In 2008, web services in Ethiopia were almost exclusively English-only. Email providers had partial localization at best. Job boards and business directories were fragmented and inaccessible to anyone who didn't read English fluently. For a country with dozens of languages and three widely spoken ones beyond English — Amharic, Oromifa, and Tigrinya — this was a real barrier.
This project was my B.Sc. thesis at HiLCoE: a unified web portal called addisportal.com that consolidated three services — email, job recruitment, and a business yellow pages — with full support for all four languages.
The challenge
Building multilingual web applications in 2008 was a different world. Unicode support was inconsistent. Ethiopic script (Ge'ez) rendering varied wildly across browsers. Right-to-left considerations didn't apply (Ethiopic is left-to-right), but character encoding, font availability, and database storage for non-Latin scripts were constant obstacles.
The bigger design challenge was making the interface genuinely usable in each language — not just translated labels, but culturally appropriate navigation patterns, date formatting, and search that worked across scripts.
What it did
- Mailing — webmail with text and file attachment support, fully localized UI in all 4 languages
- Recruitment — vacancy announcements that employers could post and job seekers could browse, search, and filter in their preferred language
- Yellow pages — a business directory for Addis Ababa service providers, searchable 24/7 in any of the supported languages
The tech
The stack was very much of its era: Visual Basic 2005, SQL Server, MySQL, Apache/IIS, with Rational Rose for UML modeling and Macromedia Dreamweaver for front-end work. Object-oriented methodology throughout.
Looking at this from 2026, the technology choices feel dated — but the core problem hasn't gone away. Localization and accessibility for non-English-speaking populations remains one of the most underserved areas in software engineering. The project was an early attempt at something I'd spend much of my career working on: making software genuinely useful for people who aren't the default user persona.
The full publication is available on Zenodo.