Find your people.Then find what’s next.
Talk with the people you trust, then discover the people, places, and moments moving Tanzania.
“Tukutane pale saa kumi? Nimepata sehemu nzuri.”
THE GAP WE ARE BUILDING INTO
200 million people speak Kiswahili. The internet still barely listens.
East Africa talks in voice notes, in code-switched Kiswahili and street slang, on 2 GB phones and metered data. Almost none of that is what today’s models were trained to hear. We are building where the data actually lives.
- Kiswahili speakers
- 200M+
- Share of the web’s text
- A rounding error
- How East Africa sends
- Voice first
- The device that decides
- 2 GB RAM
MORE THAN A MESSAGE
A conversation becomes a plan. A shared interest becomes a community. A place on the map becomes your new favorite place.
The best things online should lead somewhere real.
An app that understands how East Africa actually talks.
Voice is the default here, not a feature. Sauti turns a 90-second Kiswahili voice note into something you can read, search, translate, and act on, without leaving the conversation and without burning a bundle.
Hear it
Isikie
Kiswahili and code-switched speech transcribed inside the conversation, including the slang no general model was trained on.
Bridge it
Iunganishe
Kiswahili to English and back, so a group chat stops being two rooms that cannot hear each other.
Act on it
Itendee kazi
A long voice note becomes the one line that matters: the time, the place, the amount, the answer.
Run it cheap
Iwe nafuu
Built for 2 GB handsets and metered data, the constraint that decides whether any of this reaches people.
Transcript · Kiswahili
“Tukutane pale saa kumi jioni? Nimepata sehemu nzuri Mikocheni, ina nafasi ya watu sita.”
English
“Shall we meet at 4pm? I found a good spot in Mikocheni, room for six.”
Your city has more to say.
Search people, communities, events, and local places when you want to explore, without dropping into an endless feed.
No doomscroll required
Videos live inside their own category. You choose when to watch, not the other way around.
Explore as @nuru
What’s close to you?
COMMUNITY
Dar Creatives
Designers, photographers, and makers building out loud.
Ocean Road photo walk
Hosted by Photography Tanzania
Mbezi runners
Morning pace · everyone welcome
One you. Two ways to show up.
Your real name stays with trusted contacts. Your @username is for the wider Kijiji. You always know which space you’re in.
Neema M.
Real name for contacts, chats, and calls.
@nuru
Username for discovery, communities, and events.
WHAT ALREADY RUNS
The unglamorous half is finished.
Kijiji is not a slide. The messaging foundation is built, deployed, and being used on real Tanzanian networks, which is exactly why the intelligence layer is the next thing worth building.
Offline-first
OUTBOX + LOCAL STORE
Messages typed without signal send themselves when signal returns. History survives the app being killed.
4 carriers
TESTED IN THE FIELD
Vodacom, Airtel, Tigo, Halotel, on low-end handsets, dual-SIM, switching Wi-Fi to data mid-conversation.
africa-south1
DEPLOYED, NOT DIAGRAMMED
Backend live on Google Cloud in Johannesburg: Postgres, Redis, WebSocket gateway, push notifications.
EN + SW
BILINGUAL FROM SCREEN ONE
Kiswahili is not a translation pass bolted on at the end. It ships in the same build as English.
Family group
Voice call · 4 people
BUILT IN THE RIGHT ORDER
First, make conversation excellent.
Kijiji is growing deliberately. Each layer earns the next one, so discovery rests on communication people already trust.
Trusted communication
Phone signup, contacts, chat, voice notes, groups, and calls. In alpha on Tanzanian networks.
Sauti · voice intelligence
Kiswahili transcription, translation, and summary of the voice notes people already send every day.
Intentional discovery
Public profiles, communities, local events, and message requests.
Useful local commerce
Tools that help communities and businesses move together.
GOOD QUESTIONS
Before you ask.
THE FIRST HELLO IS COMING
Karibu Kijiji.
A new kind of social app is taking shape, starting with conversation.