Case study · MINDS Africa · 2026
A pan-African alumni platform for the Mandela Institute for Development Studies, with membership, donations and an AI assistant.
- Client
- MINDS Africa
- Year
- 2026
- Services
- Web Platform, React, AI
- Built with
- ReactTypeScriptViteTailwind CSSSanitySupabaseStripeGoogle GeminiUpstashVercel
- Live product
- alumni.minds-africa.org
The brief
MINDS needed one home for its alumni across Africa: news, events, stories and resources, plus a way to join the network and support it.
See it in action
A scroll through the live site: the network in numbers, alumni activities and the regional coordinator pages.
Demo
Needs we met
What each group needed for the project to count as a success.
Business
Grow and engage the alumni network, and open a channel for donations.
Stakeholders
The MINDS team needed to manage content themselves and review membership applications in one place.
Customers
Alumni wanted to find events, stories and library resources, and get quick answers about MINDS.
How we delivered
Every external platform and its purpose was documented for the MINDS team, along with the page structure and CMS guide, so the institute can run the site without the original developer.
- Step 01
- Mapped the page structure: regions, news, events, stories, library and contact
- Step 02
- Set up Sanity Studio so editors manage pages, news, events, regions, the gallery and the library
- Step 03
- Built membership applications with an admin review flow and Slack notifications, plus Stripe donations
- Step 04
- Added a RAG chatbot that answers from MINDS content and cites its sources
Results
0
content areas editors run themselves in Sanity
AI
assistant that answers only from MINDS content, with citations