Jiji Scraper — Africa Classifieds (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania)

Jiji is the largest online classifieds network in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the volume is real: on the Nigerian site alone there are 420,000 home & garden adverts, 251,000 vehicle adverts, 216,000 electronics adverts, 67,000 cars, 24,000 houses for sale and 13,000 rentals live right now. This Actor turns any of those categories — on any of five country sites — into a clean table with price, per-category attributes, location, seller and photos.

One Actor covers Nigeria (jiji.ng), Kenya (jiji.co.ke), Ghana (jiji.com.gh), Uganda (jiji.ug) and Tanzania (jiji.co.tz), each with its own currency and regions, because the sites share one data contract.

What you get

One row per advert, 37 columns:

Group	Fields
Identity	advertId, guid, url, title, description, status, source, country
Pricing	price, currency, priceLabel, pricePeriod (e.g. "per month" on rentals)
Category	category, categorySlug, categoryId, isJobAd
Attributes	condition, attributes (object), attributesText
Location	region, regionName, regionParent, regionSlug
Seller	sellerName, sellerId, sellerRating, sellerAvatar, canViewContacts
Trust & promotion	isVerifiedId, isInspected, isPopular, isPromoted, promotionPackage
Media	imageCount, mainImage, imageUrls
Meta	scrapedAt

attributes is the column that makes this dataset useful. Jiji stores a different attribute set per category, and this Actor keeps all of them — as a nested object that the platform flattens into its own CSV columns, and as a readable one-line string:

• a car: Condition: Foreign Used | Transmission: Automatic | Mileage: 150000 km
• a flat: Property size: 250 sqm | Furnishing: Unfurnished | Bedrooms: 4 | Bathrooms: 4
• a phone: Condition: Brand New

Sample row (Kenya, rentals)

{
  "advertId": "54491233",
  "url": "https://jiji.co.ke/kiambu/houses-apartments-for-rent/4-bedroom-townhouse-....html",
  "title": "4 Bedroom Townhouse in Kiambu Road",
  "price": 380000,
  "currency": "KES",
  "priceLabel": "KSh 380,000",
  "pricePeriod": "per month",
  "category": "Houses & Apartments For Rent",
  "attributes": {
    "Property size": "250 sqm",
    "Furnishing": "Unfurnished",
    "Bedrooms": "4",
    "Bathrooms": "4"
  },
  "region": "Kiambu, Kiambu / Kiambu",
  "regionParent": "Kiambu",
  "sellerName": "Peter M Ndungu",
  "sellerRating": 4.8,
  "isVerifiedId": true,
  "imageCount": 11,
  "mainImage": "https://pictures-kenya.jijistatic.com/86703997_....jpg"
}

Input

Field	What it does
Country	Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda or Tanzania. Each is a separate marketplace.
Category	The slug from the category URL. Verified on jiji.ng: home-garden, vehicles, electronics, furniture, services, cars, mobile-phones, houses-apartments-for-sale, land-and-plots-for-sale, houses-apartments-for-rent, jobs.
Search term	Optional free-text search across every category — overrides the category when set.
Maximum adverts	Stop after this many rows; roughly 23 adverts arrive per page.
Proxy	Residential, pinned automatically to the selected country.

{
  "market": "ng",
  "categorySlug": "cars",
  "maxResults": 1000,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Searching instead of browsing:

{ "market": "ke", "searchQuery": "toyota corolla", "maxResults": 500 }

What it is good for

Price benchmarking in markets with no official index. Used-car and property prices across West and East Africa are not published anywhere reliable. A few thousand rows with price, condition, Mileage and regionParent produce a real price curve per model and per state — the input to a valuation tool, an insurance model or a trade-in calculator.

Supply and demand intelligence. isPromoted and promotionPackage reveal which sellers are paying for reach this week; isPopular and isVerifiedId separate serious sellers from noise. Run daily and the delta shows which categories are heating up.

Dealer and merchant discovery. sellerId is stable, so grouping a run by seller shows who is running a business rather than selling one item — a shortlist of active traders in a category, with rating and advert count attached. sellerName is filled where the seller trades under a name (about 15% of adverts in property, higher in vehicles and services).

Product-catalogue and pricing data for e-commerce. Electronics and phone categories carry brand, condition and price at a volume no marketplace API exposes, which is what makes them usable for repricing and for building a local catalogue.

Cross-market comparison. The same phone, the same car model, five countries and five currencies, in one schema — a comparison that normally means five separate scrapers.

How it works

Jiji's own front end reads its listings from a JSON endpoint, and this Actor reads the same endpoint directly. That means no HTML parsing, no headless browser, and no breakage when the site is restyled — the result is fast, cheap and stable.

Each request is routed through a residential IP inside the target country, because each Jiji site serves its full result set only to local traffic.

Long runs are protected by the guards this Actor family shares:

• A fresh IP on every retry, since one 403 from one exit node says nothing about the next.
• A failed page is skipped, not fatal; three consecutive failures stop the run.
• De-duplication by advert ID, so promoted adverts repeated across pages are saved once.
• A time budget that stops the crawl while everything already collected is safely pushed.

Deep pagination is verified rather than assumed: pages 1, 15 and 40 of the same category return entirely distinct adverts.

Cost and limits

Billing is per result, so cost follows rows saved rather than pages fetched. Store discounts apply on paid Apify plans.

• Phone numbers are not included. Jiji puts seller contacts behind a click that requires a session, and this Actor does not log in. canViewContacts tells you whether the advert exposes contacts at all; sellerId and the advert URL are what you use to reach a seller.
• Category slugs differ slightly between countries — copy the slug from the category URL on the site you are targeting.
• condition is a car/electronics attribute; property adverts have Bedrooms and Furnishing instead, all of which live in attributes.
• sellerName is present only where the seller publishes one; sellerId is always present.

Legal

This Actor reads publicly listed adverts. It does not log in, does not bypass access controls, and does not touch contact details hidden behind authentication. Advert text and seller names may constitute personal data — process them with a lawful basis and honour deletion requests.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Jiji or its operators. The name is used only to identify the public source of the data.