Zanguni is an event management platform that showcases events happening around you and enables you to pay for them. This was something three high school leavers, Benjamin Oganga, Januaris Mbithi and Albert Obura ,thought about as they searched for a “plot”(plan). They observed that such a platform, customized to Kenyans either did not exist or that those that existed were poorly managed and very basic. They sought out to create an Android application that would not only show you events in your surroundings, but also enable you to purchase tickets. Zanguni is derived from 2 swahili words; “zangu” and “ni” which loosely translates to where my things belong. This is something the developers feel like events should be to the event goers, personal.
Created under their company, Becarn Corporations Africa Limited, the developers describe the reception of Zanguni in the Kenyan lifestyle market as both encouraging and driving factor for improvement. They acknowledged that the journey has not been easy, but when they see people talking about it, tweeting about it among other things, then this motivates them to wake up everyday and create more.
First impressions..
The Zanguni app is available on the Google Playstore. Being only 643kb, it won’t really dent your storage space or take up much of your precious bundles to download. Once you open the app, you are greeted with a list of upcoming events for the week. I quickly noticed that there wasn’t a quick view of upcoming events for the next few months or weeks. I think this would be a good feature to add especially for annual events and those events that require earlier planning (more than a week). Various tabs are also presented to the user. These are categories, featured and top free tabs which work to give a view of specific events based on what you are looking for.
The user interface is fine, there is quite a straightforward navigation. The pictures could do with better resolution and aligning but you can still gather information about the event from the posters. You can view more details about an event but in my opinion, the font used could be better.
Once you identify an event, you can proceed to purchase a ticket. This process is quite convenient and easy. With a few details (your name, phone number and email) you are given various ways to make your payment. They use Jambo pay as the pay channel and this allows user to access various methods of paying from mobile money to credit and debit cards.
My take away..
Well this is an application that works. Its a brilliant first step for this young developers who identified a problem that they faced and provided a working solution. They said that this is not the final product and it will become better, and appeal to more people. To this effect, they have hinted that there will be an added feature called “My Tickets” which will let you buy an unlimited number of tickets without having them sent to your email. Essentially this means you can access your tickets without having to go outside the application which is a plus.
This is the first of many applications to be developed under their umbrella company with the aim of developing Nairobi into Africa’s Silicon Valley. They are therefore geared towards new innovative projects with Zanguni as their flagship project.
