BACKGROUND
Markit Opportunity is an award-winning for-profit, social enterprise with the mission to improve the lives of smallholder famers in the East African Community by leveraging mobile technology and logistics innovation to create trusted, transparent and coordinated supply chains.
We offer a full-service trading platform, accessible via feature phones, that ensures high quality produce is sold in real-time into markets that pay the highest prices for the farmer crops. Markit Opportunity facilitates the entire trading process to ensure real outcomes.
Markit Opportunity is the winner of the 2015 Barclays Africa Supply Chain Challenge (with over 200 other startups competing across Africa).
October 2015 saw the first version of our platform. We chose one crop to focus our understanding - red onions. In the future, we aim to trade all crops in East Africa. As of March 31st, we have traded with dozens of farmers, earned impressive early-stage revenue, had repeat traders buy onions from the platform, and are steadily supplying a supermarket in Nairobi.
The next phase of our platform will take place in August and September of 2016 (the second harvesting season of the year).
PLEASE VOTE HERE | We seek your collaboration on our next feature
We hope to improve our platform with the OpenIDEO community by receiving feedback on our suggested features below.
Markit Opportunity Limited is a registered corporation in Kenya, CPR/2015/212791.
[APRIL 28 update]
FEATURE 2 - Agent App - is the most voted for feature! As the norm is to work with brokers during trading, and most farmers and traders seek trusted brokers, incorporating an Agent model into our platform will allow us to bring in logistics technology through a select group of trusted Markit Opportunity agents.
[MAY 1 update]
Our farmers have asked us to provide a better user experience. We believe that having a face-to-face interaction during the trading process will allow our farmers to feel they are getting a fair and protected trading experience. That does not mean we won't use technology. The Agent App will be an Android app that (1) collects farmer registrations data, (2) holds current pricing information for farmers to access and (3) syncs with our back-end web service to know the trade details of their assigned farmers and traders. See a mockup of (3) below in the product ideas. We will work on (1) and (2) with farmers.
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