South Sudan first.

The code that remembers.

South Sudan is the youngest country on Earth, and almost everything it will run on is still being built. We build some of it. Software made for this place, by people who know it, for the generation that inherits it.

See what we're building Why South Sudan

Ancecode brain at night — the code that remembers.

The brief

The numbers are the design.

These aren't statistics to be sad about. They're the spec. Every one of them changes what a tool here has to do, and what it can't take for granted.

12.2M

people

twelve million of them, in a country the size of France

median age

half the country has yet to turn nineteen

42%

under 25

the people who will run this country are already here

languages

spoken at home; English on the certificate, Juba Arabic in the market

16%

online

five in six people have never loaded a web page

$1.2B

sent home a year

the diaspora carries about a quarter of the economy by hand

Sources: UN, World Bank, national statistics, 2024–25.

What we're building

First, do one thing properly.

The first projectIn development

Junub

A place to raise what's happening where you live, find the people who'd act on it, and be heard past your own village. Built for South Sudan, so it works when the network doesn't.

Built for no signal. Built in the languages people actually speak. Built around how communities here already organise.

More about Junub

Circles the groups and places you belong to
Campfire talking something through, at conversation pace
Pulse what a place is raising, gathered in one view
Heroes the people quietly holding things together
Offline-first works with no signal, catches up later
Languages Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Zande, Juba Arabic, English

Who it's for. Communities and young people in South Sudan, and the diaspora who stay close to them.

After Junub

A roadmap we're keeping to ourselves for now. You get the domains. The plans stay sealed until they're real.

Finance

In research · not public

Agriculture

In research · not public

Learning

In research · not public

Health

In research · not public

Peace

In research · not public

Diaspora

In research · not public

See the roadmap →

How we build

Built for the real one.

Not the South Sudan in the slide deck. The one with no signal, no grid, sixty-four languages, and a long walk to market. Those aren't obstacles to design around. They're the design.

Offline-first, not online-only

Eight in ten people here are offline. Not slow. Offline. So the thing works on a phone that hasn't seen a tower in a week, and quietly catches up the moment it does.

Heard before read

About a third of adults read fluently. So voice comes first. Audio comes first. Plain words and clear icons come before any wall of text.

Many languages, from screen one

English on the certificate. Juba Arabic in the market. Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Zande at home. We build for that from the first screen, not as a translation pass at the end.

Cheap on data. Cheap on battery.

Connectivity costs real money against real income. Power is a roof panel and a long night. Every kilobyte and every milliamp is a budget, not an afterthought.

On the phone people already own

Smartphones still lose to feature phones across much of the country. SMS and USSD aren't a fallback we apologise for. They're a channel we build for.

Through what people already trust

Churches. Chiefs. Women's groups. Radio stations. Cattle camps. People trust these. We work through them, not around them.

Built for the worst day

Floods. Displacement. A currency that loses value overnight. If it still does its job then, it works. If it only works on the demo, it doesn't.

Where the name comes from

Ancestor. Code.

For most of South Sudan's history, knowledge had no hard drive. It lived in songs. In genealogies recited from memory at a fire. In the judgements of the Beny Bith, the Masters of the Fishing Spear, and the courts of the Reth. An oral tradition is a database that ran for centuries on no power, no servers, and no backup but the next generation's attention.

So the name: Ancecode. Ancestor and code. Software is never neutral; it carries whoever built it and whoever it was built for. We would rather it carried this.

And we have seen what this place does when someone backs it. A national basketball team that had never won a game became the best in Africa and made history at the Olympics, inside four years. They did it with a ball. We are pointing the same conviction at code.

The next generation

They don't need permission to build.

Forty-two percent of this country is under twenty-five. The median age is eighteen. The people who will run its systems are alive right now. Most of them have known nothing but conflict. Almost none of them have ever been asked to build anything.

We are not training young people to be someone's junior hire. We are forming the ones who will author the systems their country runs on. The first group has a name, the Builders' Circle, and it is forming now.

About the programme Register your interest

Ancecode spiral door — the threshold the next generation walks through.

Ancecode starry sky — a country looking up, building toward what comes next.

Build with us

This needs builders.

Engineers and students in South Sudan. The diaspora, with your code, your mentorship, your money, your time. Radio stations, churches, civil-society groups, telcos. People who know things we don't and will tell us so. If that's you, the door is open. Knock.

Get in touch What we believe