The digital finance fix helping Nigeria’s market vendors grow their businesses
For years, Ifeoma Isietulugo walked from stall to stall in the bustling Lagos Island Market to collect small cash deposits from vendors and record them in a paper ledger for her microsavings and credit business, Feedwell.
“People save little by little with me. At the end, they use the money to buy what they need—or they collect it in cash.”
Feedwell builds on an age-old practice in Nigeria known as esusu, or thrift savings, in which informal workers pool their money for their mutual benefit. (In addition to storing customer money, Feedwell offers goods for layaway purchasing.) As Isietulugo’s business grew, she needed a better way than pen and paper to track the hundreds of daily cash transactions with market vendors.
“If anything happens to the [paper] records, you’re lost—you can’t tell who paid. Sometimes the records get torn or go missing. And if there’s an error in the [ledger], it won’t match what customers have in their [passbooks].”
What if community savings systems could evolve to help market vendors save their money more securely, expand their businesses, and thrive?
Just 30 kilometers down the road at Lagos Business School’s Sustainable and Inclusive Digital Financial Services (SIDFS) Innovation Lab, AbdulAzeez Oguntoyinbo was prototyping a digital platform and mobile app to help answer this very question.
When he was younger, Oguntoyinbo helped collect rent from tenants of his father’s real estate properties. He saw the same issue repeatedly: People had no way to securely store and manage their money, making it hard to save enough for rent. At the Innovation Lab, he and his team created a new digital tool that could help address this problem.
“We discovered that many of our tenants could not pay for their rent as a result of thrift collectors who eloped away with their money. The problem was the insecurity and the informal way things had been done.”
The result is Esusu Africa, which combines features of traditional esusu groups with modern technology. It offers businesses like Feedwell a more reliable, transparent, and safe way to provide financial services and serve more people. Customers can go online or use the app on their phones to track their savings, add or withdraw funds, pay bills, and view their transaction history.
Eloho Iyamu, the learning and engagement manager at the SIDFS Innovation Lab, says the lab helps make financial systems more inclusive by ensuring that digital progress benefits everyone, not just those already in the formal economy.
By using Esusu Africa, Feedwell can reach more people, deliver savings and credit services more securely, and give Nigerians greater control over their money.
Esusu Africa already serves more than 180 thrift institutions, reaching over 500,000 customers. The platform has so far helped Nigerians save more than 100 billion naira (about US$70 million).
Digital public infrastructure—technologies like digital payment and ID systems—makes innovations like Esusu Africa possible, helping more Nigerians participate more fully in the economy.
“What makes my business bloom and grow every day is that a lot of people have great trust in Feedwell. The Esusu Africa platform has given us even more of an edge, because we have gone from doing things manually to doing them digitally.”
Today, Feedwell employs 70 people and serves more than 10,000 customers in Lagos Island alone. That wouldn’t be possible without Esusu Africa and the SIFDS Innovation Lab. But Isietulugo’s story isn’t just about growth. Her success allows her customers to build stability and lead more comfortable lives.
“Each time I see people have food on their table with the help of Feedwell, each time I see them get what they could not afford before, it makes me happy.”
Read next
