COVID-19 has had its grip on the World with hundreds of thousands deaths and millions of infections worldwide. Those who will survive this pandemic will certainly tell you about the stringent lockdowns that were introduced to curb the spread of coronavirus. In Rwanda, the lockdown was introduced on March 22, which saw a lot of people leaving their homes for food panic buying late at night. However, others stayed home enjoying their cozy night, for they knew they had a reliable partner, Murukali.com, who is always ready to go through all those hustles to deliver be it the food or other home necessities, as the lockdown guidelines only allowed movement to acquire essential products and services. That partner, Murukali, put their necks on the line for their customers by delivering home necessities with 30 minutes, mostly groceries at such times, to the customers while they stayed home sanitizing to not contract the coronavirus whose infected people were increasing exponentially every day. On top of that, as others charged delivery fees according to the location, Murukali set a fixed delivery price of 1500 Rwf-which is relatively low as the lowest delivery price on any platform in Rwanda is mostly 1000 Rwf, regardless of the client’s location in Kigali basically like a friend would come to the rescue in the most difficult times. That goes hand in hand with how their platform is user-friendly, with customized food baskets to smoothen the shopping experience mostly for people who are not familiar with grocery shopping when they need to prepare a certain dish. Murukali helping other businesses to transition to technology However, Murukali doesn’t stop there because looking at how very few businesses are using technology, which had a rough impact on their sales during the pandemic period, they want to help others drink from the chalice that business that needs to stay alive should be sipping on. Murukali had the idea to develop a platform that will link sellers and customers, to be enrolled in the East Africa according to the company’s CEO. “COVID-19 period has been an eye-opener for the businesses to join the tech world therefore we could have a lot of suppliers wanting to work with us”, said Yvette Uwimpaye adding that they immediately came up with a new platform that could connect these suppliers with their customers, as most of them provide goods different from what Murukali provides. The CEO noted that the new platform will be able to link suppliers with their customers directly and will be launched in the coming days. “To access the platform, the supplier will need to set up an account and manage it by him/herself without the intervention of Murukali,” Uwimpaye said. However, she added, we shall be giving those suppliers trainings on how to use the platform more beneficially and help them with the technical services.
