The 5C’s of Cashless
The Reserve Bank of India has unveiled their Vision 2018, an ambitious plan to shove the juggernaut into a cashless future. Here are their pithy yet to the point 5C’s, which focus the framework on a set of objectives. Coverage – by enabling wider access to a variety of electronic payment services Convenience – by […]
Cashless
Platforms that aggregate small businesses can integrate the informal with the formal economy
Continuing my thoughts on Nilekani’s vision introduced in the previous post, I want to use this post to focus on the key element of what captured my imagination from his article “The New Road to Nirvana“: So manufacturing is squeezed on one side by Chinese overcapacity and on the other side by extreme automation. So […]
Digital literacy plus “sharing economy” platforms can offer formal employment for African youth
Back in February of this year, I made a note on the inherent potential of Uber (and related apps) to deliver the data necessary for the informal taxi sector in Kenya to clamber onto the path to formalization. Today, I came across an article reflecting on the potential for formalization in India that quotes Nandan […]
A Framework for New Market Entry Strategy
There are two parts to this article: The first is a revision of the lenses through which we assess the landscape within which your new market strategy will be expected to operate; and the second covers your implicit assumptions at inception, as well as gaps in your mental model. 1. The lenses for innovation need […]
Borderland Biashara: Mapping the Cross Border, National and Regional Trade in the East African Informal Economy
And, we’re back! With apologies for the long delay in posting on the blog, we’d been busy wrapping up our groundbreaking design research for development programming project for Trade Mark East Africa this past month or so. As you can imagine, the last few weeks of any project suck all the bandwidth out and leave […]
Trade is the network
Trade is not a verb or a noun. Trade is a living, breathing network of give and take. When Doc and gang wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto all so many years ago, the first chapter described teh “bazaar” – that markets are conversations was a revelation to the first world in the generations since the end […]
Biashara Economics: Get attuned to the cycles in your business – Lesson #4
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 […]
Where life got in the way of blogging
It’s easily been 5 years since I last wrote a personal note on the blog, of this sort that “regular readers” would recognize, were there any left reading this blog after a decade of blathering on? The fragmentation of demographics by social media is the last straw for the advertising industry that emerged in the […]
Biashara economics: You can’t afford to let go of the reins – Lesson #3
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, […]
