Nairobi's Gikomba Market Gets Its First Digital Inventory System

On a Tuesday morning in Gikomba, Mary Wanjiku used to know her stock by feel and memory — 300 kilograms of mitumba sorted by hand, priced by instinct, sold to buyers who came specifically because they trusted her eye. That system worked for 15 years. It also meant that when she was sick, business stopped. When a buyer from Kisumu wanted to order ahead of travelling, there was no mechanism. When a large consignment arrived at 6 AM and she hadn't slept, the sorting errors cost her money she couldn't quantify.

Now she opens an app. Photographs each piece with an AI-powered categorisation tool that suggests price ranges based on brand, condition and current market demand. Lists available items on a shared digital catalogue that reaches buyers across Kenya and, increasingly, across East Africa. Tracks what sold, what didn't, and what price adjusted best.

The platform is built by Soko Digital, a 12-person startup founded in Nairobi's iHub incubator in 2024, and it has onboarded 847 Gikomba traders in its first six months of operation. Monthly transaction volumes on the platform exceeded Ksh45 million in August — modest by fintech standards, transformative for the individual traders involved.

"The traditional argument against digitalising informal markets is that traders don't want it," said Soko Digital CEO James Kariuki. "That is wrong. Traders want anything that makes their business better. What they don't want is technology designed for someone else that they're expected to adapt to. We designed this for Gikomba. That's the difference."

The platform is now expanding to Mombasa's Kongowea Market and Kisumu's Kibuye Market, with a Sh15 million seed round completed in July enabling the rollout. Investors include two Kenyan family offices and a UK-based impact investment fund that focuses on informal economy digitisation across sub-Saharan Africa.