Afrikoni does not make blanket trust claims. Every protection described here is backed by a specific column, RPC or migration a reader can point at, and a badge ships only when the row behind it is filled in. Where a capability does not exist yet, this page says so rather than implying it.
Afrikoni does not hold your money. The payment is held by a licensed payment provider and is released to the supplier's own account only after you accept delivery. Every funded order is stamped on the trade row (status escrow_funded plus escrow_funded_at) before the supplier sees it, and Afrikoni never accepts direct-to-supplier payments.
Disputes resolve within 14 days. The payment stays with the payment provider — undelivered to the supplier — for the entire window. Auto-resolvable cases are routed by the dispute decision engine; the rest escalate to human review.
No. Afrikoni does not currently provide inspection and has no inspection partner under contract. Buyers may commission an independent pre-shipment inspection themselves — SGS, Bureau Veritas, Intertek and Cotecna each run these for roughly $150 to $300 — and the report becomes evidence in a claim. What Afrikoni does enforce is the ceiling: disputes above $5,000 do not auto-resolve, they route to manual review by the Afrikoni team.
When both the buyer country and supplier country are AfCFTA member states, preferential tariffs apply. The landed-cost calculator on every product page reads the schedule from the AfCFTA HS catalogue and reduces duties to the preferential rate.
Every active supplier is personally onboarded by the founding team — that fact is stored per-row in companies.personal_onboard. Automated KYB (companies.kyb_verified_at) is the future pipeline column. A "Verified" badge ships only when one of those columns is filled in for that company.
Afrikoni is in the startup-curation era. The founding team meets every supplier directly before they are admitted. The accountability is personal, the verification fact is recorded per-row, and the badge is removed if the row is removed. As Afrikoni scales, automated KYB takes over — a global "all suppliers verified" claim will never ship without per-row proof.