Building tech in low-bandwidth environments: How we engineered offline ride booking

Afeez Akinfola Oyinloye

In tech, we often romanticize scalability and sleek design—but in most African cities, the question isn’t “Can it scale?” It’s “Will it work without signal?”

In 2021, while building WakaForMe Ride, Nigeria’s first locally-built ride-hailing platform for secondary cities, I came face-to-face with a core challenge: internet unreliability.

In cities like Osogbo, where we piloted the platform, over 40% of neighborhoods had spotty or no mobile data access. 3G could vanish mid-trip. For a ride-hailing app, that’s catastrophic. It risked user abandonment, operational losses, and a broken trust cycle. So we pivoted. We built offline ride booking.

The Challenge

Most ride-hailing apps globally assume 24/7 internet access. But in Africa, users often toggle airplane mode to save data or live in areas with dead zones. We needed a system that allowed users to:

Book rides even without mobile data, Match drivers based on preset locations, Receive SMS confirmations, Complete rides with offline payment options.

Our Technical Solution

We designed a hybrid model combining, Location caching: User and driver locations were cached locally during their last online session.

Preset route matching: Users could save common locations (e.g., “Home,” “Market,” “Office”) in-app.

USSD integration: We built a fallback USSD service (e.g., 1311#) for users without smartphones.

Driver-side data sync: Drivers’ apps pinged cloud servers every 30 minutes to retrieve ride requests, reducing active data usage.

This model allowed users to schedule rides offline and receive pickup confirmation by SMS, with driver info and pricing included.

The Results

Within six months of launching offline features:

Ride completion in low-connectivity areas grew by 47%

Abandonment rate dropped from 31% to 12%

Daily active riders increased by 38% in peri-urban communities

What’s more, offline-first technology proved inclusive. Market women, artisans, and older users—often ignored by big mobility platforms—started booking regularly.

Lessons for African Tech

Building for low-bandwidth environments isn’t a compromise—it’s a competitive edge. Offline-first apps can unlock entire demographics and cities, driving adoption where global platforms fail.

Africa’s infrastructure realities demand that we reimagine how tech works—not in Silicon Valley, but in Surulere, Sapele, and Sokoto. Offline isn’t backward—it’s brilliant.