Kilimo Grid

Horticultural cooperatives aggregate supply in WhatsApp groups and exercise books. Buyers can't see provenance, volumes or reliability before committing money. Logistics is arranged ad hoc, payments trail deliveries by weeks, and nobody — including the cooperative — has a live picture of what is actually moving.

A three-sided system: farmers declare planned harvests through a progressive web app or SMS; cooperative officers consolidate lots, grade quality and publish supply; buyers browse verified lots, commit to orders and trigger logistics. Payments flow through M-Pesa with escrow-style release on delivery confirmation, and every actor sees the same record of a transaction.

• ▸Next.js PWA for officers & buyers, SMS gateway for farmers on feature phones
• ▸PostgreSQL as the single record of lots, orders, settlements
• ▸M-Pesa Daraja integration with idempotent transaction handling
• ▸Event pipeline for order state transitions + SMS/USSD notifications
• ▸Offline-tolerant grading forms for low-connectivity collection centres

Three personas, three interfaces: a farmer's SMS thread that reads like a conversation; an officer's console built for speed (grade, weigh, photograph, publish in under a minute); a buyer's marketplace with provenance timelines on every lot.

Price discovery from the cooperative's own transaction history instead of rumour; demand forecasting per market to guide planting conversations; route suggestions that pool deliveries heading the same direction.

Targets are what this design is dimensioned for — not results claimed from work we haven't done. We think you should hold us to exactly this standard of honesty.

• Design target — 10,000 farmers per cooperative at full scale
• Design target — core flows usable on a 2G-class connection
• Design target — payment reconciliation accuracy of 99.5%