Terra Biga: Digitising Burkina Faso's Community Solidarity

Batiana Nacro, a Burkinabè economist and former banker, returned home to build Terra Biga, a platform that brings digital structure to a practice West African communities already know well: pooling money for family, health, hygiene or group-purchase projects through tontines and WhatsApp groups. Launched in 2024 as a subsidiary of Terra Invest SA, the startup aims to become the reference infrastructure for coordinating collective action across the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA).

Terra Biga offers two tools. Te Raga lets users form group-buying circles to access wholesale prices, while MamCagnotte channels contributions toward community projects run by registered associations and NGOs. Before a campaign launches, community members vote on whether to support it. The platform never holds the funds: contributions go directly to project leaders through licensed mobile-money operators, and Terra Biga tracks the initiatives and keeps contributors informed.

Since December 2024, the startup says it has mobilized more than 11 million FCFA (roughly €17,000) for impact projects, mainly in health and hygiene. Its flagship campaign with the UN Development Programme that month gathered over 500 contributors across different regions. Recognition has followed: second place at Orange's POESAM social-entrepreneurship prize in September 2025, the grand prize at Burkina Faso's Faso Digital event a month later, a mention by The Fintech Times in March 2026, and a spot at Paris's VivaTech in June 2026 under Orange's banner. Notably, the company has grown without a single fundraising round, and only about 2% of its users are in the diaspora — a deliberate choice to prove that local resources can fund local solidarity.

Why Terra Biga Shuns the Diaspora Playbook and Never Holds Funds

A local alternative to the Western crowdfunding model

Nacro's central claim is that foreign crowdfunding platforms solve one-off needs, while solidarity in West Africa is a recurring habit. Terra Biga is therefore designed as a multi-use coordination layer: no per-project reinvention, an interface that integrates mobile money, and validation by the community itself. The approach deliberately avoids imposing a Western template on local practice — "crowd-collaboration," as Nacro calls it — and instead formalizes what already happens informally.

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An architectural answer to the BCEAO constraint

Any platform touching money flows in the UEMOA zone sits within the central bank BCEAO's regulatory orbit. Terra Biga's response was structural: because the company never holds funds and routes everything through licensed e-money operators, it positions itself as coordination infrastructure rather than a financial institution. That keeps it out of the heaviest licensing territory — but it also means the startup forgoes the float and payment margins that fintechs typically monetize, leaving its business model dependent on scale.

Local-first, with African diaspora potential

Where many African startups target European diasporas first, Terra Biga reversed the order, betting that endogenous resource mobilization can be a stronger social proof. The appearance of contributors from Côte d'Ivoire suggests a second, often-overlooked diaspora — Africans living in other African countries — may be an easier expansion path than the West. Security challenges at home have slowed national deployment, pushing the company toward partnerships in Senegal and a stated ambition to cover the whole UEMOA zone within five years. Whether it can reach that scale without outside capital remains the open question.

What Terra Biga's Model Signals for UEMOA Fintech

  • For fintech founders in the UEMOA zone: Terra Biga's structure shows how to operate near financial flows without a payment-institution license — by never holding funds and routing through licensed e-money operators. The trade-off is that scale, not float or transaction margins, must drive revenue.
  • For NGOs and community groups in the region: the UNDP-backed December 2024 campaign, with more than 500 contributors spread across regions, is a concrete reference case for using community-validated, direct-transfer crowdfunding for health and hygiene projects.
  • For investors tracking West African fintech: watch whether Terra Biga moves from its current proof-of-concept phase — roughly €17,000 mobilized — into its stated UEMOA-wide expansion, and whether it eventually opens its first fundraising round, which the company says it has never done.