Design of a Road Condition Reporting App for Citizens in Kaduna State

Deteriorating road infrastructure across Kaduna State persists partly because the state's road management authority lacks a systematic mechanism for receiving and triaging citizen-reported road defects. This study presents the design and implementation of a mobile road condition reporting application for citizens in Kaduna State, North West Nigeria. The application was developed using React Native, with a Node.js and MongoDB backend. Citizens report potholes, drainage failures, and road blockages by submitting geo-tagged photographs and incident descriptions through the app. Reports are routed to the Kaduna State Road Management Agency's administrative dashboard, where officers triage, assign, and track remediation work orders. Push notifications inform reporters of status updates. The development process used Agile Scrum methodology over six sprints. Functional testing covered 90 test cases, all of which passed after two rounds of bug fixing. A pilot phase spanning 45 days involved 200 citizen beta testers across Kaduna North, Kaduna South, and Igabi LGAs. During the pilot, 510 reports were submitted, of which 43 percent were classified as requiring urgent attention by road officers. Average response time from report submission to officer acknowledgement was 4.1 hours. The study concludes that citizen-sourced road defect reporting apps can supplement government road inspection activities in Nigerian states and recommends statewide launch with a public awareness campaign.

Keywords: citizen reporting, road condition, Kaduna State, mobile application, smart governance