Wakanda - One App for Africa

Wakanda Market - One App for Africa

Despite increasing smartphone penetration, many African communities remain offline. People prefer offline markets or WhatsApp groups for finding goods, services, jobs, food & more over dedicated internet platforms. Prominent existing platforms center around "Western" business models, do not reach beyond the most educated 5-10% of the market and are struggling to become profitable.

Therefore, we have created Wakanda. One app for social & community networking, shopping goods & services, finding jobs, accessing health information & doctor consultations, wallet payment, more.

• Built for the masses of Africans
• Community- and location based, flexible, and as easy to use as WhatsApp
• Highly scalable “the Wakanda Way”: Offering maximum possible value at minimum variable cost.

Initial rollout to 10,000 sellers in various communities has shown people understand, use, and love Wakanda - in particular small shops or providers who have been new to online selling.

Africa has seen many attempts to establish local online platforms, yet adoption remains limited. 

• They are too “Western” in terms of high automation and standardization and too hard to use for the masses: People buy & sell more through WhatsApp groups than through dedicated platforms. 
• All major platforms struggle with high marketing and execution cost and don’t scale well: items bought on a local market are typically cheaper than on online portals
• A truly "African" business model requires location & community focus and means of direct interaction between buyers & sellers to reflect common market dynamics. This, however, is hard to monetize for platforms with a high cost base which require a transactional commission

Wakanda Market - One App for Africa

• 20 apps in one tailored super-app
  • for neighbourhood-based buying and selling of goods and services
  • for finding and placing job offers
  • for basic financial services around a wallet and an escrow-service
  • for basic health information and online doctor consultation
  • for fun and business around location-based communities
  • with specific online business support and a personal website for shops
  • and more to come

• with a truly African approach to bringing the masses online
  • No commission: Same cheap prices and benefits as on the local market
  • Directly contact sellers: You directly check availability, negotiate with the seller
  • Location- and community based: Find sellers and shops near you and that you may know, share offers in your communities
  • Inclusive: Anybody can open a shop
  • Secured: Search results are based on ratings, reviews, joint communities and joint followers. Payment can be done directly or with an in-built escrow service
  • Revenues through a multitude of add-on services
  • Special Requests: Send specific requirements to multiple providers around you who can directly respond.

Wakanda Market is currently live with about 10,000 sellers from various regions of Nigeria and Ghana and above features.

Wakanda Market provides a democratised approach to mobile commerce and online shopping. This gives sellers, traders and service providers from low-income areas especially women, simple technology access to increase their economic output and input. These are generally people with a minimum level of education/literacy but with ability to use a smart phone for basic tasks.

Our field agents continuously engage with users within low-income areas of the cities: Abeokuta, Ibadan, Kaduna, Port Harcourt (all in Nigeria), and Accra (Ghana). We initially tested for quick adaptability to the use of the mobile phone for commerce and we got quite encouraging responses.
Our field agents, who double as community managers for different communities, provide ongoing assistance and training to the users to enable them to become familiar and adept at the use of their phones for commercial activities.

For most of the users especially the women, the prospect of being able to use their predominantly dormant smartphones for other things than just receiving calls was intriguing. Also the fact that most of the sellers can now provide services within their immediate locality without the constraint of selling only on market days or at a rented store is a critical feedback we are receiving. 

The lack of viable options for digital inclusion of people living within marginalised populations is  a major problem. For many within this category, good jobs and inclusive entrepreneurship is as critical as it gets.

Wakanda Market is designed to enhance the users' economic options by providing direct, democratised access for both consumers and providers of different services to use technology as a means of exchange. This increased economic leverage gives the user increased control over socio-cultural norms, service delivery, cost of business entry, recruiting/hiring, enterprise, and reduces the disruption that poverty and reduced income usually brings into their daily life.

While all of our individual services exist both globally and in the African context, we have not yet come across a super-app that offers both the breadth of services and the depth of localization to the African context.

Wakanda will create a new dimension of performance through leveraging upon three aspects:

• Technology innovation: The rise ob mobile phones has already changed Africa. With more people having access to a phone than to running water, Africa has gone beyond adoption and into leapfrogging in areas such as mobile payment in selected countries.
  A next wave of change will happen with the affordability of internet services. Only over the last few years have smartphones become so affordable and mobile data coverage wide enough that the masses of people in Africa are able to use internet services.
• Market and social readiness: With substantial improvements in the level of education, increased literacy, reduced poverty and decreasing mortality rates, the masses of Africa have become ready and willing to embrace technology that supports their lives.
• Specific process needs in the African context: Only the unique dynamics of Africa (such as low labour cost, high level of flexibility, and the need for direct buyer-seller communication) enable the Wakanda business model to thrive in its context. 

We use a lean setup with one react-native app built around a Google Cloud Functions serverless backend and a single Firestore NoSQL index database. This allows us to rapidly innovate while leveraging upon Google's backend security and database scalability.

To make our wallet uniquely secure and potentially interdependent, we have created the ACoin cryptocurrency. ACoin (₳) is a purpose-built, asset-backed cryptocurrency based on the Stellar Protocol and currently used by our Ghanaian customers. It combines the simplicity of a mobile app with the potential of a modern cryptocurrency.  Money in your Wakanda Market wallet is stored in ACoin; offers in local currency automatically convert at the exchange rate at order time. 

Details: https://www.african-founders.c...

Our vision is to create one app that every African will use.

We're currently serving 25,000 customers in a pilot stage.
Our aim at this stage has been to attract a number of customers high enough so it becomes useful to get significant direct feedback - and optimize our platform based on that.

Our approach is to optimize our platform so it can grow sustainably, meaning the revenues we generate from add-on services cover our cost and as such allow us to grow.

While we are open for investment to help reach a critical mass of customers required to become sustainable, we are aiming at taking the next step a large-scale pilot, possibly with the support of an impact grant.

As a consequence, we would imagine to serve 150,000 customers in one year from now. 

The wider our reach, the more we are seeking collaboration with multiple stakeholders crucial to Africa, including both religious organizations and governments to participate in and help promote the ecosystem.

As a consequence, the number of people we serve in 5 years could be many millions.

We are a team of 12 people full-time in Nigeria and Ghana plus a network of community managers who serve as our human interface to communities.

Christian Keller, CEO

• • >10 years strategy consulting & management experience
  • Previously MD of Carmudi (Jumia Car Nigeria & Ghana), Africa´s most trusted car site
  • MBA (USA), Dipl. Wi.-Inf. (DE)
  • Passion for Tech and Africa

Biodun Makinde, COO

• • >10 years Tech, Media & Marketing Communications
  • Former Head of Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Carmudi NG (Jumia Car)
  • MicroMasters, DEDP (MITx); SLT (UNAAB)
  • Dev. Policy Consultant
  • Author, Poet, Musician

We have partnerships with numerous organizations in Nigeria and beyond, including but not limited to

• Access Bank
• African Language Technology Initiative (ALT-I)
• Innovation Kitchen
• South West Regional eCommerce Summit
• Civic Hive

Most African internet platforms come with a relatively high cost basis as they aim to control the customer experience and manage all transactions. Our business model is however specifically designed for the masses of Africans with a radically different approach.

Following a "Blue Ocean Shift" strategy, our business model can be summarized as “Highest possible value at minimum variable cost”

Compared to amazon-like e-commerce platforms, we have no vendor and order management, no inhouse delivery, and no transaction-related customer care. We reduce customer acquisition and marketing cost through smart partnerships and simple referral programs and keep operational cost limited.

As we're not charging for transactional commission, we're targeting revenues from add-on services which don't affect the customer experience, but rather enhance it. Revenues with add-on offers can include

• business websites sold
• referral commissions for delivery and other premium services
• commission on our wallet escrow service (operated by local institutions)
• whitelabel apps for selected communities such as religious organizations
• carefully chosen premium ads

We intend to collaborate with all stakeholders relevant and interested in leveraging Africa's potential through the use of technology.

Our platform is designed to uniquely reach the masses of Africans - as such, we can imagine research partnerships that enable access to a broader base of users.

Furthermore, we can imagine a number of ways how Artificial Intelligence could help us serve our users better and improve the usability of the app - be it through local African language voice navigation, through voice and text bots for medical pre-consultation advise, to even a "Siri for Africa".

Sustainable solutions to the refugee crisis include measures that support economic growth in the countries of origin and as such prevent mass migration in the first place.

Our solution is designed to help bring African communities online without destroying their heritage and patterns of interaction - we see tremendous potential for economic growth and inclusion in that.

Wakanda is designed to allow people to turn their dreams into reality - regardless of their background, education or ethnicity.

We empower inclusive entrepreneurship in three ways:

Many Africans dream of starting their own business - no matter if it is fashion design, buying & selling or a professional service. Wakanda Market provides an ideal platform for anybody to present themselves in a way that is inclusive and does not take the important aspects of how business is done in Africa.

Making a living to support a family is a constant struggle, which is why we have seen strong resonance to our Wakanda Jobs section - here we provide access to education as well as professional and temporary jobs.

Wakanda Academy is designed to support businesses in what they need to be successful in Nigeria's business environment - with offline and online seminars on various topics.

Our vision is to serve the whole of Africa. As such, we are aware we have to find solutions to bridge the gap for potentially left behind groups, including a significant number of illiterate people.

While we have designed our app to be as simple to use as possible and while our concept is based around "community managers" and super-users who help support people with getting along with our app, we are also looking at specifically serving people who only speak local African languages and have limited literacy.

In particular, we have developed a prototype for voice-enabled app navigation which has shown promising results for English. In a larger-scale pilot, we would love to transfer this technology to local languages, in particular Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba in Nigeria which are not supported out of the box by voice recognition solutions. With a limited set of words needed to navigate Wakanda, this will likely be possible, yet it requires further resources. 

Our vision is to serve the whole of Africa with one targeted super-app. While we have designed Wakanda to be as simple to use as possible and while our concept is based around "community managers" and super-users who help support people with getting along with our app, we are also looking at using Artificial Intelligence to enable app usage as seamless as possible.

In particular, we have developed a prototype for voice-enabled app navigation based on a set of 300 keywords which has shown promising results for English. In a larger-scale pilot, we want to adopt this technology to local languages, in particular Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba in Nigeria which are not supported out of the box by voice recognition cloud solutions. With a limited set of words needed to navigate Wakanda, this will likely be possible, yet it requires further resources.