Dharavi: Initial Impressions
Ahead of my research in ernest of unpredictable incomes at Dharavi in Mumbai this month, I am taking this week to explore and photograph the area.
Synthesis of the Prepaid Economy Project
The impetus for the Prepaid Economy project came from field observations during other projects which focused on the design and development of products and services for those at the BoP. It was noted that the majority of the BoP lived on irregular incomes derived from a variety of sources, while few business models or payment […]
Download PDF of research paper submitted to TU Delft
I was lucky to be able to get very insightful feedback from Brett Mathews of Mathwood Consulting, who has been in the field looking into the challenges oral cultures pose to business models in rural microfinance. Here is the PDF of the draft paper and Mr Mathews' comments on the prepaid economy project as submitted […]
Seasonality and its influence on rural BoP household financial management
Fallow field, Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan India January 2009 I first noticed the influence of seasonality on income halfway during the Indian fieldwork. On one hand, its but natural that the seasons are linked to a farmer's cash flow, dependent as it is on the harvest. But it was when I met the silversmith that I […]
Observations: Rural BoP and the cash economy
Investment or Independence? Photo Credit: Goverdhan Meena Across the board, the particular characteristic that most stood out during my conversations with the rural populace in India and The Philippines, as well as prior experiences elsewhere, was their undeniable pride in their degree of self reliance, and thus, their level of independence from […]
Update on final report of project and research paper
The final report for the iBoP Asia Project will be approximately ten pages long (not including appendices) and completed by the end of the month. I'll only put that up online once they have approved the final submission. In other news, the research findings from the field form the core of an abstract that has […]
Wrapping up the project
The time has come to make my primary blog, Perspective 2.0 the default on Emerging Futures Lab's website. While the oodles of information, data and understanding churned up by this project means that there's material enough for future thinking and pondering on the topic of the BoP's household financial practices, the primary phases of this […]
Some observed behaviour patterns in rural BoP households
Collage by Dave Tait Across the regions, we saw patterns of financial behaviour (download PDF) that echoed similarities of intent and goals. For example, at peak times such as the post harvest season, wealth was often stored in the form of grain (rice in the Philippines or wheat in India) and then converted to cash […]
Some thoughts on community based models for sharing costs
We found that the key factor that makes 'prepaid' payment plans (whether its for electricity, mobile phones, water etc) so attractive to the BoP customer, in the context of their own behaviour patterns regarding the management of their personal finances. This is the fact that this model puts significant control over time – frequency and […]
Increasing the customer’s span of control seems to imply success
We broke down the basic concept of the 'pay as you go' or prepaid mobile plan – in general, discounting the details of the various different strategies and pricing/time plans of different countries as a way to begin understanding what is it about this model that makes it work at the BoP, now in the […]
