Elevating Manufacturing in Africa

Vision

Spark a new economic paradigm by tokenizing all parts of production chains.

Mission

Building the first decentralized industrial network to replace and disrupt a historical exploitative industry with a decentralized and democratic network that incorporates all African producers. This allows them the participation in efficient and transparent value chains to produce at scale for the global market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTewhzjct9o

Motivation

We believe in an Africa where everyone has the opportunity to fulfill their personal potential, where everyone can have access to a stable income and growth opportunities. We believe that African economies can grow and prevent mistakes the rest of the world has committed, while building a livelihood for millions of Africans.

We have observed a pattern in the way many African economies are built: The number of formal jobs is limited, so many people turn to run their own small or micro business, often in light manufacturing such as tailoring, carpentry, or else. However, because of a lack of formal education and professionalism, these small businesses only serve the limited domestic market, lack access to capital, and usually do not grow. This is especially evident in the fashion industry. It is the second-largest employer in Africa, but exports from African countries are just a tiny fraction of the global fashion exports.

We believe that this is a huge opportunity – all the resources are already there, they just need to be organized in a better way. With Cardano, we want to make these value chains transparent and efficient and give millions of small businesses access to the global market, as well as the tools to supply it. We aim to create a network that creates incentives to participate, trust and invest in the growth of Africa locally and globally.

Model

Manufacturing is the only way to create necessary jobs and enable economic growth in Africa. We decided to start with the fashion industry.

The African continent is naturally decentralized, and imposing centralized industries will repeat all the suffering we can observe in textile production hubs of the world. Imposing centralized structures might also damage many of the natural advantages the African continent has.

Thanks to blockchain, those mistakes can be avoided. The Waya model builds on existing small businesses in the fashion industry and organizes them in a decentralized production system. By aligning incentives and creating a clear path to grow a production business, we open the way to an alternative model of industrialization.

This alternative model of industrialization is transparent, democratic, fair, and makes every participant a beneficiary of the overall growth.

How do we do this?

Access to market

The production of a garment is a complex task that includes designing, product development, and sewing, pattern making, fabric sourcing, tailoring, printing, packaging, and shipping. The Waya platform streamlines these production steps and makes it easy for international labels to produce clothing in Africa.

Using Cardano, we can decentralize and organize all these tasks transparently so that small businesses in Africa can take them up. Furthermore, the platform is an aggregator of production capacities. We can split tasks, i.e. divide 5000 pieces into five tailor shops when they only have a capacity of 1000. This way, we provide fashion production at the click of a button while creating value in Africa. Small African businesses can access orders, including the global market's instructions, capital, and materials on their phone. 

Access to working capital

We want African businesses to grow within the network, take up big orders, and reward consistent high standards. That requires working capital. Because of our knowledge regarding the performance of businesses, we can determine a credit rating. This credit ranking is the basis of the platform's internal lending scheme. By providing capital to trustworthy partners, we bridge the funding gap many businesses in Africa struggle with while also fueling the growth of our network.

A transparent and effective value chain

Supply chains in Africa are usually peer to peer and informal. This often leads to higher prices and less efficient systems. We think that decentral value chains have big advantages too such as flexibility and robustness. With the help of Cardano, we can preserve those advantages and eliminate the disadvantages. We map out every part of the supply chain to make it transparent, efficient, and resulting in cheaper products.

Implementation

For multiple reasons blockchain is the superior operating system for global and socially ambitious business ventures – and Cardano appears to be by far the cleanest implementation of that vision. Processing payments as well as orchestrating the shipping of real goods and user data at scale – and maybe more importantly, subject to complex and ever-growing business logic - sounds like a nightmare if it were to be handled in the traditional way, meaning: Centralized servers, expensive payment service providers, swathes of papers crossing jurisdictions. While those problems won't magically disappear, a DAO as the heart piece allows pushing the risky bits to the edges - allowing the whole system to at some point spread like ivy over the globe, unbeholden to contingent pettiness of singular fiefdoms.

We devised a somewhat complex scheme – a "game" if you will – to ensure the correct functioning of each part of the production process. Since we are already experienced working with Plutus (see mirqur.io - a DEX on Cardano) as well as all the other common constituents of the tech-stack – web-dev, app-dev, backend, even data science and AI (https://gitlab.com/fthagn) – there is no way we can not build something truly beautiful here. 

Definition of success after 3, 6, and 12 months

Progress made so far

We have…

• produced a basic clothing line with Ugandan producers
• built relationships with textile producers in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania
• built a database of 50 different African fabrics
• talked sustainability and fairness focused labels and found out what they need and want
• acquired two customers and are currently fulfilling orders for 5 products
• built agreed partnerships with 2 Ugandan producers
• built a strong advisory board
• developed a website and working on an online tool for fashion labels to post orders which the producers can easily fulfill
• built a local team of employees in Uganda

3-month milestones

• Having successfully produced and sold 500 pieces
• Launch ordering tool
• Total of 10 collectives on board
• Explore garment producers in 2 more countries and adding 30 more fabrics to the database
• Building of the training program & laying ground to onboard new collectives

6-month milestones

• Having successfully produced and sold 1000 pieces
• Built the DApp and blockchain representation
• Total of 15 collectives on board

12-month goals

• Successfully producing and selling 500 pieces monthly
• Onboarding 50 more collectives
• Collectives registered on blockchain
• Payment over DApp
• MVP of NFT model for fashion designers to publish their patterns

Launch date

1st December 2021

About us

Founders

Antonia Lorenz

https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonia-lorenz/

Antonia is an entrepreneur at heart and very passionate about all of her endeavors. She is on ground in Uganda for us which over the past two years also became her second home. She is creative, tech-savvy and has a great business mind. Before Waya Collective, she started the Podcast Foundality Africa and worked at E&P focus Africa, a consulting firm focused on African markets. She studied industrial engineering and management at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Currently, she is also the Africa coordinator for Sigma Squared Society, a global entrepreneurship community. At Waya Collective, she is our CEO and responsible to lead the Ugandan Team to build the processes on ground.

Chris M. Hiatt

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-m-hiatt-880187187/

Besides being a computer scientist by trade, cognitive systems and the way society organizes itself in form of various games have always fascinated Chris. Also, he was always annoyed by involuntary waste of human potential. It is not surprising that this resulted in him becoming passionate about smart contracts, which are a computational way to re-organize society from the ground up and lower the barrier of entry to superorganism-inception by orders of magnitude, thus posing a challenge to incumbents. Waya constitutes his second project on the Cardano blockchain, after the Mirqur-exchange.

Carolin Baltzer

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolin-baltzer/

Carolin is our numbers expert. Passionate about logical connections, she studied Economical Mathematics at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). During her studies, she started to learn about entrepreneurship and started to work as a CFO at heliopas.ai, a startup committed to helping farmers with soil moisture analysis, and for Plug and Play, an early-stage investment company. At Waya Collective she is responsible for Finances and for Operations.

Advisors

Simon Peters - CEO Decus Network
https://www.linkedin.com/in/snj-peters/

Tom Pause - Managing Partner E&P Focus Africa
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-pause-b2749678/

Dr. Michael Rabbow - Senior Advisor E&P Focus Africa, 34 years of experience in Africa & Asia

Gregorine Agbekponou - Consultant Accenture, Consultant for logistics & social impact
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorine-agbekponou/

Ping Lu - Founder Customized Drinks GmbH, entrepreneur & mentor
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pinglu/

Budget

This is the breakdown of expected costs for the next 6 months. We are currently building an MVP including accessing and partnering with production capacities in Uganda, customer acquisition in Europe and a DApp where every stakeholder can obtain governance tokens. We are also in the process of setting up our legal structure.

After those 6 months we will raise more money to complete our 12-month goals and to scale.

• Legal: 5.000$
• Product Development Fashion & Logistics: 15.000$
• Product Development DApp: 15.000$
• Marketing and travel costs: 4.000$
• Employees: 10.000$
• Other costs (telephone, storage costs, …): 1.000$
• Total: 50.000$