About LoadLink

The problem

Freight coordination in Zimbabwe still happens over phone calls, through brokers, and in WhatsApp groups. That arrangement has three costs that compound: there is no price transparency, so nobody knows what a fair rate looks like; there is no verification of who is on the other end of the deal; and between 30 and 40 percent of truck trips run empty because nobody knows which trucks are heading where.

The approach

LoadLink replaces that with a verified, trackable, ranked marketplace. Customers post loads. Verified operators quote. A two-stage matching engine filters out trucks that cannot do the job, then ranks the rest on five weighted criteria and shows the working. The customer chooses.

One of those five criteria is backhaul alignment, which is where the empty running is addressed directly: an operator declares the route they are already travelling back on, and loads running that way rank their truck higher.

Data and privacy

Location tracking runs only for the duration of an accepted trip, only with the driver explicit consent, and the history is erasable on request. National ID numbers are stored as a one-way hash so duplicate accounts can be detected without the platform holding the identifier itself. Every state-changing action is written to an append-only audit trail. These are obligations under the Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07], not preferences.

Project context

LoadLink is a final-year Information Systems dissertation project at Midlands State University. It is built as a working system rather than a prototype, with a Laravel backend, a server-rendered web frontend, and a versioned JSON API that a React Native driver application will consume in a later phase.