Why we exist
Ask anyone who has tried to source a service in East Africa and they will tell you the same story. Search engines return outdated phone numbers. The supplier on page one paid for placement. The "reviews" are friends of the owner. The address turns out to be a market stall that closed in 2019. You waste a week, you waste money, and you end up doing what people have always done — calling someone who knows someone.
That is the problem EABD was built to solve. Verified businesses, real customer reviews, transparent ranking, and direct contact with no middleman. We do not take a cut of the deal. We do not hide contact details behind a paywall. We do not let a business pay to be ranked above a higher-rated competitor. What you see on EABD is what is actually there.
What we do
EABD is three things in one place. First, it is a verified business directory — every business with a verification badge has had its registration number, physical address, and contact email confirmed by our team. Free listings get a profile and a contact button; paid listings unlock detailed profiles, photo galleries, product catalogs, job postings, and direct customer messaging.
Second, it is an AI-grounded search engine for finding the right business by what they actually do, not just by what category they tagged themselves with. Ask "who installs off-grid solar in Garissa with at least a 4-star rating" and EABD reads thousands of verified profiles to surface real answers. The search engine cites its sources — every recommendation links to the listing that produced it.
Third, it is a regional marketplace. Businesses post jobs that route applications directly to the owner. Buyers leave reviews that owners can reply to. Event organisers sell tickets and check attendees in at the door. Award seasons let customers vote for their favourite supplier and surface the regional best. Everything you would expect from a modern B2B platform, sized for the way East Africa works — M-Pesa first, English-default, mobile-shaped.
Where we operate
EABD covers six countries today, with full administrative coverage of each:
- Kenya — all 47 counties from Mombasa to Turkana
- Uganda — Central, Eastern, Northern, Western regions
- Tanzania — mainland regions and Zanzibar
- Rwanda — Kigali City and the four provinces
- Burundi — Bujumbura and the inland provinces
- South Sudan — Juba and the ten states
We chose East Africa because the region has the businesses, the buyers, and the broadband — but it has been underserved by global directories that treat Africa as one country and by local directories that never modernised. Our roadmap will see us cover the East African Community fully and selectively expand into the broader region as our verification capacity grows.
How verification works
"Verified" on EABD means a human at our verification desk has confirmed three things: the business is registered with the relevant government authority (KRA PIN in Kenya, URSB in Uganda, TIN in Tanzania, RDB in Rwanda, etc.); the physical address resolves to a real location; and the contact email is owned by someone with authority to speak for the business. Verified listings get a badge on every surface they appear — directory cards, AI search results, emails, schema markup, the lot.
Verification is offered at every paid tier, free of additional charge. We do not charge for verification because charging for verification creates the wrong incentive — businesses should be verified because they are legitimate, not because they paid extra.
How we make money
EABD's revenue model is transparent. Businesses pay an annual subscription to upgrade from a Free listing to Basic, Premium, or Lifetime. Higher tiers unlock more photos, more job posts, AI-powered Q&A on the profile, schema markup for SEO, and direct email campaigns. We also sell promoted placements in clearly-labelled slots (sidebar, in-content, top-of-search) — but no amount of payment can move a low-rated business above a high-rated one in organic results. Our ranking is rating, completeness, freshness, and verification — in that order.
We do not sell user data. We do not run third-party ads. We do not take a cut of the deals that happen between buyers and sellers on our platform. The business pays for its listing; the buyer uses the platform free.
The team
EABD was built by TECHenya Solutions, a software studio that has spent a decade building platforms for East African businesses, government agencies, and global NGOs. The verification desk is staffed by researchers who actually live in the countries they verify — we don't outsource verification to call centres in other regions.
Get involved
Three doors into EABD, depending on who you are:
- You run a business? Pick a plan and list it in under five minutes. Free tier available.
- You're hiring a supplier? Browse verified businesses by industry, country, region, and rating.
- You have a question or a problem? Reach out — every email goes to a human, replied within one business day.
The promise
Three commitments we will not walk back. We will keep verification free for every paid business. We will keep organic ranking honest — never pay-to-rank. We will keep the platform open enough that an LLM, a search engine, or a competitor can read our data and cite it. East Africa deserves a business platform that does not lie. That is EABD.