If you've ever needed your car washed in Abuja, you already know how this works. You ask around. Someone knows a guy. The guy shows up, sometimes on time, sometimes not. You agree a price by mouth, no receipt, no record. If the wash is bad, there's nowhere to complain to. If something goes missing from your car, there's no one to hold accountable. And if you never see that washer again, there was never really a relationship to lose in the first place.
This is the informal car wash economy, and it's not small. Across Kubwa, Gwarinpa, Wuse, Lugbe, and every other axis in Abuja, thousands of washers earn a living this way. But "informal" doesn't just mean unregistered. It means invisible. No verified identity, no consistent income, no protection when a client refuses to pay, no way to build a reputation that follows them from one job to the next.
We didn't set out to build another car wash brand. We set out to build the infrastructure this sector has never had.
None of this had to stay informal. It just needed the right infrastructure.
What actually breaks in the informal model
Three things, mainly.
- No trust, in either direction. The customer doesn't know who's coming to their house. The washer doesn't know if they'll get paid. Both sides are operating on faith, and faith runs out fast the first time something goes wrong.
- No income consistency. A washer's earnings on any given day depend entirely on who they happen to run into. There's no pipeline, no way to plan a week, no way to grow beyond word of mouth in one neighborhood.
- No accountability structure. When a dispute happens, there's no third party to look at the evidence and make a fair call. It becomes he-said-she-said, and usually the person with less power in that conversation loses.
Every part of what we've built on INIDETO Wash exists to answer one of these three problems directly.
What we built instead
- Vetting and verification. Every washer on the platform goes through an application and approval process before they ever get assigned a job. Customers aren't rolling the dice on a stranger, they're booking someone who's already been checked.
- Escrow-protected payment. Customers pay upfront, but that money doesn't move to the washer until the job is confirmed complete. It removes the two biggest fears on both sides, the customer's fear of paying for a no-show, and the washer's fear of doing the work and not getting paid.
- A real reputation system. Every completed job gets rated. Over time, a washer builds a visible track record, not a memory in one customer's head, but a portable, provable one. That's the difference between a reputation that dies when a customer moves house and one that compounds.
- A 70/30 split that favors the person doing the work. The washer keeps 70% of every job. The platform fee funds the technology, the vetting, the dispute resolution, and the payment protection, not a middleman's margin.
- Steady income through subscriptions. One-off jobs are still unpredictable by nature. Our subscription plans, Bi-Weekly, Monthly, Every 3 Days, give washers a pipeline of bookings that doesn't reset to zero every morning. That's the closest thing to a salary this sector has had.
- A dispute process that protects washers too. If a customer raises an issue, we investigate with evidence from both sides, not just one. Washers who do the job right shouldn't lose their payout because a customer changed their mind after the fact.
Where this is heading
We're not trying to replace the informal economy with something colder and more corporate. We're trying to give the people already doing this work the tools that formal-sector workers take for granted: proof of income, a fair process when something goes wrong, and a way to be judged on the quality of their work instead of how well someone remembers their number.
The car wash is the starting point, not the whole plan. The same problem, informal, undocumented, unprotected service work, shows up across nearly every trade in Nigeria's service economy. If we can prove this model works here, in one of the most fragmented and trust-starved corners of that economy, it's a blueprint for a lot more than car washes.
We're building this from Abuja because this is where we understand the problem best. But we're early, and there's a long way to go before this is proof and not just intention. Every washer building steady income through the platform, and every customer who no longer has to gamble on who's washing their car, is a small piece of evidence that it works. If you've got a story about the old way of doing this, good or bad, tell us. It shapes what we build next.