Adwuma: Project Management Built for How African Trade Businesses Work

The Brief

The established project management tools are built for office software teams. They assume salaried staff, predictable payment terms, and clients who are themselves organised on the same tools. That set of assumptions does not describe how trade businesses across Africa actually operate.

Adwuma set out to fill that gap: the task and project management capability of a ClickUp or an Asana, but designed around invoicing as a core function rather than an integration, and around the payment and working patterns of the African trade market.

The Challenge

Building for a market the incumbents have ignored means the gap is not a missing feature — it is a set of assumptions that do not hold. Work in the trades is quoted, delivered and invoiced in ways generic project tools treat as an afterthought, if at all. Invoicing had to be part of the core model, not something bolted on through a third-party integration.

Serving many independent businesses from one product made multi-tenancy the decision everything else depended on. Get the isolation boundary wrong and one business can see another's clients, quotes and invoices — the kind of failure a young platform does not recover from. Every query, background job and uploaded file has to be tenant-aware by default, not by a developer remembering to add a filter.

Trade work also does not happen at a desk. A platform used on site needs to work on a phone as a first-class client, not as a cut-down version of the web application.

What We Built

We built Adwuma on Laravel with tenancy enforced at the data layer, making isolation a property of the system rather than a rule developers must remember to follow.

AI is applied inside project management itself rather than as a separate feature — assisting with the work of planning and tracking rather than sitting alongside it. Both Gemini and Claude are integrated, so each model can be used where it performs best rather than committing the product to a single vendor.

Real-time notifications run over WebSockets via Laravel Reverb, so updates reach users immediately without the battery and bandwidth cost of polling — which matters on mobile networks. The web front end is a React single-page application, with a React Native app sharing the same API for use on site. A cross-tenant admin panel provides operational oversight, and six report types cover the questions businesses actually ask about their work.

Delivered

• Multi-tenant architecture with isolation enforced at the data layer
• Project and task management designed around trade workflows
• Integrated invoicing as a core function, not an add-on
• AI assistance built into project management, using Gemini and Claude
• Real-time notifications over WebSockets using Laravel Reverb
• Six report types for operational insight
• React SPA plus a React Native mobile application
• Cross-tenant admin panel for platform oversight

Technology

Laravel · React · React Native · Laravel Reverb · Gemini · Claude · MySQL

The Outcome

Adwuma is live and in daily use by real businesses. Organisations run their projects, track their work and invoice their clients through one platform, across web and mobile, with updates arriving in real time.

The eight-month build produced a complete commercial product rather than a pilot: tenant isolation means onboarding a new business is routine rather than an engineering task, and the platform serves a market the established tools were never shaped around.

• Live in production with active users
• 8 months from concept to launch
• Web and mobile applications sharing one API