Housing Assembly's Auditing Application

Why This Project Exists

South Africa’s housing waitlist was intended to provide fair access to government housing for people affected by apartheid. But over time, the process has become opaque and vulnerable to corruption. There is little public visibility into who applied, how long they’ve waited, or how many times someone has received a house — allowing connected individuals to bypass the system entirely.

Housing Assembly, a grassroots organization advocating for housing justice, needed a digital solution to:

• Record and organize audit receipts from residents
• Expose patterns of misconduct in housing allocations
• Build a public, transparent waitlist
• Support a class action lawsuit against systemic housing corruption

And that's where we came in!

This app was built through EDU Africa for Housing Assembly to provide the technical foundation needed to turn paper trails into searchable, structured, and legally usable data — strengthening Housing Assembly’s case in their class action lawsuit against the South African government.

Install Dependencies

npm install

To run the backend

• cd backend
• node server.js

To run the frontend

• cd frontend
• npm start

Tech Stack Overview

• Frontend: React 19, Tailwind CSS, React Router DOM, Axios
• Backend: Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Mongoose, JWT, Tesseract.js
• Security: bcryptjs, JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
• Date & Time Utilities: moment.js, date-fns