Esusu and Ajo, in an App

If you are Nigerian and living in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, or anywhere else on the list of 42 live countries, none of that applies to you. You register where you live and you can start today.

One rule to know before you invite anyone: every member of a circle must be registered in the same country. An ajo between you in Manchester and your brother in Ibadan is not something the app can run, because Stripe will not settle a cross-border payout from our platform. The circle has to be local to you. In practice that is usually the circle that helps anyway, since the rent, the fees and the stock are all priced where you live.

Nigerians use these words loosely and often interchangeably, which is fine in conversation and unhelpful when you are trying to work out what a piece of software should do. The distinctions that survive scrutiny are these.

• Esusu (Yoruba, also osusu, and isusu in Igbo) is the rotating group itself. A fixed set of members, a fixed contribution, and one member takes the whole pot each round until everyone has had a turn. This is the arrangement economists call a ROSCA.
• Ajo (Yoruba) is used for the same rotating group, but it also carries a second and quite different meaning: the daily contribution habit, where a collector comes to you. Which one somebody means is usually clear from context and occasionally is not.
• Adashi (Hausa, northern Nigeria and Niger) is the same rotating structure, most often organised through a market, a workplace or a neighbourhood.

That second sense of ajo is the one worth pulling apart, because it is not a savings circle at all and the difference costs money.

In the daily-contribution version, an alajo (the collector, also called akawo) comes to your shop or stall each day and takes a small fixed deposit. They keep a card with your marks on it. At the end of the cycle, usually thirty days, they return your savings to you.

They do not return all of it. The standard arrangement is that the collector keeps one day’s contribution out of each cycle as their commission, which works out at roughly three percent of everything you saved. Rates vary by collector and by market, but that is the shape of it.

Stated plainly, this means:

• You pay for the discipline, not for the money. An alajo does not lend you anything and does not bring your lump sum forward. You get back less than you paid in. What you are buying is the fact that somebody came and took it before you spent it.
• One person holds everything. Your entire balance sits with the collector for the whole cycle, secured by their reputation and nothing else. When a collector disappears, the money is gone, and there is no ledger anywhere but their notebook.
• A rotating esusu does something the alajo cannot. It moves your lump sum forward in time. If your turn is round three of twelve, you have the full pot nine months before saving alone would have produced it. That is the entire point of the rotation, and it is why the two arrangements are not substitutes.

Whether you go looking for an esusu app or an ajo app, you are looking for the same four things, because most circles that fail do not fail for want of a good idea. They fail on one of a very short list of old problems, and those happen to be problems software is genuinely good at.

• Nobody should hold the pot. In The SuSu App, contributions move through Stripe Connect to that round’s recipient. There is no organiser holding cash, so the alajo failure cannot happen, and nobody has to carry the burden of being the one who is trusted with it.
• The order must be fixed before the first round. Every member sees the full payout order before anyone pays in. The most common argument in an informal circle, who goes next and why, has nothing left to run on.
• A missed payment has to surface immediately. Payment status per member per round is on the group screen, reminders are automatic, and an admin can remove a member who stops paying. Post-payout default concentrates in the second half of a cycle, and it is much easier to handle in week one than in month seven.
• There has to be a record. Every contribution and payout is timestamped. A disagreement about whether somebody paid in March is a question with an answer rather than an argument between two memories.

What no app removes is the underlying credit risk. If a member stops paying, the pot for that round is smaller. Admins can remove them, but the shortfall is not insured, and any product telling you otherwise is worth reading closely.

Creating and joining are free, and contributions carry no added fee. You pay exactly the contribution amount. Fees come out of the pot only when you receive a payout: a 5% platform fee (minimum $0.30), plus Stripe's own costs passed on with no markup — what it charged to collect the round's contributions (about 2.9% + $0.30 per card payment, about 0.8% per bank payment), payout processing of 0.25% + $0.25, and a $2 account fee on your first payout of each calendar month. On a $700 pot paid entirely by card, that is $35.00 + $23.30 + $2.00 + $2.00, leaving $637.70; paid by bank debit, about $655.40. There is no subscription, and every member can see the breakdown before the round closes.

Worth comparing against the alajo arrangement above, which takes its cut from money it only held for you, and against a rotating circle run in cash, where the cost is not a fee at all but the risk that the pot walks away.

• How to start a savings circle — choosing members, setting the amount, agreeing the order, and surviving round one.
• Running a susu abroad — the guide for Nigerians and Ghanaians who left and want their circle back.
• Susu, ajo, esusu, partner hand — the same idea in twenty other languages, and how the mechanics differ.
• What a susu is — the mechanics, a worked example, and the risks stated plainly.