Economic Empowerment
A business journal built for the notebook habit
Yao Gervais Amoah is building a mobile-first business journal for small and informal African merchants, designed around the way they already use handwritten notebooks.
Handwritten notebooks. That is what small and informal African merchants use to keep their businesses, Yao Gervais Amoah says, and it is what inspired the mobile-first business journal he is building for them.
Pen and paper work early on, he says. As businesses grow they become unreliable, leading to lost records, unclear profits and poor stock tracking. Existing digital tools are too complex for daily informal use.
“users log transactions naturally, and the app organizes everything automatically in the background”
Yao Gervais Amoah
His aim is to replace that friction with a simple system.
Gervais, whose university is the University of Lome, is looking for his next step. The app is what he is building now.