Port Harcourt Has Been Reporting Its Problems on WhatsApp for Years. Two Builders Just Fixed That.

Port Harcourt Has Been Reporting Its Problems on WhatsApp for Years. Two Builders Just Fixed That.

The story of AiWee, a civic incident reporting platform built for Port Harcourt and Rivers State by two developers at Renaissance Innovation Labs.

Every city has an informal information network. In Port Harcourt, that network runs primarily through WhatsApp.

When a road floods on the way to Mile 1. When a transformer explodes in D-Line. When a pothole claims a motorcycle on Rumuola Road. When a pipeline begins leaking near a residential compound. The people who witness these things reach for their phones and send a message to the closest group they belong to.

The message gets reactions. Someone asks for the exact location. Someone else forwards it to another group. By the time the information has traveled two or three groups down the chain, the original photo has been compressed beyond recognition, the location is described as near that eatery close to the junction, and the agency responsible has no idea any of this is happening.

The report existed. The problem existed. Nothing changed.

This is not a Port Harcourt problem exclusively. It is a Nigerian infrastructure problem with a Port Harcourt face. But the specific texture of it here, the flooding that returns every rainy season, the oil-related environmental incidents that have become so frequent they barely register as news, the roads that have not been properly maintained in years, gives it a particular urgency that anyone who has lived in this city understands intimately.

Kelvin Dilton and David Aroh understood it. And they decided to build something better than a WhatsApp group.

A resident who encounters a civic problem, whether flooding, road damage, a power outage, a security concern, an environmental hazard, or a public service failure, opens AiWee in their browser, submits a report with photographic evidence and their precise GPS location, and creates a record that is structured, traceable, and built to be acted upon.

The platform requires no application download. It runs in any modern mobile browser, which matters in a city where the friction of downloading and installing a new application is enough to prevent many people from reporting anything at all.

AiWee was built as a Vite and TypeScript single-page application deployed on Vercel, with Google Gemini handling classification, summarization, and verification scoring across every incoming report.

WHY A WHATSAPP GROUP IS NOT ENOUGH

The distinction between a report on AiWee and a message in a WhatsApp group is not simply organizational. It is a distinction in credibility.

AiWee uses Google Gemini to assist with the verification and triage of every report submitted. The AI classifies the incident, flags potential duplicates, identifies reports that may lack credibility, and produces a verification score that determines how prominently the report is surfaced to the community and to relevant authorities.

The result is not a feed of unfiltered complaints. It is a credibility-weighted, evidence-backed picture of what is actually happening on the ground in Port Harcourt, built from information that residents submitted themselves.

The decision to make camera access and geolocation first-class requirements of the reporting flow was deliberate. A report without a photo is a claim. A report without a location is a story. AiWee was built on the premise that civic accountability requires evidence, and the platform requests both from the moment a resident begins a report.

WHERE RIL CAME IN

Renaissance Innovation Labs was not just a location for Kelvin and David. It was the infrastructure that made AiWee possible.

The space gave them a place to build without distraction. The community gave them access to people who understood their technical stack and could push their thinking further. The culture at RIL, where builders are taken seriously regardless of their background or resources, gave them the confidence to pursue a product that addresses a problem most people in this city have accepted as permanent.

RIL operates on a single conviction that where you are born should not determine how far you can build. For Kelvin and David, that conviction extended beyond career and product into something more fundamental. It extended into the city itself. If you are going to build in Port Harcourt, you should build for Port Harcourt.

WHO AIWEE SERVES

The people AiWee serves extend beyond individual residents.

Community leaders tracking patterns of infrastructure failure across a neighborhood. Civil society organizations documenting environmental violations. Journalists covering conditions across Rivers State. Local government agencies that need reliable ground-truth data rather than second-hand information.

All of them benefit from a verified civic data layer that currently does not exist in any structured form in Port Harcourt.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR NIGERIA

Nigeria has hundreds of millions of people living in cities and communities where infrastructure gaps are visible, persistent, and routinely underreported. The gap between what residents experience daily and what reaches the attention of the agencies responsible for addressing it has been wide for a long time.

That gap exists partly because of politics, partly because of limited resources, and partly because the information infrastructure for civic reporting in this country has simply never been built properly.

AiWee is the beginning of that infrastructure for Port Harcourt. A credible, structured, AI-verified system for reporting what is actually happening on the ground. Built here, by people from here, who understand exactly what this city needs and what it has been waiting for.

AiWee is live and accepting reports from Port Harcourt and Rivers State residents.

If you live in Port Harcourt and you see a problem that needs to be reported, AiWee was built for you.

This is part of The Builders, a series from Renaissance Innovation Labs profiling the founders, developers, and problem-solvers building the future from Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Renaissance Innovation Labs | 19B Ada George Road, Port Harcourt | renaissancelabs.org