Check Oja is a reliable platform to check the current prices of goods in local markets across Africa. Powered by remote data routing and real-time data analytics. The goal is to create the heartbeat of the African e-commerce ecosystem that allows people to track prices at their convenience while also providing a databank for old prices and connecting millions of local markets to the internet. As a son of a farmer who has viewed this ecosystem for decades, the economic analysis of the market can be checked in terms of prices and the tech must be deployed locally. As a Yoruba boy, I call this innovation check oja which means, view market.
It is debatable that price availability might not be novel enough as Jumia and other e-commerce platforms have done so for accessories especially in Nigeria. The lacuna lies in foodstuffs and local farmers who belong to the poor class of which uniquely using data analytics and AI will transform their lives. This beckons for a layer of local penetration that is missing. He who connects the market owns the market, and what moves in between these connections. In filling this impact, that is where we come in. The strategy is to be able to gather and retrieve local prices in local dialects and the English language. We take advanced tech like ai and data analytics and merge it with natural language processing to communicate analytics findings to people in local dialects via our AI bot. Furthermore, these markets currently have; nothing like pay on delivery, online shipping or black Friday, etc. Revolutionizing this industry with advanced tech in a local way will transform the lives of billions of people. God knows we might have uber for fufu or MoinMoin or a local bike man delivering yams.
A local use case will be a local trader named Iya Ibeji accessing data analytics in her local dialect for a token of #50. From our bot ( with two simple buttons green and red) a voice query can be made to the check oja bot and response in form of a voice note in her local dialect will be delivered ( we are starting with Yoruba and English language). A simple farmer can be impacted by machine learning and make informed economic decisions in terms of the market.
We are not alien to machine learning and the market ecosystem in Africa with its need for local impact. Preliminary research shows price is the smallest and most important data anyone needs to make sales. It is fair to say the price is the fingerprint of sales and its aggregation builds up datasets to build a machine learning model for real-time analytics. Coincidentally, price is in text, and experience has shown that about 10 million entries of prices in the CSV file are less than a 1gigabyte of memory. Realtime analytics on price is memory inexpensive and computationally feasible!
In another vein, wholesalers often buy at ridiculous prices from farmers and sell at exorbitant prices in local or modern markets (they complain the most and they gain the most in the sales chain). Check oja provides a public offering of the average prices of goods as they were sold in the local markets that very day. This public offering allows the farmers to know the actual prices their goods are being sold hence will be able to demand more for their produce. The prices will be provided by a random majority pool algorithm to prevent cheating or market manipulation. This ecosystem rewards the local price provider and charges the platform users or household women who ask for those prices for their knowledge. Check oja is building a databank of these prices per time per market and would also be available for research purposes for the benefit of humanity.
Before this innovation, local markets have no public presence, remember the phrase, what happens in the markets stays in the market. That is why when you ask what is the price of garri ten market days ago, only a few people can remember talkless of a year or two. We are losing economic data at our point of sales in local markets. A data bank from us will cure this problem. Furthermore, prices escalate in Africa (festive season, fuel hike, etc) and intervention is quite hard because public record isn't known. With analytics from this datapoint about goods of interest say rice, relevant authorities can easily step in to stabilize its price and traders can easily ally to sell to the public or another wholesaler at a favorable price.
Conclusively, check oja is creating an ecosystem of Africans with data, tech, AI, and govt. It is an ecosystem driven by the people and for the people and has a huge potential of redistributing wealth in the African ecosystem from one country to another. The most unique barrier breaker is the check oja bot. This bot allows a user (local trader) to interact with the platform with his/her voice and two buttons ( Green and red ). Daily or weekly analytics is also meant to be provided on local tv and radio stations about these prices and possible fluctuations based on our algorithm. This helps people budget, especially during festive seasons.
We know check oja is bound to be the heartbeat of the African e-commerce system and the primary source of African prices for research. We are doing our best, your grant is what is left.