Last week, I wrote that the gap coming to Africa is not about access but about building. The next economy will divide people by whether they can build with AI, and not whether they can use it. The technology boom allowed people who could use technology make a mark. But now Artificial Intelligence requires builders not just users or consumers. You can’t just talk about it either. You have to be able to build with it. Demonstrably. This will be the separator.

Last week, was the first full week of running our AI Builders curriculum at New State High School in Mushin. It was a week of classes, gamified lessons, prompts, AI generated code, marking and leaderboards. It was the kind of week that tells you whether the thing actually works end to end, and whether it is received well, or not.

This Happened
We have two cohorts of students learning our AI Builders curriculum on kadelabs.io. On the one hand, we have school students who access our site through their school, and on the other hand, we have others that signed up directly on our website such as teachers and aspiring AI tool builders, like Temitope my assistant. The total number of all students that we have is 409. I can tell you that of our 44 direct signups on kadelabs.io, 42 are active. That’s 95%. That’s not the story today but we will come back to them.

In our school cohort, we have 15 classes, 10 of which have attempted Game 1 – What is AI. 312 students, 154 passed, and 35 need to retake Game 1 before they can move on to Game 2. We will get to the remaining 5 classes this week but what’s also interesting is that there are about 33 students who logged in, presumably started Game 1, but never completed. We need to find out why.

None of our 222 students who attempted Game 1 have built anything yet. One week in and no builds may sound like a slow start but it isn’t. In fact, it is exactly where we should be. Let me explain why.

The AI Builders Curriculum & What It Means To Be A Builder
Our AI Builders curriculum teaches students how to build with AI, taking them through four stages of learning and building, with each stage building on the previous one. Our students are just starting stage one, the foundation. This stage takes you from being an AI Consumer to an AI Explorer. This stage is critical because it is the stage that changes preset behaviours and mindsets. I recently heard a story that really encapsulates what we have set out to do with our curriculum.

A security man at a friend’s office could not find the right key to a door. He had misplaced it so he picked up a different key and tried it. It did not work. Still he persisted and forced it in. Of course it jammed. My friend asked him what he was doing because he could not understand why still kept on pushing. The man told him he did not understand why the door would not just open. He said, Sebi na key. But this response was not stupidity. It was actually something more interesting.

What my friend then told us was that this man had probably never, as a small child, played the game of matching shapes to their correct holes. He probably had never had to match a ball to a round hole and a box to a square hole. The security man actually thought that the keys looked alike so the new key should work. You may find it incredulous that that was the reason but you will be surprised how much of what we do so easily now is actually learned behaviour.

Why this story is important to our AI Builders is that our 222 children did not build anything not because they are not bright. They did not build anything because they have not realised that that is the next step. Even when we told them to make sure they try building a game and we repeated it again and again, it did not come naturally to them.

And it is not natural to them because nobody has put the right things in their minds and in their hands in the right order. They have literally spent their whole lives being trained to be consumers. Watch this. Use this. Copy this. Pass this exam. They have not learned that the next step should be, try it for yourself. What do you think. Why. Nobody has told them, prove it. They have not yet realised that they can have an idea and try to make it work. Nobody has put a tool into their hand and said, here, use this to make something.

Until now.

Zero to Builder in …

These are 10 to 18 year olds in a private secondary school in Mushin. They are bright kids. I know because these are the same kids who 2 years ago had no idea what chess was, and now they are going for national competitions at Ecobank Centre and Eko Hotel and beating older established schools like Kings College Lagos and Queens’ College Yaba Lagos.

We are at that same point today that we were 2 years ago.

The idea that you can take a phone, a tablet, a device, and produce something that did not exist before by just writing out your idea is new to them. Genuinely new. Even alien.

They knew about AI. But only as consumers. AI can help give answers but AI can hallucinate. But they did not know AI as something you can use to build something out of nothing. And that’s what we are going to teach them.

But you do not go from zero to building in one week. First they will go from not knowing to realising it’s possible. They play. They try something small. It works. They don’t believe it. They try again. It worked again. They start to believe. They try something bigger. It doesn’t work.

But because they have seen something work, they don’t give up. They ask why didn’t this one work. And that right there is the turning point. They ask why. Why didn’t it work. Then they figure it out. They correct it. They try again. Finally it works. The smile that turns into a full grin and maybe an exclamation comes from the heart, from deep inside the very core of that student.

But that’s not when they became a builder.

They became a builder when they asked why.

And they know they are builders when they figure it out and it works. At 10. At 13. At 15. They know. And that feeling and that knowledge will never leave them for the rest of their lives.

Honestly, I would rather have 222 kids who have not built anything yet but actually understand what AI is and what it can and cannot do, than 222 kids who have built something they do not understand. The first group becomes builders. The second group becomes a different kind of consumer.

Nigerian Education, Our Youth and Our Literacy
The state and the future of Nigerian education is what keeps me up at night.

The statistics tell us that roughly four in ten Nigerian adults cannot read nor write properly. They say it is worse for women, and worse the further you go from the cities. We have been trying to close that gap for decades the same way. With more schools, more teachers, more textbooks, more years. We sometimes even say some people are not cut out for formal education so we build vocational schools. Progress is real but slow. A whole generation slow.

Our AI Builders curriculum opens a door the old route never could. A child learning to use AI properly is doing a lot of other critical things at the same time. They are learning to read and read fast, because they have to read what AI sends back and judge if it is right or not. They are learning to write better, because the better the prompt, the better the result. They are learning to think structurally and critically, because AI rewards clear thinking and exposes lazy thinking on the spot.

Literacy and critical thinking are value adding side effects of AI building. And being able to build gives them a reason to want to be literate. That’s the trick and that’s what we never had before.

It’s a different curve from asking a 14 year old to memorise a passage because the syllabus says so. Now they engage because they want something and the thing they want is to make their own idea work. The reading and writing ride along with the wanting. I believe we will get to a future where nine out of every ten Nigerians can read, write and think critically.

And this is the part that should make every parent in Nigeria pay attention. Being able to build with AI is a different vocational skill that gets the students ready to earn quickly. A child who can build a small tool with AI by their final year of secondary school does not have to wait four years for university and another two for a job that may or may not exist. They can earn from what they can build now.

A poster for mummy’s shop. A simple site for daddy’s business. A tool that helps their pastor research and write his sermons faster. A tool that helps a teacher mark homework quicker. Real money. Real value. The pathway from learning to earning collapses from another decade to a few months.

That’s not theory. That is what we are building at Kade Labs. And it’s already happening. Some students are logging in and playing at home before their class has even reached the ICT lab. Like Silas in JSS 1. He scored 60% on his first attempt at Game 1, came back four days later and got 80%, then came back again the next day and got 80% again. All on his own time.

Then This Happened
We put the top five learners in each class and the top 10 in the whole school on the school’s noticeboard. Names, classes, and points. Children ran to see if they made the cut. The students who hadn’t made it asked why. The classes that hadn’t played Game 1 yet pushed to know when. The leaderboard refreshes weekly so the children are motivated to do more every week and it becomes a habit. Then the children went home and told, and more parents responded by paying.

Wait until we put up the first names on the AI Builders leaderboard of the kids who actually built something. And once the first names go up on that one, the whole school will feel it. So will the parents. Their friends. Their communities. Because we will also feature those builds on Kade Labs.

What We Want
We expect that within a month every child still on the curriculum will have built something. It can be small but it should work and it should be their idea. Not copied. Theirs. We want them to think of an idea, something from school or home, something that creates some value or is new or different, and build it with AI.

Within two months, their second build should be better than the first. They should want to outdo themselves. They should have learnt one or two things and improve on their first act.

Within 4 months, we should have our first graduates of AI Explorers. They will be kids who can take a simple idea and turn it into a tool that creates real value that someone would actually pay for.

Picture This
Nigeria has an estimated 242 million people, 61% of which are under 25 and youth unemployment is 40%. For decades we thought the answer was more formal and vocational schools but the graduates come out and the jobs are still not there. And more graduates keep coming out and the jobs are still not there.

But AI changes the maths.

A Nigerian child in Mushin with a second-hand smartphone now has the same building tools as a child sitting in Palo Alto with a 2026 MacBook.

Think about that for a second. The AI model is the same. The prompts are similar. The output is similar. The only differences are the questions they ask and the problems they choose to solve.

And I daresay our problems are bigger, more interesting, and more underserved than anyone else’s. This actually makes them better problems to build for. If we get this right, the next 3 to 5 years in Nigeria will look very different. Not because the country changed. But because the children changed. And the children are the country.

What’s Next

Every child. Every where. From consumers to builders.

We are starting with Mushin but we won’t stop with Mushin. We started with a private school in Mushin because that’s where we are and where we could test honestly. But the curriculum is built for the Nigerian child. For the African child. Wherever they are. Same games. Same leaderboard. Same ladder from learner to explorer to builder. It works in any school, in any state, and in any country.

That’s the future we believe in for the Nigerian child. That’s the future we want for the Nigerian child. Not hoping for a job but building now with tools they already have in their hands, for the problems that are right in front of them. And earning from the work as soon as the work is good enough to be paid for.

This week the remaining classes start. The 35 retakes go through. We follow up on the 33 that did not complete Game 1. The 154 passes move on, and the games start getting harder. And somewhere in there, one child is going to try to build something. Anything. Not just because we told them to. But because they believed they could. And once one does, the rest will follow because that’s how kids, and adults, work. They need to see one of their own do it first.

And we will be back to let you know when it happens.