Morekisi is the marketplace and financial platform built for South Africa's fresh produce hawkers — the traders who keep townships fed, and have never had a financial tool built for them.
The daily reality
South Africa's fresh produce hawkers wake before dawn, travel to major markets, and source stock by hand — in cash, no invoice, no paper trail. When prices spike, they absorb the loss alone. When they need capital to grow, their only option is the mashonisa charging 40% monthly interest.
They have no transaction history. No credit record. No formal financial relationship of any kind — not because they haven't earned one, but because the system was never designed to see them.
Vendor count: Stats SA Labour Force Survey 2007, analysed by WIEGO. Fresh produce hawkers are a part of it; no national count of them exists. Cost and time per hawker: Morekisi's estimate, from R160 a day in transport and four hours before trading.
What we're building
Hawkers place orders from their phone. Runners source at the market. Drivers handle last-mile delivery. One coordinated flow — no calls, no cash middlemen.
Daily prices from South Africa's major fresh produce markets, brought into the app, so a hawker sees the day's prices before she commits a single rand.
A credit score built on real trade behaviour, not bank history — so a partner bank can lend to a trader it could never see before. A first formal financial relationship.
The moment
Mobile penetration is high. Trust networks are tight. The infrastructure gap is wide open. Morekisi sits at the intersection of marketplace, logistics, and fintech — in a segment formal finance has not yet reached.
Partners
Morekisi verifies traders, records every transaction and instructs payment. Funds stay with the licensed institution. We are looking for partners on three fronts.
Verified, KYC'd traders who transact every week, market purchases funded by transfer instead of cash, and accounts opened through the platform. Credit facilities can sit on your balance sheet, not ours.
Support reaches hawkers who have no fixed premises and cannot be verified by a site visit. Every rand is disbursed into a verified wallet and reconciled in an auditable ledger.
Aggregated, prepaid demand from many small buyers, paid into market accounts by transfer instead of cash — and a direct route from smallholders to township stands.
The company
Company
Morekisi (Pty) Ltd
Registered in South Africa, number 2026/344111/07. Incorporated on 30 April 2026. Based in Tshwane, Gauteng.
Founder
Sylvester Molokoane
Founder and director. He designed and built the platform, and is also the founder of Transformer Business Labs, the Pretoria venture studio co-building Morekisi.
How it is built
Built and tested
The platform was built with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, and runs on Google Cloud. An independent security assessment comes before any trader's money moves. A first pilot with 20 hawkers is in preparation.
Two conversations we welcome: investors who see South Africa's hawker economy as the next frontier for African fintech, and institutions that want to reach these traders and never could.