# Marka

> Marka is the verified record of the informal economy, Africa first: the traders, artisans and market women who built it, written in with their consent, so they can be found by customers on WhatsApp and USSD, trusted by lenders and platforms, and read by the systems that run the global economy. Status: pre-launch. First markets: South West Nigeria.

## What Marka is

- A marketplace: customers ask for a merchant (a welder, a tailor, a pepper seller) on WhatsApp or USSD and get verified merchants. They order in one reply. The merchant calls them. Customers pay merchants directly; Marka never holds money.
- A registry: every merchant on Marka is written in with their consent: who they are, what they sell, where they trade, and proof that they are real.
- An index: a consented, continually verified dataset of real businesses. Licensed to approved partners. Never scraped.

## Why

- 85.8% of employment in Africa is informal (ILO, Women and men in the informal economy, 2018).
- Nigeria had 39.65 million MSMEs in 2020, 96.9% of them micro enterprises (SMEDAN/NBS survey).
- In Nigeria the informal economy is estimated at 50–65% of GDP (IMF, The informal economy in sub-Saharan Africa: size and determinants, 2017).
- A business with no record has no address, no history and no proof it exists, so no credit, no contracts and no customers beyond the people who already know it. A verified record is the first page of a credit history. Marka's mission: recognise what the informal economy gives, restore the visibility that was stripped from the people who run it, and connect them to the global economy on their own terms.

## Where

- Phase 1: South West Nigeria (Ibadan, Lagos, Abeokuta, Osogbo, Akure, Ado-Ekiti).
- Phase 2: Nigeria.
- Phase 3: Ghana, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, then every market on the continent.

## For data partners, lenders and AI builders

- Early access to the Marka Index is by application at /partners. Licensed, consented, never scraped.

## The name

- Marka: in Arabic (ماركة), Turkish, Hindi (मार्का), Polish and Serbo-Croatian, the mark that carries value: a brand. The sign on a thing is alama in Swahili, Hausa and Arabic (علامة). The Marka (Maraka) people of Mali were Mande-speaking merchants who dominated trade across the Sahel for centuries. In English, mark was first a boundary, then a sign, then a unit of money. Domain: marka.africa. The mark is a tally: four strokes and a fifth across, rising; it means counted. Tagline: Every trade, counted.

## Founder

Olamide "Mide" Dada, founder. Builds software for companies overseas; moves between Nigerian cities and their markets.

## Machine-readable

This page carries JSON-LD (Organization, Person, WebSite, Dataset, Service, FAQPage) in its source.