For decades, Africa has lacked a reliable addressing system, a gap that has hindered e-commerce, financial services, and logistics. Across 54 countries and 1.4 billion people, many locations cannot be formally verified, creating friction for businesses and consumers alike.
Swiss-based location intelligence startup Bwendi said on Thursday it has deployed a system capable of turning GPS coordinates into verifiable digital addresses, bypassing the need for street signs or government-issued postal codes.
Founder Francis Osih previously led Cameroon’s national digital addressing project in 2019. Despite technical success, the system was discontinued due to corruption and bureaucratic hurdles. “We needed to build something that could not be switched off,” Osih said. “Not dependent on a single government, but usable by anyone building for Africa.”
The platform is now based in Switzerland and designed to operate independently of any state. In many African cities and rural areas, directions rely on landmarks rather than numbered streets. Phrases such as “turn after the church, next to the blue pharmacy” are common. While intuitive for people, these directions are difficult for digital systems that require precise, standardized location data.
Bwendi’s API converts any GPS coordinate into a structured address, enriched with local economic and commercial context. Responses are delivered in under 20 milliseconds and localized in more than 30 African languages. Rather than simply labeling a place, the system attempts to define its economic relevance, supporting credit scoring, logistics optimization, and marketplace expansion.
Africa receives less than 3 percent of global venture capital. Analysts cite infrastructure gaps, such as addressing, as a key reason for investor hesitation. okHI has been building a similar platform for years but Bwendi aims to reduce friction for fintechs, logistics firms, and online marketplaces by providing a standardized “address-of-record.”
The company said its platform currently covers all 54 African countries, supports 1.4 billion people, indexes over 19 million commercial points of interest, and delivers responses in approximately 20 milliseconds. The API is publicly available to developers and enterprise partners at https://bwendi.com/en/africa.
The success of digital addressing systems depends on adoption. Bwendi’s platform aims to make Africa’s locations legible to the digital economy, but its impact will hinge on how widely it is integrated by businesses and governments.