We are building Kutenga.
A manufacturing marketplace built in Africa, for Africa — and for every company that has been waiting for a reason to source locally.
We are Africans who spent years working inside the manufacturing industry and kept noticing the same thing — the ease with which global companies exclude Africa from the conversation. The A in EMEA is silent. Not because the capability isn’t there, but because the infrastructure to surface it never was.
We have been in rooms filled with manufacturing and procurement conversations and no one was building with Africa in mind with any real seriousness. We realised that no one would care about Africans in Africa more than Africans in Africa. So we started building what we kept waiting for someone else to build.
Africa has been treated as a place where raw materials leave, not where finished goods are made.
Procurement officers across Africa needing manufactured parts have largely had one option — look overseas. European, American, and Asian suppliers have been the default, not because local manufacturers cannot do the work, but because no one made them easy to find or easy to trust.
On the other side, local suppliers are waiting. The demand that would push them to grow, take on more complex work, and build a track record never quite arrives. No track record means no trust. No trust means no orders. No orders means no growth. The cycle holds.
Africa is the second most populous continent in the world and it is on track to add one billion people in less than 25 years. That is not a small market — that is the future of global demand. The companies who need parts made are already here. So are the suppliers who can make them. Someone has to connect them. We think it should be us.
We serve two groups and we need both of them equally.
Procurement officers and engineers at companies across Africa who need parts manufactured, on a timeline, at a cost that makes sense. Right now their default is to look overseas — longer waits, inflated costs, and a process that was never really designed with them in mind.
Local and regional manufacturers — CNC machining, injection moulding, 3D printing — who have the capability and the capacity but not the demand. They need work, they need to grow, and the companies looking for exactly what they offer are not as far away as the current system makes it seem.
Kutenga.
Kutenga is a Chichewa word meaning “to take” or “to procure.” Chichewa is spoken across Malawi, Zambia, and parts of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The name was chosen deliberately — it is African in origin, easy to say across languages, and rooted in the exact action the platform enables. Procurement, at its core, is the act of getting what you need. Kutenga.
We’re building this now.
If you are a procurement officer tired of the overseas default, or a manufacturer ready to be found — join the waitlist.
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