Mobile app eases access to small loans for sacco members

Waweru Kuria, 30, grew up in Kinangop and later moved to Gathiga village in Kiambu. He knows the frustrations of not being able to access credit when emergencies arise.

Kenya has about 10 million people in the low-income bracket who often require urgent access to loans and 98 per cent of the total population have access to a mobile phone, with 75 per cent of them using mobile money every day, according to the African Economic Research Consortium.

Most of those living in rural and semi-urban areas primarily rely on saccos to access financial services, which in some cases do not offer emergency solutions for members.

With his nine years’ experience in insurance sales, strategy and analysis, Mr Kuria braved all odds to create an online application that would address that need.

He created InukaPap that also doubles as his company name. The firm is situated at Neleon place in Westlands, Nairobi.

InukaPap, an HR application allows people to access micro-insurance and instant micro-credit on their mobile wallet and for those in formal employment, the money is later deducted from their salaries.

Armed with intense market research together with his team of nine developers from Kenya and South Africa, they started the app development last June with a starting capital of Sh100,000.

“I got a Sh80,000 loan and added my own savings to start and we tested a few business models before implementing our current model. It is important to us to follow an action learning approach in order to provide a service that our customers really value,” said Mr Kuria.

The company’s valuation currently stands at Sh500 million.

To do this, the Shangato College of Psychology and Design scholar involved their first batch of customers to develop a product that will have them in mind.

Besides listening to their customers the team also plugged into an amazing start-up ecosystem including organisations such as Sinapis, Spark Change maker and the Unreasonable Institute (in Uganda), attracting investors from Silicon Valley, Denver Colorado and South Africa.

The team has people experienced in investment, banking, finance, IT, customer relations, operations, sales and marketing.

“They say if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, build a team… our team is growing fast.”
“Growing my own company to address a dire need in Kenya has always been my dream.”

His company offers sacco members access to emergency loans within seconds regardless of someone’s location.

Once an agreement is signed with a particular sacco, members affiliated to it are able to borrow money from their mobile phones and receive it instantly on the iNukaPap wallet mobile app.

Members can then withdraw from M-Pesa or use the iNukaPap debit card to transact, which is free of charge. ATM withdrawals of any amount up to Sh40,000 costs Sh30.

InukaPap can now integrate with any banking platform, as well as work independently without any integrations required and has grown to have 12 members currently on board.

Through the platform, employers can also insure or provide access to insurance for their workers together with their families for as low as $0.03 a day. One can also get airtime credit and prepaid power credit advance via mobile money.

InukaPap gets commissions from insurance underwriters and earns an interest on the micro-loans. They charge 1.5 per cent commission to saccos while sharing a 60 per cent commission.

Forty per cent commission is charged if InukaPap lends its own money.

The app was recently accepted to the first ever class of the Barclays Accelerator, Powered by Techstarson in South Africa.

“To be selected out of the 462 applications from 45 countries across the globe is no small feat.

“Our company represents a unique technological platform that Barclays Africa ABSA believes has the potential to become a significant and relevant player on a global scale,” said Mr Kuria.

Mr Kuria’s company is in the process of setting up an office in Cape Town, South Africa as an expansion strategy to enable them reach southern African countries.

Paul Muriu and Stephen Mureithi are beneficiaries of the app.

Mr Muriu, 48, a horticulture farmer in rural Kenya, earns most of his income from his 1.5 acre onion plantation. When his onion crops were unexpectedly attacked by parasites shortly before harvest time, he was afraid of losing everything he worked for.

“My farm is my livelihood and I had no money to buy pesticides to save my onion crop,” said Mr Muriu.

After learning that InukaPap offers instant emergency loans that he could access through his mobile phone, Mr Muriu immediately signed up in order to buy pesticides to attempt saving his crop.

He is a member of the Nyala Sacco that gives him access to InukaPap’s services as a member on the platform.
“I signed up in 10 minutes, immediately bought the right pesticides and harvested flawless onions three weeks later,” said Mr Muriu.

He would have lost his entire crop worth Sh420,000 without the pesticides.

If he had lost his onion harvest, it meant that he would have lost the security of his bank loan.

“If InukaPap could not have been there to offer me the loan, the loss would have destroyed my relationship with the friends who guaranteed me the loan and I would not be able to fend for my family,” he said.

In the case of Mr Mureithi, his six year old daughter developed a worrying high fever and acute abdominal pain in the middle of the night he hesitated to take her to the hospital.

“I knew she was very sick, but I also knew that I did not have money to pay the medical bills at the hospital.
“I was worried and I had to take her to hospital despite my concerns about paying the bills,” said Mureithi.
Mr Mureithi is a small-scale farmer who lives from hand to mouth.

His daughter would later be diagnosed with internal parasite amoeba, which could have life-threatening consequences.

His daughter’s medical bill was Sh6,000 – but he was unable to pay.

“A friend told me of the InukaPap platform and I quickly signed up and in less than 10 minutes I had the money.

My daughter wouldn’t have been discharged from the hospital if the bill was not paid in full,” said Mr Mureithi.

It is such people who make it is easy for us to do what we do with passion. We hope to reach over 100,000 people through InukaPap by end of year, said Mr Kuria.

“Our customers make our work a worthwhile,” he said.

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