Firm unveils application to locate addresses

To reduce the spate of failed deliveries in e-commerce space due to inability to locate an address, software development interns at Hotels.ng has created a referencing system for addresses that helps people find addresses in Nigeria.

In the absence of comprehensive address systems in Nigeria, landmarks and awkward descriptions are used to pinpoint places. That’s how phrases like “opposite the filling station” and “just after the junction” achieve notoriety in Nigeria’s lexicon.

Olayinka Success, developer at Hotels.ng and a group of interns sponsored by Hotels.ng began a project to define a new addressing format for locations across the country

Their idea is to uniquely identify places using a number of characters, for example NG-LA1600-OD-01. This string, when used to tag any location (for example a hotel), uniquely identifies it down to the exact building.

This is a scalable and flexible way to identify not just specific buildings, but can also be used to identify entire regions, e.g. the string NG-AK31UY would represent the entire region of Nigeria > Akwa Ibom State > Uyo > Uyo Urban.

“The product is still in its very early stages and it can only get better especially through collaborative efforts. We cannot possibly provide every address so we need people to contribute. People can actually suggest new addresses and flag those that might be wrong and need corrections.” says Olayinka Success.

Olayinka tells BusinessDay that the program why not an app behaves like one. It is hosted on the internet and typing http://locations.hng.tech/ in the url which will take the user to the site.