International perspective. Local understanding.
Sankofa is a private technology and consulting company established in Quebec, Canada, with operations and partnerships across Rwanda and the African continent.
Four habits that survive contact with the field.
None of these are novel. They are just the ones most often skipped.
We solve the problem, then write the software.
Five phases. Each one ends with something you own and could act on alone.
The Quebec ↔ Rwanda connection.
Canadian enterprise engineering discipline, paired with firsthand delivery in East African field conditions. The dual presence gives us access to global research while staying accountable to how things actually run on the ground.
The people who will be on site.
Engineers and consultants across Montreal and Kigali. The person who scopes your project is one of the people who builds it.
Our mission
To build practical technology that helps organizations solve real problems, decide earlier, and keep the value of what they build.
Our vision
A region where organizations use their own data and their own systems to grow — without renting their operations from someone else.
Two weeks on site and in your records, before a line of code.
On site, in the records, with the people doing the work. We write down the baseline.
A written scope with what is in, what is out and what it costs.
A scope naming what is in, what is out and what it costs. You could take it elsewhere.
Short increments you can see and challenge every fortnight.
Fortnightly increments you can use and criticise, not a reveal at the end.
Training in the language of the people who will use it daily.
Rollout with training in the working language, and a fallback for the first weeks.
Measured against the baseline we agreed at the start.
Reviewed against the baseline. If it did not move, we say that too.
Engineers who visit the site
The people who write the code walk the barn, the shop floor or the plot. Requirements gathered second-hand produce software nobody uses.
Local language as a requirement
If the people using a system think in Kinyarwanda, the system works in Kinyarwanda. That shapes the model work as much as the interface.
Offline is the default case
We treat a lost connection as normal operation rather than an error state, because in the field it is.
No lock-in by design
Source in your repository, data in your infrastructure, documentation good enough for another team to take over.