Uruziga: designing for cooperatives and basic phones

In March 2022, the month I started at IPRC Tumba, I joined the Youth Innovation Challenge run through the college's business incubation projects. The idea I presented was Uruziga.

The problem

Cooperatives have to manage sales, income, expenses and, at the end, profit sharing among their members. That is a lot of money moving between a lot of people, and it needs to be transparent.

Many members don't use smartphones. Any system that only works in a browser or an app leaves some of them out.

Three channels, one system

Uruziga was a management system for cooperatives that worked over three channels:

• The web, for cooperative leaders and administrators.
• USSD, the text menus you reach by dialling a short code, which work on any phone.
• A mobile app, for members with smartphones.

It included payments and SMS, so members could take part and stay informed whichever phone they had.

Selected, and then a change

I built the first version with my friend NDAYAMBAJE Celestin. We were selected in the top 20, as the third-ranked team.

After the selection, Celestin continued his studies abroad, and UWAYEZU Jean Felix joined me to carry Uruziga forward through the business incubation programme.

That decision shaped everything that followed, including the company we registered that October.

What I took from it

Design for the phones people actually have. USSD is not exciting technology, but for many cooperative members it is the only channel that works. Supporting it was the most important product decision we made.

Transparency is a feature. In a cooperative, the value isn't only recording numbers. It's making sure every member can trust them.

Credit every phase of a team. Uruziga began with Celestin and me and continued with Felix and me, and both phases built what came next.