Member Article

Another developing nation has adopted what3words for its postal service

The innovative addressing system developed by London’s what3words has another convert in the form of the national postal system in the Djibouti.

The Horn of Africa nation becomes the fifth country to handle the UK tech firm’s three word addresses as part of an effort to standardise patchy and often chaotic addressing systems.

With a population of around 850,000 citizens, the small African republic has only a few named streets meaning La Poste Djibouti, the country’s postal company, often struggling to deliver mail, with home delivery currently restricted to express mail in its capital, Djibouti City.

Now the country, which becomes the first East African country to adopt the addressing standard, will be able to deliver direct to people’s doors thanks to what3words.

The firm has developed a unique addressing system which splits the world down into 3m x 3m squares, assigning each square a fixed address featuring a string of three words, for example ‘doctor.could.retain’.

Bahnan Ali Maidal, Chief Executive Officer at La Poste Djibouti said: “Thanks to our partnership with what3words, every place in the country now has a fixed, accurate and immediately assigned address.

“Each inhabitant living in Balbala or Arhiba, Ali Sabieh or Obock, Randa or Assa Geyla will be able to quickly determine any address, write it on an envelope or communicate it by telephone.”

Adoption of what3words’ addressing system has ramped up in recent months, with the Côte d’Ivoire following Mongolia in adopting the addressing format for its postal service in December last year.

Indian motorbike taxi service Bikxie and private ambulance aggregator Stanplus both started utilising its address formatting in October 2016 as a remedy to India’s notoriously unreliable street addresses.

Chris Sheldrick, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of what3words, hailed the company’s new agreement when he commented: “La Poste Djibouti are now the fifth country to adopt 3 word addresses within the last 12 months.

“They have taken the lead and now have a solution that leapfrogs traditional, expensive, and inaccurate street systems.

“La Poste Djibouti were keen to connect their residents with each other, and the rest of the world. We have worked closely with them for easy implementation and we’re looking forward to doing the same for more regions in the future.”