swazi112/mali-retail-iot-infrastructure

# Regional IoT & Retail Infrastructure — Mali & Africa > Digitizing gas station operations and fuel monitoring across remote West African regions through offline-resilient software and low-power IoT telemetry. --- ## Executive Summary This project delivers a **full-stack digital transformation** for gas station retail networks operating across Mali and West Africa. It addresses two operational pain points that cost the industry millions annually: 1. **Fuel loss visibility** — Underground tank levels were checked manually, often weekly. Theft, leaks, and accounting discrepancies went undetected for days. 2. **Retail inefficiency** — Gas station convenience stores (boutiques) managed pricing, promotions, and stock via paper lists and phone calls, with no centralized oversight. The platform replaces both with a unified, cloud-managed system: an **IoT Smart Station** backend for continuous remote fuel monitoring, and a **Progressive Web App (PWA)** for retail catalog and promotion management — both engineered to operate reliably on the intermittent 2G/Edge cellular networks typical of the region. **Key ROI drivers:** - Fuel shrinkage detected in **minutes** instead of days - Retail catalog updates propagated to **all stores instantly** instead of per-store manual distribution - **Zero hardware cost** for the boutique app — installs from the browser on any smartphone - **No on-premise servers** required — fully managed cloud infrastructure --- ## The Challenge ### Infrastructure Constraints Gas stations in Mali and across francophone West Africa operate under conditions that invalidate most standard SaaS assumptions: - **Connectivity** — Rural stations rely on 2G/Edge cellular. Connections drop frequently, bandwidth is metered, and latency is high. A cloud-first, always-online architecture fails here. - **Power** — Grid electricity is unreliable. IoT sensors run on solar with limited battery reserves. Every byte transmitted and every CPU cycle on the device c …