(A column highlighting scientific, technological, engineering and design innovation in Africa)
Ffene is a low-cost business management platform that allows small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to track their finances, manage customer data, track and manage inventory, and generate statements in real time. It relieves business owners of the tedium of manually carrying out those processes, freeing them to concentrate on business decisions and at the same time saving on administrative costs.
Ffene, which means “jackfruit” in Luganda, was developed in 2012 by 23-year-old Ugandan Titus Mawano, a computer science major at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the United States, who skipped his last year to begin working on the platform at home in Uganda.
Ffene software runs on both desktop and mobile devices and to date has about 600 users. Businesses sign up for free on the company’s website, and pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee of 30,000 Ugandan shillings (US$12) a month. Payment plans and special discounts are available on a case-by-case basis. Ffene partners with PesaPal to enable mobile payments on the platform, but hopes to eventually allow payments to be made directly between customers by mobile money.
Subscribers can also have an online presence in the form of a web page, which is provided via a mobile accessible web-application, allowing users to access their data anytime, anywhere.
Mawano says he plans to expand across Uganda before striking out for East Africa and subsequently across the entire continent. To this end, the company is fine tuning the analytical side of Ffene to add further value, such as integrating tax laws into the software so that you can provide automated tax position information. Ffene Ltd. is also developing offline tools to enhance the software, in response to the unreliability of Internet connection in Uganda and in many other African countries.
In addition, Ffene is trying to create industry-specific products, including for the agriculture, hospitality, medical and dentistry sectors.
Ffene was one of three winners in the Apps4Africa 2012 challenge, earning Mawano $10,000 in prize money. Mawano also won second place and $15,000 in the 2013 Anzisha Prize, the premier award for African entrepreneurs aged 15-22, who have developed and implemented innovative businesses or solutions that have a positive impact on their communities. Most of the prize money goes toward R&D, with some reserved for hiring to grow the Ffene team.
