A digitally-driven project, “Tajiri” which is channeled towards empowering African youths and small-scale businesses in Africa was recently launched in Lagos, Nigeria.

The Tajiri initiative is driven by the need to help the livelihoods of people especially young Africans, women, and SMEs in Africa grow to the capacity in which they can drive the economy.

Head of the Tajiri Project team, Mr. Kabiru Abiola, in a presentation held on Sunday, July 4, 2021, mentioned that “to solve all other problems of Africa, we need to first solve the economic problem. It is easier to do business with people outside the African continent than countries within Africa because there are problems of cross-border payments and remittances, he lamented.” We are in an economy that should better help people's livelihood however, people wake up and resume on the roads as beggars.

He also mentioned that there is a need for Africans to do more business amongst themselves and access better finance to be able to build on whatever skills or ideas they have harnessed. The main objective of the project is to provide long-lasting solutions to Africa’s Economic problems through youth empowerment and providing support to small-scale businesses for them to grow.

Abiola highlighted five big problems that hinder the majority of Africans from becoming financially free; Cross Border Commerce Constraint, Financial Exclusion, Poor Infrastructure and Support for Businesses, Poverty and Rising Rate of Unemployment, and Limited Digital Economic Integration. According to him, the limitations in digital integration in the economy seem to be pertinent amongst the major problems which the Nigerian economy has at the moment.

These problems have brought about the need for the economic empowerment project named ‘Tajiri’, a Swahili word that means wealth, hope, or riches depending on the context it is being used.

He further stated, that World Bank estimates Africa’s economic value at 2.6trillion dollars as at the last valuation, and this value is estimated to hit 5.6trillion dollars in the next five years. But, that will not happen if the people just sit back and do nothing to accelerate the economy better than what it is at the moment.

It was explained that every nation’s economy is driven by their small businesses, hence the need to focus on start-up entrepreneurs and small businesses. The Tajiri project is driven by Blockchain technology, as the project team wants it to be decentralized so anyone from the 54 countries in Africa can have access and own a stake in the project from wherever they are in the continent. Tajiri is a community-driven project; a project by Africans for Africa.

Kabiru in his statement however explained that the project will be starting in Nigeria; gradually extend to and change the other parts of the continent.

The Tajiri Project team built a ‘Tripod Solution’ to combat the identified major problems of the African economy as earlier mentioned. One of the solutions being proffered is, ‘The Tajiri Financial System (Backbone)’, which is built to address the problem of financing, improve digital integration, and enhance cross-border transactions across the continent.

The Tajiri Financial system aims to provide a solution to one of the biggest problems facing businesses in Africa, which is, ‘cross-border trading’; To provide a platform where Africans can do business amongst themselves through a financial resource that will help grow their businesses.

It will also help African youths, women, and small business owners have unlimited access to the opportunities available in the emerging global digital economy and establish an economy in which good infrastructure thrives and enhance the smooth flow of business operations.
The second system of the tripod is ‘The Tajiri Digital Enterprise Economy (Lab)’. This is built to facilitate digital economy integration for young entrepreneurs, women, and small businesses in Africa. The team is deliberately building an enterprise lab in order to develop solutions and make it easy, especially for content creators to monetize and maximize their income, business owners to automate their businesses, and every African to have a source of passive income, providing them access to bigger markets, digital solutions that tackle economic issues and ultimately making more money.

Another tripod system that will be adopted to combat infrastructure issues, as well as the massive unemployment rate, is the ‘The Tajiri Industrial City’ using the ‘Grid model’. This means that they will be building mini industrial estates for different industries across Africa providing state-of-the-art infrastructure with the aim of taking a huge chunk of the bottlenecks off the shoulders of Africa’s entrepreneurs in effect reducing drastically cost of producing world-class goods.

The team’s job will be to coordinate and build the structures and enable entrepreneurs to carry out their activities. A fashion design entrepreneur, for example, can walk into an estate of his or her industry and rent all she/he needs to sew clothes for a token; which means the entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily have to own a shop or tools to carry out his or her business of the day. All these solutions will come together simultaneously to solve the economic issues of the continent.

THE PRODUCTS
One of the Products the platform is building is called ‘CREATAJ’. It is designed to empower people by monetizing their skills, knowledge, experience, and passion. It will also improve the rate at which people can use digital content to earn a living in Africa. Another product on the platform shall be “SMETAJ”, which is especially for small business owners. It aims at simplifying and automating business processes for easy evaluation, storage, and retrieval of business information.

All these activities and indeed the entire Tajiri ecosystem shall be powered by the Tajiri token called “TAJI”. A hundred billion units of TAJI (100 billion) has been created on the “Binance” blockchain network and shall be the primary medium of exchange in the ecosystem as well as a representation of stake-holding in the project, while “Mtaj” which represents the value of dividend emission on a regular basis shall be distributed to all TAJIRI token holders as at when due. Holders of TAJIRI tokens can also trade or provide their tokens to earn more returns on the ecosystem’s centralized and decentralized exchanges “TAJIREX” and “TAJCASH” respectively.

The Tajiri team which include Mr. Michael Adeyemi and Fred Lawanson expressed their optimism that TAJIRI, being first of its kind in Africa and indeed the world, will have mass appeal and a very fast adoption rate, therefore encouraged people to quickly take advantage of what the project is offering by making use of the products and acquiring as many of the tokens as possible for themselves. They however cautioned that such decisions be done from a place of knowledge that can be accessed online and specifically from their website https://gotajiri.com/ito and social media handles.