The diaspora delivery problem no one has solved yet

Every year, millions of people in the African, South Asian, and Caribbean diaspora send packages to family back home. Birthday gifts. School supplies. Medicines. Clothes their relatives cannot find locally or cannot afford at local prices.

The official way to do this is expensive, slow, and often unreliable. A 5 kg package from London to Lagos via a major courier costs GBP 80 to GBP 150. Delivery takes 3-10 working days. Tracking is inconsistent. Customs delays are common. And the package may not arrive at the doorstep; it may arrive at a collection depot hours away from the recipient.

The informal approach, sending with a traveler you know, has existed for as long as diaspora communities have existed. Every community has a version of this: the community WhatsApp group with "anyone going to Accra next week?", the trusted auntie who always brings things when she visits, the church member who hand-carries packages for a small fee.

This works. People do it every day. But it has problems. There is no payment protection. There is no identity verification. There is no accountability if something goes wrong.

Sendways is our attempt to solve this properly. Not by replacing the traveler with a drone or a van, but by giving the existing informal system the infrastructure it was missing: identity verification, escrow payment, dispute resolution, and a reputation system that works regardless of whether you went to the same church.

The diaspora delivery problem is not primarily a logistics problem. It is a trust problem. Once you solve trust, the logistics follow naturally, because the people doing this (travelers making journeys they were already making) are already everywhere.

We have not fully solved it yet. But we are working on it, route by route, traveler by traveler.