We're building Akawo, a digitised Ajo (rotating savings/thrift) platform, for the Nomba x DevCareer Hackathon — participating in both the Subscriptions Engine (primary) and Virtual Accounts as Infrastructure (secondary) tracks.
Akawo takes the traditional Nigerian Ajo/Esusu rotating savings model and rebuilds it as modern infrastructure on top of Nomba's payment rails. The project is split into two architecturally separate layers:
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Subscription Engine: The Akawo Subscriptions Engine (ASE) — a domain-specific recurring billing and cycle orchestration engine built as a reusable primitive on top of Nomba's payment infrastructure. It owns the full cycle lifecycle: scheduling, member debiting, grace period management, retry logic, payout disbursement, and state machine transitions.
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Akawo Backend: The consumer-facing Reference App API — a NestJS service demonstrating the engine in action. Handles user onboarding, KYC, group (cycle) management, member invites, rotation scheduling, and payout disbursement via the Nomba Transfers API.
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Akawo React App: The consumer-facing frontend — React / TypeScript / Vite, styled with TailwindCSS. Where members create cycles, track contributions, and watch the pot rotate.
The split is intentional: the engine is a reusable primitive that could power other subscription/rotating-payment products; the reference app is one concrete use case built on top of it.
