Name: Loccomaps
Availability: PreOrder
Author: Secco

The API

Maps, routing and places — as an API

Almost every map on a Tanzanian screen is rendered somewhere else, priced in dollars, and thin exactly where local detail matters: unnamed roads, informal settlements, the market that everyone navigates by but no dataset knows about. Loccomaps starts from local data and stays here.

Vector basemaps

Vector tiles built from Tanzanian geospatial data, styleable to your own brand rather than someone else's default palette.

Routing & directions

Point-to-point routing, distance matrices and turn-by-turn directions, with road classes that reflect how people actually move.

Places & POI index

A searchable index of places, landmarks and points of interest, built for local addressing where street numbers often do not exist.

Geocoding

Forward and reverse geocoding tuned to how addresses are described here - by ward, landmark and neighbourhood, not just street lines.

Boundaries & admin data

Regional, district and ward geometry for joining your own data to the administrative units your reporting already uses.

Served locally

Hosted in-country. Lower latency on local connections, and data residency that stops being a question you have to answer in a procurement document.

Built in layers

Take the whole stack, or one layer of it

Tiles, routing graph and places index are separate services behind one API. Use the basemap with your own routing, or the routing with someone else's tiles. Nothing forces you to adopt all of it.

REST and vector tile endpoints, keyed per project
Client libraries and styling that work with existing map tooling
Self-hosting for institutions that cannot send data anywhere

The data

Satellite imagery and GPS, checked on the ground

A map is only as good as what it is built from. Imagery tells you what is there; GPS traces tell you whether it works. Neither is enough on its own.

Imagery passes give the footprint: roads, buildings, land use
GPS traces confirm what is passable, and how long it really takes
Change detection catches what a survey from three years ago missed

Satellite imagery

Recent multi-source imagery as the base layer for extracting roads, buildings and land use - and for spotting what has changed since the last survey, which in a city growing this fast is most of it.

GPS & GNSS traces

Ground truth from field survey and vehicle traces. Imagery shows a track exists; GPS traces show whether it is passable, which way it runs and how long it actually takes.

Official datasets

Administrative boundaries, ward geometry and public registries, so your data joins to the units your reporting already uses.

Community mapping

OpenStreetMap contributors, universities and surveyors who know the ground. Local knowledge is what makes the difference between a map that renders and a map that is right.

Trilateration from overhead, corrected by traces collected on the ground.

Digital sovereignty

Infrastructure a country should own

Maps are national infrastructure. Today Tanzania rents that infrastructure from elsewhere, in a currency it does not print, on servers it does not control. Loccomaps is a concrete step in the other direction.

Priced in shillings

Billed in TZS, not dollars. No forex exposure, no international card required, and no invoice that changes size because the exchange rate moved. Budget it once and it stays budgeted.

Hosted in Tanzania

Tiles and API responses served from in-country infrastructure. A map request from Dar es Salaam does not travel to another continent and back before a pin appears.

Data stays home

Where your users are and what they search for is sensitive. It stays under Tanzanian jurisdiction, which turns data residency from a procurement obstacle into a checkbox.

Capacity built here

The people who build and maintain it are here. Critical national infrastructure should not depend on a support ticket in another timezone and a roadmap nobody local can influence.

TZS Billed in Tanzanian shillings — not dollars, not euros. No forex exposure on a line item your product depends on.

Built on top

Fully customisable apps, on local data

Loccomaps is the layer underneath. What gets built on it is the point — and these are the places the gap is widest.

Real estate

Plot and property search with catchment analysis, travel-time isochrones and neighbourhood context that buyers actually recognise.

Listing mapsTravel-time searchSite comparison

Agriculture

Farm and plot boundaries, route planning to collection points, and field data capture that works when the signal does not.

Plot mappingCollection routingExtension coverage

Finance

Agent and branch networks, coverage gaps, and location as an input to credit and risk decisions built on local geography.

Agent networksCoverage analysisBranch planning

Government

Registries and service delivery tied to real administrative boundaries, on infrastructure that keeps the data in the country.

Asset registriesService planningWard reporting

NGOs & development

Programme coverage, beneficiary mapping and field logistics, with offline-capable tooling for teams working outside network range.

Coverage mapsField logisticsImpact reporting

Logistics & delivery

Dispatch, route optimisation and proof of delivery for fleets moving through cities that no global router models well.

DispatchRoute optimisationLive tracking

Have a play

Pick a place, watch the call change

A sketch of the shape of it. Drag the map, toggle the layers, choose a place — the request and response beside it update to match.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $LOCCOMAPS_KEY" \
  "https://api.loccomaps.com/v1/places/search" \
  --data-urlencode "q=kariakoo" \
  --data-urlencode "near=-6.818,39.272" \
  -G

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.loccomaps.com/v1/places/search?q=kariakoo",
  { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${key}` } }
);
const { places } = await res.json();
map.flyTo(places[0].centre);

import httpx

r = httpx.get(
    "https://api.loccomaps.com/v1/places/search",
    params={"q": "kariakoo", "near": "-6.818,39.272"},
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {key}"},
)
places = r.json()["places"]

200 OK

{
  "places": [{
    "id": "pl_5b90",
    "name": "Kariakoo",
    "kind": "market",
    "centre": [-6.818, 39.272],
    "ward": "Kariakoo",
    "region": "Dar es Salaam"
  }],
  "currency": "TZS"
}

The plan

What happens from Day 01

Early, honest, and public. This is the shape of the first few months.

Day 01

Open the notebook

Repository, architecture notes and the data sourcing plan published on day one. The first commits happen in the open.

Weeks 1-4

Basemap pipeline

Ingesting and normalising Tanzanian geospatial data, then getting vector tiles rendering from it.

Weeks 5-8

Routing & places

A routing graph worth trusting, and the first version of the places and geocoding index.

Beta

Keys in hands

API keys to the first cohort of builders, with documentation and client libraries written alongside them.

Early access

Be first to build on it

Keys go out in signup order when the first release is ready. Early users get direct input into what ships next — if something is missing for what you are building, that is exactly what we want to hear.

An API key as soon as there is something worth trying
A say in what gets built after the first release
No newsletter — we write when there is something to try

Sponsors & partners

Back the project

Companies, NGOs, government institutions, universities and donors: this is infrastructure the whole country ends up using. Backing it early is how it gets built here rather than imported later.

Fund the build

Direct funding for engineering time, imagery licences and the infrastructure the platform runs on.

Contribute data

Satellite imagery, GPS traces, survey data, address registries or fleet telemetry. Data is often worth more to this than money.

Provide infrastructure

In-country hosting, compute for tile rendering, storage or connectivity. Keeping it local is the whole point.

Be a pilot

Put it to work on a real problem in your organisation and tell us honestly where it falls short.

Sponsor students

Fund placements for university students on the project - paid work on national infrastructure rather than an unpaid attachment.

Open doors

Introductions to data holders, institutions and the people who can make a dataset available.

Talk to us about sponsoring

No tiers, no pitch deck. Tell us what you could offer and we will tell you honestly whether it helps.

Organisation

Type of organisation

Your name

Work email

Phone

Website

How you would like to help

Tell us what you have in mind What you have in mind, and anything we should know about how you work.

We use your details only to talk to you about Loccomaps.

Call for collaborators

Come and build it with us

We are looking for university students and people who know maps — cartographers, GIS specialists, surveyors, engineers and domain experts. Paid, credited or for the experience: tell us which, and we will be straight with you about what we can offer.

University students

Geography, geomatics, GIS, computer science, urban planning. Real work on a real system, with mentorship rather than fetching coffee.

Cartographers & GIS specialists

People who know what makes a map honest: projection choices, generalisation, symbology and the limits of a dataset.

Engineers

Backend, data pipelines, tile servers, mobile SDKs. If you have opinions about PostGIS or vector tile schemas, come and use them.

Data & survey people

Surveyors, OpenStreetMap contributors, anyone who has collected ground truth and knows how wrong remote data can be.

Put your name down

Two minutes. You will get a confirmation straight away, and the repository and plan before Day 01.

Full name

Email

Phone / WhatsApp Optional.

University, employer or organisation

Your background

How you would like to be involved

Portfolio, GitHub or OSM profile Optional — GitHub, OpenStreetMap, LinkedIn or a portfolio.

Anything you want us to know What draws you to this? What would you want to work on?

We use your details only to talk to you about Loccomaps. No list, no resale.

Students, specifically

If you are studying geography, geomatics, GIS, computer science or urban planning, this is a real system with real constraints — the kind of thing worth putting on a CV. Attachments and final-year project scoping welcome.

Already mapping?

OpenStreetMap contributors, surveyors and anyone sitting on ground-truth data: talk to us early. Getting the data question right matters more than any code we write in month one.

Follow the build

Progress, dead ends and demos as they happen.

@secco_tz @secco_tz

Local maps infrastructure for Tanzania.