MIA Spotlight: Adress(ya)-ing the issue: Improving Access & Opportunities

Find out how Addressya, a social business startup of our MAN Impact Accelerator, can help you find your way and be found, whilst solving a 4 billion people challenge.

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LIVING OFF THE GRID

When Karoline Beronius, founder and CEO of Addressya worked for a child and maternal health organisation on the registration and follow up of child health - she was struck by the sheer amount of children who lacked a registered identity and address.

Although the proliferation of mobile tech has helped many people become more connected, there still remains four billion people that live ‘off the grid’ or in places that have no street names, no house numbers, without anything that constitutes a reliable address.

The simple lack of an address can have major consequences for individuals, countless businesses and governmental agencies.

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HAVING AN ADDRESS IS A CIVIL RIGHT

Just consider the last time you were asked for a home address... Without one, we cannot fully participate in society and have trouble accessing essential goods, services and opportunities.

Moreover, according to Addressya, without an adequate address, six of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are hard to achieve nor could we reach the UN’s 2030 Agenda for sustainable development for all countries and world citizens. Addressya feels the urgency to solve this challenge fast.

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For an individual, seemingly basic and often essential tasks become extremely difficult - receiving parcels, participating in political processes, opening a bank account, family and property insurance, accessing products on the global market such as female hygiene products. Most importantly, imagine the difficulty of explaining to emergency services how to be found without a reliable address... ‘Take the street that leads to where the Church once stood. Our house is on the right after the third mango tree. The door is grey...’ all whilst dealing with a life threatening situation.

For all businesses which involve delivery, poor addressing becomes excruciatingly time-consuming, with high costs and countless opportunities missed. Last mile delivery worldwide accounts for 28% of the total delivery costs and often it is lack of adequate addresses infrastructure that create this inefficiency. Usually the cost of delivery is double to what can be charged to the customer (e.g., deliveries cannot be bundled, increased costs for petrol, wear and tear, and mobile airtime), which means that it is difficult to achieve logistical efficiency and economy of scale.

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STRUGGLING TO FIND THE WAY - COULD BE A THING OF THE PAST

To try and solve this problem, in 2017 Karoline Beronius joined hands with her co-founder Maria Cheadle to find a new way to address the unadressed. The two women founders now work in 2 offices (Sweden and Uganda) with an international team of 12 people from 8 nationalities, including 9 women. They have created a mobile app and a system that empowers individuals as they gain access to goods, services and opportunities.

Addressya makes it possible to register a precise, complete and easy to use address, and share it securely with friends, family, customers, delivery drivers and authorities for as long as you decide.

All you need is a smartphone and in less than 2 minutes, you can download the app, create your profile with your very own personalised digital address - that can be shared with a delivery driver or the like, avoiding miscommunication around place and directions and avoiding endless calls to provide direction.

Furthermore, Addressya cares about your privacy! The app is GDPR Compliant. Users own and have full control of their data since they can always decide with explicit permission with whom they share their details with and for how long. This way nobody can see any of your information unless you want them to.

AND it’s free of charge! Having an address is a civil right so creating, looking up, and sharing addresses will always be free for individuals. However, they have built ‘Addressya as a Service’ as their business solution.

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SMART BUSINESSES USE APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY TO DELIVER ON THEIR MISSION!

Addressya is catching the attention of the many companies dependent on good quality addresses (e-commerce, logistics, transportation and utility companies).

With Addressya, they no longer feel they are losing business and customers because of inadequate address infrastructure, risk of miscommunication and getting lost on the last mile. This directly improves planning and organisation, saves costs, provides efficient access to new markets and overall improved customer satisfaction.

For example, companies in retail and hospitality can manage company locations and make them publicly searchable. Online shops/ e-commerce can look up customers’ location data for efficient delivery and increase their satisfaction with the overall service.

This solution is widely accessed via the mobile app, web application (soon to be launched) or easily integrated with customers’ ERM or CRM through their APIs.

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‍ADDRESSYA IN A FEW KEY POINTS

• Addressya have received many awards: SAS Scholarship, Impact Maker in Venture Cup Region East, DI Digital Female Founders, Female Founders at the Executive Women's Conference, EIT WOMAN Award.
• Received first seed investment of 275k€ in 2018.
• In 2019 the Addressya Android app and their first APIs were launched in Rwanda – which has been chosen as their first market entry point for doing business in Africa.
• Addressya launched in September 2019 and have now have more than 40k users in Rwanda.
• Addressya’s goal is to transform 1 billion lives through quality addressing by 2030.

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