Stellar Community Fund

By Lul-Serving the unbanked

Lul-Serving the unbanked

SCF #29

$20.5K

Legacy v5.0 Activation Award

Awarded

Enabling financial inclusion for refugees and the unbanked in Africa with Remittance,ROSCA, Virtual cards, and other service.

Products & Services

Our app aids financially underserved refugees and unbanked individuals in sub-Saharan Africa. Many Africans lack adequate banking. For example, 350 Million people are unbanked in Sub-Saharan Africa. Also, millions of refugees don’t have financial access. Refugees often encounter hurdles accessing traditional banking due to language barriers, documentation challenges, and unfamiliarity with other financial options.

Our app, utilizing Stellar, tackles these issues by providing vital services like remittance, digital wallets, payments, crowdfunding, rotating savings and credit associations, and virtual cards. These solutions are crafted to offer refugees and unbanked individuals secure and affordable access to financial services, bolstering their financial inclusion and stability.

Remittance & Payment

Problem: In Sub-Saharan Africa, refugees and locals heavily rely on remittances from developed countries, facing high costs from existing providers—around 8% or more, including unfavorable exchange rates. Many resort to expensive Hawala networks for cross-border payments due to limited banking access.

Solution: Our system facilitates fast, secure remittance primarily for refugees and unbanked populations across 21 African countries. We leverage USDC transactions, establishing our own on/off-ramp system of agents and partnering with Stellar Network Anchors where necessary. USSD functionality ensures swift, secure payments for users without reliable internet access.

How it works with Stellar: Senders and receivers will get Stellar wallets where they will be able to send and receive money, by depositing and sending in USDC. Once the beneficiary receives the amount in her wallet, she can easily cash out the funds using our on/off ramp. This will make the remittance delivery cheap and fast.

Saving

Problem: Our target audience commonly resorts to holding their savings in cash, posing security risks, especially for refugees and low-income persons in crowded accommodations. There's a pressing need for a secure money storage solution. Moreover, local currency inflation exacerbates the risks of prolonged cash holding.

Solution: Our app enables users to securely deposit and save cash in USDC, safeguarding against inflation and theft. Developed in native languages it ensures accessibility. We'll establish a proprietary on/off ramp system, leveraging local businesses and our agent network for convenient cash-out.

How it works with Stellar: Integrating with Stellar wallets allows users to easily deposit funds in USDC, enabling secure savings and protection against inflation.

Communal Funding

Problem: In African societies, a strong tradition of community support exists, aiding those in need with expenses like hospital bills and funeral costs. However, online crowdfunding poses challenges for our target audience, including high processing fees and difficulty in delivering funds to beneficiaries without access to financial institutions.

Solution: Leveraging our system, users can securely and affordably transfer funds to designated beneficiaries. Upon reaching the predetermined funding threshold, beneficiaries can promptly cash the much-needed funds via our off-ramp system.

How it works with Stellar: We will designate wallets for such collections, allowing the beneficiary herself to access these funds, streamlining the collection processes, making it easy and efficient. Additionally, cashing out will be easy.

Rotating Savings and Credit Associations

Problem: Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) are highly popular in African societies, where members regularly contribute a fixed amount to a communal fund. Each member then takes turns receiving the total pooled amount, providing access to a lump sum. This mechanism is particularly beneficial for unbanked individuals. However, there is currently no secure method to facilitate ROSCAs for groups spread across different localities, which is common for refugees dispersed in various countries.

Solution: We will enable people to create wallets on our app and once they subscribe to a group for ROSCA, payment will be made from their wallet to the common wallet. And when all the members of the group accept, the funds will be transferred to the beneficiary wallet.

How it works with Stellar: We will designate wallets specifically for such collections, allowing ROSCA groups easy collection and disbursement.

Virtual Card

Problem: Majority of Sub-Saharans don’t have access to card payment, blocking them out of the international financial system. They can't purchase online causing many difficulties.

Solution: We will enable people to create and fund virtual cards from their Stellar wallet by partnering with third-party card issuing companies. Through this way, people could easily access international payments by paying in their local currency.

How it works with Stellar: We will integrate Stellar wallets with the third-party companies to seamlessly transfer funds from wallets to virtual cards.

Requested Budget

$20.5K

Team

We are a group of dedicated software developer that want to create apps that will help solve real problems in our communities. We are a team of software developers with all of us having up to decade of experience in software development. Our team also includes CFO who is responsible for our financial planning and accounting. We are 5.