🇿🇦South Africa

Cassava Technologies AI Factory

AI

Pan-African NVIDIA Cloud Partner deploying GPU-as-a-service and AI-as-a-service from data centers across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco, having procured 12,000 NVIDIA GPUs with the first cluster operational in Cape Town. It offers localized model support via its CAIMEx multi-model exchange.

InkubaLM

AI

InkubaLM-0.4B is a 400M-parameter open-weights small language model built from scratch by Lelapa AI for five low-resource African languages (isiZulu, Yoruba, Swahili, isiXhosa, Hausa, plus English/French), using a LLaMA-style architecture trained on 2.4B tokens.

Ozow

APIs

Ozow, formerly i-Pay, is a South African instant smart EFT and open-banking payment provider that lets customers pay directly from their bank account. Its API generates payment links and exposes transaction-status endpoints such as GetTransaction and GetTransactionByReference on api.ozow.com.

PayFast MCP

MCP

A TypeScript MCP server (npm @theyahia/payfast-mcp) wrapping the South African PayFast payment gateway with 8 tools covering payments and subscriptions. Part of theYahia's Emerging Markets MCP collection.

PuoBERTa

Tools

PuoBERTa is a RoBERTa-based masked language model purpose-built for Setswana, trained on the PuoData corpus by the Data Science for Social Impact group. It ships with example scripts for fill-mask, news classification, NER and POS tagging via HuggingFace Transformers.

Stitch

APIs

South African open-banking and pay-by-bank platform exposing a GraphQL API for Pay By Bank, Card, DebiCheck, Manual EFT, Capitec Pay and disbursements, with an in-browser Stitch IDE for building queries. Distinctive for its GraphQL-first developer experience.

Vulavula

AI

Vulavula is Lelapa AI's API platform for speech-to-text transcription and machine translation across South African and African languages (isiZulu, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, French), purpose-built for telco and financial-services contact centres.

Yoco

APIs

South African card-payments provider offering a developer hub with online payment APIs, SDKs, an API explorer, ecommerce plugins (WooCommerce, Wix, Shopify) and an MCP server for AI integrations. Docs hosted on a Fern-powered developer hub.

Yoco MCP

MCP

A TypeScript MCP server (npm @theyahia/yoco-mcp) wrapping the South African Yoco payment gateway and card-machine APIs with 8 tools. Part of theYahia's Emerging Markets MCP collection.

south-african-id-validator

Tools

TypeScript-native validator for 13-digit South African ID numbers that checks the Luhn checksum and extracts date of birth, gender and citizenship status. Zero runtime dependencies, runs on Node, Bun, Deno and browsers.

za-id-number

Tools

Python library to validate and parse South African (RSA/ZA) identity numbers using the Luhn check digit, breaking the number into birth date, gender and citizenship components. Installable with pip install za-id-number.

Luno

APIs

South Africa headquartered cryptocurrency exchange offering a REST API for account, wallet and trading operations plus a streaming WebSocket feed for market and order updates. Lets developers access market data, place orders and move crypto and fiat programmatically. Widely used across African and international markets.

Luno MCP Server

MCP

Official MCP server from Luno, published under the company's GitHub org, that wraps the Luno Cryptocurrency API for market data, trading and account operations. Written in Go with SonarCloud quality gates and a Homebrew tap. Luno was founded in Cape Town, South Africa and is a major crypto on and off ramp in South Africa and Nigeria.

Municipal Money (municipal-data)

OSS

API and web application by South African civic-tech NGO OpenUp that lets citizens explore the financial performance of South Africa's municipalities. Built in JavaScript and Python, it powers the Municipal Money site published with the National Treasury. It turns municipal budget and audit data into accessible public dashboards.

Peach Payments

APIs

African payment gateway serving merchants across South Africa, Mauritius and other regional markets with a Payments API, checkout, payment links, mobile SDKs and point-of-sale devices. Supports cards and multiple alternative payment methods behind a single integration. Documentation is published on its developer hub.

SouthAfricanIDValidator

Tools

A PHP package that validates South African ID numbers by checking structural rules, the embedded birth date, gender and citizenship digits, and the Luhn checksum. It is actively maintained with a substantial test suite. Installable via Composer.

Statistics South Africa Economic Time Series

Datasets

Official downloadable economic time-series from South Africa's national statistics office, including CPI, GDP, PPI, employment and trade indicators. Series are provided as Excel and ASCII flat files and refreshed on monthly and quarterly release schedules. Free public access with no login.

TextAugment

OSS

Python text-augmentation library from the Data Science for Social Impact group at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. It provides word and sentence level augmentation methods such as WordNet, word2vec and mixup to expand training data for NLP models. It is widely used in low-resource and African-language NLP research.

VALR

APIs

South African cryptocurrency exchange (licensed FSP 53308) providing a REST API for trading and a WebSocket service for streaming market, order and balance updates. Supports buying and selling 60-plus cryptocurrencies and withdrawing both crypto and fiat programmatically. API keys require account 2FA to be enabled.

Zabantu-XLM-Roberta

AI

Zabantu is a family of XLM-RoBERTa masked language models (roughly 80M to 250M params) trained from scratch on South African Bantu languages including Tshivenda, Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Northern and Southern Sotho, Setswana and Xitsonga. It serves as a benchmark for low-resource Bantu language NLP. It was built by the Data Science for Social Impact group at the University of Pretoria.