For the majority of low-income communities in Nairobi, access to nutritious food is greatly hampered by their economic circumstances. Important food sources like meat, poultry, and fish, which would provide the needed daily nutrient intake is out of reach for this demographic, most of whom work in the informal sector where incomes vary daily. Realizing this deficiency, Khadija Churchill Mohammed founded Kwanza Tukule (loosely translated from Swahili as first let us eat) to sell affordable and nutritious plant-based food options from pulses. Today, it supplies peas, lentils, and beans, to low-income workers and households in Nairobi as an alternative to protein from meat. Since its inception in November 2019, Kwanza Tukule has been serving over 300 food vendors, focusing on Nairobi’s low-income consumer households and workplaces, and rapidly expanding.
However, despite the success of the Kwanza Tukule business model, their growth was constrained by their reliance on manual records and excel files for management of inventory and staff operations. This also made it difficult to trace their last-mile distribution of foodstuff to vendors in informal settlements and eventually to consumers.
Given Kwanza Tukule and 2SCALE’s focus on BoP consumers, a partnership was formulated with the goal of enhancing nutrition for low-income consumers. In September 2020, Kwanza Tukule, with the support of 2SCALE, engaged a systems development firm to implement a digital salesforce management system to manage their inventory, receive digital payments and manage daily business operations. This digitization was aimed at enabling Kwanza Tukule to handle increased traffic which was expected as the company expands into new geographical areas in Nairobi.
Kwanza Tukule initially started out as a company focused on enhancing the nutrition of low-income communities by supplying affordable and nutritious pulses. While this is still a core part of a business, we have since the onset of the pandemic ventured into the delivery of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) products like sugar, rice, cooking oil to the low-income areas. This integrated approach has so far been successful, and we see this continuing going forward. The addition of FMCG was prompted by challenges we had with sourcing pulses from markets due to the covid lockdowns.