App founder who clicked on idea to grow saccos’ visibility

Anthony Kabugi’s (dot) coop domain business of managing websites for co-operative societies had flourished for nearly a decade when profits took a nosedive in 2015.

Mr Kabugi, an online marketer by training, visited his former customers seeking answers to his woes and was informed that mobile phones had eaten into his business leaving him with 10 websites that had withstood the highly disruptive mobile phone revolution storm.

“No one visited cyber cafes’ anymore to access their co-operative society accounts and all they did was to send a text message to a sacco office for feedback or made a call for other services. I knew my (dot) coop ‘cheese’ had been moved, leaving me with only one chance to survive in the market-go mobile,” he recalls.

The Global Links Consult proprietor held endless meetings with his staff where they formulated a new service that addressed co-operative societies’ need to market their products while reducing costs for members seeking to contact their co-operative societies.

CoopConnect was born, providing co-operative society members with a secure way to login into their individual accounts to transact business at no cost on an online mobile platform.

During the interview with DigitalBusiness, Mr Kabugi said they forwarded their new App to Global IT giant, Google which scrutinised the App and agreed to licence it as a Sacco App available on Google Playstore— offering a service for members, infrastructure and a platform for co-operative and their members to interact.

The platform has all cooperatives posted on its site by category and where they are located in every county thereby enabling a user to easily search for a co-operative society that best suits their tastes.

This gave the Kenyan company new impetus, signing up three co-operative societies in Nairobi serving company employees and another in Kirinyaga serving thousands of coffee farmers.

“As a cloud product, we allow co-operative societies to subscribe once every two years and this gives them access to a secure self-regulated platform to engage members.

Mr Kabugi said society members automatically view loans, shares and savings’ growth on the web- placed platform thereby saving them the need to visit offices. The loans also self-calculates, providing repayment duration as well as interest paid.

While he started off with a Sh200,000 capital injection, Mr Kabugi says they have grown to manage an annual turnover of about Sh2 million. “Co-operative societies can send individual or bulk messages at no extra cost to their members as CoopConnect is based on an online platform where members access on-demand services at a small fee charged for purchase of data bundles,” he says.

This saves societies large amounts of money since it no longer sends any statements via postal addresses or text messages thereby helping them engage members one-on-one on a real time basis.

Where members want to engage their societies, they log in a query and obtain a ticket for future reference which also helps societies gauge their efficiency in service delivery.

CoopConnect has been adopted by the 4,000-member Barichu Coffee Farmers Co-operative Society which annually exports about 500,000 kilorammes of coffee berries to America, Wanaanga Sacco’s 6,000 members and the 98-branch strong Ukulima Sacco which boasts 28,000 active members.

Mr Kabugi is also the local agent for “MYEDU” App developed by India based IT firm Hodusoft which provides a real time parent-teacher platform to converse.