The building blocks of African software.
Tofali (meaning brick in Swahili) provides the foundational knowledge layer for modern African engineering teams: independently-verified developer infrastructure, transparent payment fee benchmarks, and technical architecture guides.
Closing the Infrastructure Documentation Gap
African software engineering is constrained not by builder ambition, but by fragmented, opaque, and rapidly changing infrastructure documentation. Payment gateways change fee schedules without changelogs, webhooks exhibit undocumented retry behaviors, and API capabilities vary across jurisdictions.
Tofali provides an authoritative, neutral, and rigorously verified reference for developers building software across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, and the wider continent.
Core Principles
The architectural and editorial invariants that govern every piece of content on Tofali.
Zero Invented Facts
Every fee schedule, API endpoint, and capability matrix published on Tofali is backed by primary source evidence, official developer documentation, and direct sandbox testing.
Static-First Performance
Built with Astro and modern static generation, Tofali loads instantly across 2G, 3G, and constrained mobile networks with 0 KB of unnecessary client-side JavaScript.
Integer Financial Arithmetic
We never use floating-point math for monetary calculations. Every transaction fee calculation runs in integer basis points and minor units (kobo/cents).
Objective & Independent
Rankings and comparisons are strictly objective. We do not sell sponsored placements in directory listings or comparative evaluations.
The Payments Beachhead
Why we began our verification standard with African payment gateways.
Payment integration is the single most critical and error-prone component of African digital commerce. Between conditional fixed-fee waivers (such as Paystack's ₦100 fee waiver on transactions under ₦2,500), maximum fee caps (₦2,000 on domestic rails), HMAC-SHA512 webhook signature verification, and idempotency requirements, developers need exact math and implementation blueprints rather than generic marketing summaries.
Architectural Foundation
Engineered as a static-first, zero-database, zero-serverless knowledge system.