Sandshade started in 2019 because we kept watching Nigerian businesses get beaten by the infrastructure around them — not by the quality of what they were doing. Importers sourcing goods from China couldn't pay their suppliers reliably. Schools were chasing parents for fees on WhatsApp. Government programmes with real money to disburse had no good way to recruit, track, or pay the field teams they needed. The gaps weren't mysteries. They just hadn't been filled.
So we started filling them. First: cross-border payments, moving Naira to Chinese suppliers in yuan at consistent rates. Then Reenjar — a school fee management platform that gives Nigerian schools a proper dashboard and gives parents a mobile app to pay from anywhere. Then field operations infrastructure, built to recruit, manage, and disburse payments to distributed teams across all 36 states. Then government M&E portals, monitoring & evaluation systems, and digital data collection platforms deployed on AWS at national scale.
Each product started the same way: we saw something broken, understood it closely enough to know what a working version looked like, and built it. We're a small, deliberate team based in Kano. We don't try to cover everything. What we pick up, we see through — and we stay involved long enough to know it works in the field, not just on paper.