Invest in Africa (IIA)-Kenya wishes to engage an experienced rm to develop and integrate a traceability
solution into its cloud based Biashara.Now platform.

About the Biashara.Now Platform:
The Biashara.Now platform is provided as a service of IIA Kenya to support its founding vision and mission. Invest in Africa (IIA) is leading African investment and trade accelerator. IIA is a high impact network whose membership includes MNCs corporates, local MSMEs, DFIs, create positive impact (Jobs).
We believe that MSMEs are the catalyst for the social and economic development of Africa, and we are passionate about shaping the next generation of African global companies. We engage private sector in the priority sectors: Food and Agriculture; Manufacturing, Infrastructure Development and unlocking the MSME ecosystems for investors and engendering inclusion of youth and women to champion private sector growth and catalyze MSME growth in 3 ways:
i. Integrate credible and vetted MSMEs into corporate and multinationals’ supply chains.
ii. Build long term capacity of MSMEs through better access to skills and nance; and,
iii. Work to improve the investment climate and shape policy in countries we operate.

Through its Biashara.Now platform, IIA connects Buyers to local Suppliers. We register and validate SMEs who supply products but lack market access and a coordinated access to it, to supply to our Anchor Partners and registered Buyers.

The Biashara.Now platform is a multi-facet software-as-a-service application that integrates the following
functionality access online at, www.biasharanow.com:

1. E-procurement capability – branded as “Tenda-space”.
2. Business network community – branded as “Biashara-Network”.
3. Knowledge and skills hub (populated with business guides and training resources) – named “Biashara-Academy”
4. A financial lending service – to support SMEs request nancing for deals won through the platform or equity.

About the Project and Assignment:
The East Africa Community(EAC) market is gaining increasing importance for value-add natural products made in Eastern Africa. In addition, there is also an increasing openness in the community to buying “products made in EAC”. The EAC market has high potential for SMEs in manufacturing but is quite often overlooked. The progress of the realization of EAC provides new growth potential for SMEs manufacturing natural products, due to the ease of access to neighboring markets.

This project will provide practical and tailored solutions to the specic challenges posed by SMEs in manufacturing of natural products in Kenya and Uganda through building their capacity in key skills areas and providing much needed linkages to enhance their competitiveness.

IIA Kenya, supported by the Business Scouts for Development program (BSfD) seeks to improve Biashara.Now to support its ongoing projects to create scale up opportunities in select clusters to help businesses improve production quality, to develop new products and processes, to facilitate technology transfer or to enter new markets. The program is funded by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation for Development (BMZ) and implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, a German development cooperation agency.

The firm shall be required to enhance and integrate a transparency & traceability solution into Biashara.Now to allow project beneciaries’ finished products to be track and traced back to their production process, to meet the increasing requests from the market. The solution should at the minimum support the following:

1. Enable beneciaries to showcase their products and product proles transparently and digitally for potential buyers on the platform – enabling them to deal with lack of visibility due to low digital marketing and brand building and limited access to international markets
2. Ability to document production processes, standards compliance, and certication into their product
3. profiles
4. Ability to generate and digital labels to display product proles at all stages of the process – E.g in packaging, online product proles etc.

Technical Information: Biashara.Now is built with Laravel PHP framework
Duration of Assignment: 8 weeks.
IIA Contact Person: Fillisters Sang - kenya.admin@investinafrica.com
Application Deadline: 1st April 2022

Eligible firms should send proposals to the above address.
Only successful applicants will be contacted by 0792951676