Sports technology, codeAmani Labs
Kipaji
A mobile-first platform that makes Kenyan high-school athletes visible to scouts.
stack layers in one production system
fully role-gated user types
sports onboarded (football, field hockey)
Some impact figures are pending verification before publication.
The challenge
Talented high-school athletes in hard-to-reach markets are invisible to scouts. The platform had to work on low-end devices and low bandwidth, verify rosters through schools, capture match stats and game tape at the touchline, and bill scouts and schools through mobile money, all in one accountable system.
Our approach
A mobile-first PWA talks to a Hono API secured with Clerk bearer tokens. Verified school rosters, match capture, and discoverable athlete profiles sit on Neon Postgres, with game tape and photos on Cloudflare R2 for cheap delivery to bandwidth-constrained users. Scout and school billing runs through M-Pesa via Daraja, and notifications reach every device over Africa's Talking SMS, USSD, and voice.
Architecture
The stack, mapped to layers
Outcome
Kipaji is live (web plus API) with a pilot at St Anthony's Boys' High School in Kitale and two teams onboarded across football and field hockey. It is the clearest single demonstration of the vertical stack, touching six-plus layers in one production system, and it spins out adjacent business lines (apparel with school royalties, a transparent M-Pesa donation fund).
“Can you build a real, multi-sided, mobile-money-enabled, media-heavy platform for a hard market? Yes, and it is live.”
Have a build to de-risk? Let's talk.
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