Leonard Bett is best known for clearing water jumps and barriers as one of Kenya’s top steeplechase athletes. But recently, Bett has been attempting to clear a different kind of hurdle: the complexity of software engineering.
Bett was one of 42 attendees at a recent workshop in Eldoret, Kenya, designed to teach people with little to no coding background how to build functional apps. His goal? To build a digital platform to manage and analyse athletic performance. A few years ago, this would have required hiring a dedicated dev team or spending months learning Python or JavaScript. Today, Bett is doing it himself using natural language prompts.
This shift—from hard coding to “low-code”—was the focal point of Zoho’s expanded Young Creators Program (YCP), which recently wrapped up a tour across East Africa.
The Indian tech giant, known for its sprawling suite of business apps, has been running workshops in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Madagascar. The goal isn’t just corporate social responsibility; it is a strategic play to embed the concept of “citizen development” in emerging markets. Across the four nations, 150 participants—ranging from CS students to total beginners like Bett—were trained to deploy business-ready applications using Zoho Creator.
The Death of Syntax?
The workshops focused heavily on the democratisation of app development. The core technology at play here is CoCreator, a feature within the Zoho ecosystem powered by their proprietary AI assistant, Zia.
For the uninitiated, low-code platforms abstract away the complex syntax of traditional programming. Instead of writing lines of code to create a database or a user interface, users drag and drop elements. Zoho takes this a step further with AI. During the East African sessions, participants were taught to build applications by simply describing what they needed in natural language.
The curriculum moved quickly from the basics—forms, reports, and workflows—to more complex territories like UI customisation, mobile deployment, and integrations. The premise is that if you can articulate the logic of a business problem, the AI can handle the architectural heavy lifting.
Regional Breakdown
Zoho didn’t go it alone; they leaned on local tech hubs and educational institutions to tailor the program to each country’s specific demographic.
Kenya: The Athlete and the Entrepreneur In Kenya, the training was held at EldoHub. While Nairobi usually gets the lion’s share of tech events, placing this in Eldoret allowed for a unique mix of entrepreneurs and professionals. Sarah Towet, Co-Founder at EldoHub, noted that the platform opens opportunities for “anyone to innovate, regardless of their background,” a sentiment backed by the presence of non-tech natives like Bett.
Uganda: Closing the Gender Gap The Uganda leg of the tour took a specific angle: inclusivity. Partnering with the Analytics Business Centre, Zoho ran a “Women in Software Engineering” edition. The 43 attendees were exclusively women, ranging from students to entrepreneurs. According to Primera Muthoni, founder of Women in Software Engineering Uganda, the focus was on equipping women with tools for process automation and digital entrepreneurship—effectively bypassing the traditional “bro-grammer” gatekeeping often found in hard-coding circles.
Tanzania: Institutional Integration In Tanzania, the program made its debut at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT). Unlike the mixed cohorts in Kenya and Uganda, this session was strictly academic, training 24 computer science students. Dr. Haji Fimbombaya, Head of Computer Studies at DIT, viewed the workshop as a necessary complement to their standard curriculum, exposing students to the “industry-grade tools” they will likely encounter in the workforce.
Madagascar: The Zero-to-One Approach Perhaps the most ambitious leg was in Antananarivo, Madagascar. In collaboration with Belgian partner BrainSolutions and the Inclusive Academy, the workshop hosted 27 participants, many of whom were complete novices to programming. Anna Andruamialivelo, Tech Lead at BrainSolutions, highlighted that seeing beginners build real applications was “truly inspiring,” proving that the learning curve for software creation is flattening significantly.
The Big Picture
Veerakumar Natarajan, Zoho’s Regional Manager for East Africa, stated that the goal is to “empower young innovators to solve local challenges.”
While that is the standard corporate line, the strategy holds water. Africa’s digital economy is growing, but the shortage of senior developers is acute. By pushing low-code tools, companies like Zoho are effectively widening the funnel, allowing business analysts, athletes, and students to build their own solutions without waiting on IT departments.
Since its global launch in 2022, the Young Creators Program has trained over 4,000 people. As AI-assisted coding becomes more sophisticated, the line between a “software developer” and a “user” continues to blur. If Leonard Bett’s prototype is anything to go by, the next big app out of Kenya might not come from a computer lab, but from the track.
