Mtaji is Swahili for capital.

A business can be profitable on paper and still die of cash flow. A supplier delivers, is owed money it has already earned, and cannot make payroll while it waits. A distributor has customers queuing for stock it cannot afford to buy. Neither is a bad business. Both are short of working capital for opposite reasons, and both are routinely refused by lenders.

The refusal is not because the money is not there. It is because a lender cannot lend against a business it cannot measure, and the conventional instruments for measuring one (audited accounts, bureau depth, collateral) describe a kind of business most suppliers and distributors in this market are not.

That is a measurement problem wearing the costume of a funding problem. It is also the more tractable of the two, because the measurement already exists: the anchor they trade with keeps good books, and those books record exactly the behavior a lender needs to see.

A market in which a business is assessed on how it actually trades, not on documents it was never going to have, and in which the anchor relationship that makes a small business viable also makes it financeable.

Both sides of that relationship. Supply chain finance as usually written is blind to the distributor, and the distributor is where the volume is. We build every surface for suppliers and for distributors, and treat a feature that exists for one side only as a defect.

Measure rather than argue. A claim about a business comes from its trading record, not from an opinion someone typed in. The same standard applies to claims about ourselves.

Both sides, always. Every supplier-facing thing has a distributor equivalent, built at the same time. A one-sided product is not half finished; it is wrong.

Say what a business owes, plainly. A credit facility is a credit facility. Who carries the obligation differs by product, and we state it per product rather than softening it across a side. Describing a credit product loosely is a mis-selling risk, not a marketing choice.

Publish less than we could. No performance figure appears on this site without a source we can reconcile, no M-Score internals appear at all, and where something is not yet confirmed we leave it out rather than soften it. An unsourced number on a page a development financier reads is worse than no number.

The SME is the point. Anchors and financiers are how we reach suppliers and distributors at scale. They are not who the platform exists for.

Anchors first, because a corporate integration reaches an entire supplier base and an entire distribution network at once, and because the anchor’s confirmation of the trade is what makes a thin-file business financeable at all.

Then the financial institutions who fund it, on whichever commercial model fits them: their own branded deployment, or the marketplace. Then development finance, who need the impact evidence to be auditable rather than impressive. Then the suppliers and distributors, who are the point.

The work bears most directly on the goals for decent work and economic growth, for industry, innovation and infrastructure, for gender equality and for reduced inequalities. We name the alignment here and measure it elsewhere: the impact methodology publishes the definitions (women-owned and women-led as separate fields, youth, rural, first-time financed, split by side) before it publishes any number, and it publishes no number it cannot reconcile.