Social Impact Project for Revamp of Bidhaa Sasa ERP - India Cohort

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience on projects like this one.

Project Description and Impact

Bidhaa Sasa has already spent years building its own IT infrastructure with a simple goal in mind: can anyone run the business from a smartphone and can any manager know what is going on irrespective of where they are located. This is not as simple as it looks. So far we are 75% of where we want to be, the 25% we have not yet built is still crucial to operating efficiently the business but because of lack of resources (skills mostly) we have not yet managed to execute. Above I am giving 3 different themes for potential projects with external collaborators. They can be approached independently from each other or not.

Learning Opportunity

How to build business IT infrastructure with little resources and in a different environment compared to your average SME in the western world.

Running a business in Kenya and Uganda means that all your usual business indicators such as costs and revenue one is used to in the western world need to be divided by 10. This means one needs to be very focus on building IT infrastructure that is of equal quality as the one for a "rich" business but that will cost 10 times less to build and run (ideally!). On top of that the context in Kenya is very different than in the western world, it is a mobile first world where android smartphones and mobile money rule, there is no room for old fashion desktops applications or credit card payments and it is a world where most users are 25 years old or below, not to mention the intermittency of the telco networks in rural areas.