It’s a rainy evening in Lagos. I am speaking with 21-year-old Ghanaian innovator Frederick Abila, a second-year student of computer science and engineering at the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) in Ghana’s Western Region. He has just returned to his room after launching a hackathon for over 70 young Ghanaians, challenging them to create software applications that address specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The hackathon will end in mid-August.
At 21, Abila has created three AI-powered platforms: Buzz Chat, Study Graph, and Legalyse, each tackling a problem he believes to be overlooked or misunderstood. “I’ve sacrificed a lot of my time, my youth and almost everything for this,” he says. “I’ve never had the luxury of having fun and constantly hanging out with peers and living a normal life. I’m always trying to think about how tech can make everyone’s lives better.”
From fiction to function
Before the products and the code, Abila was a curious 14-year-old in Accra trying to publish short stories. He grew up in the Ghanaian capital, with roots in the Central Region. His first love was storytelling. As a teenager, he wrote fiction and spent hours online trying to figure out how to share his work with the world. “I was constantly on Google and started wondering what was behind the search engine,” he recalls. “I’d search for something and immediately get results. I wanted to know what made that happen.”
It was this curiosity that pulled him into the world of technology. Using free online resources, he taught himself how to code. In 2019, whilst still in boarding school, he built an e-commerce platform for local vendors. But it stalled when he tried to integrate payments.
“I needed to add a payment system and couldn’t find Ghana on PayPal’s list of supported countries,” he says. “That’s when it dawned on me; almost every tech product we use in Africa is made by someone who isn’t African.”
The project eventually shut down because he couldn’t manage it remotely from school. But the experience planted a seed: What if tech in Africa wasn’t built elsewhere?
“If PayPal can block us from using their service, what stops Facebook or Instagram from doing the same?” he wondered. That realisation would later inspire his most ambitious project.
Buzz Chat: More than social media
Buzz Chat began as Abila’s response to the idea that foreign-owned platforms could arbitrarily exclude African users. But when AI tools gained momentum in 2022, he saw an opportunity to build something deeper.
“The very first AI I added was Charles, a chatbot that mimics real human conversations,” he explains. “People didn’t even realise it was AI; they thought it was a real person.”
Charles was soon followed by Ember, a mental health chatbot designed to offer emotional support rather than amplify the comparison and toxicity that often define social media. “I realised how social media usually causes mental health issues,” he says. “I wanted to turn that around and make it positive.”
Buzz Chat now has over 13,000 users, mostly students and young professionals in Ghana, according to Abila. For many, it offers more than a social platform but a digital ecosystem that serves need beyond social connections. “I looked at Facebook and realised how many jobs a social platform could create,” he says. “I want Buzz Chat to do that for Ghana.”
Study Graph and Legalyse: Personalised learning, simulated justice
Abila’s second project, Study Graph, addresses a challenge he’s experienced firsthand: a rigid education system that doesn’t cater to different learning styles. “Sometimes I struggle in school; not because I’m not smart, but because the teaching style doesn’t work for me,” he says. “Study Graph adapts to how each person learns.”
Unlike traditional e-learning platforms, Study Graph analyses a student’s learning history. Users upload transcripts, and the platform tailors study materials to their preferred style: visual summaries, audio lectures, or interactive quizzes. “I’d call it a co-pilot for students,” he says. “It understands every bit of a student’s learning life and offers tools to help them progress.”
Then there’s Legalyse, an AI-powered legal training platform. Inspired by conversations with law students frustrated by the lack of practical experience, Legalyse lets users simulate real legal cases without needing a license.
“With Legalyse, they pick a case, choose to be the prosecutor or defender, and go through an entire trial simulation with a virtual judge,” Abila explains.
The platform, like many AI applications, is built on large language models, trained with jurisdiction-specific data, and designed to make legal education immersive and hands-on.
The hidden cost of innovation
Abila’s parents were initially unsure about his path. His mother, who once hoped he’d become a doctor, struggled to understand why her son was always in front of a laptop. “She never said she hated what I was doing, but I could tell she wasn’t happy,” he says. “They didn’t understand why I’d sit in front of my laptop for hours.”
Even at university, most of his lecturers don’t know the full scope of his work. “They know the name, but they don’t know the person behind it,” he says quietly.
It has taken an emotional toll. But what keeps him going, he says, is the shared sense of purpose he finds in solving real-world problems. “I feel most alive when I discover a problem others also face and decide to solve it.”
Despite the traction his solutions have gained, Abila has faced rejections in his bid to scale his ideas and products. He’s applied four times to the Y Combinator accelerator program without securing a spot. “I see people doing lesser things in the US and getting into YC,” he says, frustration creeping into his voice.
The bias isn’t just institutional, he says. “At one point, people assumed Buzz Chat was a Chinese kids’ app.”
So far, he has yet to raise venture capital, even for Legalyse, despite the increasing investor interest in AI applications. Most of his funding comes from Andrew, a UK-based market researcher who acts as co-founder and mentor, and who wants to be identified only by his first name.
Their partnership began in November 2022 when Andrew stumbled across a Facebook article about an 18-year-old in Ghana creating social media for Africans. Intrigued, he reached out through Messenger. “He was kind of not sure of who I was and why I would be reaching out,” Andrew recalls, “but eventually he agreed to talk with me.”
What started as curiosity has evolved into a nearly three-year working relationship. He sees potential in Abila’s coding skills and believes his efforts will eventually pay off.
While Andrew doesn’t offer technical guidance (he admits he’s “not that good with technology”), his mentorship draws from decades of experience as a market researcher in the UK. He focuses on connecting Abila to a broader network and providing the perspective of someone much older who has navigated various career challenges.
Beyond Andrew’s financial backing, tech giants like Google, Nvidia, and Amazon have supported Abila’s projects with cloud credits. “The credits help, but once they run out, you’re stuck,” he says. “It’s a risk, but that’s the price of building without capital.”
A life beyond metrics
What does success look like for a young man with much to look forward to? Abila says it is the ability to help people. “The best currency I thrive on these days is ‘Thank you’s’,” he says.
His platforms’ revenue models (subscriptions for Study Graph and Legalyse, ads and premium features for Buzz Chat) are merely a means to an end.
In the next ten years, Abila wants Buzz Chat to create real employment in Ghana. He hopes Study Graph will transform education across Africa and that Legalyse becomes a formal training tool in law schools.
But his bigger dream is cultural: that Africans stop seeing themselves only as consumers of global tech and start building for themselves.
Despite the ups and downs of his innovative and entrepreneurial journey thus far, Abila shows no signs of slowing down. He intends to keep learning and building until every problem in Africa has a technological solution.
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