About Okava
A trust-first home for African diaspora property.
Okava combines a property marketplace, mortgage facilitation, construction management and escrow — so families abroad can buy, build and invest at home without flying back to check on a foundation.
Empower Africans in the diaspora to build, own and invest in property — with confidence.
Diaspora property has always been a leap of faith: trust the cousin, trust the agent, trust the photos on WhatsApp. Okava replaces those leaps with a verified marketplace, escrowed payments and milestone-locked construction — so every dollar your family sends home goes exactly where it's supposed to.
We were built for the relative in London paying for a roof in Bulawayo, the engineer in Toronto buying a stand in Borrowdale, and the nurse in Manchester financing a build in Marondera. Every product decision starts there.
What "trust-first" actually means
- Every developer goes through 5-stage verification.
- Every construction upload is GPS-stamped, timestamped and reviewer-checked.
- Every payment is escrow-held until you approve the milestone.
The five pillars we engineer to
The architectural objectives. Every product choice we make is judged against these.
Security
Prevent fraud and unauthorised access. Argon2id passwords, JWT refresh rotation, audit logging on every critical action.
Transparency
Real-time visibility into construction milestones and payment flows. Nothing happens behind closed doors.
Scalability
Built to support millions of users across multiple African countries from day one.
Reliability
99.9% uptime target, daily backups, multi-region replication and a documented disaster-recovery plan.
Compliance
AML / KYC across every transaction; GDPR and POPIA for data protection; local property compliance per country.
Okava in numbers
Where we are today — and where we're heading by year three: two million users across multi-country deployments.
- Happy clients
- 2,500+
- Properties listed
- 3,200+
- Verified developers
- 150+
- Countries served
- 12+