Alama Za Barabarani

In Tanzania, learner-drivers prepare for the provisional licence test from dense, mostly-English booklets and photocopied handouts. There's no easy way to self-test, no sense of progress, and the official SADC sign set is scattered across sources. People memorise blindly and walk into the exam unsure of what they actually know.

Alama puts every one of the 170 SADC signs in one place, in Swahili, grouped exactly the way they appear in the exam. Learning is broken into short loops (see a sign, learn it, test it) and progress is made visible with XP and levels so studying feels like advancing, not cramming. And because connectivity can't be assumed, the whole thing works offline.

I'd wanted to build this since 2014. I was learning to drive, and the driving school had exactly one book with all the road signs in it, so we'd photocopy its pages just to be able to study at home.

Making Alama was finally realising a decade-old dream: the resource I wished I'd had, in the language we actually think in, free for the next learner.