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About
Hiring somebody in Harare means finding out what they are like after you have paid them. A number comes from a neighbour, or off a board at the shops. You let them into the house, you pay half up front, and the answer to whether they are any good arrives once the work is finished. If it goes well, you are the only person who knows. If it goes badly, you are the only person who knows that too.
That is the part worth naming plainly: nothing accumulates. Somebody who does bad work in Avondale is a stranger again in Borrowdale the following month — you have no way to warn the next person, and he has no reason to worry that you might. It cuts the other way just as hard. A tradesman who has done fifteen years of good work has to prove it from nothing to every new customer, because the proof of it sits in other people’s heads and does not travel.
And that is if you find him at all. The trade is scattered across WhatsApp groups, Facebook posts, a signboard on a fence and a number painted on a wall, so there is no list to look at. You take the first number you are handed rather than the best of five, because you never see the other four. Comparing what two people charge, how near they are, or how quickly they answer is not difficult so much as impossible.
Trustline is built by Patience Musekiwa and a small team, to do something about those three things. Every business sits on one page next to every other, so there is finally something to compare. Every review is tied to somebody who really made contact here, and stays up — a business can answer it and can dispute it, but it cannot quietly delete it. How fast somebody replies is measured from real conversations rather than claimed. Nothing on a listing is a thing a business can simply say about itself.
None of that removes the risk of letting a stranger into your house. What it does is move what you need to know to before the decision instead of after it, and make one person’s bad afternoon useful to the next hundred people rather than something they carry alone.
It is new, and it is thin in places — trades with nobody in them, suburbs with a single listing — and that will be true for a while yet. Covering it with invented numbers would be a strange way to start a business whose whole argument is that you can check what it tells you.
At the moment it does not. Trustline is meant to charge a business for two things — a lead, when they choose to take on a posted job, and a placement at the top of a trade — and neither is switched on yet, so taking on a job costs nothing and no position can be bought. Customers pay nothing either way, and we take no percentage of the work.
There is nothing to pay for at the moment, so nothing does. Every result is ordered by how well it matches, how it is rated, how fast it answers, and how near it is. When placement opens, the only place it will move anything is the slot that says Sponsored on it, in those words — and a business will still not be able to buy a rating, a review, or the verified badge.
A real identity document was checked against the account by a person. We keep the fact that it matched and throw the document away — so a badge means somebody stood behind that listing with their name, and it does not mean we are holding a scan of their ID.
There is no way to put money on at the moment. Some accounts hold free credit we gave them, and that is not a wallet either — when paying opens it will buy leads and placements on Trustline and nothing else, and it cannot be withdrawn, transferred or exchanged for cash. It does not expire, so it waits.
No. They can reply to it, and they can dispute it — at which point the reviewer is asked to show that they really dealt with that business. Reviews that cannot be backed up are removed. Reviews the business simply dislikes are not.
No, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Trustline introduces you; the agreement is between you and the business. What we can do is make it easy to tell who is worth calling and hard for somebody who does bad work to hide from it.
Trustline is run by Patience Musekiwa with a small team, and operates as Trustline in Harare, Zimbabwe. You can reach us at info@trustline.co.zw.
If something here is wrong — a business that has closed, a listing that is not what it says, a review that should not be there — tell us. A real person reads it, and the things people report are most of how a directory this young stays worth reading.