MarketForce is launching Troops, an on-demand sales force for consumer brands in Africa.

MarketForce 360‘s mission is to build the most comprehensive field sales and distribution platform for Africa and emerging markets, through pushing the needle in innovation in the retail distribution sector and creating impact for millions of businesses and users through building solutions that solve real African challenges.

Since launching our sales force automation tool, our customers who are mainly comprised of consumer goods and services companies across East Africa have seen drastic improvement in their sales and distribution lifecycle, moving over USD 200 million worth of goods and services through the platform so far and citing over 50% overall reduction in order to delivery times.

However, the team at MarketForce has quickly come to the realization that our technology is just one part of the equation. To fully bridge the gap in “last mile distribution”, coupling up our technology with essential services on the ground will create maximum impact for over 15 million retailers that are at the heartbeat of Africa’s communities.

From July 2020, our clients can purchase access to both our software and an on-demand workforce(troops); typically independent agents that go on the field and conduct activities on their behalf – such as retailer listing, order capturing, feedback collection and stock counts. This will help manufacturers and distributors get discovered and sell more, while generating employment to thousands of youth and making essential goods and services available to millions of consumers in Africa.

Through crowdsourcing, MarketForce intends to leverage this community of thousands of young field contributors(troops) that will use our app to collect orders on the ground from consumers and retailers at the shop levels, and get paid through commissions. We are building MarketForce Troops to help FMCGs, banks, insurance companies and other MFIs with the right distribution to sell consumer goods, render digital financial services and capture customer identities via local merchant stores and sales teams. Through this, employment is created for youth and consumers get timely access to essential goods and services. Troops will attract a transactional commission for all orders placed through our platform.

To make this a reality, we have partnered with Ajiry, a Centum-backed and Mastercard funded project, who are on a similar mission to bridge the unemployment gap in Kenya. Ajiry plans to impact more than 24,000 young people in 10 counties, in the next 12 months, before rolling out to other counties. The pilot counties included Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, Kilifi, Laikipia, Meru, Nyeri, Machakos and Nakuru.

MarketForce Troops is beginning the pilot in Nairobi today with a select group of manufacturers and we look forward to bringing it to more companies as we go forward. We have built an open model to welcome more partners in the future.