Digital technology has immense potential to strengthen communities and empower individuals in the developing world, especially when it comes to personal finance.

However, uptake is often uneven and digital financial services often try to implement products that ignore the unique social and community structures that surround money in the developing world.

aidx is a tech for good company with the ambition to combine the centuries’ old tradition of peer-to-peer mutual aid and pooling in East African communities with an accessible, easy to use mobile app.

By combining a traditional form of social security and saving with modern technology, they hoped to make it simple and safe for communities to pool money no matter how spread across the world they are.

They approached us as they needed an end-to-end partner who would be able to contribute everything from initial concept validation and market research to designing, building and launching the product to market.

Kicking off our partnership with a four-week discovery phase, our multidisciplinary team carried out in-depth market research and user research to help understand the market and the needs of their users.

Leveraging hundreds of hours of interviews from real people in East Africa, we developed a detail product roadmap in tandem with AidX and helped them to identify high priority features.

The Moja app launched into Early Access on Android in 2020 in Kenya ahead of a wider launch into East Africa.

The app already gives users the ability to add friends and family to a pooling group with security features such as pooling approval, KYC approval processes and multi-signatory disbursement.