Why we built EABD
Ask anyone who has tried to hire a supplier in East Africa and you will hear the same story. Search engines return phone numbers that no longer work. Addresses lead to shops that closed years ago. The reviews turn out to be written by the owner's friends. You lose a week and some money, and in the end you call someone who knows someone.
EABD was built to fix that. We check business details, publish real reviews, explain our ranking in public and let you contact businesses directly. We do not take a cut of any deal you make, and we do not hide contact details behind a paywall.
What you can do on EABD
EABD brings four tools together, and each one feeds the others.
An AI-powered business database
Every business has a profile with its services, location, contacts, reviews and EABD Score. Ask a question the way you would ask a friend, such as “who installs solar in Garissa”, and EABD's AI works out the service and the place, then shows the businesses that fit. Every answer links to the profiles it came from, so you can check for yourself.
Private sourcing
Buyers describe what they need once, and EABD sends the request to paid suppliers who sell it in the right places. Suppliers see the buyer's industry and town but never the name, so the buyer gets honest prices without a flood of sales calls. If nobody quotes, the buyer's fee comes back as sourcing credit.
Quote requests and analysis
Quotes arrive priced line by line. EABD lines them up side by side, points out prices that look unusually high or low, and orders them by value and trust. What a supplier pays EABD never moves its quote up the list.
Email outreach
Businesses on the Premium plan can send email campaigns to other businesses on EABD in the industries they serve. The sender's business name is on every email, replies come back through EABD and anyone can unsubscribe in one click. Senders never see the recipients' email addresses unless a recipient replies.
Around these four tools sit the things a modern business platform needs. Businesses post jobs, sell event tickets and check guests in at the door, and compete in the EABD Annual Awards. Payments work with M-Pesa from the start.
Where we operate
EABD covers all eight partner states of the East African Community, down to the local administrative level.
- Kenya, all 47 counties from Mombasa to Turkana
- Uganda, every district in the Central, Eastern, Northern and Western regions
- Tanzania, the 26 mainland regions and the five regions of Zanzibar
- Rwanda, Kigali City and the four provinces
- Burundi, the five provinces created in 2025, from Bujumbura to Buhumuza
- South Sudan, Juba, the ten states and the three administrative areas
- Somalia, Mogadishu and all 18 regions
- DR Congo, Kinshasa, Goma, Lubumbashi and all 26 provinces
We chose East Africa because the region has the businesses, the buyers and the connectivity. It has also been badly served, by global directories that treat Africa as one country and by local directories that never modernised. Now that every member state is covered, our focus is depth. That means more checked businesses in every town as our verification team grows.
How verification works
A verified badge means a person on our team has checked three things. The business is registered with the right authority, such as KRA in Kenya, URSB in Uganda, TRA in Tanzania or RDB in Rwanda. Its physical address is a real place. And its contact email belongs to someone who can speak for the business. The badge then appears everywhere the business does, from search results and AI answers to its own profile.
We do not charge for verification. A business should earn the badge by being legitimate, not by paying extra for it.
Where our listings come from
Most profiles start as unclaimed listings built from public information. Our sources include official registers (such as Tanzania's Contractors Registration Board and the Uganda and Rwanda tourism licensing authorities), business directories that allow it, and open data from the Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA-Permissive-2.0). Towns and regions are matched using administrative boundaries from geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0). Owners can claim any unclaimed profile, and we correct or remove a listing whenever we are asked.
How we rank businesses
You should know exactly why one business appears above another, so here is the whole rule. Lists on EABD are ordered in four groups. Category Sponsors come first, then businesses running a promotion, then businesses on paid plans with the higher plans first, and then everyone else. Sponsored and promoted places are always labelled.
Inside each group, businesses are ordered by their EABD Score. The score reflects a business's overall presence on EABD, including things like verification, customer reviews, profile completeness and how quickly it replies. More on our How we rank page.
So yes, paying members appear before free listings. That is how EABD pays its way. What money cannot buy is better reviews, and in Sourcing it can never lift a weak supplier's quote above a strong one.
How we make money
Businesses pay for plans and for a few optional extras. Every listing starts free. Basic is a one-time payment that never expires, and Premium is paid once a year. No plan renews by itself. Before an annual plan ends we email a reminder with an invoice, and you decide whether to pay.
We also sell clearly labelled promotions and category sponsorships. A sourcing request costs KES 1,000 and sending a quote costs KES 200. Buyers search EABD and contact businesses free of charge.
We do not sell personal data, we do not run third-party ads, and we do not take a cut of the deals made through EABD.
The team
EABD is built by TECHenya Solutions, a software studio that has spent a decade building platforms for East African businesses, government agencies and international NGOs. Our verification team lives in the countries it checks. We do not outsource verification to call centres in other regions.
Get involved
- Do you run a business? List it free in a few minutes, then upgrade when it pays.
- Are you buying? Search the database or request quotes from several suppliers at once.
- Do you have a question or a problem? Get in touch. A person reads every message and replies within one business day.
Our promise
We will keep verification free. We will keep publishing exactly how we rank, and we will label every paid place. And we will keep EABD open enough for search engines and AI assistants to read and cite it. East Africa deserves a business platform that tells the truth about itself.
