02 · The Thesis
Informal traders, smallholder farmers, boda boda riders, jua kali artisans — they generate the bulk of livelihoods on the continent yet appear in no national accounts, no bank credit files, no rights registries with anything close to fidelity. We reject the framing that this is a measurement problem. It is a design failure, traceable to three specific causes: the instruments are wrong, the incentives are wrong, and the design discipline is missing.
01
The participant sees themselves before anyone else does. Optimisation, monetisation, and policy use cases come after the participant has a usable mirror of their own activity.
02
Data, identity, models, and standards stay under African governance. We are not building extraction pipes for global platforms, surveillance pipes for any government, or training data for someone else's model.
03
Each thing we build is a product with its own users, revenue, and multi-year roadmap — not a pilot, not a deliverable, not a feature in someone else's stack.
03 · Portfolio
Shield
Digital intelligence platform for Kenya's grassroots government administration network.
NGAO makes Kenya's ~15,000-strong National Government Administrative Officers operationally intelligent — WhatsApp-native reporting, AI-assisted decision support, satellite-fused Common Operating Picture, and M-Pesa-mediated value flows for verified community reports.
In the streets
WhatsApp-native identity, contracts, splits & ISRC rails for Kenya's creative economy.
Studio Mtaani is a four-layer platform: WhatsApp-native copyright identity → unified national metadata registry → open royalty marketplace → skills and export infrastructure. Delivered under State contract via KECOBO.
Contract-to-cash
Turning 7.4M Kenyan MSMEs from invisible-to-credit to legible-and-bankable.
A WhatsApp-native contract-to-cash and dispute resolution rail: Handshake (Mkataba AI) turns each transaction into structured financial identity. Haki handles dispute resolution from the same conversation thread. BoxCommerce makes the jua kali economy transactable.
People
Identity layer for the unseen economy — making informal workers visible as legitimate economic actors.
Watu is the foundational identity rail that every other Jabali product builds on. It enables informal workers to accumulate verifiable identity, history, and reputation that they control — without surveillance.
04 · How we work
Visibility before optimisation
The participant sees themselves before anyone else does. Optimisation, monetisation, and policy use cases come after the participant has a usable mirror of their own activity.
Sovereignty by design
Data, identity, models, and standards stay under African — often community-level — governance. We are not building extraction pipes for global platforms.
Contextual intelligence
Local languages, oral knowledge, trust-mediated relationships, mobile-first realities, cash-mediated transactions — first-class design inputs, not edge cases.
Integrity over speed
Where rights, security, or sovereignty are at stake, we ship slower and audit harder. The cost of moving fast is borne by the people who can least afford it.
Product, not project
Every thing we build has its own users, revenue model, and multi-year roadmap. Not a pilot. Not a deliverable. Not a feature in someone else's stack.
Plain language
External communication leads with what the product does and for whom. Concepts are defined when used. No jargon that obscures the stakes for real people.
Refuse extraction
No data deal, no partnership, no investor that requires the studio to compromise the sovereignty stance — regardless of headline value.
Work with Jabali
If you are an investor, DFI, government counterparty, or implementation partner interested in Jabali Studios or any of our products, we want to hear from you.