Why am I so excited about an African hair style app released on smartphones?
Darling, the pan African hair extension brand owned by Godrej of India, has just released an app in Nigeria aimed at helping customers choose their latest hair style on their smartphone. The implications are enormous, imho. Mobiles are ubiquitious. E-commerce in Nigeria is becoming commonplace. Smartphones are default. The African consumer market is sophisticated in […]
Book Review- Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles by Richard Dowden
After a gap of 6 years and many more journeys looking at Africa through the lens of design ethnography, I sat down to re-read Richard Dowden‘s Africa this past weekend. It moved me to want to write so many times during the read, it’s a wonder I made it through the book before starting this […]
Global consumer data shows demographics have changed completely
The past half decade‘s worth of financial crises and increasing scarcity of resources have led to an increasing equalization in the global water level. Instead of the high tide that would lift all boats, the leveling off of growth is leading to an entirely different equation of purchasing power parity. Tomorrow’s equilibrium seems to imply […]
New data shows “middle class” label misleading; skews market analysis
Anyone familiar with the literature and handwringing around the size of the African middle class that’s an ongoing sidebar to the emergence of the continent’s economies, will appreciate the FT’s analysis of recent research results. The global middle class is both smaller and poorer than previously thought, according to a new study, with hundreds of […]
Can too much formalization be bad for poverty alleviation?
Earlier this year, there was an interesting article which pointed out the important role the informal sector plays in developing countries, particularly on the African continent. Apart from being over-financialised, which reduces the incentives to create “real jobs” the other structural problem facing the South African economy is its over-formalisation. The informal sector accounts for […]
Is there a tipping point price for low income customer behavioural change?
When the price of the LPG cylinders dropped significantly earlier this year, it was noticed that increasing numbers of urban lower income customers were purchasing the entry level size of 6kg – seen displayed along the top of the display unit above. “A good number of my customers come from the slum,” said Kinuthia on […]
The business model of drinking water in urban Ghana
In Accra, Ghana, packaging potable water into single serve sachets for the mass market (the prepaid economy) is a business model that has evolved extremely rapidly in response to customer demand and purchasing power. Bottled mineral water for the elite trickled down in quantity and form until the man on the street can buy a […]
Africa’s world trade: Informal economies and globalization from below by Margaret C. Lee
The entire text of Professor Margeret C. Lee’s work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Licence. Clicking on the cover will take you directly to the PDF. Chapter 3 takes the reader through a journey to different countries of Africa, including Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, […]
@Prepaid Africa Connecting Dots – November 2015
This month’s slightly delayed review will take a look at larger business trends in the cash based informal markets of sub Saharan Africa. Multinationals in Africa are growing revenues but losing market share to local rivals is the eye catching headline of a recent Quartz article. Its based on the findings emerging from […]
Trade in East Africa – A very short introduction to a very long history
Who were the pioneers who opened up the trade routes that criss cross the seas and deep into the interior from the ancient ports of Zanzibar and Mombasa? We don’t know who these intrepid sailors must have been, making their profit from rich Roman’s wives seeking Indian silks and spices, but the African continent’s eastern […]
