Gold Sourcing Project

a) Preamble background

Polinas ltd is a start-up franchise company enabling gold buyers to source sustainably and giving small scale miners a better deal. Polinas is digitizing informal gold value chain, bringing transparency and transaction security to ‘first mile sourcing’.

b) Business model

Polinas service consist of three elements; platform, network of village agents and trade finance.

The online and mobile enabled trading and payment platform enables collaborative supply chain management: it allows for the capture of all costs, analysis of transaction viability and price setting, registration of miners and triggering payments; and tracking of gold produced from collection to delivery.

Polinas shall provide trade finance so that miners can be paid ‘cash-on –the-bag’ as they hand over the gold produced at the collection point. Our trade finance covers transaction costs including packaging, handling, storage, transport, taxes and value addition services up to delivery to final buyer. when the buyer pays polinas the fund is replenished.

Our sourcing network uses the platform and finance to provide a marketing service to small scale miners in their area. Miners can see market prices displayed on board at collection points. They bring the produce and receive down payment immediately on mobile money. On quarterly basis accountability meetings are held to feed back on trading performance and any profit generated is shared.

c) Social and environmental impact

Polinas increases small scale miner’s incomes and builds their confidence to invest in production; create employment opportunities, in particular for youth and women as village agents; and enables off-takers to source sustainably.

d) Financial sustainability plan

Polinas is a business that earns revenue from commissions ( 5% of miners price) and has a 50% share in any profit from transaction. There is a service charge for trade finance to cover associated costs such as equipment lease. Polinas is projected to break-even in 2020 when trading value reaches USD 4 million.

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e) Start-up investment required: USD 230,000

This investment will be used to:

1. Bring our service to new areas reaching 1200 small scale miners in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. 2. Develop our technology platform, with a greater directory and dashboard functionality to provide additional services to our clients and revenue streams from polinas.

f) Team

Polinas as an ambitious and experience leadership team (CEO, finance and admin director and partnership director), bringing together expertise in supply chain management, finance and social business.