Built from the Streets: How Nigeria's Informal Economy Inspired Vendoh
Before there was an app, there was a street
Every significant product has an origin that predates its code. For Vendoh, that origin is not a whiteboard session or a pitch competition. It is the streets of Nigerian cities. The mama-put stands, the roadside tailors, the makeup artists working out of their living rooms, and the electricians who are known only by word of mouth in their own neighbourhoods.
Nigeria's informal service economy is estimated to account for more than sixty-five percent of the country's GDP. It employs tens of millions of people. It feeds families, builds homes, and powers celebrations. And yet it operates almost entirely outside the reach of digital systems. It is invisible to technology, difficult to search, and almost impossible to verify from the outside. That invisibility is the problem Vendoh was built to solve, and understanding why it persists requires going back to where the idea first started.
The mama-put economy
In 2019, when I first sketched what would become Food Vendor Naija, the earliest ancestor of Vendoh, I was thinking primarily about mama-put vendors. For readers unfamiliar with the term, "mama-put" refers to the women, and occasionally men, who operate small, informal food stalls across Nigeria. They cook in their homes or under canopies by the roadside, and they serve some of the best food you will ever eat. Their businesses are real. Their skills are proven. Their customer bases are loyal.
But their reach is limited to whoever happens to walk past the stall. There is no Google listing, there is rarely an Instagram page, and there is no way for a hungry person three streets away to know that the stall exists at all. The entire business model depends on physical visibility and word of mouth.
When I wrote about Food Vendor Naija on my Geospatial Innovation blog, I proposed something that seems obvious in retrospect: give these vendors a digital presence tied to their physical location. Let customers find them through their phones. Let ratings and reviews build trust beyond the boundary of a single street. Let delivery agents extend their effective reach well beyond the corner.
What I did not fully understand at the time, and would only learn in the years that followed, was that mama-put vendors were simply the most visible example of a much larger pattern.
The pattern behind the pattern
Nigeria has an extraordinary service economy that operates almost entirely on informal networks. Consider how most Nigerians currently find service providers today. Someone needs a plumber, so they send a broadcast message to their WhatsApp groups. Replies trickle in. Some are recommendations from friends, some are self-promotions from vendors, and most are untested. The person picks one, hopes for the best, and has no recourse if the vendor delivers poor work or simply fails to show up.
This process repeats itself millions of times each day, across every service category imaginable. Makeup for a wedding. Catering for a party. Repairs for a generator. Tailoring for an outfit. Photography for a birthday. The demand is enormous, yet the discovery mechanism is fundamentally broken.
The informal economy is not broken because the services themselves are bad. Many informal service providers in Nigeria are extraordinarily skilled. A self-taught caterer in Surulere will often outperform any restaurant in Victoria Island. A neighbourhood electrician might have twenty years of experience and a flawless track record with every household on the street. The skills exist. The trust also exists, but only locally. What does not exist is a system that makes those skills discoverable, that trust portable, and that quality verifiable beyond the immediate neighbourhood.
Why Western marketplace models do not fit
Most global marketplace platforms were designed for economies in which services are already formalised. In the United Kingdom or the United States, a plumber typically has a business licence, a Google Business profile, insurance, and a body of online reviews before they ever list on a marketplace. In those markets, the platform's role is largely one of aggregation and convenience, collecting already-visible providers into a single searchable interface.
Nigeria's informal economy requires something fundamentally different. Here, the marketplace's first job is visibility, which means bringing providers into the digital world for the first time. Its second job is trust, which means creating verification and accountability systems capable of substituting for the formal business infrastructure that simply does not exist. Its third job is accessibility, which means designing an interface that works for people who communicate primarily through voice, who may not be comfortable typing detailed search queries, and who reasonably expect technology to meet them where they already are.
This is why Vendoh could not be built by simply localising an existing Western platform. It had to be designed from the ground up, informed by how Nigerian streets actually work.
What the streets taught us about trust
The original 2019 design for Food Vendor Naija included something that might seem unusual for a first-time app concept: partnerships with community health offices for hygiene verification. At first glance, it is fair to ask why a food delivery app would need to partner with local health authorities.
The answer is that this is how trust works in Nigeria's informal economy. Trust is not built initially through star ratings on an app. It is built through verifiable, real-world signals. A mama-put vendor whose stall is visibly clean, whose customers return daily, and whose name is known at the community health office has accumulated a form of trust capital that no algorithm can manufacture after the fact.
Vendoh's current verification system is more technically sophisticated than the 2019 concept, but it carries the same underlying philosophy. We do not ask vendors to create a profile and simply self-describe their skills. The platform is designed to build trust through multiple overlapping signals, including identity verification, customer ratings accumulated over time, consistency metrics, and community endorsement. The goal is to create a digital equivalent of the trust that already exists on Nigerian streets, rather than to replace it with an imported rating system that ignores local context.
Voice: the language of the streets
There is a specific reason Vendoh is voice-first, and it connects directly to the informal economy origins of the platform.
Walk through any Nigerian market, whether it is Balogun in Lagos, Wuse in Abuja, or Ogbete in Enugu, and listen carefully. Commerce happens through conversation. Negotiations are spoken. Recommendations are given aloud. The entire economic culture is oral, not written.
When I was building Food Vendor Naija in 2019, the technology for voice-powered interfaces was not yet mature enough to support a real marketplace. But the underlying insight was already present. A platform built for Nigeria's informal economy has to be built for how people in that economy actually communicate. Nigerians do not type queries like "affordable catering service within 5km radius with verified reviews". They say, quite naturally, "I need someone to cook for my daughter's birthday party this Saturday".
Vendoh's voice search is the technological realisation of something I understood in 2019 but could not yet build. It is not a feature added to make the app feel modern. It is a design decision rooted in respect for how Nigeria's informal economy already operates.
The road from streets to screens
When Vendoh launches, it will serve an economy that has been building itself for generations without any meaningful digital support. The makeup artist who learned the craft from her mother. The caterer who began by cooking for neighbours and now serves fifty-person events. The tailor who can recreate any design from a single photograph. These are the people Vendoh is built for, and they deserve a platform that understands where they come from.
Seven years ago, I looked at a mama-put vendor and saw a digital innovation problem waiting to be solved. Today, I look at Vendoh and see that same vendor's potential fully expressed: discoverable, verified, bookable, reviewable, and thriving.
Built from the streets. Designed for the future.
This is part of a series exploring the origins and philosophy behind Vendoh, Africa's voice-powered service marketplace. Alex Nwoko founded Vendoh after several years in geospatial technology and humanitarian data analytics.