West Africa’s incipient mobile platform boom will transform the ECOWAS economy

While East Africa has tended to grab the headlines as the mover and shaker in mobile platform innovation, there’s an imminent boom due to emerge in West Africa. The GSMA’s most recent report on the West African mobile ecosystem contains all the signals of this happening within the next 3 or so years.

Even in mobile money solutions, where East Africa has had a headstart (and worldwide fame for M-Pesa), numerous new solutions have been launched in West Africa and subscriber numbers show double digit growth.

In addition, both smartphone penetration (~30% of all subscribers) and internet use are growing as well.

All of this, taken together with the growth of incubators, accelerators and variations of tech hubs to support the startup ecosystem provide evidence of a transformation underway.

Does West Africa have the potential to surpass the success of East Africa? I believe so, given its larger population, greater numbers of dynamic economies from both Francophone and Anglophone regions, and the side effect of years of watching East Africa grab the headlines.

Disrupting Predictions: How Stereotypes Distort Expectations

This chart embodies some stereotypical thinking regarding the high growth opportunities now available in low income and lower middle income countries. Its from the just released World Development Report 2019’s concept note on the theme “The Changing Nature of Work”.

Where the cognitive dissonance lies is in the accompanying text which highlights the transformational capacity of digitization and its impact on the nature of work in developing countries. As this snippet shows, Kenya has been showcased as an example of such technology enabled change:Based on this, the chart’s positioning of jobs such as “mobile application developer”, “data technologist”, and even “cyber security consultant” should actually be further to the left, given that its the lower income nations where the majority of the future need will emerge from.

Even fashion designers are not spared, placed as they are in middle income countries. Lagos Fashion & Design Week has become the byword for up and coming fashion brands, sponsored heavily by the likes of Heineken. Kigali is another hotspot for fashion’s rapid growth, and the local brand “House of Tayo” reached the pinnacle of global visibility with their bespoke suit for Lupita Nyongo’s brother, worn for the Black Panther premiere.

The irony is that if this chart is used as is, without correlation to the transformations mentioned in the text, it will end up being the one thing that readers will notice when glancing through the final report. Diagrams and visuals catch our attention faster among reams of text.

Further, if these are the predictions being made, how much of the unquestioned assumptions relegate lower income nations to tourism hubs and farming? Drones are being deployed for healthcare in East Africa, and being tested for parcel delivery where transportation is scarce. Won’t drone operators and robotics engineers find jobs if these initiatives scale as planned? Its the developing countries that face greater logistics challenges, lacking the infrastructure of the developed.

There’s a strong case to be made for the redesign of this chart. It places an unfair burden on lower income and lower middle income countries, and implicitly relegates their future of work opportunities to the less skilled quadrant. Given the current and existing changes already underway, there’s a disruption waiting to happen if this is the chart that’s used for policy planning and analysis.

Trading economics: a new theoretical system

From the Financial Times, a snippet from a guest post by Wang Zhenying, director-general of the research and statistics department at the PBoC’s Shanghai head office and vice chairman of the Shanghai Financial Studies Association, summarising the arguments in his new Chinese-language textbook on economics.

“Trading economics” is one new theory emerging against this backdrop. Mainstream economics deduces the macro whole by extrapolating from the behavior of individual “representative agents”. Trading economics replaces this with a systematic and comprehensive analysis approach. It stresses that in an interconnected world, the interaction between trading subjects is the fundamental driving force behind the operation, development, and evolution of economic systems.

Trading economics first analyses the actions of trading subjects, then builds a dynamic trading network among trading subjects through trading relations, and finally reveals the operational rules of the economic system. The rules could be examined from two perspectives: short-term and long-term. The business cycle and price changes are examined in the short-term perspective. The long-term perspective would focus on the rules of economic evolution as well as changes in technology, knowledge, system, and network.

Throughout the history of economics, trading economics is the first and foremost theory to incorporate all economic phenomena into an all-encompassing logical system. It changes the long-standing scenario in the economics field, that is, the macro was separated from the micro, and the short-term from the long-term. Trading economics is a revolution of mainstream economic theories and is bound to exert a great and profound impact on all areas, including economic theoretical research and practical application.

NB: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this summary and expect to contextualize future research with some of the theoretical frameworks as presented here.

A Unique Path to Development Seen for the Informal Economy

Just recently I stumbled over this slim book < 60 pages that analyzed existing data sources in order to frame an answer to the research question they posed:

How did the informal economy―markets and the private sector―develop in the absence of legal and administrative frameworks to support it?

Some of the most intriguing insights extracted here:

And they echo my own statements regarding the East African Community that its the informal sector that’s growing faster and responsible for employing the majority of the population. This makes integration and bridging efforts between the formal and global together with the local and informal even more critical.

The path to integration as described in the book may not apply to the African economies but holds some unusual insights for those in eastern Europe which may struggle with some of the same issues of top down planning and grassroots income generation.

All in all, the step by step approach over the past decade to recognize, and thus integrate the informal sector was much appreciated and if you’re interested, you can download the book here.

UNDP’s 2017 Report: Universalism and Human Development

Though I’ve often deconstructed a variety of reports released by private sector actors like management consultancies, and public sector institutions like the UNCTAD or World Bank, I’ve never been moved to write about them here on the blog.

Last night, using the twitter hashtag #UNDP2017, I went through their recently released 2017 issue of the Human Development Report (their hashtag, #HDR2017*) and was rather surprised by their decision to take an unusual approach to the topic.

Unlike the majority of the reports I’ve seen till now, which tend to segregate regions by geography or continent or income (lesser developing countries, for instance, or sub Saharan Africa), this was the first time I’d seen such a holistic and inclusive approach to humanity’s development.

In fact, it was the first time I’d come across the concept of “universalism”. Almost a planetary focus, one might say, on the intertwined future of our common humanity, now mostly interconnected through this world wide web.

Here are a few more bits from the report to whet your appetite, though I do suggest taking a look through it yourself.

While things are improving, there are far too many marginalized groups of which the largest segment of humanity is women, especially those of us who were born in the formerly-known-as-developing world.

Though I must say that the skills the UNDP’s report writing team selects as necessary for our emerging future is one that can be mastered by anyone, regardless of culture, gender or education.

*You can see why I picked my own hashtag for easier readability

Mobile Money’s next challenge: Enabling the development of a cashless ecosystem

Equitel billboard, Nairobi Kenya (Photo: Niti Bhan Jan 2016)

The latest GSMA State of the Industry report on Mobile Money is out this month and the numbers look great in the developing world.
The report frames the industry’s next challenge as the need to grow the platform beyond the basics of airtime purchase and person to person transfer.
Here are my concerns, starting with the very first sentence – “to convince customers to actively diversify their usage patterns.”

This is where there is a critical need for MNOs to segment their userbase prior to designing fresh approaches to increase adoption and build an ecosystem. According to the report, only a few MNOs have data on urban vs rural, much less on gender.

The report’s fashioning of the data available into the form of an “average user” will hinder the progress more than it will help. Look at the geographic spread across widely varying economies, there’s no such thing as an average user when it comes to a tool closely related to one’s patterns of cash flow and income sources. Usage patterns reflect cash flows – why else would the prepaid business model be dominant in these same locations?

The hard work of disaggregating the information into region specific customer profiles must be done if solutions are to work effectively beyond teh basics of P2P transfer and airtime purchase – mobile money’s equivalent of a phone call and an sms.

Many of the reasons why its important to segment by rural/urban, and the proportion of users in the informal sector and on prepaid subscriptions are covered in my old posts on Google’s BebaPay fiasco – a smartphone app enabled NFC solution for cashless public transport payments introduced in Kenya a few years ago.

Economic ecosystems, particularly those with a heavy dose of the informal sector, and closer links to rural hinterlands, such as those common in sub Sahara, will need to be mapped out and understood before interventions can be designed to lower barriers to adoption. These use cases may not be plug and play components or readymade low hanging fruit, as imagined by the writers of this report. They need grounding in the context of the existing operating environment – formal or informal, urban or rural – and, the characteristics of the informal and rural economies, depending on the segment.

Future scenarios for sub Saharan Africa’s opportunity and market

When you look at selected sub Saharan African markets from the perspective of being a micro-SME up here in Finland, you discover just attractive they can be. This is Team Finland’s futures based report on four most promising (defined by size, growth and ease of doing business) countries: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania.

Using present facts and information, combined with future insights, signals, and scenarios, the report suggests possible futures and the related implications for SMEs interested in doing business in sub-Saharan Africa. Sectors in focus are: ICT, mobile & digitalization, education, health & wellbeing, energy & environment.

Unlike the majority of introductory reports to the African opportunities, Team Finland’s focus on scenario development and opportunity directions in unique, and very interesting to peruse further. They recommend reading it before drilling down deeper into specific country level data. So do I.