Building the Infrastructure
for African News Intelligence
CompassNG is the structured data layer for African media — making news searchable, enriched, and developer-ready from day one.
Our Mission
Africa generates millions of news articles every month, but most of that information is trapped in unstructured HTML, paywalled archives, and siloed publisher websites. Developers building media-aware products have no reliable, machine-readable source of truth.
CompassNG exists to fix that. We crawl, clean, enrich, and serve Nigerian news through a single REST API — with NLP pipelines that extract sentiment, entities, and version history in five languages.
Our goal is simple: make African news as accessible and queryable as financial market data. Starting with Nigeria, scaling across the continent.
What Drives Us
API-First, Always
Every feature starts with the API. If it isn't available programmatically, it doesn't ship. Developers are our first audience, not an afterthought.
Built for Africa
Not a global product with an African add-on. Built from the ground up for African media realities — multi-language, multi-publisher, multi-format.
Data Quality Over Quantity
50 sources well-crawled and deeply enriched beats 500 sources with broken parsers. We invest in pipeline reliability, not vanity source counts.
Open by Default
Generous free tier, transparent pricing, public documentation. We grow by making news data accessible, not by locking it behind enterprise contracts.
The numbers behind the platform
50+
Publishers
Nigerian news sources aggregated and enriched daily
1M+
Articles
Structured, searchable articles in our growing archive
5
Languages
English, Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo NLP support
From Prototype to Platform
A timeline of the key milestones that shaped CompassNG into what it is today.
Early 2024
The Problem
Started prototyping crawlers for Nigerian publishers from Yaba, Lagos — validating that structured news data was a gap worth filling.
Mid 2024
First 50 Publishers
Onboarded 50+ Nigerian news sources into a unified crawling and enrichment pipeline with entity extraction and sentiment analysis.
Early 2025
API Launch
Opened the public REST API with full-text search, sentiment scoring, named entity recognition, and article version tracking.
2025
Multi-language NLP
Launched Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo NLP support — making CompassNG the first news API with indigenous Nigerian language processing.
Built by People Who Understand the Problem
A small, focused team combining engineering depth with African media domain expertise.
Hakeem Ibrahim
Founder & CEO
Full-stack engineer who previously built data pipelines for fintech in Lagos. Obsessed with making African data infrastructure world-class.
Amara Okafor
Lead Engineer
Backend architect specializing in distributed crawlers and NLP pipelines. Keeps the data flowing reliably across 50+ publishers.
Emeka Nwosu
Data Scientist
NLP researcher focused on low-resource African languages. Built the sentiment and entity models that power the enrichment layer.
Fatima Bello
Product & Growth
Former media analyst who bridges developer needs with the Nigerian media intelligence market. Shapes the product roadmap.
Trusted by teams across Africa
See how developers and newsrooms are building with CompassNG.
“CompassNG replaced three different tools we were using for Nigerian news monitoring. The API is clean, fast, and the sentiment analysis actually works for African English.”
Adaeze Okonkwo
Lead Developer · MediaTrack Africa
“The entity extraction and multi-language support is a game changer. We can finally track coverage across English and Pidgin sources in a single query.”
Ibrahim Yusuf
Head of Research · West Africa Insights
“Our clients get real-time media intelligence reports that used to take hours to compile. CompassNG cut our monitoring workflow from 4 hours to 15 minutes.”
Chioma Eze
PR Director · Sage Communications
Ready to ship with African news data?
Join developers and newsrooms building with CompassNG. Start free, scale when the traffic does.
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