Case · Community business directory · Botswana
Built for the phone people actually have.
A district business directory built for cheap handsets, expensive data and patchy rural signal.
- Build
- Mobile-first PWA directory
- Client
- SKHAT INVESTMENTS (PTY) LTD
- Based
- Kgatleng District, Botswana
- Scope
- Design → Build → Handover
- Live
- kgatlengconnect.co.bw
The product
Community Business Directory
Free to list. Free to search.
Kgatleng Connect is a business directory for Kgatleng District in Botswana, built for SKHAT INVESTMENTS and its founder Gofaone Thebe. Residents find local businesses by village, ward and category. Any local business can list itself free, with no account and no password. Alongside the listings the site carries community announcements, including government job vacancies. Reidify designed and built it end to end, then handed it over with an admin panel and written documentation so the client runs it himself. Most studios build for fast phones and cheap data. This project had neither, and nearly everything good in it came from taking that seriously.
Most studios build for fast phones and cheap data. This one had neither.
The numbers
24
villages
district coverage, frozen in the codebase
56
wards and dikgoro
Mochudi, mapped as it is
293
positions in one advert
office cleaner, primary certificate only
The geography, as it actually is
The district is held as frozen reference data: 24 villages, 56 wards and dikgoro across Mochudi, and 16 business categories. It cannot drift. During the build the client corrected our own model. Boseja South is a political constituency rather than a ward, so listings filed under it belong to Mmapole. Local knowledge outranked the data structure, and the structure changed to match.
Listing without an account
A business can list itself and be live in minutes, with no sign-up and no password to forget. That was a deliberate scope decision rather than a shortcut. The people most worth reaching are the ones least likely to have built anything online before, and designing for them shaped the rest of the product.
Built for the connection that exists
Fonts are subsetted by script so a page downloads only the glyphs it uses. Heavy animation was left out and WebGL was refused outright, with type and colour carrying the design instead. The site installs to the home screen and keeps listings and images readable when the signal drops.
What the build delivers.
Free to list, free to search
Any local business can put itself on the map without an account, a password or a fee.
Call and WhatsApp first
The primary action on every listing is the one people there actually use, rather than a contact form.
Readable without a signal
A progressive web app that installs to the home screen and holds already loaded listings offline.
His to run
A full admin panel and written handover, so the client operates the platform rather than depending on us.
The build
Reachable.
The directory carries government vacancies district-wide, including 293 office cleaner posts and 74 gardener posts that ask for nothing beyond a primary school leaving certificate.
Atmosphere
Every visual.
Generated imagery. It carries mood and scale, it is not evidence, and every rail below says so.
In their words
“I took a bit longer to decide on starting the project, but the moment I said "let's start," Rish had a demo ready for me to test within 3 days.”
Gofaone Thebe
Founder, Kgatleng Connect
Outcome
A district directory that opens on a cheap handset, lists a business without an account, and stays readable when the signal drops. It launched publicly on 1 September 2026, so there are no traffic, listing or revenue figures yet, and this record will not carry any until they are measured.
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