Zao Link - Hackathon Project

ZaoLink began as a hackathon challenge to tackle a familiar problem in East Africa: smallholder farmers struggling to reach urban buyers and steep post‑harvest losses in the supply chain. While my two teammates conducted field interviews, mapped supply routes and inspected storage sheds, I was called on to design and build the entire web platform. In just forty‑eight hours we delivered a working prototype supporting four user roles (Farmers, Buyers, Operators and Admins) that streamlines everything from produce listings to cold‑storage monitoring.

At its core, ZaoLink lets a farmer assemble a fully detailed produce listing in under two minutes: upload high‑resolution photos, tag harvest dates and assign quality grades. Buyers filter by crop type, location or grade, place orders and pay via an integrated M‑Pesa escrow system powered by Daraja APIs, which only releases funds once delivery is confirmed. Operators book solar‑powered cold rooms by the hour and monitor temperature and humidity through real‑time IoT sensors. Admins verify users, enforce quality checks and slice through consolidated analytics on a unified dashboard.

Although we didn’t roll it out beyond the hackathon, our judges were impressed, advancing us to the semi‑finals and validating that a lean, web‑first tool can move agricultural markets. Demo logins for any of the four user roles are available upon request.

Under the hood, ZaoLink runs on PHP 8.x and Laravel’s MVC framework with Eloquent ORM. The front end is built using Blade templates, Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js for a fast, responsive UI, and authentication/security is handled by Laravel Sanctum. Data is persisted in MySQL and cached via Redis. IoT telemetry from cold‑storage units is ingested through an MQTT broker and processed by a Node.js microservice, while real‑time updates are broadcast via Laravel Echo and Pusher. Source code lives in Git (GitHub), CI/CD is driven by GitHub Actions, and deployments are served on ShujaaHost.