MobilizeZA

’s entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneurs are integral to community upliftment, providing goods, services and job opportunities. Through working with a number of micro enterprises across Africa, however, we realised that small business owners spent a lot of their time doing tedious tasks, that although integral to the operations of their business, were distracting them from growth opportunities. And that is where technology can make a difference. Often food stall owners would make a trip to the market on a daily basis, during this time they would close their stall and therefore lose potential sales. They would only have enough money to buy stock for the day and were buying such small quantities that they paid high unit prices. As they did not have their own transport they would either hire expensive vans or transport their goods using minibus taxis (who would charge them double for taking up a seat in the taxi with their bags of potatoes for example). They would then get back to their stall, make and sell their food dishes and put nearly all the revenue aside to go to the market the following day ­ and so the cycle continued. As mobile pe*******on continues to increase we have the opportunity to work with these entrepreneurs to build the technology platforms that will break this cycle ­ enabling them to formalise their processes, get access to market information, share resources and reach new markets. How we do this:

Learning from and adapting existing mobile technology, we can build a platform where local business owners can organise themselves into powerful clusters and benefit from the efficiencies of scale. buying groups that negotiate bulk discounts (think Groupon)

logistics teams that share transport to reduce costs (think Uber)

non­cash payment systems (think Mpesa or Paypal)

access to a global marketplace (think Etsy or gumtree)

simple tracking of cost allocation (think Splitwise)

transaction records that automate accounting process ­ (think Wavesapp)

Essentially, the entrepreneurs develop a sharing economy which allows them to unlock the value of under­utilised assets (such as idle vehicles) create employment opportunities (for delivery drivers and new employees within their businesses) and band together to save money, reduce time on tedious tasks and focus on growth opportunities.