Manny Anyango, a Kenyan digital communications and social media strategist, runs a chama through a WhatsApp group. Chamas are informal micro-savings and lending groups popular in Kenya and East Africa. Like Nigeria’s ajó or South Africa’s stokvel, members pool money together to invest, save or lend to individual members at little to no interest. Beyond micro-savings, these groups also form small closely-knit communities where members often fundraise for social causes or to support members in times of loss.
Most of these groups operate on social messaging apps like WhatsApp and track member contributions there. According to Anyango, manually updating names and contributions, as opposed to utilising crowdfunding apps like M-Changa and GoFundMe, poses a headache.
“People join, leave, or change numbers, and keeping track of who has paid is a constant struggle,” says Anyango.
“You need to remember how much you had (in your mobile money wallet) or eventually trace to the first amount you received and from whom and add the total manually countless times,” says Eddie Saroni, a social media marketer who runs an Arsenal FC fan WhatsApp group of 258 members and often manages contributions for funerals, birthdays, and hospital bills. “Updates stream in, people call asking why you are yet to add their names and balances, etc. It’s messy.”
Still, WhatsApp offers more transparency and accountability to the crowdfunding process in a low-trust market like Kenya.
In 2023, 23-year-old university student Danche Nganga came upon the idea to create a crowdfunding alternative that worked on Telegram and WhatsApp where people were already trying to keep track of communal fundraising.
Nganga, who was studying Applied Physics and Computer Science at Multimedia University of Kenya at the time, first saw this as an opportunity while discussing with his then partner, who was trying to support a fundraiser for a late cousin.
“I suggested to her that we create a payment kitty (an informal term for a pool of money raised communally) where you can send money and automatically [receive] the funds in your wallets,” Nganga says.
“We argued a little, but I recalled that contributors also like to track the contributions being raised via WhatsApp. That was the starting point,” he says.
A real-time chatbot
OneKitty, the product which resulted from that conversation, is a crowdfunding app integrated with social messaging chatbots that provide real-time updates of contributions to every member in the group.
This not only eliminates the hassle, confusion, and delays in managing contributions manually, it also lends transparency to the process, giving every member of a fundraising community equal insight into the communal pot.
Crowdfunding platforms like M-Changa and GoFundMe are popular in Kenya, but monitoring the progress of crowdfunding campaigns in ways that contributors can track did not happen in real-time on either service, Nganga claims.
As the startup’s technical lead, Nganga sought operational proficiency in 28-year-old Shem Maina, who joined the business as chief finance and operations officer.
“My background is not in IT and Computer Science like many techies,” says Maina, who holds an MBA in Strategic Management from the same university.
Once they had a product, the two partnered to conduct AB tests with friends and classmates at their university and church, attracting responders both organically and through referrals.
Some of their initial challenges were building a platform that was simple and worked end-to-end, the co-founders said. They also struggled with market entry and earning user and partner trust.
“Taking someone through how the product works was not enough, as most Kenyans are sceptical when sending money online,” Nganga says.
The app, through partnerships with banks and telcos, allows payments from mobile money wallets M-Pesa and Airtel Money, but it is the integration with peer-to-peer services like SasaPay, that has led to the company’s success so far, according to Maina.
To mitigate fraud, OneKitty’s co-founders say that an inbuilt AI monitoring system, as well as dedicated financial fraud personnel, are among several safety measures it employs.
Its chatbot also allows a group to set as many or few signatories as possible to authorise withdrawals to avoid embezzlement.
Since its launch, OneKitty—whose team of seven hybrid employees work out of a head office in Nairobi—says it has facilitated over 10,000 fundraising campaigns for over 200,000 Kenyans on its platform.
Differentiating from competitors
OneKitty’s co-founders say they’re differentiating from their competitors with its WhatsApp chatbot integration. They are yet to roll out a chatbot for Telegram.
“Our competitors, most of them; actually, all of them are not on WhatsApp,” Maina says.
According to Statista, the number of Kenyans who use WhatsApp, which has steadily grown over the years, is estimated to reach 15.31 million of the country’s 22.7 million internet users in the next four years.
With the chatbot integration, not only can a fundraising community see contributions as they come through in real-time on a messaging app they use frequently, they can see when withdrawals are made and by whom.
OneKitty is also the most affordable option in the market at the moment, according to Maina. While GoFundMe charges a fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per donation, deducted from the total amount raised, and M-Changa charges a standard platform fee of 4.25% of the total funds raised, OneKitty charges 2.5% of the total contributions upon withdrawals.
For chama contributions, the company charges 2% of all withdrawals, and 5% for events—the WhatsApp bot can be integrated into a group and used to sell event tickets, the co-founders say.
In addition to M-Changa and GoFundMe, OneKitty is also competing with platforms like Thundafund, Kickstarter and even Safaricom’s M-Pesa whose Paybill and Short-Term Paybill products offer long term and short term crowdfunding solutions for institutional and individual projects respectively.
Most of these platforms employ an all-or-nothing fundraising model which means campaign managers can only receive their funds if they meet their target fundraising goals. OneKitty does not use this model, offering flexibility and allowing projects to receive any funds raised, which is beneficial for smaller community initiatives or emergencies.
Other alternatives like Indiegogo and StartSomeGood, an Australian crowdfunding platform operating in Kenya, also offer similar flexibility, although apps like Indiegogo require PayPal accounts and have limitations on what kinds of campaigns one can launch.
Vincent Kimosop, an economist and fintech expert, opines that higher rates and the inability of global crowdfunding platforms to connect their products with consumers in a relatable way presents one of their major drawbacks.
“It’s important to have a product that trickles down to the people in a way that they can be able to relate,” Kimosop told TechCabal.
“I think they (OneKitty) target social context and culture and have an upper hand in contracting local celebrities to endorse them. They speak a common language with the users,” he says.
Both Anyango and Saroni say they have yet to hear about OneKitty.
Nairobi-based architect Chriss Ndenga says he found OneKitty after an online search for “a more transparent way for people to contribute to different causes.” Like Anyango and Saroni, he’d manually tracked and tallied fundraisers in the past but was on the lookout for more effective alternatives.
He has contributed to other campaigns through M-Changa and GoFundMe, but found OneKitty’s social messaging bot useful for quick updates and transparency.
“I started using it during our game days and other functions, and by the time we lost Maggie (his partner’s cousin), I had already used it for about five other (fundraising) forums,” Ndenga says, adding that the app is appealing for very local campaigns with shorter target dates and in emergency situations.
So far, OneKitty operates only in Kenya and plans to launch in Tanzania. To fund an expansion, the co-founders who have so far bootstrapped the startup say they will consider seeking out investments. Product-wise, they are looking to accommodate card payments in the future.
Enabling community giving
OneKitty has enabled many heartwarming community projects, from a Muslim charity organisation fundraising to supply water tanks to children’s homes to the nursing home that uses the platform to help the sick for free.
Last year, the co-founders used the platform to raise Ksh 200,000 (~ $1,500) to purchase food and other household goods for residents of Mathare Slum in Nairobi in the wake of the infamous floods in which an estimated 281,835 people were displaced.
These causes continue to motivate the founders. In some of these projects, Nganga says, the startup has worked with campaigners to offer rate discounts, a feature of being closer to their market than other competitors are.
“These passionate stories motivate us to enhance our platform and also our delivery,” Nganga says.
