A new regulator, building the digital backbone of a national seed sector.
The Somali Agricultural Regulatory and Inspection Service is a recently established federal agency, set up under the Seed and Plant Variety Law, the SARIS Law, and the Plant Protection and Quarantine Law enacted in 2024. It carries responsibility for seed certification, plant variety testing and protection, phytosanitary controls, and enforcement across the entire Somali agricultural sector.
FAO Somalia commissioned PANEOTECH to design, build, and hand over an integrated digital platform that gives SARIS the tools it needs to operate from day one. The platform replaces paper-based procedures with seventeen regulated workflows organised into two operational streams: Seed Certification and Plant Variety Testing and Protection.
The mandate. Deliver a configurable, offline-capable, trilingual platform that digitises every SARIS process from merchant registration through field inspection, sampling, laboratory testing, certification, post-control surveillance, and enforcement, with full source code transferred to SARIS and a twelve-month support engagement to follow.
Seventeen regulated processes, one configurable platform.
The SARIS platform is built around a configurable workflow engine. Process types, form structures, approval stages, fee schedules, and certificate templates are defined as data, not code. As Somali regulations evolve, SARIS administrators reconfigure the platform without depending on a development cycle. A working staging environment is already running and demonstrates the core engine, role-based interfaces, and end-to-end workflows for FAO and SARIS reviewers.
Actor Registration
Three distinct workflows for Seed Merchants, Seed Growers, and Seed Sellers, with facility verification across farms, machines, shops, stores, and seed banks. Geotagged photographs, dual signatures, and direct linkage to the merchant register.
Field, Intake, and Processing Inspections
Sequential gating across vegetative, flowering, and harvesting stages, intake verification of sealed containers under transport orders, and processing inspections with pre and post checks. All offline capable on inspector mobile devices.
Sampling, Testing, and Certification
Accredited Sampler register with chain-of-custody tracking, ISTA-aligned laboratory result entry, and QR-verifiable digital certificates with public verification through an unauthenticated endpoint.
Plant Variety Testing and Protection
Four interconnected workflows covering National Performance Trials, Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability tests, Plant Breeders Rights grants, and Variety Release, with committee-based approvals modelled as reusable patterns.
Post-Certification and Enforcement
Post Control Testing, Post Certification Surveys, Variety Maintenance Checkplots, Stop Sale Orders, and Transport Order Notices, with audit-grade traceability from finding through enforcement action and resolution.
Import / Export and Public Verification
Plant Import Permit workflow with phytosanitary and ISTA certificate verification at point of entry, plus a public-facing verification portal where farmers, traders, and partners verify any certificate or permit through QR scan or reference lookup.
A configurable engine, not a hardcoded application.
The platform is built on Laravel 12 with React 19, served through Inertia.js, styled with Tailwind CSS 4 and shadcn/ui components, and backed by MySQL 8. The architecture is monolithic by deliberate choice, organised internally into clean domain modules so SARIS technical staff can navigate the codebase and extend it after handover. The system is delivered as a Progressive Web Application and packaged for the Google Play Store through Trusted Web Activity, giving inspectors a native app experience without a separate codebase.
Configurable workflow engine
Process types, workflow stages, transitions, and form definitions are stored as data. Sequential gating, approval routing, SLA timers, and committee-based decisions are configured by SARIS administrators through a Process Builder, Form Builder, and Workflow Builder, without code changes.
Offline-first field operations
Inspectors operate where connectivity is unreliable. The Progressive Web Application caches inspection forms and queues submissions in the device IndexedDB. GPS coordinates and photos are captured on device and synchronised when connectivity returns, with explicit per-record sync status surfaced to the inspector at all times.
Trilingual from day one
English, Somali, and Arabic are supported across the user interface, document generation, and notification templates. Arabic right-to-left rendering uses logical CSS properties throughout. Translation keys live in version-controlled language files for static interface strings, and in the database for content SARIS administrators edit at runtime.
Defence in depth
Database-backed sessions support per-user invalidation. Multi-factor authentication is mandatory for privileged roles. Payment callbacks are verified through HMAC-SHA256 signatures with replay protection and IP allow-listing. Role-based access control uses a community-standard permissions package, complemented by model-level Laravel Policies that prevent identifier-manipulation attacks at the framework layer.
Built to serve a federal regulator from day one.
The engagement is structured as a five-month delivery followed by a twelve-month support period. Inception, needs assessment, and system design were completed in the first month, with the working staging environment available for FAO and SARIS review throughout the build. The remaining sprints cover prototype validation, core module implementation, user acceptance testing, training of trainers, pilot deployment, and final production handover. SARIS will operate the production environment directly with a deployment package and operational documentation prepared for independent execution by SARIS ICT.
Partners and institutional ownership.
The SARIS Integrated Seed Certification and Traceability System is being delivered by PANEOTECH for FAO Somalia, in support of the Somali Agricultural Regulatory and Inspection Service. The engagement includes full source code and intellectual property transfer to SARIS, a complete documentation set covering system architecture, deployment, administration, and standard operating procedures, role-based training for SARIS staff and ecosystem actors, and twelve months of structured post-deployment support with defined service levels.
