For the longest, Africa has maintained great ingenuity with how community based merchandising is done locally.
Be it buying and selling or providing services, there are clever means devised to insure efficiency.
One of the many ways in which these local business owners use in meeting up their targets is what we will now know to be: Ajo in yoruba, Esusu in Igbo, Akawo / Adashe in hausa and in local palance; “Contribution”.
An age old practice of communally funding each other’s business or endeavors via micro units of daily, weekly or monthly contributions.
There are various modus operandi with how these practices are done, some are done as a daily piggy bank to in-the-end give a member, others are basically the coming together of persons of the-same trade or geographic trading location to put an agreed sum of monies aside to give each member an agreed sum at an agreed time.
This practice has gone on for centuries and has become a backup for so many small business owners.
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With the growth in financial technology juxtaposing the economic challenges of inaccessibility to funds by small business owners – a better way to do “Ajo” was born.
eAjor ; Nigeria’s first digital contributory platform bringing people together to collectively meet each other’s financial goals in a periodic and rotational pattern. ”Contributory” here refers to Ajo in Yoruba, Esusu in Igbo and Adashe in Hausa as earlier established.
With eAjor, tech savvy and upwardly mobile people will now be able to crowdfund their business or meet up with their financial targets directly while the aged and not so tech savvy could equally access the offerings of eAjor’s services indirectly via agents and agent outlets.
As a breath of fresh air, the Nigerian tech sphere as well as it’s financial community did witness the launch of what is now being perceived as the new trend in financial aids services and what will now solve the problem of crowdfunding or communal savings.
Not to be mistaken for a loan mobile application, eAjor sets itself apart for being the pioneer digital contributory scheme everyone can now be a part of.
Joining eAjor is as simple as joining Facebook, all you will need do is to download the eAjor mobile application for android/ IOs and then sign up using your email, you can view any of the existing cells on the cell chart and join any or create your desired cell.
One could also lock their funds in their “wallet” as a means of savings or just to stay financially disciplined.
The eAjor cells are in two kinds; Public and Private cell.
Public Cell is a general cell that is open to everyone. Here the system randomly determines the order of collection.
Private Cell is a invite-only cell. Where the cell creator can send invitations to family and friends. However, members can request to join a private cell. Collection is agreed amongst cell members.
Unlike the traditional Ajo where a 5 – 10 % charge from member’s payout is deducted, eAjor charges a 3.99% admin processing charge per payout; a fairer deal to today’s offline contributory schemes.
The security of the eAjor community is highly insured by the fact that all saved funds are warehoused with and managed by the payment platform Flutterwave and an efficient recovery team makes sure there’s a low default rate.
In addition with a PCIDSS-compliant payment processor, our partners at Flutterwave handles all card details. The card information is extremely safe and warehoused where they can hardly be compromised.
As testimonials are on the rise via the eAjor google business and social pages, the numbers of users, inquiries and satisfied customers have tripled since inception.
Indeed, there’s now a better way to do ajo and if this hasn’t been what Nigerian business owners have been waiting for, i wonder what is.
More information could be found via their official website www.eajor.com or by following her social media pages @eajorng across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google.
