Description

Kukura is a digital platform designed to empower community-based organizations in Mozambique with essential tools for growth, fundraising, and management. The platform enables organizations to build their profile, identify areas for improvement, access personalized resources, and receive donations through multiple payment methods including M-Pesa, E-Mola, PayPal, and bank transfers. With a robust admin dashboard, role-based access control, push notifications, and bilingual support (Portuguese & English), Kukura delivers a complete ecosystem for sustainable social impact. The mobile app is available on the Google Play Store.

My Role and Contributions

• Backend Architecture & API Development: Designed and developed the entire backend infrastructure and RESTful API using Laravel , including user authentication (OAuth2), organization management, donation processing, and notification systems. 

• Admin Dashboard: Built a comprehensive admin panel with role-based access control (RBAC) supporting 7 distinct roles with granular permissions for managing organizations, donations, users, and content. 

• Payment Integration: Integrated multiple payment gateways including M-Pesa (mobile money), E-Mola, PayPal (one-time and recurring subscriptions with webhook support), and bank transfers, with multi-currency support (MZN and USD). 

• Team Coordination: Led and coordinated the development team, overseeing project planning, task distribution, code reviews, and ensuring alignment between the mobile app and backend systems. 

Key Features

• Multi-Payment Gateway: Supports M-Pesa, E-Mola, PayPal (one-time & subscriptions), and bank transfers with automatic currency switching between MZN and USD based on user location. 

• Role-Based Admin Panel: Full-featured dashboard with 7 roles and granular permissions for managing organizations, donations, withdrawals, verifications, content, and user accounts. 

• Organization Management: Complete organization lifecycle management including profiling, scoring system, verification levels, resource Q&A, and cause/project management with approval workflows. 

• Push Notifications & SMS: Real-time push notifications via Firebase and SMS delivery through Twilio for donation confirmations, withdrawal updates, and system alerts. 

• Bilingual Support: Full Portuguese and English support across the UI and database content, with dynamic language switching via middleware. 

• Reports & Exports: Excel and PDF export capabilities for donation reports, receipts, and organizational data using Maatwebsite Excel and DomPDF. 

• Blog & CMS: Integrated content management system with blog articles, categories, and rich text editing via TinyMCE for publishing organizational stories and updates. 

Technology Stack

• Backend Framework: Laravel with RESTful API architecture, Laravel Passport (OAuth2) for authentication, and Spatie Laravel Permission for RBAC. 

• Frontend (Admin Dashboard): Blade templating engine with Bootstrap 5, Sass, Vite 5 for asset bundling, Yajra DataTables for dynamic data display, and TinyMCE for rich text editing. 

• Database: MySQL/MariaDB with 75+ migrations covering users, organizations, donations, payments, subscriptions, RBAC, and multilingual content. 

• Payment Services: M-Pesa SDK (samuelbie/mpesa), PayPal REST API (srmklive/paypal) with subscription and webhook support, multi-currency handling. 

• Notifications: Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications and Twilio SDK for SMS delivery. 

• Reporting: Maatwebsite Excel for spreadsheet exports and DomPDF (barryvdh/laravel-dompdf) for PDF report generation. 

• DevOps & Deployment: Docker (Dockerfile + docker-compose) with Apache configuration, supporting MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL environments.