaches such as one-on-one mentoring, career seminars, and telephone hotlines haven’t scaled to meet this demand.

The Kayode Alabi Leadership and Career Initiative (KLCI Africa), a nonprofit social enterprise headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, set out to solve this problem using generative AI and Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this post, we describe how KLCI Africa built Rafiki AI, a WhatsApp-based generative AI career advisor that delivers personalized career guidance to underserved and displaced youth in under 2 minutes.

The challenge

Founded in 2017, KLCI Africa prepares young people in underserved and displaced communities for the workforce. The organization has trained over 10,000 young people across 14 Nigerian states in leadership, skills development, and career readiness. Over the years, KLCI tried one-on-one coaching, group counseling, career seminars, and even phone hotlines. None of these approaches could reach the scale of the problem.

Providing personalized career guidance requires maintaining context across conversations, understanding individual circumstances, and delivering relevant recommendations. Doing this manually for tens of thousands of young people across multiple countries isn’t feasible with a small team and limited resources. A single career counseling session can take 30–60 minutes per person. At that rate, reaching even a fraction of the youth who need support would require thousands of counselors who don’t exist in these communities.

KLCI needed a way to deliver quality career guidance at scale, in a format accessible to youth with limited internet connectivity and no access to laptops or desktop computers. This is where generative AI offered a path forward.

The solution: Rafiki AI

KLCI initially prototyped their career advisor using the OpenAI GPT-4o mini model, calling the API directly from a basic server setup. While this proved the concept worked, the architecture couldn’t scale. There was no automatic scaling to handle concurrent users, no reliable state management across conversations, and no infrastructure to support additional capabilities like voice or document processing.

In February 2025, KLCI was selected for the AWS Education Equity Initiative, receiving $51,000 in cloud credits to build and scale their solution. As part of the initiative, KLCI received technical consultations with AWS solutions architects who helped them address these infrastructure challenges. The team decided to migrate the entire solution to AWS, running the AI model through Amazon Bedrock and building the supporting infrastructure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Route 53.

With the infrastructure in place, KLCI launched Rafiki AI in April 2025 as a WhatsApp-based career chat assistant. Users message a designated WhatsApp number and engage in a structured conversation where the AI guides them through their interests, strengths, limitations, and aspirations using KLCI’s Interest, Strength, Limitation, and Purpose (ISLP) framework. The output is a personalized career pathway plan delivered in under 2 minutes.

Since launch, the team has continued adding functionality. Rafiki now supports over 56 languages, including Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Pidgin English, French, and Swahili, meaning it can reach youth across Francophone Africa, East Africa, and refugee communities.

Users can upload their CV for an applicant tracking system (ATS)-standard review and receive tailored interview preparation based on the document’s content. Voice accessibility was added through Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Polly so users with limited literacy can interact by speaking rather than typing.

KLCI also launched Rafiki X, a companion web application that offers extended features including document uploads, payment integration, and email-based career reminders for users with reliable internet access. Conversations across both solutions are retained, meaning users can pause and resume their session within 24 hours. The system is available around the clock.

The results

Since launch, Rafiki AI has achieved significant traction with zero marketing spend, growing entirely through organic word-of-mouth efforts.

The solution has reached over 11,300 users across more than 60 countries, exchanging over 109,000 messages and delivering 49,861 pieces of career advice. It has answered 41,571 career queries, reviewed more than 50 CVs, and unlocked 17,600 free career interactions for underserved youth.

Compared to traditional coaching sessions averaging $350 per session, Rafiki AI has saved users an estimated $280,000 and provided over $767,300 in career guidance value. If users increase their income by just $300 as a result of improved career decisions, the potential collective income gain exceeds $3.1 million.

The impact has also extended offline: KLCI trained 27 school leaders who retrained 70 teachers, reaching 276 students directly. The organization has engaged 54 schools and organizations and trained 2,716 students on how to use Rafiki AI. For youth without smartphones, trained volunteers known as Rafiki AI Champions use their own devices to provide access so no one is excluded due to digital barriers.

Additionally, the AWS credits helped KLCI scale their Skill2Rural courseware platform, growing the educator base by 27.84% to 223 educators who now reach and mentor 128,600 young people in underserved communities.

“It is great to see a solution like Rafiki AI created for underserved and displaced young people get access to AWS cloud support and credits. It is giving growing organizations such as ours a chance to use AI to scale our work and democratize access to career service for young people on the African continent without access to career counselling services and guidance. With the support of AWS EEI to launch Rafiki AI, we have given them something to believe in. This is the intersection of AI and career revolution right in front of us,” said Hammed Kayode Alabi, founder of KLCI Africa.

Conclusion

KLCI Africa’s partnership with AWS is a testament to the transformative power of generative AI in career development and youth empowerment. By building on AWS, KLCI is making personalized career guidance accessible to young people in underserved communities across Africa and beyond.

As the organization continues to innovate and expand, it remains dedicated to breaking barriers to career support and empowering youth to make informed decisions about their future.

With AI-driven solutions and strategic support through the AWS Education Equity Initiative, KLCI Africa is helping shape the future of inclusive, equitable career guidance for all.

Visit Rafiki AI to learn more about their impact.