Building AI Tools for East Africa

EngineeringJuly 9, 20265 min read

Building AI for East Africa means designing for different constraints. Here's our approach.

Design Principles

Low-bandwidth first. Core functionality delivered through Telegram (text-based). Web pages under 50KB. Local Ollama models instead of cloud APIs.

Offline-capable. PAYE Calculator runs entirely in the browser. Agreement Generator generates PDFs locally. No server dependency for core tools.

Tech stack: Ollama + Qwen2.5-Coder, python-telegram-bot, Caddy, PostgreSQL, Docker Compose. All running on a single Oracle Cloud VM.

OR

OpportunityRadar Team

Building tools to help East Africans discover and act on economic opportunities.

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