I was part of the team doing the actual work, sitting with business owners and going through their finances, their operations, where they were stuck, one conversation at a time. It worked. I saw it work. Gooseberry Delight was one of the businesses that came through that same program, a small business selling gooseberry fruit products that ended up on supermarket shelves across Kenya. Their product didn't change. What changed was that someone sat with them long enough to figure out exactly where the business was weak, then walked them through fixing it.

What stuck with me was how much that took. Every business needed hours and hours of an advisor's time. Every diagnosis lived in someone's notebook or a spreadsheet, not in anything the business itself could go back to later. We could only really be in front of a handful of businesses at a time, and there are millions of MSMEs in Kenya standing exactly where those few were.

 So that's what I set out to fix. I built Jiinue (it means "to lift" in Swahili) to try and put that same kind of diagnosis into software instead of relying on one advisor's time. It looks at a business across six areas- financial health, market fit, operations, team, sustainability, and investment readiness- and turns real answers into a real score instead of a guess. From there the business gets its own development plan, an AI advisor inside the app to walk through it with them, and gets matched to actual service providers and investors who can help close their specific gaps, with real ICL staff still involved the whole way through.

 We built it together with I Choose Life Africa, and Jiinue ended up winning at CISCIC, the China Africa Innovation Competition through Nanjing Agricultural University. I still think about Gooseberry Delight when I think about why I built this. Not because it was my story, but because I watched, up close, what's possible when a business gets that kind of attention. I just want more businesses to get the chance.