Fintech firm Proximaforte has launched Oloja by Payxy in a strategic partnership with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, deploying a free all-in-one digital commerce platform specifically built for Nigeria’s 37 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.
The platform was formally unveiled in Lekki, Lagos, in the presence of business owners, fintech stakeholders, startup founders, and policy advocates, with SMEDAN confirming plans to formalise the collaboration through a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at integrating more small businesses into the digital economy.
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The problem Oloja is designed to solve
Damilola Adeniji, Marketing Manager at Proximaforte, offered a diagnosis that resonated across the room. Nigerian SME owners are among the hardest-working people on the continent, he said — operating from early morning to midnight — yet at the end of the year, nothing has changed. The business has not grown, the owner is exhausted, and they cannot even identify why, because they have no records.
The platform Adeniji described as the response to that pattern: a single dashboard that consolidates five core business functions — digital storefront, secure payment collection, inventory management, order tracking, and staff access control — into one free, accessible interface.
Millions of Nigerian entrepreneurs are currently running serious businesses on infrastructure assembled out of necessity: Instagram for discovery, WhatsApp for orders, personal bank accounts for payments, screenshots for confirmation, and mental arithmetic for inventory. It works until it does not.
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What Oloja offers merchants
Merchants can set up a branded digital storefront where customers can browse and purchase around the clock without the seller needing to be available. Payments are processed through Payxy’s payment infrastructure, which eliminates fake payment alert risk entirely and keeps personal banking details separate. Inventory is tracked in real time with automatic low-stock alerts. Every order is logged by status with downloadable PDF records, and staff members can be added with customised access permissions that protect sensitive business data.
The platform positions itself as moving SMEs from isolated social commerce into a structured ecosystem built for scale — and from there, into cross-border trade across African markets. SMEDAN Deputy Director Bunmi Kole-Dawodu described the partnership as directly addressing the perennial challenge of market access, providing SMEs with virtual shopfronts that allow them to sell to individuals and customers anywhere, while also managing inventory, records, and other business operations in one place.
Getting started on Oloja is entirely free. The platform is available at oloja.africa, with clearly delineated transaction fees applying only to payments processed through the network.
When the tools to manage your business cost nothing to access and require no technical skills to use, the barrier to digital adoption stops being a capability problem and becomes a visibility problem. Oloja’s success will depend on how many Nigerian SMEs find out it exists.
