Cairo-based agri-fintech start-up Dajin has introduced Shariah compliant financial solutions, widening the circle of Egyptian start-ups providing Halal digital financial services.
“The poultry industry is vast, encompassing various goods, from essential raw materials like soybean and corn to crucial inputs like feed and chicks, all the way to the live poultry and the end of the supply chain with slaughtered chicken. Developing finance products to cater to this diverse ecosystem was both challenging and rewarding,” Mohamed Hisham, CEO of Dajin, explained.
The products were developed in partnership with AlMajna Advisors, an Islamic finance consulting firm.
Launched in 2022, Dajin is a B2B agri-tech marketplace platform with embedded finance solutions for the poultry industry. It connects poultry farms in Egypt with various stakeholders, while offering credit scoring for feed factories, farm boilers, slaughterhouses and restaurants.
In May 2021, the start-up raised US$100,000 in pre-seed funding from Wealth-Grid Venture Studio, a venture building firm Mohamed co-founded.
The launch of the new products come at a time when Egypt’s poultry industry is suffering from the adverse impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has disrupted global supply chain and triggered instability in feed prices as foreign currencies take a beating.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, investments into Egypt’s poultry industry reached EGP100 billion (US$5.09 billion). In the 2021 calendar year, the poultry sector produced 1.5 billion chickens and 13 billion table eggs. The Union of Poultry Producers intends to increase investments in the sector; it aims to produce 2 billion chickens in 2030 to meet local market demand as well as doubling the production of table eggs.
There are at least five other start-ups in Egypt that offers Islamic financial services and products, according to the IFN Islamic Fintech Landscape as at the 3rd August 2023.