User driven innovation planning and strategy in development
It was with feeling of satisfaction that I read Eric Smallberg’s recent post titled “Thankfully, ICT4D is Now About Strategy and Implementations, Not Technovelty” where brings up the lessons from failure and the shift in emphasis of technology based development projects and social enterprises. He says: Richard Heeks wrote about the early history of these […]
“Some NGO gave us a mosquito net”
Kitui, Eastern Province, Kenya July 2012 Serem, Western Kenya, June 2012 This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
Marketing principles for the informal economies of the emerging world
This will be the working title of the book I plan to sit down and start writing the latest by January 2013. And I can’t start earlier than November this year because I need to see the results in the market start to come in first before I can pontificate on the topic, but naturally […]
Mapping global seasonality: national times of abundance and scarcity?
Connecting some dots made me think of this exercise. If national governments are increasingly looking at ways to bridge the informal economy with the formal, in order to provide more inclusive benefits to their citizens and at the same time there’s an increasing focus on providing inclusive financial services to those outside of the formal […]
Why South Africa should not be the entry point to reach Africa’s emerging consumer markets
This post is about something I’ve been musing upon for some months now, ever since my 2011 project which took me around rural and small town Kenya visiting with a variety of cyber cafes. Since then, many other well respected Kenyan professionals that I’ve spoken with, either in person or online, have confirmed my suspicions […]
Seasonality in incomes still underrated as influence on purchasing patterns
While the BBC has begun questioning the oft quoted “$1 a day” statistic used most often to demonstrate the bottom billion below the global poverty line, they barely touch upon the impact of seasonality on the population segment’s cash flow, and thus, their bottom line. And surprisingly perhaps, people who live on $1 a day […]
Lost in transliteration
A couple of things caught my eye on this highway sign in New Delhi last week – toll roads are increasingly common, I hadn’t ever seen one in the city before (but then again I haven’t lived here since the late 1990s.) And the prepaid “Gold” and “Silver” levels have been transliterated in Devanagari i.e. […]
Aspiring changes; inspiring futures
I’ve been in New Delhi this past week for some work and its been interesting to see the shift in thinking and aspirations. The first few visits in the early 2000s showed the dramatic surface changes of a noisy market opening up to the rest of the world. Today it struck me that many of […]
Fool’s gold and cornflakes
@syamant pointed me to an interesting article on HBR yesterday “Are you targeting a phantom market?” which was at once amusing and yet quite sad in the spectacle that Kellogg’s Cornflakes has made of itself in India. How is it possible that Kellogg could envision building a $3 billion business in India, invest $65 million […]
Cookstoves matter less than the ladies who must use them
Photo credit: Goverdhan Meena, village Rawal, India Jan 2009 The Wonkblog covers findings from a randomized control trial on the impact of cookstoves in a blogpost titled “What cookstoves tell us about the limits of technology” where they share such insights as: So what went wrong? Basically, none of the earlier evaluations of the clean […]
