Haba Na Haba — Connecting food banks with communities in need

Food banks in underserved communities across Uganda and Nigeria had surplus food sitting in storage while families in the same communities went without. The problem was not supply. It was connection. There was no reliable, scalable way to match what was available with who needed it — especially in communities where smartphones are rare and internet access is inconsistent.

When Yielded Circle Tech joined the Tech To The Rescue Zero Hunger Hackathon, the brief was clear: solve food insecurity with technology. But the temptation in most hackathons is to build for the demo — a polished web app that looks great on a projector and reaches nobody in the real world.

We asked a different question: who actually needs this, and what phone do they have?

The answer changed everything.

The communities facing the most acute food insecurity were not using smartphones. They were not browsing the web. They were using basic feature phones — the kind that can receive SMS and dial USSD codes. Any solution that required a data connection, an app download, or a smartphone would miss the people it was supposed to help entirely.

The existing process for food distribution was manual — phone calls, WhatsApp messages between coordinators, paper lists, and word of mouth. It was slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale. Communities missed distributions. Surplus food expired. The system was failing the people it was meant to serve.

We designed and built a USSD-based application that works on any mobile phone — no smartphone, no internet, no app download required. USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is the same technology behind mobile banking codes like *737# — it works on every phone, on every network, instantly.

The application gave food banks the ability to register available food, specify quantities, and broadcast availability to registered communities. Community coordinators could query availability, reserve allocations, and confirm distributions — all through a simple menu-driven USSD interface that required nothing more than knowing how to dial a number.

On the backend, we built a management layer that gave programme administrators real-time visibility into stock levels, reservations, distribution status, and community demand — turning what had been an invisible, manual process into a tracked, auditable system.

We implemented observability tools to monitor the production environment, catching and resolving issues before they affected users — and built the system to handle concurrent sessions across multiple communities simultaneously.

The constraint of a hackathon is time. The constraint of this problem was trust — we were building for real communities, not a demo audience. We had to move fast without cutting corners on the things that mattered.

Discovery and scoping: We spent the first phase understanding the real user — not the hackathon judges, but the community coordinators and food bank operators who would actually use the system. We mapped the existing manual process step by step and identified every point of failure.

Architecture decisions: The decision to build on USSD rather than a web or mobile app was deliberate and central to the entire design. Every other architectural choice flowed from that — the session management system, the menu structure, the backend data model, and the monitoring approach.

Build and test: We built in parallel — USSD interface and backend simultaneously — with the team of 3 engineers taking clear ownership of separate layers. We tested on real devices, on real networks, before the submission deadline.

Result: The solution won the Tech To The Rescue Zero Hunger Hackathon and was presented to AWS for further development funding — which was approved.

The biggest lesson from Haba Na Haba was not technical. It was a reminder that the definition of a good product is not one that looks impressive — it is one that reaches and serves the person it was built for.

Choosing USSD over a web app was a counterintuitive decision that made everything harder from a development standpoint and made everything better from an impact standpoint. We made the right call because we asked the right question first.

This principle — understand the real user before choosing the technology — is now central to how Yielded Circle Tech approaches every project.