Social commerce is changing how consumers discover and buy products across Africa. In Kenya, a growing share of online shopping activity now happens through mobile apps, social platforms and messaging services rather than traditional websites.
But as commerce moves into these informal digital channels, one problem remains difficult to solve: trust.
TransUnion’s H1 2026 Top Fraud Trends report found that among Kenyan consumers who reported losing money to digital fraud in the past year, 39% said third-party seller scams on legitimate e-commerce sites were responsible. The median reported loss among Kenyan victims was KSh108,132, the highest among the African markets assessed by TransUnion.
A separate Visa study found that 37% of Kenyan consumers had experienced a financial scam in the previous 12 months. Among those who experienced a scam, 58% said it occurred on social media.
For legitimate sellers, the problem is not simply attracting customers. It is convincing unfamiliar buyers that their money and orders are safe.
That is the problem Zemi Africa is attempting to address.
TechPolyp recently spoke with Raphael Karanja, CEO and Co-founder of Zemi Africa, about the trust gap in social commerce, how Zemi’s payment and delivery system works, why the company describes itself as trust infrastructure rather than a conventional wallet, and its ambition to support social and informal commerce across Africa.
Why Social Commerce Has a Trust Problem
Social commerce has developed around platforms that were not originally designed to provide a complete e-commerce transaction experience.
A customer might discover a product on Instagram, move the conversation to WhatsApp, agree on a price with the seller, make a mobile-money payment and then arrange delivery separately.
The process is convenient, but the individual transaction can lack several protections associated with structured e-commerce marketplaces.
There may be no standardised checkout, no independent delivery confirmation and limited recourse if the product does not arrive or differs significantly from what was advertised.
Kenya’s own e-commerce data illustrates how important these alternative channels have become. According to the Communications Authority of Kenya’s 2024–2025 Customer Satisfaction Survey, mobile applications accounted for 44.8% of reported online order placement and receipt, while WhatsApp accounted for 20.2%. Website portals accounted for 12%.
The same survey found that 71.3% of respondents accessed e-commerce platforms primarily through mobile phones.
The figures describe reported channels used by survey respondents rather than the share of every transaction taking place on each platform. Nevertheless, they illustrate the mobile-first environment in which Kenyan social commerce is developing.
For Karanja, the central problem is therefore not that buyers are unwilling to transact online. It is that the transaction often requires buyers and sellers to rely on one another without a shared mechanism for managing risk.
What Zemi Africa Does
Zemi Africa describes itself as a trust and checkout infrastructure platform for social commerce.
The company’s approach is to introduce a conditional payment mechanism into transactions that may have started on social media or messaging platforms.
According to Karanja, a buyer pays for an order and the funds are staged until delivery has been completed and the buyer has had an opportunity to inspect the product.
Zemi describes the system as protected payments in which funds are held until delivery is verified. Buyers can inspect the product before providing the delivery code, while Zemi says products that do not match the order are eligible for a full refund.
The company also describes delivery-code verification, photo verification and real-time tracking as components of its system.
The objective is straightforward: separate the moment when a buyer pays from the moment when the seller receives the money.
That creates a mechanism in which delivery confirmation becomes part of the transaction rather than something handled independently after payment.
Zemi Is Building Around Existing Buying Behaviour
Rather than asking social-commerce sellers to abandon WhatsApp, Instagram or other platforms where they already find customers, Zemi is designed around those existing behaviours.
This is important because social commerce is often attractive precisely because it does not require a seller to build and maintain a conventional online store.
A small seller can display products through social media, communicate with customers through messaging and use mobile money to receive payments.
Zemi’s proposition is to add a structured transaction layer without requiring the seller to completely change that workflow.
The company describes this as building the infrastructure of trust around existing African commerce behaviour.
Why Zemi Does Not Position Itself as a Conventional Wallet
Karanja distinguishes Zemi from conventional digital wallets.
A wallet primarily facilitates the movement of money. Zemi’s stated role extends beyond payment initiation to the conditions surrounding the transaction — including checkout, delivery confirmation, settlement and dispute handling.
The distinction is particularly relevant to social commerce, where payment is only one part of the transaction.
A buyer can successfully send money and still have a failed transaction if the product is never delivered, the wrong product arrives or the seller cannot be reached.
Zemi’s model attempts to connect payment with fulfillment so that the transaction is not considered complete simply because money has changed hands.
The company describe Zemi as a commerce intermediary and checkout system that temporarily holds buyer payments and releases them following delivery verification or the expiry of the inspection period.
The Sellers Zemi Is Targeting
Karanja says Zemi is particularly interested in small and informal sellers who may have products and customers but lack the infrastructure required to establish credibility with new buyers.
He points to sellers operating around Nairobi’s Gikomba market and other micro-enterprises where social media has become an important route to customers.
For these businesses, reputation has traditionally been built through repeat customers and word of mouth.
The challenge is that reputation is difficult to transfer when a seller encounters a customer for the first time.
Zemi’s thesis is that transaction history, delivery confirmation and structured payment protection can help make that trust more portable.
Instead of asking a first-time customer to trust a seller purely on the basis of a social-media profile, the transaction itself provides an additional layer of protection.
Mobile Money Provides the Payment Foundation
The infrastructure on which Zemi operates is being built in a market where mobile money is already deeply established.
The GSMA’s State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026] found that mobile-money services processed more than $2.1 trillion globally during 2025.
Africa accounted for approximately $1.432 trillion of that transaction value and had around 1.2 billion registered mobile-money accounts.
Kenya is one of the continent’s most mature mobile-money markets.
The country’s 2024 FinAccess data, cited in Kenya’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy, put mobile-money usage among adults at 82.3%.
This means the fundamental payment infrastructure already exists. The problem Zemi is attempting to solve is what happens around the payment — particularly verification, delivery and settlement between people who may not know each other.
Dispute Resolution and Delivery Verification
Trust infrastructure is only useful if there is a mechanism for dealing with transactions that go wrong.
Karanja says Zemi integrates delivery information and verification into its transaction flow.
The company says its system can use delivery confirmation and photographic evidence to create a record of the fulfilment process.
Zemi also says it provides customer support and refund protection when an order does not match what was purchased.
The company’s public materials currently state that sellers can receive settlement within five minutes after delivery confirmation, while its website also describes 24/7 support.
These are company-stated service features and should be understood as such.
The broader principle behind the model is that payment protection and delivery verification need to operate together. If the payment system knows that an order has been delivered and confirmed, it can use that event to determine when the seller should receive the funds.
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Why Logistics Matters to the Model
For Zemi, logistics is not simply an additional service.
The company’s trust model depends on knowing what happened to an order after payment.
If delivery status cannot be reliably established, conditional payment release becomes difficult to enforce.
Zemi therefore says it works with third-party logistics providers and is building integrations that allow delivery information to feed back into the transaction.
Karanja describes this integration layer as important to the company’s longer-term vision because sellers should not have to manage multiple delivery relationships simply to complete a social-commerce transaction.
The wider African trade environment also highlights the importance of logistics.
[UNCTAD] has reported that infrastructure gaps in transport, energy and ICT make trade in Africa about 50% more expensive than the global average.
For social-commerce businesses operating on thin margins, delivery efficiency can therefore have a direct impact on the viability of transactions.
Zemi’s Pricing Approach
Karanja says Zemi is designed around the economics of micro-enterprises.
The company’s current website states that seller registration is free and that transaction fees are applied when transactions are completed. It also advertises flat fees beginning at KSh30.
The principle is that sellers should not have to pay a significant upfront cost simply to gain access to the transaction infrastructure.
Instead, the platform’s revenue is connected to successful transactions.
That model is intended to reduce the barrier for small sellers who may be unwilling or unable to commit capital before generating a sale.
Cross-Border Commerce and Africa’s Digital Trade Infrastructure
Zemi’s ambition extends beyond Kenya.
Karanja says the company wants to provide infrastructure that can support cross-border social commerce as African digital trade develops
The AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade, adopted in February 2024, establishes a framework for digital trade and includes provisions covering areas such as electronic transactions, logistics, digital identities and online consumer protection.
The protocol specifically recognises the importance of creating a secure and trustworthy digital trade ecosystem and includes provisions addressing logistics and last-mile delivery.
For companies building transaction infrastructure, regulatory interoperability will become increasingly important as commerce moves across national borders.
Zemi’s approach, according to Karanja, is to build on existing regulated payment infrastructure rather than attempting to create an entirely proprietary financial system.
Its longer-term challenge will be ensuring that the payment, delivery and dispute-resolution mechanisms that work in one market can operate effectively across different regulatory environments.
Africa’s Social-Commerce Opportunity
The market opportunity behind Zemi’s thesis is significant.
The Africa Social Commerce Market Intelligence and Future Growth Dynamics Databook from PayNXT360 projects that Africa’s social-commerce market will reach approximately $33.7 billion in 2026, representing annual growth of 13%.
That growth is taking place alongside the continued expansion of mobile payments and social-media-driven commerce.
But market growth does not automatically solve the structural problems surrounding trust.
The more commerce moves into informal digital channels, the more important it becomes to establish mechanisms for verifying payments, deliveries and counterparties.
This is where Zemi sees an opportunity.
African Startup Funding Continues to Flow Toward Infrastructure
The broader African technology investment environment also provides context for the company’s ambitions.
According to TechCabal Insights, African startups raised approximately $711 million in disclosed funding across more than 80 deals in the first quarter of 2026.
Fintech attracted approximately $221 million, making it the largest funded sector in that dataset.
By the end of May 2026, TechCabal Insights reported that African startups had raised approximately $1.044 billion during the first five months of the year.
These figures combine different forms of startup capital and should not be interpreted as funding available to every company across the ecosystem.
For founders like Karanja, however, the data illustrates the continued importance of financial and commercial infrastructure as a category within African technology.
Zemi Africa’s Three-to-Five-Year Vision
Looking three to five years ahead, Karanja says Zemi wants to become a standard trust layer for informal and social commerce across Africa.
The roadmap he describes has several components.
The first is geographic expansion, beginning with East Africa and eventually extending into additional African markets.
The second is deeper integration with the platforms where social commerce already takes place, including WhatsApp and Instagram.
The third is the development of a broader logistics network under the Zemi Fleet concept.
The company does not want to become another marketplace competing for consumer attention.
Instead, Karanja describes the long-term vision as infrastructure operating underneath existing social-commerce behaviour.
The idea is that consumers should be able to continue discovering products and communicating with sellers where they already spend their time, while Zemi provides the transaction layer that makes the exchange more structured.
What Raphael Karanja Thinks African Founders Should Focus On
Karanja’s advice to early-stage founders is centred on resilience and a focus on real consumer problems.
He argues that founders should pay close attention to foundational infrastructure for individual consumers rather than automatically pursuing business-to-business models.
His reasoning is that consumer problems can be immediate and highly visible, while B2B sales cycles can take considerably longer and often require established credibility.
He also emphasises grit.
For African startups, he says, building can involve navigating infrastructure constraints, regulatory complexity, price sensitivity and fragmented markets simultaneously.
The implication is that founders should be prepared to build for the long term rather than measuring progress only in short funding or growth cycles.
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Trust as Infrastructure
Zemi Africa’s proposition is ultimately based on a simple idea: payment infrastructure alone does not guarantee trust.
Kenya already has extensive mobile-money infrastructure. Consumers already use mobile apps, social platforms and messaging services to discover and purchase products.
The missing layer, according to Karanja, is the infrastructure connecting payment, delivery verification and settlement.
The market evidence supports the relevance of the problem.
TransUnion’s research shows the financial consequences of third-party seller fraud in Kenya. Visa’s research shows both the popularity of social commerce and the continued exposure to scams on social media. The Communications Authority of Kenya’s data shows how important mobile apps and WhatsApp have become in online commerce.
Zemi is positioning itself at the intersection of these trends. Its long-term ambition is not simply to process another payment. It is to make transactions between people who do not know each other easier to complete with confidence.
For Karanja and the Zemi Africa team, that makes trust less of a feature and more of an infrastructure problem.
About Zemi Africa
Zemi Africa is a Kenyan-built commerce intermediary and checkout platform focused on making social-commerce transactions safer. Its stated product model combines protected payments, delivery verification, settlement, dispute handling and logistics integration.
About Raphael Karanja
Raphael Karanja is the CEO and Co-founder of Zemi Africa. He is leading the company’s effort to build transaction and trust infrastructure for social commerce and informal commerce in Africa.
About TechPolyp
TechPolyp, a subset of Cloudmesh Global Limited, is a startup discovery and intelligence platform focused on the African technology ecosystem. TechPolyp aims to make African startups easier to discover, provide founders with exposure, give investors useful ecosystem insights and provide reliable information about emerging technology companies.
