Powering Africa's Largest Entrepreneurship Platform.

TEFConnect had been running on a PHP monolithic architecture. As application volumes grew to tens of thousands of concurrent users during programme cycles, the platform came under significant pressure. Load times became a measurable problem for entrepreneurs trying to submit applications. The user interface needed a complete rethink for the experience to match the ambition of the programme. Customer support teams were receiving high volumes of queries from applicants who could not complete submissions or could not tell where their application stood. The platform needed to grow into what the programme was becoming, not hold it at what it had been.

Manual document verification was the other constraint. Reviewing identity documents, checking for duplicate applications, and flagging discrepancies across tens of thousands of submissions required significant team capacity and still took longer than the programme timelines demanded. The opportunity was to use AI to do what human reviewers could only do slowly at scale: read documents, cross-check for inconsistencies, identify duplicates, and surface flagged applications to reviewers in a fraction of the time. Getting that right would reduce operational overhead, speed up disbursement cycles, and free the support team from the verification queue that was dominating their capacity.