About
Bulawayo · Zimbabwe
Knowledge Mhodi
CAT
- Based in
- Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
- Focus
- Research-led products
- Products live
- 5
- Preprints
- 3
I’m a founder, researcher and systems builder from Bulawayo. I take information that is scattered, messy or hard to trust and turn it into tools people can actually decide with.
I farm a plot at Simanyene Cooperative in Bulawayo — tomatoes, onions, chomolia, pumpkin leaves and maize — sharing underground water on a twelve-hour weekly allocation. Working within limits like that is where my interest in decision tools started: when water, land and money are scarce, a bad guess is expensive.
So I build systems that do the hard reading for people. GROW weighs crops against a farmer’s own land, water and season. ZiMINDEX turns Zimbabwe’s tangle of currencies and price data into a household’s real monthly picture. The Africa Chess League puts players from seventeen countries on one board without anyone boarding a bus.
The research and the software are one practice for me. I analyse the data before designing the product, publish what I find, and build the evidence into the product itself — so it improves from what is actually happening rather than from what I assumed.
On the land
Tomatoes, onions, chomolia, pumpkin leaves and maize on a cooperative plot — with twelve hours of shared water a week. It is why GROW treats water as the first question, not the last.
At the board
Chess is where AFCL came from: a continent full of players separated by borders, and a way to put them on one board without anyone travelling.
Timeline
2021
O-Level, Bulawayo
Mathematics and the sciences at Mandwandwe High School.
2023
A-Level Pure Mathematics
Founders High School. Began farming my own plot at Simanyene Cooperative.
2024
IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate
Formal grounding in data analysis, SQL, visualisation and Python.
2025
GROW and ZiMINDEX
Built an agricultural decision-support system and a national cost-of-living platform, and wrote the climate-resilience working paper behind GROW.
2026
Africa Chess League
Launched in August; 300+ players from 17 countries within a month. Puzzles, ratings and an open data portal followed, with two preprints on the league.
Principles
Say what is not known
Where a price, a yield or a local condition is missing, the product says so. I would rather leave a gap than dress an estimate up as a fact — and I have removed features when the data could not support them.
GROWEvidence before features
I analyse the data first and design second. AFCL studies its own participation; GROW’s location-first approach came out of 24 years of provincial crop and climate records.
Research-ledBytes are money
In Zimbabwe a gigabyte can cost $43.75. Page weight is an access problem, so I build for a cheap phone on a bad connection first — offline queues, small fonts, no wasted requests.
PerformanceDeterministic where it matters
AI can read and extract; decisions run on pure, testable functions. Every figure should expand into the steps that produced it, so anyone can check the arithmetic.
AIValue before sign-up
People should get the answer before they are asked for an email address. Accounts exist for saving work, never as a gate in front of the useful part.
ProductToolbox
What I work with
Plus an IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate and a lot of reading other people’s source code.
Interfaces
Next.js · React · TypeScript · JavaScript · Tailwind CSS · Astro · Svelte · Framer Motion · Lottie · D3 · Vite · PWA
Services & APIs
Node.js · Express · Fastify · Zod · JWT · REST APIs · Web Push · Cron workers
Data stores
MongoDB · Mongoose · PostgreSQL · Supabase · SQLite · Turso · Drizzle ORM · Firebase
Research & AI
Python · pandas · NumPy · SciPy · statsmodels · matplotlib · Jupyter · Hugging Face · LLM integration · Web scraping
Ship & verify
Vercel · Render · Cloudflare Workers · GitHub Actions · Docker · Git · Vitest · Playwright · ESLint · axe-core
Integrations
Lichess API · Telegram Bot API · Cloudinary · Google Identity · Open-Meteo · Leaflet