Design and Development of Mala-link Citizen-Centred Inter-Agency Service Platform For Malawi

In order to access essential public and private services such as banking, healthcare, education, voting, employment, mobile money registration, and international travel heavily depends on the timely issuance of the Public services e.g National Identity Card, passport, and license. But Public-service application processes can require citizens to interact with separate administrative workflows and may provide limited visibility into application progress. This paper presents Mala-Link, a citizen-centred platform designed to consolidate selected public-service (like the National registration buero, Immigration and Directory of Road Traffic Safety Services) application workflows in Malawi through a common web and mobile interface. The web frontend is implemented with Next.js, the mobile application with React Native, and the backend with Node.js and Express. PostgreSQL stores operational application data, accessed through Prisma ORM. The system supports application submission, document uploads, status tracking, administrative status updates, notifications, English and Chichewa language support, and a lightweight blockchain-style audit ledger. The ledger uses SHA-256 hashes and previous-hash links to make inconsistent changes to recorded audit events detectable. It is a single-process, locally persisted ledger rather than a decentralised blockchain network. Functional test cases documented in the project report cover login, application submission, document upload, status tracking, and administrative status updates. Informal user interaction also formed part of development, but no formal survey records are available. The platform does not connect to the production databases of the relevant government agencies; therefore, the work demonstrates an implemented application prototype rather than a live inter-agency government integration. The paper describes the system design, its audit-ledger mechanism, preliminary functional evidence, and the limitations that must be addressed before operational deployment.