Rivers State House of Assembly — AI-Powered Civic Engagement Platform

The brief

The Rivers State House of Assembly needed a digital platform that did more than a static website. Citizens had no straightforward way to find their representatives, track active bills, or follow committee work. Press accreditation was paper-based. Internal staff still routed questions through phone calls and WhatsApp.

We were brought in to design and build a single, accessible platform that would set a new bar for what a Nigerian state legislature’s web presence could look like.

What we built

A comprehensive civic-engagement platform with:

• Member directory — full profiles for every honourable member, constituencies, committee memberships, attendance records, and direct contact channels.
• Committee structures — every standing and ad-hoc committee, scope of work, members, and current proceedings.
• Legislative tracking — bills, motions, and resolutions with status, sponsors, and full document history.
• AI-powered search — a retrieval-augmented natural-language search that lets a citizen or journalist ask, “what bills has my representative sponsored on education?” and get accurate, cited answers.
• Accessibility-first design — WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, keyboard-first navigation, and African-first performance (sub-2-second loads on 3G).
• Press & media centre — accreditation forms, press releases, and a structured archive.

How we built it

The platform runs on Laravel and MySQL, deployed behind Cloudflare with full image optimisation, lazy hydration, and aggressive HTTP caching. The AI layer is a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) system that indexes every legislative document and serves grounded answers — the model never hallucinates a bill that does not exist.

For accessibility, we used semantic HTML, ARIA where it actually adds value, and tested every flow with screen readers and keyboard-only navigation. Performance budget was set early: every page had to load in under 2 seconds on a typical Nigerian mobile connection.

In the press

The launch was covered by Vanguard, THISDAY, and StartupInsights — all three describing the platform as a model for government digital transformation in Nigeria. Read the press coverage.

Why it matters

This project is proof that an African government website can hold its own next to anything built in London or San Francisco — and that production AI, deployed thoughtfully, makes legislative work radically more accessible to the people whose lives it shapes.