Savannah Pay — Pan-African Mobile Wallet

Savannah Pay is an ambitious pan-African mobile wallet platform designed to serve the forty percent of Sub-Saharan Africans who remain unbanked or underbanked. The project vision is to build a single application that works seamlessly across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, and Nigeria — handling local currency accounts, cross-border transfers at transparent rates, mobile money integrations in each market, and a merchant payment layer that allows small businesses to accept digital payments without expensive POS hardware. The technical challenge at the heart of Savannah Pay is building a multi-currency, multi-rails payment architecture that abstracts over the very different mobile money ecosystems in each country. In Kenya we integrate with Safaricom M-Pesa via Daraja API. In Ghana we work with MTN Mobile Money and Vodafone Cash. In Nigeria we integrate with Flutterwave and Paystack as intermediaries for bank transfers. The system must handle currency conversion, reconciliation, and compliance reporting across five regulatory regimes simultaneously. The mobile application will be built in Flutter for maximum code reuse across Android and iOS, with a strong emphasis on performance on low-end devices and offline resilience. The backend will be a microservices architecture in Node.js, with separate services for accounts, transactions, notifications, KYC, and compliance. All services will be containerised and deployed on Kubernetes, with event-driven communication through Kafka for transaction events and webhook delivery. KYC and identity verification is a particularly complex component — each market has different national ID types, different acceptable selfie and document quality thresholds, and different regulatory requirements for tiered KYC. We are integrating with Smile Identity for document verification and liveness detection, with a custom workflow engine that routes verification requests to the appropriate market-specific process. The project will be built in three phases: Phase 1 covers Kenya and Uganda with M-Pesa and MTN integrations; Phase 2 adds Ghana and Nigeria; Phase 3 adds merchant QR payments and the cross-border transfer product. We are seeking a core team of four specialists to build alongside Fatima as project lead.