Navigating the African Informal Retail Sector
Nigeria’s consumer market has captured global attention. A significant proportion of this emerging market opportunity is in the FMCG category. Due to historical reasons, 87% of this retail trade happens in the “unorganized” or “informal sector”. The market is highly fragmented and inefficient. Yet due to the nature of the informal economy, most of this […]
RIP Google BebaPay – Requiem for a cashless payment system
Less than a year after going live, Google is closing down the BebaPay smart card which was introduced as an NFC based cashless payment mechanism for Nairobi’s public transport. Last year, I’d analyzed the context and the operating environment in which they’d launched their service, on hearing the news that they’d been struggling to gain […]
African consumer market insight from Chinese flip flop manufacturer in Tanzania
This recent interview of the Chinese owner of a flip flop factory based in Tanzania offers some interesting insights into the mindset of the East African consumer. Trade in commodities has been the dominant feature of China-Africa relations over the past 20 years, but many traders, particularly those who arrived in Africa early, are now […]
Welcome to the new home of The Prepaid Economy blog
Instead of two separate locations, all my research, fieldwork, analysis and synthesis as well as news snippets covering all aspects of The Prepaid Economy project, systeme D, the informal and rural cash based markets of the developing world will now be available here together with the original Perspective blog. The Research category will pull […]
While you were outsourced: Last 10 years of mobile design, business and emerging markets
There’s a lot to be said here and I’ve been trying to sort it all out into some kind of logical flow. The global landscape of mobile phones is undergoing a huge shift, and like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, much of it is still under the radar. If I hadn’t gone down the […]
Human centered design for financial inclusion: Lessons from fieldwork in rural India, The Phillipines and Kenya
Introduction Financial inclusion has become mainstream thinking in economic development. The vast majority of the unbanked live in the developing world, and a significant proportion of this population are rural residents. One can easily surmise, without recourse to statistics, that the bulk of the target audience for institutions seeking to offer them affordable and accessible […]
Service design for the prepaid economy: Continuing the case of Google’s Bebapay in Nairobi
The previous post on the sluggish adoption of Google’s BebaPay, a cashless prepaid card introduced in Nairobi as a payment mechanism for public transportation, had me pondering the challenge of designing services for the informal sector. There are two main challenges that I see here, which don’t seem to have been taken into consideration during […]
The curious case of Google’s Beba Pay: a mobile payment app that users refuse to adopt
This week, news from Nairobi, that hotbed of mobile money innovation, opened up a Pandora’s box of reflections on payment plans, service design issues and the challenge of technology adoption in the mass markets of the African informal economy. None of these are ‘bad’ things in their own right, but taken together, they have resulted […]
FAQ on Value creation
The NDA expired 4 years ago 1. Problem statement: How do you build and maintain trust and commitment without face to face contact with your customers? Value proposition: Through a cohesive, integrated strategy of brand building across all information media sources, whether they be handhelds, mobiles, monitors, screens or even the product interfaces on medical […]
In rural Africa, livestock and produce markets exemplify local, social, mobile ecosystem
Mama Mercy taking a call during our visit to her farm. Her new cow is brown & white. April 2013 Kenya If we can find and support the key enablers of the shamba’s day to day needs, I believe we could assist with increasing the pace of market reach and spread (new market creation). I […]
