Kasilam: teaching township youth to build with AI
Teaching people to build for themselves
Township businesses can’t afford agencies and township youth aren’t taught the skills that now pay, so Kasilam teaches people to build with AI by doing real work.
- What it is
- Programme of work
- Role
- Teacher: shows participants how to build; does not build their projects
- Organisation
- Kasilam Digital Platforms
- Period
- 2021 to present (first public repository August 2021)
- Status
- Active
- Topics
- AI education
- Capacity building
The problem
Two problems with one root. Township businesses stay invisible online because agencies cost more than they can spend, and township youth cannot turn their potential into income because the skills that now pay, building with AI, are taught almost everywhere except where they are.
Why it mattered
Handing a business a website solves one thing once. Handing a young person the ability to build the next one, and the one after, changes what they can do afterwards, and can turn into income.
The context
A free community initiative, not an agency. The deliberate constraint is that participants do the building; the point is capability transfer, not a portfolio of sites with my name on them.
What I did
I teach: learners, schools, small businesses and local entrepreneurs, showing them how to use AI and digital tools to build for themselves. I do not build the participants’ projects for them.
What changed
Businesses that could not afford a presence got one, and young people gained an in-demand skill, a public portfolio and a path to earning, rather than a one-off favour.
Who benefited
Township small businesses, and the young people who did the building and kept the skill.
What remained
The capability that stays with the participants, and a growing set of real community builds that they made.
Technical context
Participants build with AI assistance and web tooling (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, GitHub Pages), described in plain English, with no formal coding background required.
Related work
- Shares ai educationAgent Roadmap Kit: learn AI agents by building one, freeA free, open source companion to the six part agents series: six stops that build one working assistant, runnable at no cost.
- Shares ai educationAI education: FabAcademic Unfiltered and LeparaLaMaparaCo hosting FabAcademic Unfiltered with Prof. Mamokgethi Phakeng, public technical writing, and LeparaLaMapara, a grounded assistant that cites its sources.
- Shares ai educationStudent success analytics and recommendations at WitsAnalytics and a clustering based recommendation system for student success at Wits, with over R2 million a year in subsidy impact attributed to it.