ChapChap Africa Ltd easing business transactions for SMEs and low income people

ChapChap Africa Ltd, one of the SNV-IAP investees has upgraded their flagship payment App by adding a Merchant application to support low income businesses leverage on the use of smart phones.

In February 2018, ChapChap Africa Ltd signed a partnership agreement with SNV-Innovations Against Poverty (IAP) Project to support scaling of its innovative IT App for financial transactions using mobile phones and digitalising SMEs that interface with low income earners.

With SNV-IAP funding ChapChap Africa Ltd was able to upgrade their flagship payment App by adding a Merchant application to support low income businesses leverage on the use of smart phones to digitally manage their businesses while easing the purchasing process for the customers.

The ChapChap App payment platform initially allowed customers to purchase only utilities, airtime, Pay TV subscription and data digitally while earning cashback bonus and merchants earning commissions on every transactions made. With the new Merchant features, small business owners are now able to keep track of their inventory stock, sales, and revenue, at the tip of their fingertips using their smartphones.

ChapChap has been developing software solutions for the last two years. Emmanuel Emodek, the Managing Director is happy with the strides they have made since they partnered with the SNV-IAP project. “Our revenue has more than doubled since we entered into partnership with SNV-IAP. We used the first tranche of the co-investment grant from IAP to improve our app and roll it out to the business community. We have since increased the number of merchants enrolled and using the app to manage their businesses from 920 to 1,795 who now serve low income earners by supporting them make payments for water, electricity, airtime and TV subscription."

One of the features that they introduced into the merchant app was the Point of Sale (PoS) feature which functions like the PoS terminals in supermarkets. This enables merchants to add items to the stock record in the ChapChap app by scanning the bar code or entering the product name manually as well as the quantity. At the point of sale, merchants simply re-scan the bar-code of the product or type the product name and the app automatically searches for the price of the item in the database and updates the inventory and sales record about the transaction. This saves time for both the trader and their customer as several transactions can be carried out in a short time which has not been the case for small shops and other small businesses. The merchant can then generate an Inventory, sales/ revenue reports.  The application also  offers merchants such as additional avenues to increase their revenue through re-selling their floats in digital products (airtime, water, electricity, TV), sharing their stock with customers; as well as services such as employee management to schedule work patterns and provide payrolls.

The SNV-IAP project provides both co-investment funding as well as business advisory services to the Company to ensure that it is able to penetrate the market with its technology. The project has partnered with eight innovative and inclusive businesses in Uganda in the Agri-food, Energy, WASH and ICT sectors who presented successful business proposals under the Innovations Against Poverty (IAP) II Challenge Fund. The IAP II Project is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) with a specific mandate to identify and support innovative Inclusive Business models that are commercially sustainable and deliver developmental benefits for the low income population; especially women and youth in both rural and urban areas.

For more about the IAP fund