• Stellar-backed ClickPesa is working to solve remittance woes in Tanzania.
• The startup’s focus is typically on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

Tanzania-based payment protocol ClickPesa built on the Stellar blockchain is making waves all over Africa with its revolutionary potential. ClickPesa is a company created by two Stellar Lumens developers, Rick Groothuizen and Richard Lema. 

The payment gateway was initially conceived as a solution for settlement challenges faced by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Tanzania. According to a published statement by ClickPesa, some of the core challenges discovered to impact SMEs are high monthly fees for maintaining bank accounts and complexities involved in bank payment processes.

There were also the problems of Business-to-Business (B2B) mobile payments not being interoperable, long settlement times, mobile wallets not supporting multiple currencies and high fees charged for receiving money from abroad. With all of these challenges posing as threats to these businesses, ClickPesa was created to simply facilitate these transactions and birth a new era in Tanzania’s remittance market.

The platform was designed to tackle the very problems and complexities experienced by the SMEs. This was achieved by having extensive conversations with entrepreneurs to gain the right knowledge about what solution would better increase their productivity and reduce operation costs. 

Hence, ClickPesa was built to offer a unified payment platform for businesses in Africa with the aim of saving cost, facilitating speed, and ultimately improving business and accounting processes. 

Stellar Provides Financial Boost in Africa

ClickPesa’s integration with Stellar to facilitate cross-border payments has been instrumental in achieving its goal. Users of the platform have access to the Stellar Lumens payment network through 3 money operators in East Africa: Tigo, Vodacom (M-Pesa), and Airtel. 

Stellar blockchain’s popularity is fast-growing in Africa. One of the platforms which also leverage the protocol is GetPaid, a marketplace and community platform for tech companies, digital platforms, and digital professionals.

Per a statement from Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), 

“Seeing an opportunity to reduce the friction inherent to intra-African cross-border payments and P2P payment activity, ClickPesa also serves as an Anchor on the Stellar network and provides on/off-ramps to the banking systems of Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda.”

Noteworthy, ClickPesa hired some of the brightest minds to help reach its goals and achieve the vision of conquering the remittance market in Africa. In a newly introduced series dubbed Decentralife, Neema Adam, a front-end engineer at ClickPesa was featured  and here, she talked about how and why she joined the team.

She cited that most popular and highly-requested payment methods like Stripe are not available in Africa. “Say you want to become a writer on Medium and get paid, but then Medium wants you to use Stripe. Stripe is not available in most countries in Africa. So it’s limitations like those that would discourage someone to start. That is something that I would like to be able to solve. That’s what keeps me up,” Neema said.