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Prafrica (product.africa)

Question

What does the landscape of digital African products actually look like?

Exploration

Curated directory and visualization of products built by African tech companies.

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Prafrica (product.africa) — desktop view

Changelog

Added autocomplete to the product search

The search box now suggests matching product names as you type, so you can find what you're looking for without finishing your query. Up to 8 suggestions appear in a dropdown — select one to jump straight to results.

Multi-country products now grouped with country badges

Products that operate across multiple countries now appear as a single row in the directory, with small country badges showing everywhere they're available. Previously these products showed up as separate entries per country, making the list feel repetitive and harder to scan.

Closed a security gap in product URL handling

Product URLs in the dataset weren't being validated before being rendered as links, which left a potential script injection vector open. Added a check that only allows http and https URLs — everything else gets blocked.

Refactored the codebase and added pagination

Cleaned up how the data layer is organized and fixed a few correctness bugs that had crept in. Also added pagination so the directory handles large datasets without slowing down.

Expanded to 700+ products across the continent

Grew the directory from the initial 50 to over 700 products from companies across Africa. The dataset is now large enough to start drawing real patterns about what's being built where.

Added full-text search across the directory

You can now search products by name or description. Makes it much easier to find something specific in a directory that's meant to grow significantly.

Launched with 50 products across 5 countries

First version of the directory — 50 products from 12 companies across 5 African countries. Small starting point, but enough to test the structure and see if the idea has legs.