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Build Africa

Tecmie

Build Africa Network is our GitHub organisation for open source projects contributing to civic progress and healthier socio-economic systems. I created it in October 2017 as wecodeafrica and later renamed it buildafrica. It is a small group: the public members are me and DevFojo, and the READMEs credit the people who actually did the work: JulianJason, Michael Hammond, Anilla Stephannie, Larry Chege, Audrey Harmonie M Mengue and Eugene.

We ran it hard from 2017 to 2020 across 22 repositories. Almost everything after that is forks; the last original commit landed in June 2024.

What we built

Open Missing Persons Archive (2017–2018). Our first project: a searchable database of missing persons in Nigeria, with social-media awareness per case, access for law enforcement, and a mobile-first design with local-language support planned. It spans a plan, a Python backend API, a Vue frontend, an mpa-server, and a React 16 client built by Koolamusic and JulianJason.

Hospitals in Ghana (2019). A progressive web app publishing a database of public and private hospitals in Accra. With eight stars and nine contributors, hospitalsghana is our most-starred repository.

Statesman (2020). An open database of the political manifestos of elected officials across African nations, split across statesman, statesman-client and stateman-docs.

#EndSARS tools (October–November 2020). Two things we built during the protests. SARS-Angel is change.org for getting bills into legislation: it triggers SMS, email and voice calls to public servants, with contact details crowdsourced through Airtable and exposed through an open API. Soro Soke Radio, by @feyikewa, is a Next.js PWA online radio that carried live updates from the protest grounds.

The Pan African Hackathon is the community programme that followed, and Blockchain Polls Market is our later take on civic data.

Visit site
Build Africa Network on GitHub Open Missing Persons Archive plan Missing Persons Archive client Hospitals in Ghana SARS-Angel Statesman manifesto archive Soro Soke Radio

Related

Afrikathon

The pan-African hackathon community we started in 2020. Our first virtual edition drew 1,600 sign-ups from 21 countries for a five-day remote design sprint.

Candy

A specification language for stateful backends: describe actors, flows and policies once in a .candy file, and generate idiomatic Go, Rust, TypeScript or Python.

ChatKJV

A GPT-powered chatbot that answers how you feel with a King James Bible verse. We built it in 24 hours in January 2023, and it reached 10k users in five days.

We ship, then iterate

We've worked with founders from Google, MIT, YC, Microsoft, Apple, and organisations like Polygon, Starknet, Stellar Foundation, OpenAI, and Solana Foundation, as partners who care as much about the vision as they do.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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