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Founder's story
Before setting up Bidhaa Sasa, David and Rocio, had both worked on increasing the access to clean energy in rural East Africa.
Despite modest success, they felt frustrated by the lack of progress the mostly technocentric approaches yielded in tackling this problem. Technology alone does not seem to be the solution for rural families in East Africa.
Most families still use tiny kerosene lamps to light their homes at night. People travel long distances on foot to charge their phones in a shop. Women have little choice but to cook on the ground outdoors, with firewood they collected from ever-dwindling sources.
Women, in particular, who spend more time at home are tasked with most household chores like cooking, fetching water and suffer the most from such poor living conditions.
Suitable technological advances – solar systems that light homes and charge phones or efficient cook stoves that reduce expenditure on biomass fuel and smoke – have long been invented and refined and whilst available in cities, they aren't accessible or affordable to rural families.
Most manufacturers and suppliers do not reach as far as the “last mile” and consumer loans are not available to those who live off the land. Loans below $100 are not interesting to traditional micro-finance organisations, nor do they have the required product or distribution expertise.
With Bidhaa Sasa, the founders are searching for a way to tackle both the access and affordability challenges and solve this distribution bottleneck that many impactful technologies, whether new or old suffer from.
We believe that we can both improve the lives of thousands of rural women, as well as provide empowerment and additional income. A start-up isn’t an idea put into action but a continuous journey of learning and agile adaptation.
Despite their crucial role in their communities, women in rural areas are probably the most underserved consumers today in East Africa. We’re all about making it easy for them to get products that will improve their lives. Our business has been built around rural women’s current circumstances, needs and aspirations, combining retail and finance in a one-stop-shop, resulting in 70% of our clients being women. Bidhaa Sasa supplies life-improving products using direct selling techniques – by women for women – and offers consumer financing to the under-served and unbanked making all products payable in affordable instalments through convenient mobile money payments.
Our ‘woman-to-woman’ direct sales model includes delivery to their homes to overcome their limited mobility, reduced awareness and lack of trust in new technologies. More than 80% of our over 80,000 clients have been recruited by existing clients, making client acquisition and distribution more cost-effective and more women-friendly than traditional agent-based models.
In addition, by leveraging that same social cohesion among rural women, we can offer micro-credit (nano-credit, actually) to groups of clients without preconditions or collateral. This allows us to specialise in sub-$100 products that have the highest potential to impact women’s lives but are normally ignored by financial institutions.
Our product range is defined by our clients’ feedback and today includes solar lamps, systems and radios, efficient cookstoves, LPG cylinders and cooking accessories, as well as water tanks and agricultural tools.