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Cedric Ongoro
Cedric Ongoro

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Mipaka: A Free REST API for 100K+ Administrative Divisions Across East Africa

#api #python #django #africa

The Problem Every African Developer Knows

You're building a form. It has a location dropdown. You need Kenya's 47 counties, then the constituencies under each county, then the wards.

So you do what we all do:

const counties = ["Baringo", "Bomet", "Bungoma", "Busia" /* ...43 more */];
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Then the client asks: "Can you add Uganda too?" And Tanzania. And Rwanda. Each country has completely different administrative structures — counties vs regions vs provinces, wards vs sub-counties vs cells.

You end up with a mess of hardcoded arrays, outdated data, and no parent-child relationships.

I built Mipaka API to solve this.

What Is Mipaka?

Mipaka (Swahili for "boundaries") is a free REST API that gives you normalized access to administrative divisions across 7 East African countries — through a single consistent interface.

103,194 divisions across 7 countries with full parent-child hierarchies:

Country Levels Records
🇰🇪 Kenya County → Constituency → Ward 1,787
🇹🇿 Tanzania Region → District 207
🇺🇬 Uganda Region → District → County → Sub-county → Parish → Village 83,012
🇷🇼 Rwanda Province → District → Sector → Cell → Village 17,441
🇧🇮 Burundi Province → Commune → Colline 491
🇨🇩 DRC Province → Territory 174
🇸🇸 South Sudan State → County → Payam 82

Quick Demo: Kenya Counties in 3 Lines

JavaScript 

const res = await fetch(
    "https://mipaka.p.rapidapi.com/api/v1/countries/KE/top/",
  {
    headers: { "X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR_KEY" },
  },
);
const counties = await res.json();
console.log(counties);
// [{ name: "Baringo", level: 1, level_name: "County", children_count: 6 }, ...]
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Python 

import requests

url = "https://mipaka.p.rapidapi.com/api/v1/countries/KE/top/"
headers = {"X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR_KEY"}

counties = requests.get(url, headers=headers).json()
for c in counties:
    print(f"{c['name']} — {c['children_count']} constituencies")
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Output:

Baringo — 6 constituencies
Bomet — 5 constituencies
Bungoma — 9 constituencies
Busia — 7 constituencies
...
Nairobi — 17 constituencies
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Building Cascading Dropdowns

The most common use case — a location picker that cascades from country → level 1 → level 2 → etc.

// Step 1: Get all countries
const countries = await mipaka("/countries/");
// [{ code: "KE", name: "Kenya" }, { code: "UG", name: "Uganda" }, ...]

// Step 2: User picks Kenya → get counties
const counties = await mipaka("/countries/KE/top/");
// [{ id: 1, name: "Baringo" }, { id: 2, name: "Bomet" }, ...]

// Step 3: User picks Nairobi (id=7) → get constituencies
const constituencies = await mipaka("/divisions/7/children/");
// [{ id: 48, name: "Dagoretti North" }, { id: 49, name: "Dagoretti South" }, ...]

// Step 4: User picks Dagoretti North → get wards
const wards = await mipaka("/divisions/48/children/");
// [{ name: "Gatina" }, { name: "Kileleshwa" }, { name: "Kilimani" }, ...]
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One API. One interface. Works the same for all 7 countries. No more maintaining separate county/district/province arrays.

Filtering & Search

The API supports rich filtering out of the box:

# All Kenyan counties
GET /api/v1/divisions/?country=KE&level=1

# Search by name across all countries
GET /api/v1/divisions/?q=kampala

# Children of a specific division
GET /api/v1/divisions/?parent=42

# Combine filters
GET /api/v1/divisions/?country=UG&level=3&q=buganda
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The Bonus Feature: Historical Names

This is my favorite part. Every division can have multiple names across historical eras.

Example: What was Kinshasa called in 1923?

GET /api/v1/divisions/?name=Léopoldville&year=1923
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The API carries ~60 major cities with pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence names. Perfect for:

  • Genealogy research — birth certificates from colonial-era cities
  • Historical data mapping — connecting old datasets to modern divisions
  • Education — exploring how borders and names evolved

Here's how four cities across four countries changed names over the centuries:

Kinshasa, DRC

Era Name Language Story
Kingdom of Kongo (~1390) Nshasa Kikongo Teke fishing village on the Congo River
Congo Free State (1885) Léopoldville French Stanley's trading post, named after King Leopold II
DR Congo (1966) Kinshasa Lingala Indigenous name restored under Mobutu's authenticité policy

Juba, South Sudan

Era Name Language Story
Pre-colonial Jubek Bari "Uncultivated land near the river" — Bari people's settlement
Mahdist State (1885) Gondokoro English Older trading post nearby, abandoned for Juba
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899) Juba Bari British built administrative post in 1922

Bujumbura, Burundi

Era Name Language Story
Kingdom of Burundi Bujumbura Kirundi Indigenous name — exact meaning disputed
German East Africa (1889) Usumbura German German military post on Lake Tanganyika
Independence (1962) Bujumbura Kirundi Original name restored

Kampala, Uganda

Era Name Language Story
Buganda Kingdom (~1300) Kasozi k'Empala Luganda "Hill of impala" — Buganda royal hunting ground
Uganda Protectorate (1894) Kampala English British fort on the same hill 
# Query any city's full name history
GET /api/v1/divisions/{city_id}/names/
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Try It Free

Try the live explorer at mipaka.dev — pick a country, drill down through divisions, and see the API responses in real time.

Mipaka is also available on RapidAPI with a generous free tier, and the code is open source on GitHub under the MIT license — contributions welcome, especially for countries with partial data (Tanzania wards, DRC territories).

Links

Tech Stack

For those curious about the internals:

  • Django 4.2 + Django REST Framework — handles serialization, filtering, pagination, OpenAPI docs
  • PostgreSQL on Railway — 103K records with proper indexes
  • drf-spectacular — auto-generated Swagger/ReDoc documentation
  • 7 management commands — one per country, idempotent syncs from pre-built JSON data

If you're building anything that needs East African location data — forms, KYC flows, delivery zones, research dashboards — give Mipaka a try. And if you have data for regions I haven't covered yet, PRs are welcome.

Coming Next

This is Part 1 of the Mipaka API series. Next up:

  • Part 2: What's New — 47 Historical Eras, 124 Place Names, and DRC's Six Administrative Eras

Follow me to catch the next one!

Mipaka — every border, one API.

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