We are very happy to share some good news: we will take part in this incubation program.
First, what it is. The Agence Française de Développement (AFD) is the French public entity in charge of the Development effort from France, mainly towards Africa, through loans, advisory and all sorts of programs. As part of their strategy to strengthen entrepreneurship on the continent and foster job creation, they have selected a few ambitious Africa based start-ups leveraging technology to tackle big problems at scale. On top of the networking opportunities, we will benefit from mentoring of top level experts in a week long session in Marseille end of November, and eventually be part of the tech event Emerging Valley in the futuristic place The Camp.
How do we fit in this scope? As a reminder, Optimetriks’ mission is to improve the way consumer goods distribution happens in Africa. We believe that digital tools can help streamline the flow of information, improve logistics and make the value chain more profitable for its participants.
Bottom line, that should translate into concrete benefits for the millions of retailers across Africa: being able to be get a better assistance by the consumer goods manufacturers, in getting a fridge repaired if it sells frozen products for example, or some branding material deployed, being able to order easily and have visibility on the delivery time, get better funding to purchase products on credit, etc.
The current situation is that retailers cannot express their feedback or communicate directly to the brands, and are as such frustrated and poorly served. Brands would typically recruit multiple intermediaries, such as market research firms, merchandisers or sales rep to engage with the retailers, get insights on how they are doing, take their sales order, etc. This is both expensive, time consuming and somehow prone to inefficiencies.
On the manufacturing part, while there are a few top well known consumer goods brands, there are more and more new local entrants in this industry. We recently engaged for example with one of the leading importer of frozen chicken in Togo, that has 5 salesmen on the ground, but lack visibility on their actions, any CRM type of analysis on the customer (shops) purchases, and would like to embark on a smarter digitised distribution process. Our mission is to make our SaaS Sales Force Automation relevant for the thousands of similar small players, so that they can easily configure their workflows, set up their users, and start being more professional in their Route to Market execution.
Any business that involves some kind distribution in Africa has to devote some high operational expenditure spending to it. If implementing our tool can result in sales increase and lower operating costs, we believe that is a social impact worth working on!
