Mouhamadou Sall is mapping Africa’s invisible places, one photo at a time 📍🇸🇳

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Finding an address, setting up a meeting point, or getting a delivery without three follow-up phone calls — in many African cities, these everyday tasks are still harder than they should be. Improvised landmarks, vague directions, streets with no names: the lack of a structured addressing system slows down everyone, from residents to small shop owners. That very practical problem is what pushed one Senegalese engineer to rethink how places get located in the first place — by giving them a simple digital identity anyone can share.

A photo turns into an address 📸

As founder of NIMA Codes, a platform he launched in 2019, Mouhamadou Sall took on one of the weak links in African urban infrastructure: making every place identifiable, even when no official address exists.

The mechanism is deliberately simple. Users snap a photo of the place they want to register — a home, a shop, an office, any point of interest — and the app automatically attaches it to the corresponding GPS coordinates, generating a reference that’s easy to share.

The goal is to cut down on the long, back-and-forth directions typically given over the phone, and make locating a place as easy as sharing a contact or a pin on a map.

An ecosystem beyond mapping 🛍️

Over time, the project grew well beyond its original scope. NIMA Codes gradually added services built to support the local economy: NIMA Shop lets merchants set up an online storefront for free, while NIMA Pay handles sending, receiving, and managing payments. A built-in messaging feature ties it all together, making it easier for sellers and customers to communicate.

What started as a way to better pinpoint a location has turned into digital infrastructure for local commerce — making everyday transactions and interactions simpler.

An education shaped by three countries 🎓

Before turning to entrepreneurship, Mouhamadou Sall built a career defined by mobility and science. His academic path started in Senegal, at Université du Sahel, where he earned a degree in physics. He then continued his training in Canada, where Polytechnique Montréal awarded him an engineering degree in computer science.

That combination of scientific and technical training took him through several international environments. He first joined Nuance Communications, the Canadian company known for its voice recognition technology, before moving to Sonder, the American startup focused on hospitality tech.

Between African entrepreneurship and US-based engineering 💻

Today, Sall operates at the intersection of two worlds. On one side, he’s growing NIMA Codes with the goal of solving concrete problems specific to Africa. On the other, he works as an engineer at Clearly AI, where he focuses on automating design reviews, threat modeling, and security assessments.

The two paths might look unrelated, but they share the same underlying logic: using technology to solve real problems, whether that means global digital infrastructure or everyday challenges on the African continent.

Could a system like this actually change the way local commerce works near you? Let us know in the comments.