Humanitarian Logistics Platform

The Challenge

The platform needed to function reliably across Ukraine, Sudan, the DRC, and Somalia: environments where connectivity is intermittent, conditions change without warning, and a system outage carries real operational consequence. The technical requirements were unforgiving. The system had to work offline, sync cleanly when connectivity returned, and deploy simultaneously across web, iOS, and Android - all within a sub-three-month window. There was no margin for architectural shortcuts.

Our Solution

Kontorva assumed full engineering ownership of the Merelink platform. We did not augment an existing team or provide resource capacity - we were the engineering function, responsible for every architectural decision and every line of delivered code. The central architectural decision was offline-first design: building the system to function without a reliable connection as its baseline, with synchronisation as a secondary behaviour when connectivity was present. This inverts the typical development assumption and requires significantly more rigour in data consistency, state management, and conflict resolution logic. We delivered cross-platform simultaneously - web, iOS, and Android - using shared codebase strategies that preserved development velocity without compromising platform integrity. Real-time sync and data consistency layers were built to handle the specific conditions of crisis-zone deployment, not idealised network environments.

Results