There’s a dearth of research on the economics of biashara – the everyday commerce that keeps daily life running. And this hampers the efficacy of the design of programmes and policies meant for operating environments where the informal economy may be providing employment for more than half the working age population, and often, as high… Read More »
Just as egg wholesalers know that business spikes during the school holidays due to increased demand, the ladies who trade in clothes, old and new, know that clothing is a discretionary purchase. In the low season, some switch to selling necessities like charcoal, or fresh veg. People still need to cook and eat. Mama Margeret… Read More »
The nature of biashara, which is primarily trade and commerce in a cash intensive economy, is such that margins are extremely thin, and there is a fragile line of trust, credit, and credentials which keeps the flows humming. M-Pesa changed that in some very fundamental ways, allowing the tightly furled buds to bloom. Trust, now,… Read More »
Without a network, you are nothing. In biashara, the complex webs of give and take (Walther has a nice map, he was inspired by social media networks, and inspired our thinking) that are the engine and the nervous system of the organic, living platform for trade are running on trust and relationships, offering you first… Read More »
Biashara’s growth strategies include the need to diversify one’s customer base from B2C to more B2B. In small markets, that’s the only way to grow revenue without hitting the cap on the actual number of people who can buy your tshirts. It’s when you are able to nurture a stable team of customers who purchase… Read More »
The true value of social network lies not in its actor’s activities but in their relationships to each other. When social networks attempt to monetize their users, they tend to identify them as discrete individuals rather than interconnected actors all acting in a wave at a concert. The ripple effect seen in biashara informed us… Read More »
This is an extract from the Introduction to John Heskett’s seminal paper, “Creating Economic Value by Design” The work of Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1978, is a rare exception of design being considered as a factor in economic theory. His starting point was acknowledging that the world we inhabit is increasingly artificial,… Read More »
After conducting research, we need to bring structure to what has been found and learned. We sort, cluster, and organize the data gathered and begin to find important patterns. We analyze contextual data and view patterns that point to untapped market opportunities or niches. Finding insights and patterns that repeatedly emerge from multiple analyses of… Read More »
Following in the footsteps of Zimbabwe, Kenya has just passed a law on the use of movable assets as collateral for loans. President Uhuru Kenyatta has signed into law a Bill allowing borrowers to use household goods, crops, live animals and even intellectual property to secure commercial loans in a move aimed at boosting access… Read More »
Regardless of continent, it is now high time we accepted the informal economy (unformal or unrecognised or unorganized sectors) as a commercial operating environment in its own right. The continued oversight is rapidly coalescing into a gaping void of hiccups and failures, by large companies, non profit institutions, and startups, alike. This issue goes far… Read More »