Njangy

Most places have a word for it: njangi, rosca, tontine, susu. A group agrees on an amount and a rhythm, everyone pays in, and each round one person takes the pot. It works because everybody remembers who has collected and who has not, and it breaks in the ordinary ways: when somebody forgets, when two people remember differently, or when the person holding the book is the person being asked about.

Njangy keeps that book. It does not change how your group works: you still set the amount, the order and the interval. What it changes is that the rules are enforced rather than remembered, and that the same record is in front of everyone at once. Alongside the houses there are personal savings goals, a way to ask your circle for help, and community raffles.

How a house works

A house has a start date, an interval and an order. Your turn to collect is worked out from those three: the house’s start date or today, whichever is later, plus your position in the order times the interval. Nobody assigns dates by hand, so the order and the dates cannot disagree. A house also decides what one payment is worth. A fixed house sets a single amount, and every payment into it has to be exactly that. A flexible house lets members pay different amounts, and each member sets the most they are willing to receive in one payment, which caps what anyone can send them.

Paying back exactly what you were given

When somebody pays into your collection, that payment is remembered as theirs, and when their turn comes you owe them the same amount back. Njangy links the two: your payment to them is recorded as the answer to theirs, and it has to be for the same amount. You cannot settle a larger obligation with a smaller payment. And until you have answered, you cannot send that person a second payment at all, so an unanswered obligation cannot be buried under new ones.

Paying early, paying late

You can pay somebody before their turn arrives, but only if their turn comes before yours. Paying ahead to somebody who collects after you would be lending to a person who has not yet paid you, so the rule refuses it rather than discouraging it. Two more refusals work the same way: you cannot pay into a collection whose date has already passed, and you cannot make payments at all once you have collected your own. Paying after the receiver’s date is allowed, and carries a late fee set as a percentage in the platform’s settings.

Trading your turn

Turns can be traded. You offer your collection date to another member, and if they accept, the two of you exchange places in the order. Both turns have to still be in the future: once a date has arrived it is not tradeable, by either side. You can have several offers open at once, and the moment one is accepted Njangy withdraws the rest, both the ones you sent and the ones you received, so an accepted trade cannot be followed by a second one you had forgotten was still open.

Saving on your own

Outside any house you can set yourself a personal savings plan: an amount, a rhythm, an end date. Two of those deliberately stop changing once you have started. The rhythm is fixed, so a plan you began weekly cannot later be loosened to monthly. And the end date moves in one direction only: you can give yourself longer, never shorter. Both limits run one way because the moment you want to soften the plan is usually the moment it needs to hold.

Asking your circle, and being asked

A help request has a set amount and a deadline, and anyone can contribute toward it. Three rules give it its shape. Creating a request and contributing to one both need a verified profile, and that requirement is itself controlled by a platform setting. An emergency request’s deadline cannot sit further out than a set number of days, so urgent stays urgent. And contributions cannot overshoot the request: offer more than what is left and only the remainder is taken, and once a request is filled it stops accepting any. When it fills, a payout is written to the person who asked, after a commission is deducted. The request is held locked while it is read, so two people contributing at the same moment cannot both believe they were the last one.

Raffles, and when you can still get out

You do not pick a particular raffle; you pick the terms: the stake, the number of seats, the number of winners. If Njangy finds an open raffle on those terms it puts you in it, and if not it opens a new one. Joining sets your stake aside, and a join is refused outright if your credits do not cover it. You can leave while it is still unlocked and your stake comes back; once it locks, the membership does not change at all, and nobody can join or leave. And nobody can run the draw. The draw happens in a separate process rather than inside the action that closes the raffle, so the moment it closes and the moment a winner is picked are not the same moment.

Who it is for

Savings circles, families, and communities who already pool money together and want it tracked properly.

Visit Njangy: www.njangy.com