Ghanaian Civic Developer Builds Crowd-Sourced Power Outage Tracker PowerPulse

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A self-taught Ghanaian developer has launched PowerPulse II, a community-driven web app designed to address the lack of real-time information during Ghana's frequent unpredictable power outages, locally known as 'dumsor'. The platform allows users to report outages by selecting their region and town, with the community able to confirm reports and track restoration times. Built using Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, and Supabase, the app requires no custom backend server and is deployable as a PWA on mobile devices. Development involved two major rebuilds, including scrapping a planned interactive map due to compatibility issues between Leaflet and Next.js, and overhauling the entire layout from a single-page design to a structured multi-view interface. The project is positioned as civic technology aimed specifically at the Ghanaian context, filling a gap left by the absence of any official shared outage information system.

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