Why I'm building SaaS for East Africa
Most SaaS is built for Silicon Valley problems. Here's why I think the most interesting products of the next decade will be built for markets like Tanzania.
Every startup advice tweet says the same thing: find a problem you personally have, build a solution, charge money.
What it never mentions is that the problems people have in Dar es Salaam are fundamentally different from the problems people have in San Francisco. And the solutions need to be different too.
The context gap
Most SaaS tools assume things that aren’t true here:
- Reliable internet connection
- A credit card to pay with
- English as a working language
- Customers who trust digital payments
Build a product that assumes all four and you’ve immediately excluded most of Tanzania.
But that constraint is also the opportunity.
What I’m working on
AmigoCare started from a real problem: patients with chronic diseases in Tanzania often stop taking their medication after a few weeks — not because they don’t want to get better, but because the healthcare system doesn’t have the bandwidth to follow up with every patient.
The solution isn’t an app. Most patients don’t have smartphones. The solution is SMS — which works on every phone, costs almost nothing, and is already deeply trusted for things like M-Pesa payments.
So we built a platform that sends treatment reminders, collects adherence check-ins, and flags patients who’ve gone silent back to their healthcare providers. All over SMS. All in Kiswahili.
ZanzBot came from a different observation: Zanzibar’s tour operators get 80% of their bookings through WhatsApp. Every morning they wake up to 50 messages, manually copy details into a spreadsheet, and confirm each booking individually. It takes hours.
Automating that with a WhatsApp bot — one that handles booking confirmations, sends payment instructions, and updates availability in real time — isn’t a hard engineering problem. But nobody has built it for this market yet.
The real advantage
Building for underserved markets isn’t charity. It’s strategy.
Competition is lower. Customer pain is higher. And the willingness to pay for something that actually solves a real problem — not a first-world luxury problem — is surprisingly strong.
The next decade of interesting software won’t come from adding another AI feature to a todo app. It’ll come from people who actually understand their local market and build for it.
That’s what I’m trying to do.
If you’re building something for East Africa or similar markets, I’d love to hear from you.
Stay in the loop
New posts on building tech in East Africa, SaaS, and AI — straight to your inbox.