For impact partners
Impact data a committee can read.
For DFIs and impact investors: every Mtaji figure, split by side. Definitions first; figures when they reconcile.
The method, in four steps
No figure appears until it reconciles. Any cell covering fewer than five entities is suppressed, on every view and every export.
Define first
Count entities, by side
Reconcile to the ledger
Suppress small cells
Split by side, always
Supply side
Suppliers: the anchor buys from them and they wait to be paid for goods already delivered.
Buy side
Distributors: the anchor sells to them and they need working capital to buy stock.
The disaggregation schema, field by field
Each field is published with its definition on the same page as the figure, its source, and a flag saying whether the value was declared or verified.
| Field | Definition | Read from | Frameworks | Reported for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women-owned | A majority of the equity in the business is held by women. Ownership and leadership are separate fields and are never combined into a single "women" figure. | The beneficial-ownership filing at the Business Registration Service, read at onboarding and re-read at each reporting date. | SDG 5 Gender Equality; SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities; 2X ownership; IRIS+ id pending confirmation; counted only with the separate impact-measurement consent | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| Women-founded | At least half of the founders of the business are women: the 2X Criteria founder test (1B). The threshold is the framework’s own, and the report names the 2X edition it applied. | A declaration at onboarding. Verified against the incorporation record where it names the founders. | SDG 5 Gender Equality; SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities; 2X founders; IRIS+ id pending confirmation; counted only with the separate impact-measurement consent | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| Women-led | The most senior executive is a woman, or women hold the share of senior management and board seats that the 2X Criteria set for leadership. The threshold is the framework’s own, and the report names the 2X edition it applied. | The director and officer filing, plus a declaration at onboarding. Declared and verified are separate flags and are never summed as one. | SDG 5 Gender Equality; 2X leadership; IRIS+ id pending confirmation; counted only with the separate impact-measurement consent | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| Youth-owned | The ownership test applied to people aged eighteen to thirty-four years inclusive at the reporting date, that is, who have not attained the age of thirty-five: the definition in Article 260 of the Constitution of Kenya. Where an impact partner’s framework uses a different band, the report states which band it applied. | Date of birth on the identity record verified at onboarding; never estimated. | SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth; SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities; IRIS+ id pending confirmation; counted only with the separate impact-measurement consent | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| Youth-led | The leadership test applied to the same age band. | Date of birth on the identity record verified at onboarding; never estimated. | SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth; IRIS+ id pending confirmation; counted only with the separate impact-measurement consent | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| Rural | The registered principal place of business lies outside the boundary of a city or municipality gazetted under the Urban Areas and Cities Act. A business trading in a town but registered in a rural sub-county is rural; the reverse is urban. | The registered business address, resolved to county and sub-county. Never device location, never an IP address. | SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities; SDG 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; IRIS+ id pending confirmation | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| First-time-financed | At the date of its first disbursement on the platform, the business holds no prior formal credit facility from a regulated lender. A business that has borrowed informally is still first-time-financed; a business with a closed bank facility is not. | A declaration made once, at the business’s first financing application on the platform; reported apart from “first financing on this platform”, which the platform observes. No credit reference bureau record is used. | SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth; SDG 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; IRIS+ id pending confirmation | Supply side and buy side, separately |
| Micro (against small and medium) | Size band by the statutory tests (headcount and annual turnover) using the thresholds in the Micro and Small Enterprises Act, 2012 for micro and small, and the national policy definition for medium. The bands are the law’s, not ours, and a business is re-banded at each reporting date. | Turnover from trade evidenced on the platform; headcount from the onboarding declaration, flagged as declared. | SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth; IRIS+ id pending confirmation | Supply side and buy side, separately |
The dashboard
Served only from the curated aggregate endpoint, over a snapshot a named reviewer has reconciled to the ledger. Until one exists, it says so, never with a zero.
Checking for a reconciled snapshot…
More about the method
Definitions first, figures when they reconcile
The common failure in this market is impressive scale with no disaggregation and no published methodology. An investment committee cannot use those numbers. So Mtaji works the other way round: the definitions are published first, here, and the figures follow only when they reconcile to the transaction ledger through a reviewed aggregate layer with suppression built in.
Nothing is published until it reconciles. A figure that cannot be traced to the ledger, with its definition beside it, does not appear, not as a rounded number, not as a range, not as a chart. If you need indicative data under an agreement, inquire.
The unit of count
Every field counts entities, not transactions and not disbursements. A business financed many times counts once. A business financed through several anchors counts once per side. A business that supplies one anchor and distributes for another appears once on each side and is flagged as dual-sided, so the two side totals are never added together as if they were one population.
Why the two sides are never merged
Supply-side inclusion is usually the established vendor base: older businesses, more often formal, more often urban.
Buy-side inclusion is usually the long tail: younger businesses, more often micro, more often rural and first-time-financed. Merging the two sides hides the part a DFI is usually funding.
Frameworks
Three named frameworks, so that a figure here can be compared with a figure elsewhere without translation.
SDG mapping, each field is mapped to the Sustainable Development Goals it evidences: Gender Equality, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, and Reduced Inequalities. The mapping is printed beside the field, not in an appendix.
2X Criteria: the ownership and leadership fields are defined so that they can be read directly against the 2X Criteria. The thresholds are the framework’s own and the report names the edition applied.
IRIS+: every field will carry the IRIS+ metric identifier it reports against, so a DFI can drop the figure into its own portfolio reporting without re-deriving it.
Suppression is a rule, not a courtesy
Any cell covering fewer than five entities is suppressed, on every view and every export. Where suppressing one cell would let it be recovered by subtraction from a total, a second cell is suppressed with it. Sex and age are sensitive personal data under the Kenya Data Protection Act, and re-identification has to be impossible by construction rather than unlikely in practice.
Figures are served only from curated aggregate endpoints. No raw dashboard query reaches a public surface.
Verification
Third-party verification is intended. It has not been obtained, so it is not claimed. Until it is, every published figure is labeled self-reported against this methodology, and any forward-looking figure is labeled modeled rather than observed.