Jamii Pay – Community creating opportunity

Jamii.one is an online community creating opportunities for unbanked people in traditional savings communities by linking them to established financial services.

The four questions:

Describe your business idea?

Jamii.one is a digital platform developed with and for people in traditional savings communities. We provide a free app that captures data in these groups and use this data, to connect unbanked people and groups to formal financial services.

Every second adult in the world lacks access to a loan from a bank, but many are part of a savings groups. Saving up money and taking loans from neighbours and friends. Jamii.one has digitalised the complex recordkeeping and logging of social data in these groups. We provide a free app that only requires one person in a group of 20 to have a phone for everyone to start building a digital identity and financial track record.

NGOs across the world support millions of people in savings groups. By bringing NGOs data on their groups, Jamii.one has an efficient, low-cost distribution channel to reach new users.
We partner with bank to offer financial services to our users based on the digital fingerprint and credit score that they have gained in the Jamii.one system.

We built the app in collaboration with more than 600 people in savings groups in Ethiopia, most of whom are women, to ensure easy use for all customers, even those with low literacy.

What is your impact on sustainability?

By gaining access to banks, the unbanked can invest in micro-businesses, education, health or agricultural production (e.g. cattle). We work to eradicate poverty, especially among women (80% of our users are female) by including a previously excluded segment into the financial ecosystem. Our solution also integrates micro-learnings to financially educate our users.

How does your business model work?

There are multiple revenue streams for Jamii coming from banks and institutions. Our goal is to break even in 2023.

What is your vision five years from now?

In five years from now we will be active in 8 countries with a total of 2 million users, 15 bank partners, and 21,000 NGO-Premium subscriptions. We want to reach Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, Philippines, Bangladesh, Brazil, and provide savings groups in these countries with the vital access to financial services that they need to move out of poverty.