dev.rw
Home Community Projects About Jobs Contact
about / who_we_are

A small community, doing real work.

DevRW is a Kigali-based group of software developers. We maintain a small set of open source libraries, run informal events, study AI together, and take on paid software projects that fund the rest. We started in 2020. Nothing about us is huge — and that's fine.

01 / story

How we sustain the community.

Open source is the part we love. Bills are the part we still pay. Paid client work — software development, developer placements — is what makes the open source side possible.

01.1

Custom development

We build production-grade web, mobile, USSD, and API systems. Community developers write the code; clients fund the open source side as a side-effect.

01.2

Developer placements

We match engineers from the community with companies looking to hire — full-time, contract, or project-based. No recruiter cut from your salary.

01.3

Social impact projects

When something we build can serve the public (like Itegure), we ship it under that banner — usually in partnership with government or NGOs.

02 / what_we_believe

Locally rooted. Globally curious.

We build for African contexts first. Rwandan data structures, multi-language UIs, low-bandwidth tolerant interfaces, USSD where USSD makes sense, AI fine-tuned for African languages. None of it is exotic — it's just the place we live.

02.1

Open source first

Anything we can publish, we publish. The Rwanda Locations Library exists because that data should be one npm install away.

02.2

Honest about size

We're a small community with two production projects. We don't inflate numbers to seem larger than we are.

02.3

Pay fairly, ship deliberately

Client work pays the people doing it. Code gets reviewed before it ships. TypeScript, tests, documentation — boring and durable.

03 / ai_focus
ai · ml · african nlp

A community studying AI together.

AI is the area DevRW is most actively investing time in right now — not as a buzzword, but as a real shift in what software can do. We approach it the same way we approach everything else: study together, build together, share what we learn, publish what we can.

03.1 study circle · weekly

Weekly AI study circle

A WhatsApp group and a recurring informal session where members work through papers, evaluate open models, share prompts, and walk each other through what they're building — hands-on demos, not slide decks.

  • Paper-of-the-week threads
  • Open evaluations of OSS models
  • Hands-on prompt & agent clinics
03.2 african nlp

Kinyarwanda & African NLP

Most foundation models barely speak Kinyarwanda. Members are building and evaluating models for African languages, and publishing the datasets along the way.

  • Open benchmark datasets
  • Fine-tuning on local corpora
  • Kinyarwanda translation evals
03.3 applied ai

AI-augmented tooling

RAG over local datasets, USSD bots backed by LLMs, AI-assisted code review, classifiers for African product data — tools we use ourselves, then publish.

  • RAG & retrieval systems
  • LLM-backed USSD bots
  • Open source when ready
Join #ai
04 / track_record

What we've actually shipped.

A short list of real work. We update this when there's something to add — not before.

projecttypeyeardetail

Rwanda Locations Library

TypeScript library for Rwanda's administrative tree.

 open source 2024 — present 14,837 villages indexed

Itegure

Web & USSD platform built with the Rwanda Education Board during COVID-19 school closures.

 partnership 2020 en · kin · fr · ussd

Want to work with us?

Two routes in: hire developers from the community, or start a project together.