A funder with money and a contractor with a crew are rarely in the same room, and almost never reading the same record. We stand between them and carry the part that neither of them signed up for.
We manage donor-funded and privately funded work in places where the funder cannot easily go. We verify the companies that do the work, place the work with them, measure what is delivered, assemble the claims, and report back to the funder in the funder's own format.
We built the platform because the alternative was a folder of spreadsheets and four versions of the truth. It is not a product we sell to other people. It is how we do our own work, and both sides of a project can see it.
We are small, we answer our own messages, and we would rather tell you we are the wrong firm for something than take it and learn that later.
To connect funding with the people who can do the work, and to carry the administration that stands between them — so that good work is chosen on evidence rather than on who was already known.
A market where a contractor in Kabul competes on what it has built, not on who it has met; and where a funder anywhere can see exactly what its money bought.
راهیاب
Rah · yab
راه — rah — is the way. The road, the route, the path through.
یاب — yab — is the one who finds. It comes from yaftan, to find, and it is the ending Dari and Pashto both put on somebody who finds a thing for a living.
Together: the one who finds the way. A guide. Not the person who owns the road and not the person walking it — the one who knows how to get from here to there, and goes with you.
We chose it because it is exactly the job. A funder knows what it wants built and does not know the country. A contractor knows the country and cannot see the work. Neither of them is lost, and neither of them needs rescuing. What is missing is the route between them, and somebody who has walked it before.
It is also a word both our languages already own. A grants officer in Kabul reads it without translation, and so does a contractor in Herat. We did not want a name that had to be explained in the country it works in — and then explained again to everybody else.
In English we write it Rahyabe, because that is how it is said.
These are not values on a wall. Each one is a rule the software actually enforces, which is the only kind of principle worth publishing.
Anybody can say work was done. A claim moves when there is proof attached to it, captured at the time, against the measurement the contract declared. Without that it is somebody's view of events, and views do not get paid.
People make mistakes, and a system that cannot absorb one teaches people to hide it. So corrections are recorded as corrections — a new entry that names what it fixes and why, with the original still there. Nothing is quietly overwritten.
The funder and the contractor read one record, not two reports written about each other. When a figure moves, it moves for both of them at once. Disagreement is then about the work rather than about whose spreadsheet is right.
We are paid out of the work, whoever wins it. That is a conflict, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest part. So the rule used to draw a shortlist is written down before it is used, and it is visible to the funder — because "we picked the best three" is not an answer anybody should accept from us.
One market, as records an administrator fills in A third is added the same way, with no code change
Those two are where the work is now, and they were chosen deliberately: they have almost nothing in common. Different currencies, different working weeks, different tax rules, different documents, different holidays. A system that handles both is a system that does not secretly assume one of them.
The platform carries no country in its code. A market is a set of records — the fields a company must answer, the documents it must hold, the screening lists that apply, the currencies, the working calendar, the tax rules. An administrator creates them. Adding a third market is a day of configuration, not a release.
Neither of the two is the default, and neither is special-cased. That is a design decision we made early and it has cost us work several times since, which is how we know it is real.
Tell us what you are funding, or what you build. We will tell you plainly whether we can help — and if we cannot, we will say so in the first reply rather than the third meeting.