As Covid-19 continues to drive the acceleration of technological adoption, businesses and people embrace the use of technology to adapt to new modes of life.
It's no different with Gig technology company M4Jam as the firm uses the power of technology to transform the model of food parcel distribution.
With its mobile app capability, M4Jam distributes food parcels to those who have lost their income during the Covid-19 lockdown period on behalf of Cell C and other donors.
Georgie Midgley, M4Jam CEO said in a statement that they were in the fortunate position of having executed market research projects gathering data on the informal telecommunications market via spaza shops for Cell C.
“With this information we could then harness a database of spaza shops across the country in order to distribute the hampers to the most convenient locations for recipients,” she said.
“As soon as we communicated the message over the M4Jam platform, it quickly spread into local communities and those who needed assistance simply had to sign up and be onboarded to receive vouchers for the hampers. Our thinking behind supporting local spazas is to ensure these small businesses remain open and the funds raised go directly to the food parcels instead of ancillary costs.
“By using digital authentication, we put in place a system for spazas to receive requests and package hampers and to then notify recipients when the hampers are ready for pick-up at their nearest spaza store. This allowed recipients to pick up their hampers at their convenience and without excessive travel costs to streamline the process,” says Midgley.