Kuraway is giving African Merchants a Long-denied Trust

Fadekemi Ajakaiye

Along a tapered lane crowded with shoeboxes sits Chinedu’s mid-sized, always-cramped leatherworking shop. Amid scraps of hide and half-finished soles, he threads the final stitch on a pair of shoes made from Aba leather, the kind known for lasting years on the pavement. The workshop smells of polish, glue, and the steady rasp of metal against hide.

The leather is tanned two blocks away. The designs come from adapted catalogues he studies as carefully as his counterparts abroad. Buyers in Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt keep business steady. But when inquiries drift in from across the Atlantic — faint reachouts through WhatsApp or Messenger — they often fade before reaching the shore of sale.

“They ask for photos, we send them. They ask for references. Then they disappear,” Chinedu says, brushing dust from a black-and-white pair at the front of his display.

Chinedu knows the vicious cycle all too well. First comes excitement from a potential big bucks buyer, then follows the list of proofs he cannot provide: registration papers, trade records, assurances that he isn’t the grifter the buyer quietly fears. Lacking the credibility scaffolding that larger exporters take for granted, he is left to plead his case through chat windows and half-read messages. Still, buyers drift, opportunities vanishing with them.
“I wouldn’t blame them,” he says. “They don’t know me. They are not so sure if I’ll send the goods. But every time that happens, it’s potential money lost.”
That gap is costly. Informal commerce accounts for up to 40% of Africa’s trade, yet the continent faces a $100 billion annual trade finance shortfall. Many exporters lack the documentation, payment history, or digital footprint needed to secure credit or cross-border buyers. Mobile money has enabled transactions, but not verifiable ones. Access has grown, credibility has not.

Before starting Kuraway in September 2023, David Chima and Isaac Edmund had launched Bondly, an Africa-first escrow platform that made e-commerce transactions safer. Technically, it worked. But conversation after conversation returned to the same question: How do we find trusted buyers? How do we prove we’re real?

Their response wasn’t another marketplace chasing volume. It was a platform engineered for credibility, structured around verified identity, escrow protection, and on-ground quality checks.

“Invisibility is twofold,” David co-founder and CEO of Kuraway says. “Merchants can’t be found, and even when they are, they don’t have the capital to travel for trade shows or the credibility to close deals online. For buyers, finding reliable African suppliers is often a shot in the dark.”

Every merchant on the platform undergoes a detailed verification process before being listed. The process combines document-based checks with selective local validation methods to confirm both the legitimacy of the business and the authenticity of its trade activity. This layered approach helps ensure that only credible, traceable sellers are approved, reducing the risks of fraud while maintaining what drives long-term buyer confidence.

What was once an anonymous Instagram profile becomes a verified profile complete with proof of inspection, order history, and transaction guarantees. Payments are held in escrow until milestones are met. Optional on-site inspections by field agents confirm quality, and reports are uploaded directly to the seller’s record. A purchase-protection policy ensures refunds for misrepresented or incomplete orders.

These layers turn trust from sentiment into a system. For example, a buyer in New York no longer has to wonder if a Lagos merchant is legitimate. They can see inspection reports, order history, and verified identity before placing an order. For sellers, they turn a one-time opportunity into a repeatable trade. Transactions leave behind data, which in turn gives proof of reliability that can be seen, traced, and built upon.

Chinwuba Madubuike, who imports and exports cosmetics across Africa via his company U3C, says he first came across the platform at a Lagos event. “Not long after, I shipped an order to Ghana through a buyer I met on Kuraway,” he says. “It’s made it easier to find credible buyers across borders and to trade with more confidence.”

Buyers, in turn, cite transparency, speed, and post-sale accountability as reasons for returning. In a region long defined by handshake trust, an escrow-and-verification model offers something rare: proof that can travel.

Kuraway’s evolution reflects lessons learned through iteration and restraint. At Bondly, the founders built a payment infrastructure. Now, they’re building a trust infrastructure. Verification is human and local, not outsourced to algorithms but handled by people who understand the terrain. Inspectors and case managers speak the language of the markets they serve, ensuring that credibility is both social and technical.

This slows onboarding but deepens trust. For merchants who cannot afford even one failed lead, that difference matters.

“Since going to market with the product in September 2023, we’ve processed more than half a million transactions, linking over 1,200 verified merchants with buyers across Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon,” David notes.

For many sellers, average order values have risen significantly, while repeat buyers now account for a growing share of all trade on the platform, proof that trust, once elusive, can compound into measurable credibility. Kuraway’s refund and dispute rate remains below 5%, reinforcing confidence for both sides.
Where informal trade still operates largely off the record, Kuraway is bringing structure and transparency through verified transactions and escrow-backed deliveries, rewriting the continent’s trade ledger, one measurable success at a time.

Kuraway’s model mirrors a broader continental shift. Like cross-border trade infrastructures such as the Pan-African Payments and Settlement System (PAPSS) and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), it points toward an Africa where digital verification and financial inclusion converge. A merchant in Nigeria can now discover and trade directly with a verified counterpart in Kenya or Ghana, an early glimpse of what an integrated African trade network could look like.

By Q4 2025, Kuraway plans to launch trade financing tools that will allow verified merchants to access working capital based on their transaction history.
For merchants like Chinedu, that future cannot come soon enough. Each verified order, each successful delivery, chips away at the long history of doubt that has fenced traders in. Believability, once a privilege of the few, is slowly becoming a currency of its own, a quiet reckoning etched in proof, visible beyond stalls and carried into the far reaches of the world.