The state of developer.go.ke (GavaConnect) is a complete joke and killing Kenyan tech startups
I was building a business verification feature for my website because you really can't trust users to submit accurate info. So I started researching whether any government APIs existed for this. That's when I stumbled onto GavaConnect, which looked promising at first. 20+ APIs, several of which seemed perfect for my use case. I got excited.
That excitement did not last.
Using this portal is a rite of passage into tech frustration. The dashboard constantly fails to load, developer accounts randomly refuse to log in, and OTP codes arrive a solid 10 minutes after you request them. If you somehow fight through all of that and reach the developer marketplace, you're greeted with a "No APIs found" error. The APIs don't even show up. But hey at least the gradients look nice.
Here's what makes this genuinely infuriating: Kenyan developers are constantly told to innovate, build local solutions, and stop depending on expensive foreign platforms billed in USD. But how exactly are we supposed to build world-class, ODPC-compliant products when the foundational APIs we need are locked behind a portal that doesn't work? Compare that to the EU, where developers can hook into unified corporate registries (BRIS) or VAT verification networks (VIES) and have production-ready systems running within weeks. Here, we spend weeks just trying to load a documentation page.
This is probably why most developers just quietly resort to Paystack and avoid the Daraja documentation rabbit hole altogether. I genuinely hoped that with AI lowering the cost and speed of building things, we'd start seeing better local infrastructure too. Maybe that's still coming.
If you think this is an overreaction, visit data.gov and see what well-organized public data infrastructure actually looks like and then imagine what African developers could build with that kind of foundation.