2022–2025 — Launching in Kenya

The hard stop that ended the 2020–2022 Ukraine campaign forced another path. Kenya made sense: English is widely spoken, the internet is reachable, wages are low, unemployment is acute, and Kevin — a trusted coordinator from the earlier years — was already on the ground there. Since 2022, Opplet has been developed further in Kenya.

The initial endeavor followed the Ukrainian blueprint. Recruitment was geared toward job seekers, the easiest audience to reach. Unlike in Ukraine, there was no advertising; usually, Kevin brought the participants. Once, Gary reached out to a participant who had come through CNM, to test the waters before the new campaign.

During those years, the team experimented heavily with enterprise business software such as Odoo, ERPNext, and Mattermost, while prototyping what later became Opplet Office. Kevin was most instrumental in new technology research and development. Among the other participants in Kenya’s first endeavor, Rahim deserves mention: he prototyped what is now the WiseNxt intake process.

Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, the team began publishing its meetings on a public YouTube channel.

But the same problem from Ukraine resurfaced: few were comfortable with an unfinished, evolving platform, and most wanted stable operations — and, with them, a stable income.

As in Ukraine, the team again refocused on school-age students. The aim stayed what it had been since Ukraine — to be the first real employer a participant can point to: a safe place to take on real tasks, and in doing so build the experience and contacts that a first job is meant to provide, and that are hardest to get without one.

One attempt even drew genuine enrollments, but the offering was still too raw, and parents soon moved their children to more polished cybersecurity programs. The pitch — that students would gain more by practicing as real cybersecurity apprentices — did not persuade them.

That was the point the Ukrainian campaign never reached. The assumption had always been that both the students and their parents would love Opplet’s tech experience simply because it was great. The reality was that the team had to compete for the students’ time against many rivals. Those rivals didn’t offer anything close, but had already established some marketing. Worse, their offers of training and certificates were better understood by the parents.

The same openness that made Opplet a proving ground also made it a hard sell to anyone expecting a finished program. Opplet needed room to keep evolving, yet it also had to be competitive in the market.

Here the team hit a structural roadblock: turning Opplet into a marketable product demanded far more development than the available resources could fund. By the end of 2025, the Opplet project was about to be shelved. Only the emergence of AI tools made the 2025–present Kenya launch possible.