Daya

Presently, 72% of the populace in Africa conduct their activities offline without a digital footprint and therefore these populations are obscured from well meaning data-driven interventions by donors, governments and development agencies.

In response to this, we have created the “Digitize Africa Program”. The DAP was designed with the sole purpose of ensuring that the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) are sustainably harnessed for increased prosperity on the African continent.

To achieve this, we are building an open network of community digitization agents (community entrepreneurs) that will serve excluded communities and small businesses in sectors such as digital financial services, agriculture, renewables, commerce and digital identity. We expect to create and empower over 600,000 community entrepreneurs and subsequently bring 60 million small businesses into the digital economy in the next 5 years.

https://daya-africa.medium.com/digitize-africa-5d51dd9ba834

Underserved  micro and small enterprises requiring interventions in Agriculture, financial services, commerce etc.) are in the 100s of millions in number in Africa. Their inability to access growth empowerment interventions are fuelled by a myriad of factors such as lack of identity, inadequate access to financial tools and digital illiteracy. 

When enterprises don't grow, they cannot hire. If they cannot hire, their communities stagnate which in turn fuels youth unemployment (Of Africa’s nearly 420 milion  youth aged 15-35, one-third are unemployed  and another third are vulnerably employed). 

These millions of youths presently exist in underserved communities (where these micro and small enterprises also exist), where they are unable to participate in the digital economy due to low level digital skills, access to opportunity and poverty. While there has been a rise in smartphone adoption on the continent, there is still a need for interventions which help to facilitate awareness and access to digital skills and opportunities. 

Our solution is an Android super-app which permits a digitization agent to seamlessly render multiple digital services to underserved micro and small enterprises across different sectors in their community. 

One of the use cases is focused on Smallholder farmers. 

Presently, agriculture employs two-thirds of the Nigeria's labour force with 38 million active smallholder farmers. Even though these farmers typically suffer from a high level of digital illiteracy and lack financial tools, they still require interventions in microsavings, crop microinsurance and data driven crop advisory for precision farming.

Our approach involves using a community digitization agent to close these gaps for farmers in the short-to-midterm. Using our Android super-app, the agent will be able to sign up the farmer on one hand to relevant financial tools and in another breath render AI based crop advisory services or digital identity. 

The business process allows the community digitization agent the opportunity to earn income by offering digital services to the smallholder farmers within his community, while building an alternative credit score.

The aim is not to make the farmer reliant on the agent perpetually, as the agent will be incentivised to educate the farmer to adopt digital and financial tools willfully.

Our initial target populations are smallholder farmers, shopkeepers and market women. These constitute the majority of micro and small enterprises  on the African continent.

We expect to increase the prosperity of micro and small enterprises within the communities served, and correspondingly lift entire communities out of poverty over the next 10 years. This will be achieved through the increased access of these vital digital interventions.

Using our community based approach for digital entrepreneurship, we also expect to create avenues for career growth for the community digitization agents in the intervention areas they choose to specialize in. For example, a community digitization agent with a good alternative credit score could get credit to play a bigger role in the agricultural value chain while bridging the digital gap for the smallholder farmers.

Lack of digital literacy and financial tools are two key factors which encumber micro and small enterprises in Africa from economic growth.

Our approach seeks to bridge this gap for micro and small enterprises through the use of community digitization agents to effect digital transformation. Through our partnership model for bundled services, we can efficiently offer a myriad of digital interventions to any small and micro enterprise. 

Overall, through our solution, millions of youths and micro and small enterprises will have access to the digital economy and in so doing, we would have achieved the objective of the Challenge. 

In its current form, the Daya agent digitization app only permits financial tools to be offered to the shopkeeper microenterprise segment.

The pilot location covered 15 communities  with 150 number of microenterprises participating. 

Pilot location - http://bit.ly/micro-mapping

Based on feedback from our initial pilot, we are currently developing a second mini-pilot for the proposed super-app in collaboration with an agricultural technology startup for crop advisory to offer bundled services to the smallholder farmer segment specifically.

We are building for the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) using a bottom to top approach. 

We realise that there are a couple of initiatives to ensure that African AI researchers and data scientists are part of the global 4IR movement. However, data models need data. Lots of it! Therefore, we intend to accelerate this process by using the data generated by our community digitization agents to build a data infrastructure layer which can be accessed via APIs; this will in turn provide other 3rd party vendors the opportunity to create the next wave of 4IR apps layered on the data infrastructure layer. 

Our mission is to be the first cross industry data API for the continent in digital financial services, agriculture and commerce etc.

Currently in conjunction with our partners, the individual apps currently serve the following microenterprises. 

Crop advisory - 5,000 smallholder farmers 

Financial tools - 150 micro merchants

As a bundled superapp, we expect to reach 50,000 microenterprises in year 1, and 60 million microenterprises in year 5.

(Microenterprises include all small business segments such as shopkeepers, smallholder farmers and marketwomen).

Youths

• Number of youths onboarded and trained as Community digitization agents.

• Cumulative Income earned by the community digitization agents over a period.

• Number of community digitization agents who are able to earn above the poverty level of $1.25 per day.

Micro and Small enterprises

• Number of micro and small enterprises (initial focus on Smallholder farmers) signed up.

• Number of micro and small enterprises (initial focus on Smallholder farmers) who continue to participate 3, 6 and 12 months later.

• Improved yields and income for Smallholder farmers.

Partnerships

• Number and diversity of partners onboarded.

• Value of additional support and interventions (such as credit) facilitated through Partners who leverage the data infrastructure.

2 full-time staff

1 part-time staff 

3 contractors

The core team possesses a heterogeneous mix of skillsets and experiences required for the road ahead.

DAVID OWOYEMI has spent the last ten years supporting startups and MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises), providing a range of services including Accounting, Financial advisory and education, venture coaching, and ecosystem building. 

Through his several years of working with MSMEs, he has been able to gain a significant level of understanding of their challenges and has been involved in conceptualizing and implementing various solutions to these challenges in Liberia and Nigeria.

AKINOLA DIXON is a digital financial services consultant focused on working with teams involved in creatively building socially responsible and profitable solutions to the benefit of our global community.

His experience cuts across many fields including Research, Programming, Technology Startups, Mobile Payments, Identity, Human Centred Design Analysis, Product Design, Project Management, Storytelling for change just to highlight a few.

He is also a grantee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for his work on bringing underserved microenterprises into the digital and formal economy. https://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/grant/merchant-acquiring-and-mobile-payments-platform-mampp-shops-and-points-sale

Additionally, he also leads a circular design consultancy which seeks to develop solutions to intractable social development challenges.

Together, we have ideated on various issues such as youth unemployment, financial illiteracy and community building, and this has now given birth to our present mission to tackle these challenges using technology through Daya.

Lastly, we use circular design principles to create solutions and this requires us to constantly keep in touch with the microenterprise segment which we serve. 

At Daya, we believe that both the Youths we engage as well as the micro and small enterprises we serve are an integral part of our team. Hence, we will be organizing the youths and micro and small enterprises and identifying leaders from among them in each community who will serve as community builders over a defined tenure. By doing this, we will be building a diverse network of community builders who are from various cultures and backgrounds. 

Furthermore, vacancies in our organizations will be published not just in regular channels such as Job sites, but also to our network of community digitization agents so that some of them who aspire to further build their careers can seize opportunities within our organization to do so. 

Finally, we plan to design and implement progressive and inclusive talent attraction and management practices that will bring more women into the workforce especially at management level.

Grant Funding and network building.

In terms of Human capital, we specifically mean data scientists. In terms of technology, we specifically mean data structuring and analysis.

We are actively seeking partnerships for the following entities.

1. Banks seeking to offer last mile financial services to underserved customers. 

2. FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies which seek to gather data about their supply chain starting from distributors down to individual customers.

3. Renewable energy companies offering pay-as-you-go solar home systems and solar lighting solutions. 

4. Agricultural companies focused on advisory and farm input solutions for smallholder farmers. 

5. Government and Donor agencies implementing social protection programs. 

We would like to partner with organisations within these sectors in order to enable our community entrepreneurs to serve a wide variety of interventions to their communities.

Through our Digitize Africa Program, we and our partners will work within communities across the African continent to build inclusive models for economic prosperity.

We will use the HP prize for Advancing Equity to create digital curriculum and training programmes for our community entrepreneurs.

Through our Digitize Africa Program, we will be building the infrastructure for the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and this requires significant investment in Machine Learning tools and resources which are out of reach at the moment.

We will use the AI for Humanity prize to hire competent data scientists and build out our 4IR data infrastructure layer; this in conjunction with our community entrepreneurship model will ensure no individual is left behind in the journey to digital utopia in Africa.