In East Africa’s regional informal trade networks, the business development strategy that works for the constraints and conditions of the operating environment is one of selective diversification in lines of business, and, upgrading from B2C retail to B2B micro-wholesale. It was an aspiration for every ambitious shopkeeper, to have women come and purchase from her… Read More »
This is a special week – emerging futures lab celebrates its 10th year! Follow the tag EFL10 for a retrospective of work over the past decade.
As we saw, Mrs Chimphamba needs to juggle time and money as part of her household financial management in order to ensure that expenses can be met by income. We also saw that the mobile phone was made viable and feasible by the availability of the prepaid business model that gave her full control over… Read More »
I’m making available the article based on our work with the Dutch government a couple of years ago. Download PDF
I have uploaded a PDF synopsis of the fieldwork conducted during the original Prepaid Economy research including approach and methodology. Also documented are the different ways those in the rural economy manage their ‘investments’. These images support the observations documented in Part 2 and my thoughts on rural Indian cow ownership have been fleshed out… Read More »
I started this blog in late December 2008, in earnest and every day during the first prototype fieldwork for The Prepaid Economy project, one of the iBoP Asia Project’s first batch of Small Grant winners from the ASEAN region. For the first 5 months of 2009, this blog was on the mainpage of my website… Read More »
Design is first and foremost a philosophy, based on a system of values, which seeks to solve problems. What are we creating? Why and for whom? Are we correctly framing the problem to be solved? These are the questions to which the answers are then manifested tangibly in the form of a new product, service… Read More »
Ever since I completed the first Prepaid Economy study which looked at how those on irregular income streams managed their household finances – focusing on rural Philippines and India – I’ve been curious about rural Kenya. I’ve long wanted to delve into the impact, if any, of the mobile money systems that have rapidly gained… Read More »
Emerging Futures Lab Founded in November 2007, the Emerging Futures Lab (EFL) is a small multidisciplinary team that aims to increase the understanding the people at the base of the pyramid across the developing world in order to improve the success rate of new ventures, products and services intended to serve this market in a… Read More »
What insights can we derive from observing and understanding how those at the BoP currently manage their household budgets to inspire new transaction models or pricing strategies for businesses wishing to serve the poor more effectively, yet profitably? The focus of our exploratory and user research in the field will be to understand the challenge… Read More »