Odoo deepened its push into Rwanda’s fast-digitizing economy after drawing nearly 1,000 business owners, corporate executives and students to its second major workshop in Kigali, hosted in partnership with Globx.
The turnout, almost triple early this year’s audience, underscored how quickly digital tools are becoming central to operations across sectors, from retail and manufacturing to professional services.
The evening doubled as a live demonstration of how Odoo’s integrated business-management system works end to end. In under an hour, Odoo’s Africa advisors built a fictional “Kigali Furniture Store” in real time: generating a website through prompts, customizing pages with AI-driven edits, launching a multi-platform social-media campaign, posting a sales commission plan, and tracking service projects with dashboards that mirror tools used by much larger enterprises. For many attendees, it was the first time seeing an enterprise system built with the simplicity of consumer tech.
“Most companies use an average of 4 applications just to run their business,” Annabel Kaveni Njuguna, Odoo’s Business Advisor for Africa, leading the demonstration. “Odoo brings everything under one roof, accounting, CRM, e-commerce, inventory, manufacturing and gives you your entire business at your fingertips,” She said.
During the live demo, Kaveni constructed the store’s digital presence from scratch. A website was produced instantly without any coding. AI tools rewrote headers, generated translations, and adapted content based on prompts. Images were swapped out from copyright-free libraries, and mobile previews showed how customers would see the site on their phones.
She then expanded the operation: posting Christmas promotions to Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and X simultaneously, tracking clicks and conversions, generating quotations, issuing invoices, recording payments, and instantly displaying earned commissions for the salesperson. The system’s power, consolidating marketing, sales, finance and after-sales service, became a recurring theme throughout the session.
This integration is what is increasingly attracting Rwanda’s small and mid-sized businesses, many of which still use a patchwork of manual processes. The local market’s appetite is rising fast, said Globx CEO Vinay Dev, whose company leads implementations across Africa, India and the UAE.
“People always ask us, Is Odoo for us?” he said. “Odoo works for anyone even a one-person business. What it really gives you is information at your fingertips.”
Vinay noted that most entrepreneurs struggle with visibility, mixing personal and business expenses, juggling different applications, or managing staff across multiple branches. Odoo consolidates these pain points into a single dashboard, a feature he said is particularly valuable for SMEs aiming to formalize and scale. “For any business that wants to get organized, digitized and move to the next level, a platform like Odoo is no longer optional,” he added.
scalability remains one of Odoo’s strongest selling points. “You can start very small,” he said. “When your business scales, Odoo scales with you. Its flexibility is what makes it powerful.”
Localization has also emerged as a key competitive advantage in Rwanda. Vinay highlighted Globx’s integration of EBM into Odoo, allowing businesses to generate compliant e-invoices directly from the system. They have also customized a Rwanda-specific payroll module capable of calculating all statutory deductions instantly, a process that previously consumed hours for HR teams.
Project-management approach is a core reason its deployments succeed, even as many IT projects globally fail. Globx said they rely on detailed scoping, stakeholder engagement and a structured implementation cycle, followed by a 90-day post–go-live support period to ease the transition from manual processes to digital tools.
The spike in attendance, filling a venue that once struggled to attract half the seats, signaled a shift in Rwanda’s digital maturity. “Last time, half this room was empty. Today we had to add more chairs,” Vinay told the audience.
The workshop also featured a real-world testimony from DP Singh & Associates Ltd, an accounting and tax advisory firm operating in Rwanda for more than a decade. Speaking on behalf of the company, Ms. Wendy Wanjiku Kibathi., Head of Corporate Affairs, said Odoo helped them streamline operations across nine departments and more than 200 clients after years of juggling multiple software tools.
Wanjiku noted that customer inquiries previously got lost between WhatsApp, Instagram and email, causing lost revenue and administrative chaos. Migrating to Odoo’s CRM, HR, website and EBM modules brought immediate structure. “Before Odoo, things slipped through the cracks now our teams finally work in sync,” she said.
DP Singh & Associates Ltd also credited Globx for managing a smooth system migration and integrating EBM directly into their workflows.
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