i
Design for the worst connection
I test on a throttled 3G profile before I test on my own machine. If a page needs more than 200 KB to be useful, something in it is decoration and I want to know what it's buying us.
Accra, Ghana · Available for work
I build web products
for people who are
building Africa.
Eight years of shipping interfaces, payment flows and dashboards — mostly for fintech, logistics and agritech teams working between Accra, Lagos and London. I care about pages that load on a 3G connection in Kumasi as much as they do on fibre in Shoreditch.
- Years shipping
- 8
- Products launched
- 34
- Median page weight
- 180 KB
- Based in
- Osu, Accra
— said out loud, more than once
01
Selected work
Six projects, 2021–2026. Client names used with permission; some figures rounded.
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Sika Ledger
Lead frontend · 7 months
A back-office tool for a Kumasi microfinance lender reconciling MTN MoMo and Telecel Cash statements against their own ledger. The hard part was never the UI — it was a matching engine that could survive duplicate reference IDs and half-written SMS confirmations. I built the review queue, the manual-match flow, and the export that their auditors actually accept.
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Kuapa Storefront
Design + build · 4 months
A direct-to-buyer storefront for a 400-member cocoa cooperative in the Western Region, selling single-origin beans to roasters in Europe. Built the product catalogue, the per-lot traceability page, and a checkout that takes both card and mobile money without a redirect. First order came in eleven days after launch.
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Trotro Route
Frontend lead · 5 months
Dispatch console for a last-mile courier running 60 riders across Greater Accra. Riders get an offline-first PWA that queues delivery confirmations when they lose signal in the hills around Aburi; dispatch gets a live board. We cut failed deliveries by roughly a third in the first quarter.
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Nkwa Health Records
Frontend + accessibility · 6 months
A records app for community health workers in the Eastern Region, used on cheap Android tablets in bright sunlight. Everything was designed at 200% zoom first and scaled down. Large tap targets, high contrast, no hover-only affordances, and a sync model that assumes the network is gone.
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Archive of Accra
Design + build · 3 months
A public archive of 1,200 photographs of Accra from 1957 to 1999, donated by three families. Built the catalogue, the IIIF-style zoom viewer, and a contributor upload flow that non-technical donors could finish without help. Now used in two university courses.
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Adesua
Founding engineer · 9 months
WASSCE revision platform for senior secondary students, built with two teachers from Achimota. 4,000 practice questions, offline packs for students without data, and a teacher dashboard that shows which topics a class is actually failing. Reached 22,000 students before I handed it over.
02
About
I'm Kwabena. I write code in Accra, and I've been doing it professionally since 2018.
I grew up in Tema, studied computer science at KNUST, and spent two years at a digital agency in Osu building marketing sites before I realised the work I actually wanted was the unglamorous kind — ledgers, dispatch boards, records systems. The software that a business runs on rather than the software it advertises with.
Since then I've worked mostly as an embedded frontend lead: I join a small team, take ownership of everything a user touches, and stay long enough to see it in production. I've been the first engineer on two products and the fourth on several others. I've shipped to users on MTN data bundles in Tamale and to procurement officers in Frankfurt, and the second group is not more demanding than the first.
I work in JavaScript and TypeScript, mostly React and Next.js, with enough backend to be dangerous — Node, Postgres, PocketBase, whatever the team already has. I'm not precious about frameworks. I am precious about page weight, keyboard navigation, and error states that tell the user what actually went wrong.
Outside of client work I maintain a small open-source set of Ghana-specific form helpers — mobile money number validation, region and district selectors, Ghana Post GPS address parsing — because I got tired of rewriting them.
Currently
Contract frontend lead at a Lagos-based payments company, three days a week. Taking on one new project from March.
Previously
Founding engineer at Adesua (2021–2022). Frontend at Osu Digital (2018–2020).
Tools I reach for
Next.js, React, TypeScript, Postgres, PocketBase, Tailwind when the team already uses it, plain CSS when they don't.
Languages
English, Twi, Ga (conversational), and enough French to order lunch in Lomé.
03
How I work
Four things I do on every project, whether the client asks for them or not.
ii
Ship the error states first
Empty, loading, failed, and half-failed are four different screens and most projects only design one. I build the other three before the happy path, because that's where users actually live.
iii
Keyboard and screen reader from day one
Not an audit at the end. Focus order, labels, and contrast get decided while the layout is still moving, because retrofitting them costs three times as much.
iv
Hand over something they can run
A README a non-engineer can follow, environment variables documented, and a deploy that doesn't depend on me being reachable. I'd rather be unnecessary than indispensable.
04
Get in touch
Tell me what you're building and roughly when you need it. I reply within two working days.