Case study · Agricultural commodity trading
Buying maize in the field — offline, photographed, and fraud-resistant
Kuzyalwa · Lusaka, Zambia · 2026 maize season pilot
The operation
Kuzyalwa buys maize from smallholder farmers at rural buying points — places with cheap Android phones, patchy network, cash-flow discipline to enforce, and every incentive for numbers to drift between the scale and the office.
What we built
- Offline-first capture: staff record every transaction on a phone — even with no signal — and it syncs safely when the network returns, with no duplicates.
- Evidence built into every bag: the farmer's ID document, their photo, and a photo of the scale dial captured with each transaction.
- AI-assisted entry: the system reads ID details and scale weights from the photos automatically, with manual fallback — faster capture, fewer "typing errors."
- Controlled pricing: buying prices set centrally and enforced by the system; field staff can't negotiate their own rates.
- Payment discipline: an approval gate before any payout, a fair first-in-first-out payment queue, and daily payout limits matched to mobile-money agent caps.
- Adjustments with reasons: weight deductions recorded with a reason and an audit trail, not scribbled on paper.
- Zone dashboards: live buying volumes and spend per zone, refreshing automatically.
Built to grow
The pilot covers one buying zone for the 2026 maize season, running alongside the paper process for reconciliation. The architecture is deliberately bigger than the pilot: the same platform grows into dispatch, sales, and invoicing as the operation expands.
Why it matters
Most software assumes an office. This system assumes a field, a queue of farmers, one phone, and no signal — because that's where the business actually happens.