One of the leading small businesses in the Philippines is the "sari-sari store.
They can be found all over the Philippines and are used by ordinary people for their daily shopping. It is said that there are as many as 1.1 million of them.
There was a time when my wife also said that when she returned to the Philippines, she would open a sari-sari store under the eaves of her own house.
Although a sarisari store is a store, customers do not enter the store. The products are displayed inside the store so that they can be seen from the outside, and customers can request to have the products handed over to them in exchange for payment.
Therefore, a store can be opened in a corner of a home with a space (usually 4 to 5 square meters) to stock merchandise.
However, it is also known that because it is so easy to open a store, it is also easy to go out of business.
Products are purchased from supermarkets and sold in small lots, so the purchase cost is small. Although profits are small, the business will not go out of business if it is run in a normal manner.
Nevertheless, there is no end to the number of sari-sari stores that go out of business because they do not manage their businesses with proper counting and control, and because they are unable to collect the payments they owe.
We often hear stories of how family members or relatives eat or take products without permission, making it impossible to run the business.
A venture company called Packworks is trying to improve such sari-sari, which has no control over counting, by using an app.
The Packworks app will help sari-sari store owners manage their business and give them access to cheaper suppliers and financial products. They already have a network of 200,000 sari-sari stores in the Philippines.
The goal seems to be to help small sari-sari stores not only survive, but also grow, by using digital technology rather than the traditional pen-and-paper way of doing business.
These efforts caught the attention of JICA, which decided to support the NINJA (Next Innovation with Japan) project with $30,000.
Filipinos are said to be terrible at keeping count, but if digital management utilizing such apps becomes widespread, not only will the number of sari-sari stores going out of business decrease, but they will also become more convenient for the common people who use them.
