Building for a city where addresses are landmarks
Most mapping assumes street numbers. Accra frequently does not have them.
Mapping software is largely built on an assumption: that places have addresses, and that addresses resolve to points. In much of Accra, directions are landmarks and relations. Opposite the pharmacy. Behind the school. The blue gate after the junction.
A platform that ignores this produces technically correct pickups at practically useless locations.
What we do about it
Three things, none of them clever, all of them necessary.
First, the pickup pin is draggable. Geocoding gives you a point; the rider knows where a car can actually stop. Letting them move it is the highest-value four seconds in the whole booking.
Second, pickup notes are a first-class field rather than an afterthought. "Side gate on the Ring Road side, not the main entrance" is information no coordinate carries, and drivers read it before arriving.
Third, gate and building information is separate again, because a security post that needs a name is a different kind of fact from a landmark.
Saved places
For journeys people make repeatedly, saving a place stores the corrected coordinates rather than re-deriving them from an address every time. This is why a saved school for a Topsy Teens arrangement is worth setting up once: the pin is right on every future trip without anyone remembering to fix it.
What we deliberately did not build
We did not try to invent an addressing system. Several exist; none is universally used, and a booking flow that requires a rider to know one is a booking flow most people abandon.
The pragmatic answer is to let people describe places the way they already describe them, and to give the driver both the point and the words.
The lesson
Localisation is not translation. It is noticing which assumptions in a piece of software do not hold where you are, and being willing to add fields that a product built elsewhere would consider unnecessary.