EduAid

A student loan portal and companion mobile app for EduAid Africa, covering the full journey from applying for a loan through disbursement to tracking repayment.

Students across EduAid's partner institutions had no self-serve way to apply for a loan or see where it stood — the process depended on manual follow-up rather than a clear, trackable status.

I optimized for a fast, uninterrupted journey over feature breadth: since the portal sits entirely behind authentication, none of it needed to be indexable, so I could spend that SEO/SSR budget on speed instead — quick loads and snappy API-driven transitions between application, disbursement, and repayment states.

• Built the web portal on Vite and TypeScript rather than a metaframework, since authenticated pages didn't need SSR or SEO — trading that overhead for faster builds and page loads.
• Built the mobile app in React Native alongside the web portal so the application → disbursement → repayment flow stayed consistent across both surfaces.
• Kept the frontend decoupled from payment logic and backend ownership, integrating strictly against the API contract so loan-status changes (applied, approved, disbursed, repaying) rendered consistently regardless of which team changed the backend.

• Keeping a multi-stage loan flow — application, disbursement, repayment tracking — consistent across web and native mobile without a shared design system to start from.
• Representing loan status accurately across both apps when the state came from a backend and API owned by another team, with no payment integration on the frontend to cross-check against.
• Keeping load times fast for students on inconsistent mobile connections across the African markets EduAid serves.

• Now used across several partner institutions in Africa.
• Shipped the full web portal and mobile app in under six months.