At first, everything is fine. You call, you catch up, “it’s coming along”. Nobody asks for figures — it would seem rude.
London – Dakar: 2,700 miles
You put up the money.
You should be able to check.
DiasporaInvest gives you and the person running things on the ground the same dashboard. Every sale, every rent payment, every expense, every bag out of stock. In CFA francs, as it happens.
No money moves through the app. It follows the activity; it never touches the funds.
One place
WhatsApp to talk.
Excel to count.
Word to sum up.
And nothing tying them together.
It isn’t poor organisation. It’s what happens when five tools that ignore one another are asked to tell the same story.
Today
WhatsApp
The messages, buried between family photos and neighbourhood groups.
Excel
Purchases and sales, in a file that exists in three versions and won’t open on a phone.
Word
The monthly write-up, sent as an attachment — findable only if you remember the email.
A notebook
The only version that counts — and it’s 2,700 miles away.
The photo gallery
The receipts, mixed in with personal photos, deleted the first time storage runs out.
No shared record. Six months on, everyone is lost.
With DiasporaInvest
- The conversations, by project
- Purchases, sales, stock
- Receipts, attached to the entry
- The record, dated and kept
One app. And you find things again.
What it ends up costing
It isn’t about trust.
It becomes about trust.
Then a question goes unanswered. Not out of bad faith — because piecing together what happened would take a whole evening, and nobody has that evening.
And one day, you stop asking. Asking your own brother to account for things already accuses him a little. So you say nothing, and the doubt settles in by itself.
What was missing was never honesty. It’s a way of looking at the same thing together, without anyone having to justify themselves.
Following a project from abroad, in practice
Three steps, once.
-
1
You create the project
A livestock farm, a groundnut field, a shop, a flat you rent out. You set the starting capital and the currency — every calculation is in CFA francs.
-
2
You invite the person you trust
Your brother, your cousin, the manager. You choose exactly what they can see and what they can change. You can take it back at any time.
-
3
You both see the same thing
They record it from their phone, even on a patchy connection. You see it from yours. No more chasing for a report.
Farming, trade, rental property
One project, or ten.
Your brother’s livestock farm in Thiès, the flat you rent out in Almadies, your sister’s shop : each activity is a separate project, with its own team, its own conversation and its own figures. Nothing gets mixed up.
And each project has its own AI assistant, which you switch on where it earns its place — and nowhere else.
- Livestock farm, Thiès AI assistant on
- Rental flats · Almadies AI assistant off
- Shop · Grand Yoff AI assistant off
Whatever the field
- Farming
- Trade
- Property
- Restaurant
- Services
- Transport
- Education
- Health
Sales, stock, cash, losses
The detail, not the summary.
Sales and payments
A sale, a rent payment, a job — including when the money arrives in instalments: who paid what, and what is still owed.
Batches and stock
Every bag in, out and sold. The purchase price is fixed at the moment of sale, so the margin is the real one.
Cash
What is available now, not what has been promised. Capital contributions are tracked separately.
Running costs
Rent, wages, transport, water. Recurring costs carry over from one month to the next.
Losses, with the proof
A death in the herd, a flood, a theft: the loss is recorded with a photo or a video. That is what spares you the painful conversation six months later.
Reports
A summary as a PDF, to read or to email — to a partner, to an accountant, to whoever you choose.
Messages, photos and voice notes
What gets said stays
with what happens.
One conversation per project. The photos of the field, the manager’s voice note, the haulier’s invoice : everything stays attached to the project it belongs to, and is still there six months later.
- Voice notes — for whoever speaks more easily than they write.
- Photos, videos, documents — the proof arrives with the message.
- Read receipts — you know whether it was seen.
- Notifications — they say who wrote, and on which project.
Ousmane · on the ground
0:12
3 photos of the field
Good. Record the sale and we’ll look at the margin tonight.
AI assistant
Just ask, in plain English.
Instead of hunting through screens, ask. The AI assistant reads your figures and answers — margins, cash, stock, late payments.
It understands English Français
- “ What’s my margin on groundnuts this month? ”
- “ How many bags are left in stock? ”
- “ Who hasn’t finished paying? ”
- « Combien ai-je dépensé en transport cette année ? »
Who still owes me money?
Three customers, 615,000 F in total.
Awa Ndiaye is the furthest behind : 340,000 F on a sale
from 12 June, half of it paid.
What makes trust possible
Three words, and what sits behind them.
Transparency
Both sides see the same thing, at the same moment. There is no version for the one who pays and another for the one who runs it — there is one record, and it is shared.
Receipts
A loss, an expense, a delivery : the proof attaches to the entry itself. A photo, a video or an invoice, filed as it happens — not reconstructed six months later.
Traceability
Every bag follows its path, from purchase to sale or loss. A batch that has already been used can no longer be deleted : the record does not disappear by accident, not even by mistake.
Start with a single project.
Create it, invite the person running things on the ground, and watch the first week fill up. It is the quickest way to find out whether the tool suits you.
Start a project