Rocket Internet’s Jumia.com.ng, an online retailer today celebrates its one year anniversary with over a half a million customers and making it the fourth most visited site in the country.
According to co-founder Raphael Afaedor: “Almost a year ago, we started with three employees building up an ecommerce platform in Nigeria. Now, we have more than 500 employees and offer Nigerian’s youth great opportunities to work in one of the leading ecommerce companies in Africa”
The firm will be celebrating its first anniversary with an e-commerce conference, various fashion events, special discounts, new partnerships, new changes to its website and the education campaign “delivering smiles.” This will include donating one book to a child in partner schools, for every book bought on JUMIA. JUMIA will visit schools with the ‘1 Child 1 Book’ foundation and the CSR co-sponsor DHL to give out books to less privileged pupils.
JUMIA will also team up with ACE Africa Charity, www.aceafricacharity.
The firm also said it had partnered with Mastercard to use MasterCard’s Internet Gateway Service for safe and easier credit card payments safer and easier on its platform. Other partnerships include Dell, Intel and Nokia for special prices and exclusive products.
Co-founder Tunde Kehinde said in the release statement: “After this tremendous one year run we want to say thank you to our employees, customers, partners and all Nigerians. Since our creation we have supported education programs to empower children and we want to use this anniversary to give back to society.”
Fresh from raising $35M in funding from MILLICOM and closing some other funidng from J.P. Morgan and Summit Partners, Jumia has embarked on a rapid growth strategy to serve more customers in Nigeria and it will be moving into its new 90,000 sqft warehouse in Lagos.