Eleven things we won't trade away.
The principles we built the platform around — and that the company has to live by, not just talk about.
African data stays in African data centres.
Everything runs on servers in Johannesburg. No fallback region in another country, no copies kept elsewhere, no third-party AI provider that needs to see the data on its way through.
Knowledge contributions get recognised and paid for.
Every contribution is recorded against the person who made it. When it gets used, they get paid. They can see what was used, by whom, and what they were paid for it.
Certificates can be checked from the outside.
A buyer should be able to verify a certificate from the QR on a pack, in the field, without trusting our database or even having an internet connection.
Compliance is part of how the system is built.
POPIA, NEMBA, Nagoya and BABS rules are written into the way the system behaves — enforced at the API, visible in the interface — not added as an afterthought.
Local languages first.
isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho and Ndebele are not extras. The platform meets contributors in the language they actually use.
Works offline.
Conservation work happens in places with poor signal. The field app works on 2G, on a slow connection, or with nothing at all until you reach a network again.
No greenwashing.
A metric that cannot be defended in front of an auditor and a journalist does not get shipped.
No tools for biopiracy.
Contributors can choose to publish their knowledge to the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, and we help defend it if a patent claim shows up. Knowledge belongs to the people who hold it.
Open about ourselves, careful with customer data.
The compliance library, the trust centre, the sub-processor list and the platform status are all public. Customer data is not.
Patience before scale.
We onboard carefully. We launch carefully. We expect to still be here in 2050.
These principles are bigger than the founders.
We write them down so that whoever runs Muranga after us knows what they inherited and what they cannot trade away.