“I printed receipts, stood in queues, and watched the paper pile up. That's where this started.”
Paying dues meant a bank queue, a stamp, and an office
I was a student at Yabatech. To pay my faculty dues, I had to queue at the bank, print a receipt, walk it to my faculty representative to get it stamped, then take it to an office to actually use it. I remember standing in that office once and seeing a heap of paper — receipts and documents piled up, probably headed for the bin. Money spent on printing, hours spent in queues, for something that should take a minute.
I showed the code to my faculty rep before anyone else
I'd built things before, so I thought: let me use what I know. I wrote the first version myself and showed it to my faculty representative first. He tried it and said, “this works.” That reaction is what kept me going.
I researched why nobody was using the tools that already existed
Before building anything, I asked myself: why aren't faculties and departments already using Paystack or Flutterwave? These platforms exist. They work. So what's stopping student unions? When I looked into it, one of the core barriers was KYC — these platforms required business registration, tax IDs, and formal documentation. A faculty association isn't a registered business; it's a group of students trying to collect dues. That gap — between how communities actually exist and what payment infrastructure assumes they are — is exactly what Packet Africa was built to close.
Everything since has come from listening, not a roadmap
Once faculty and department reps started using it, they kept telling me what they needed next. That's genuinely how ticketing, voting, and storefronts got built — not from a plan I wrote alone, but from listening to the people actually running these communities, and building alongside them, again and again.
