WebTodi
Africa's higher-education discovery and admissions platform — helping students find universities, scholarships, tutors, and mentors, and track every step of their application journey in one place.
Africa's higher-education discovery and admissions platform — helping students find universities, scholarships, tutors, and mentors, and track every step of their application journey in one place.
Disclosure: WebTodi is a venture co-founded by MOW Designs' Walter Akpedeye. Design and engineering are delivered by the MOW Designs team, built and documented with the same rigour as any client engagement.
The project
WebTodi is being built as Africa's higher-education discovery and admissions platform — bridging the information gap between African students (aged 14–25) and universities worldwide. It brings together university and scholarship discovery, a tutor and mentor marketplace, application and goal tracking, and an AI recommendation assistant ("Todi BOT") into one connected experience.
The platform serves six distinct user types — students, tutors, alumni mentors, admissions agents, admins, and superadmins — each with their own journeys: students discover and apply, tutors host paid sessions, mentors volunteer their time, and agents manage student pipelines from a CRM-style dashboard.
MOW Designs is building the full product: a React frontend backed by a Node.js microservices architecture, PostgreSQL and Redis for data and real-time state, and a dataset already covering 15,000+ universities worldwide.
Capabilities
Deliverables
The challenge
Students, tutors, mentors, and admissions agents each need a fundamentally different experience from the same platform — different data models, different incentives, and very different performance and scaling needs behind the scenes.
Students, tutors, mentors, agents, admins, and superadmins each needed a tailored journey without the product feeling fragmented or bolted together.
Tutors earn income through the platform and students spend on subscriptions — payment flows needed to be isolated and reliable, independent of everything else.
A dataset of 15,000+ universities plus scholarships, programs, and internships needed to stay fast and genuinely useful to search and filter, not just large.
Every student's path is different — the platform needed a way to offer relevant, personalised recommendations rather than one generic list for everyone.
Our approach
Split the platform into independent services by business domain — identity, core platform, payments, messaging, and AI — so each can scale, fail, and evolve on its own without dragging the rest down.
Designed the university and scholarship search around how a 17-year-old actually narrows down 15,000+ options — filters, comparisons, and shortlists, not an unfiltered database dump.
Built dedicated real-time infrastructure for 1:1 and group chat, plus a calendar-based booking flow for tutor sessions and mentor meetings.
Built an isolated AI service that powers university recommendations, scholarship matching, and profile guidance — kept separate so AI latency and cost never affect the rest of the platform.
Isolated subscriptions, session payments, and tutor payouts into a dedicated payment service — never touched by any other part of the system.
The outcome
A fast, filterable database of universities, scholarships, programs, and internships built for real student decision-making.
A working marketplace connecting students to paid tutors, volunteer alumni mentors, and admissions agents — with booking, messaging, and payments handled natively.
A microservices foundation where messaging, payments, and AI can each scale on their own — no single point of failure for the whole platform.
WebTodi is still being built — but the foundation is already in place for a platform that can carry a student from their first university search all the way to enrolment, with real people and real guidance along the way.