WhatsApp platform offers CBC career guidance at KSh 300 a report
Rezial Career Centre’s digital service aims to bring professional pathway advice to Kenyan learners regardless of location
By Ashford Kimani
Kenya’s shift to the Competency-Based Curriculum has changed what career guidance needs to do. Where the old system rewarded academic performance above most else, CBC asks learners to identify their talents, interests and passions before choosing a pathway — a demand that requires informed, personalised advice at an earlier stage of schooling than most families are used to navigating.
The gap between that demand and what is actually available to most Kenyan families is wide. Professional career counselling has historically been expensive, concentrated in urban centres and largely inaccessible to learners in rural or peri-urban areas. A new digital platform from Rezial Career Centre, operating under the name Office of Career Pathways, is attempting to close that gap using a tool most Kenyan families already have on their phones: WhatsApp.
The service is accessible by sending a message to +254 737 099 099. Users are then guided through an automated conversation that gathers information about the learner before generating a personalised career guidance report. No specialist software is required, no office visit is necessary and the service is available at any hour.
The platform serves three distinct groups. Learners in Grades 6 to 9, who are in Junior Secondary School, can use it to explore career pathways, identify suitable senior schools and understand which subject combinations lead to which careers. Visual pathway reports illustrating the route from school to employment are included.
Students in Grades 10 to 12, preparing for higher education, receive more detailed analysis — personalised career maps, university and college recommendations aligned with their preferred career, and a clearer picture of what educational progression looks like for their chosen field.
The third group is post-Form Four students facing the often daunting task of selecting university programmes, diplomas or certificate courses. For this group, the platform provides programme recommendations, institutional searches covering both local and international options, and an analysis of Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service admission possibilities based on the student’s cluster points.
Each report costs KSh 300, paid via M-Pesa through an STK Push transaction triggered within the WhatsApp conversation. Once payment is confirmed, the system generates the report and delivers it directly to the user, with downloadable visual summaries included depending on the service selected.
The process involves answering a short questionnaire covering the learner’s interests, preferred study destination, academic results and career aspirations. The system saves each response and presents a summary for confirmation before payment is initiated.
The pricing is deliberately positioned to reach families who would not ordinarily pay for professional career counselling. Traditional services in Kenya can cost several thousand shillings per session and are typically located in Nairobi and other major towns. At KSh 300, the platform is within reach of a significantly larger portion of the population, including families in counties where career guidance infrastructure is thin.
The timing aligns with a broader challenge facing schools. As CBC rolls out and learners move through Junior Secondary into Senior Secondary, guidance and counselling departments are under increasing pressure to help students make pathway decisions earlier and with greater specificity. Many schools lack the staffing or resources to deliver that at scale.
Rezial’s platform is not designed to replace school-based counselling but to complement it. Career teachers and guidance counsellors can direct learners to generate a report before a face-to-face session, allowing the counsellor to spend the appointment interpreting personalised findings rather than collecting background information from scratch.
The CBC framework places emphasis on nurturing individual competencies rather than sorting learners by examination scores alone. That philosophy requires parents and students to engage with career planning in a more deliberate way, and earlier, than previous generations had to. A platform that delivers evidence-based, personalised recommendations through a widely used application addresses a practical need that has emerged directly from the curriculum reform.
Whether it reaches sufficient scale to meaningfully shift access to career guidance will depend on uptake among schools, community networks and parents who are navigating CBC pathways for the first time. The infrastructure, however, is already in place — and at KSh 300, the barrier to trying it is low.
Kimani is a teacher of English and Literature who writes on education and social affairs.
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