World Bank-funded: Tanzania's national e-commerce platform, live at kipepeoshop.co.tz

Tanzania Posts Corporation now operates a national e-commerce marketplace. You don’t have to take my word for it; it’s live at kipepeoshop.co.tz. I’m the Project Manager on the programme that delivered it, working through Jenga Tech Consulting as a sub-contracted partner within a joint venture with an international technology partner. The platform is funded by the World Bank under the Digital Tanzania Project, and my engagement is ongoing.

The challenge

Before this programme, Tanzania’s e-commerce ecosystem was fragmented in ways that no single vendor could fix. The programme’s readiness work, completed before my involvement, had already mapped the gaps: no unified marketplace where Tanzanian sellers and buyers could meet, no interbank payment integration for online commerce, no mechanism for a consumer to tell a legitimate e-commerce site from a fraudulent one, and no integration with government tax systems. The result was predictable: low consumer trust, no standardised payment rails, and businesses unable to participate in the digital economy at any real scale.

Closing those gaps is not a website build. It’s a marketplace, a payments integration with the national interbank settlement system, a public key infrastructure for trust certification, and a government integration layer. Each component carries its own stakeholders, security requirements, and approval chain, and the whole thing is delivered by a team split across local and international partners.

The approach

I manage the full 59-week project lifecycle, from detailed design through development to deployment.

Design came first, and it was treated as a phase with teeth, not a formality. We produced data models, level 3 business process maps, and system architecture for every use case defined in the Business Requirement Document, with stage-by-stage approvals before any development began. On a government programme with this many parties, that discipline is what keeps fifteen-plus people building the same system instead of fifteen different ones.

From there I coordinated the joint-venture development team across the platform’s components:

• The marketplace: the storefront layer where sellers list and buyers transact.
• An Enterprise Service Bus: a standardised integration layer so that every ecosystem component talks through one contract instead of a web of point-to-point connections.
• Promise-to-Pay payment functions integrated with the Tanzania Interbank Settlement System (TIPS), so online transactions settle through the country’s actual banking rails.
• PKI infrastructure and a Trust Label system: cryptographic certification that lets legitimate e-commerce websites prove they are what they claim to be.
• Government tax system integration, so compliance is built into the platform rather than bolted on.

One deliverable I pushed to keep in scope rather than treat as an afterthought: knowledge transfer. We ran a DevOps shadowing environment for Tanzania Posts Corporation’s Innovation Center staff throughout delivery, so the people who will maintain and extend this platform learned it by operating it alongside us, not by reading a handover document.

The outcome

The platform is delivered and operational, to my knowledge Tanzania’s first unified national digital marketplace. The Enterprise Service Bus provides the integration backbone connecting the ecosystem’s components. Payments run through the TIPS integration. The PKI-based Trust Label system is deployed to certify legitimate e-commerce websites. The infrastructure runs across the eGA and TPC data centres with disaster recovery capability, and TPC Innovation Center staff have been through the full DevOps shadowing programme.

I’m deliberately not quoting commercial numbers here: sellers onboarded, transaction volumes, GMV. Those figures belong to TPC and the programme, and I’d rather show you nothing than show you estimates. What I can point to is the thing itself, in production, at kipepeoshop.co.tz.

What this engagement says about how I work: on a multi-party government programme, the project manager’s job is sequencing and honesty. Get the design approved before the code is written, keep the integration contracts stable, and make sure the client’s own engineers can run the system the day you leave. That’s what we did here, and the engagement continues.