A civic platform that only works on the internet excludes most of the people it's meant to serve. When I started building MAONI — a national civic consultation platform for the DRC, I had to design for a country where most citizens don't have reliable internet. So we built two front doors:→ Web for citizens with smartphones→ USSD (*123#) for everyone else. The lesson wasn't technical. It was architectural: accessibility isn't a feature you bolt on later. It changes how you design the whole system — identity, participation, and how you count a user. On the back end, that meant: • Row-Level Security on every table (79 policies across the platform) • Atomic participation so a vote can never half-commit • 2FA + audit logging for every admin action • Claude API for proposal analysis so a small team can process national-scale input. Building for the DRC taught me more about software than any tutorial ever did. If you're building civic or government tools in markets with mixed connectivity — I'd love to hear how you've approached it. #CivicTech #GovTech #DRC #AI #FullStack