UMSCOPE

UMScope is an online marketplace specifically designed for the university community, where all goods sold will be sourced locally from student entrepreneurs and local markets around each university.

UMScope is an online marketplace built to give the marketplace feeling to the university community and tertiary institutions without actually going to the market. It is an E-commerce platform built with a specific geolocation feature that helps to filter goods and services sold on the platform ensuring that only goods sold and services offered in local markets and student entrepreneurs located around the university is displayed, affording the underserved and overlooked community the luxury of buying goods and services at a  market price, coupled with the immediate speed in the delivery of these goods ordered. UMScope also affords the unique opportunity for student entrepreneurs, student artisans and local artisans to sell their goods and services with convenience. Where students who are not entrepreneurs can earn by delivering goods and services ordered by individuals in the university. Essentially UMScope is an ecosystem for the university community.

In the year 2016 when my teammates and I gained admission into the university, it was then and there I discovered the shocking truth, the university community was exactly how we thought it will be, for the majority of the academic session, my teammate and I were forced to shuffle between 3 food, namely rice, bread and noodles, students were busy hawking goods and services in lecture halls to make ends meet, lecturers were busy sending students on various errands mainly because of the time and distance it takes to get this goods and services and not to talk about the fact that local market remained largely inaccessible to the university community.

For many years, students in tertiary institutions have been subject to the same conditions meted out to individuals in the working class, without any special concessions dedicated to them. 

They are subjected not only to the high prices for goods and services but the exorbitant prices required to deliver the goods down to their respective universities, not to mention the counterfeit goods sometimes sold on these platforms.

With the advent of the COVID-19, the new norm, such as restriction in physical engagement and social distancing, life gradually became unbearable for students in the university.

According to the NUC(NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY COMMUNION) as of March 2021, we have more than 2.1 million students in Nigerian universities and more than 300,000 teaching staff in universities. Providing accessibility with convenience to these populations is the problem we are trying to solve.

UMScope targets an underserved population in Africa - the university community. It is a perfect solution that integrates the daily needs of the university community on its friendly e-commerce platform while providing last-mile delivery to its users. UMScope also aims to aid student entrepreneurs and artisans towards the positive development of their businesses by providing them with an opportunity to properly propagate their businesses through its e-commerce platform. 

What defines the norm for our target audience (student, teachers, and other affiliates of the university community) is; 

For lecturers - they have to result to sending any nearby student on errands to procure whatever they may need due to their busy schedules and the distance it will take for them to get these goods and services.

For students in general - they mostly find it hard to procure their needs as they have little or no time to explore nearby markets. Hence, sometimes obliged to use conventional e-commerce websites

For student entrepreneurs: Students can revolutionize change, to start with a profitable change they become entrepreneurs, with no system to support their daily needs, they resort to hawking of these goods during lecture hours.

For visitors and other affiliates - there's nothing worse than not knowing where to go or get something you need in a seemingly alien environment.

UMScope is a one-stop solution to all these and more.

In 2021 we conducted research using 200 students from 43 tertiary institution in Nigeria, where we asked various questions to understand if they felt the same way we did. Using the Lagos state university centre for entrepreneurial studies, we obtained valuable data from the centre and we also conducted a field survey, where distributed google forms to these students.

At UMScope, we have deployed our pilot on the 1st of June 2021, where we are currently operating it in Lagos state university and its community.

We currently have a total of 1,500 users broken down into 400 vendors and 1,100 registered users. Since launch, we have fulfilled over 3,000 orders from this community and processed more than N6, OOO, OOO(naira)($14,653.26) worth of sales.

Our pilot is currently live at https://umscope.com/

We built UMScope as a web app to rely on 2 major technology. the progressive web application and the use of geolocation to help filter the goods displayed on the platform.

We decided to incorporate the progressive web application because after concluding research, we found out that our target audience didn't have enough space on their phones to download applications, and would have to rely on weighing the value of the apps before uninstalling one app to make way for a new app. Using the progressive web application, Our target audience can access the UMScope platform, without downloading any application.

Sendly we decided to add the geolocation feature to help filter goods displayed. This aim to help ensure that goods displayed are from the closest store to where an order is about to make, thus reducing delivery fees and encouraging the patronization of goods bought from local markets. This is the major key component of the web app we built

UMScope currently serves 1500 individuals directly and more than 13,000 individuals indirectly. Our target audience consists of teaching staff, non-teaching staff and students of the Lagos state university. We project sufficiently to serve more than 30,000 individuals within the first quarter of 2022 and further serve more than 100,000 individuals as we expand by the ending of 2022.

Our impact goal is to solve and propagate the SDGs 1,2,4,8, 11

Where our main is for students to be able to earn whilst learning, to create an economy built for students by students to which it will always be self-sustaining, which will, in turn, alleviate poverty for students and prevent hawking in classes whilst learning is going on and further alleviate modern-day slavery by teaching staffs on students.

By building UMScope the university community now have a fighting chance to be part of a larger connected ecosystem that caters to their needs directly most unconventionally and innovatively way.

This is why we started and this is what we aim to impact into the lives of the individuals in the university community

We are currently measuring our progress through a bi-weekly consensus, where we move from faculty to faculty in the university to understand growth and development rate, we have also built our analytic system to understand the rate of the student to student buying and selling and also to understand how many lives we are currently impacting as we aim to solve the goals we projected. We also have created a partnership with the university centre for entrepreneurial studies, to continuously have access to data that can help us better design our solution to the needs and the desires of the university community.

To better measure our progress also we have created a partnership with the Lagos state office of SDGs where we continuously exchange information in terms of growth and also how to better measure our key performance index towards the fulfilment of SDGs 1,2,4,8, 11.

As we continue to grow and test our pilot, we project certain barriers that we will overcome eventually, such as the level of technical literacy of women selling in local markets and the availability of students using smartphones which will aid in accessing the platform. These barriers are very much significant and that's why we designed a solution to help overcome this barrier as we continue to collect data in our pilot version.

When I thought of the idea of creating a suitable marketplace for the university community, I decided to start building the foundational codes, coupled with my academic schedules it became important to get more co-founders and staff who will help build UMScope. so I approached my individuals who had the necessary skills to help build the platform. Our team is highly professional with these individuals possessing different skills to play their roles effectively and most importantly is we all feel the same and share the same passion. 

UMScope current has 11 staff, where we have 3 front end, developers, 1 back end developer, 1 project manager, 1 UI/UX designer, 2 marketing specialists, 1 customer and merchant interactions manager, 1 research and development manager and 1 field and customer collecting manager. these individuals have a collective experience with more than 5 years in their respective roles and have helped build UMScope. To get these individuals I had to first get 2 co-founders who had the necessary skills, fortunately, I had the opportunity to find 2 of them who were my childhood friends and had participated in most ideation challenges with me. Together we further ideated on UMScope, rebranded it from L-Help(abbreviation for LASU HELP) and started the active search for people, mainly students who believed in what we were trying to build and create.

When it comes to ideation we operate the garbage can model in the building of UMScope, where every single input is discussed appropriately and when it comes to the decision-making process we take votes. We participate in team bonding sessions and upskilling, so to cover the roles we did not knowW we took courses and increased our knowledge.

Our ability to morph and adapt is what has made this team very successful.

We are currently partnered with Lagos state university to become its official marketplace where this will help in the ease of market entry and also help encourage our target audience to the platform. 

We have also partnered with African fintech foundry an initiative of Access bank plc after we were selected to participate in its Accelerators programme where we received access to their technology such as APIs, office space, mentoring and legal advice.

We also partnered with appropriate student associations such as Lagos state university students union and Lagos state university medical students association in a bid to ensure that our development and services are student-friendly and to predominantly ensure that the rights of students are well protected and transparent.