The need for human agency: Is the middleman always a monster?
Mobile phone charging receipt, Kenya Photo credit: Niti Bhan The unfair demonisation of the middleman is apparent in this recent article on solar power products for the low income market in Africa. “Putting African ‘power pimps’ out of business” is the headline and the rest of the text goes downhill from there: It’s hard to […]
Exploratory User Research in the Rural Economy
When I first began developing the attributes by which to select representative user profiles for the original fieldwork to begin understanding the “prepaid economy”, that is, household financial management in rural India, The Philippines and Malawi, it was based on people’s ability to plan and budget. One can plan best when one is certain of […]
Reflecting on this blog’s genesis after 5 years
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 […]
CNC experts set up kiosks or work on demand on your equipment – imagine jua kali upgrades
Emeka Okafor talking to an award winning maker at Maker Faire Africa 2010, Nairobi August 2010 Emeka Okafor has captured a blog snippet today that refers to a study on Ghana’s informal manufacturing and fabrication industry: With over 100,000 technical artisans, auto-mechanics, and purveyors of related supplies, Ghana’s “Suame Magazine” cluster is a hotbed of […]
More or Less: the flexibility of the informal
One of the things that stood out for me during the recent household consumer behaviour study was the lack of weights and measurements used to sell foodstuffs and commodities in the market. There were no weighing scales at all, unless they themselves were for sale. Instead, some form of “socially accepted” measure was used to […]
Impact of mainstreaming and commodification of cyber cafe services
Around 2007, the urban cyber cafe industry began to display signs of maturing as the market saturated and the services specific to internet access underwent a process of commodification. As it came to be perceived as no different a business than setting up a corner kiosk or hot dog stand, there was a shift in […]
The role of the cyber cafe: Assisted entry ramp onto the information superhighway to use a cliche
Monica’s cyber in the small town of Maai Mahiu, a market for a primarily rural area, is now the only such facility available. There was another cyber on the other side of the main highway, she said, but it closed within its first year of operation. Internet access in this locale is available only through […]
Estimating price in unexplored and untapped markets
In addition to estimating the size and value of the Kenyan cyber cafe industry for our client, Village Telco of Cape Town, South Africa, we were tasked with finding out what would people pay for their product, the Mesh Potato. This challenge was the equivalent of walking up to someone and asking: How much would […]
Why prepaid business models work so well for the rural and informal economy
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. Could we somehow […]
Exploring the market forces acting on the cyber cafe industry in Kenya
This post continues on the challenges of estimating size and value of an untapped market in the developing world – in our current case, it is the cyber cafe industry in Kenya. A critical aspect of this exercise will include assessing the impact of a variety of market forces acting on the industry in the […]
