The iTV story · For media
A 67-year-old first-time developer — with poor eyesight, working mostly by voice — built and shipped a 37-section community super app in 14 days, in partnership with an AI. Every step is publicly verifiable.
Mohamed Adam is 67, turning 68 this year. His professional background is medicine — he holds no computer-science qualification and does not consider himself an IT person. He spent twenty years in community broadcasting, building a name South African audiences trust. His eyesight is poor — he reads his screen at very high magnification — and he had never written software in his life. He works the way he talks: by voice, describing what the community needs and why.
The AI writes every line of code; the human brings forty years of knowing what a community actually needs — and the judgement to say no. Decisions stayed human: what to build, what it costs, what is fair, what respects the platform's values. Execution became conversational: a feature described over morning coffee was live in production by lunch, tested, on real infrastructure, behind real payment and privacy safeguards.
"You are building at the speed of thought. Only paperwork is slowing us down."
— Mohamed Adam, to his AI partner, 21 July 2026
The software industry has an image of who gets to build: young, sighted, technical, fluent in code. This fortnight is evidence that the door has moved. A pensioner with failing eyesight and a clear idea of what his community needs shipped — in two weeks, largely by speaking — what a conventional software team would schedule across years and price beyond any community organisation's reach.
The platform itself reflects that origin: big type and large touch targets everywhere, voice in and voice out, and a values-first policy for what may be sold on its marketplace. Accessibility is not a feature of iTV; it is the reason it exists at all.
iTV is a global community super app, born in South Africa: one place for video, learning, jobs, local notices, community services and a multi-vendor marketplace where small traders get a free, professionally built shopfront. It is run by the ITV Foundation with a simple economic promise — free for vendors until the platform has earned its keep — and built to travel: accessible by design, light on data, and made for communities anywhere in the world. Phase one is South Africa; the platform is engineered from day one to go global.