Category Archives: Frameworks

The Research – Practice Gap for a Kenyan Mobile Startup Business

By Niti Bhan | Published: November 9, 2019

There is very little literature on business operations management, and product development methodology  that actually helps African SMEs and startups to navigate their own operating environment with its local characteristics. Analysts struggle with frameworks and processes developed in highly industrialized contexts as a means to evaluate the strategies of businesses and solutions with local or […]

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The legacy of Uber’s business model and app will outlive the company in Africa

By Niti Bhan | Published: August 27, 2019

As news of Uber’s possible decline and fall filters in, it behooves me to take a moment to ponder the implications for sub Saharan Africa’s digital economic ecosystem, particularly the decentralized hybrid one emerging among the erstwhile informal sectors of the economy, such as motorcycle taxis and other on demand services. While Uber itself has […]

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Lessons from African Fintech for the Gig Economy

By Niti Bhan | Published: December 20, 2018

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to share my research on the past decade of mobile ecosystem development across the African continent with Dr. Antti Saarnio, founder of Zippie; co-founder of Jolla (developers of the Sailfish OS, among other things). “We want to test our product first and foremost in Africa because there is […]

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All Hail the Business Model Behind the Global Gig Economy

By Niti Bhan | Published: December 11, 2018

The first world’s ardent embrace of the gig economy is already over. Buyer’s remorse is setting in, even though it may have helped global unemployment hit its lowest point in forty years. What will remain, however, is its impact on the usually overlooked Rest of the World, where the ability of an app to drive […]

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Africa’s Delivery On Demand Apps are Transforming the Informal Economy

By Niti Bhan | Published: December 10, 2018

When women in rural Rwanda can buy sanitary napkins and contraceptives, on demand, simply by pushing a few buttons on their phones, you know the digital informal economy is here to stay. And, its not just imported apps and social enterprises pushing this digital commercial activity. The “uberization” of the African informal economy is well […]

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Lessons from the Informal Economy: Managing on Irregular Payments in the Gig Economy

By Niti Bhan | Published: November 3, 2018

Last week, an unusual report was released in Great Britain. Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), together with the Resolution Foundation, addressed the question of earnings volatility in the UK, a first for a developed country with a formal economy. Their research and analysis made use of anonymised transaction data from over seven million LBG accounts. That […]

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Financial Patterns at the Last Mile of the Farm to Fork Value Chain

By Niti Bhan | Published: October 19, 2018

This value web illustrates the last mile of the farm to fork agricultural value chain in the state of Maharashtra, India. We’d mapped it during our project/s for the Dutch government back in mid 2013, where we’d introduced human centered design thinking for sustainable agricultural value chain development. Subsequently, I led a multidisciplinary team conducting […]

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Rural Household Financial Management on Irregular Incomes

By Niti Bhan | Published: October 18, 2018

While all farms are not alike, and scale and variety and geography differs, the pattern of household financial management holds its fundamental logic across continents. As we saw previously, an experienced farmer tends to fall somewhere in between a salaried employee and an odd job labourer in their ability to predict with any reasonable degree […]

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Stepping up human centered innovation planning for financial inclusion

By Niti Bhan | Published: July 8, 2018

Two Ugandan analysts from the Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) programme in Uganda write on the need for more human centered product development approaches in the design and delivery of financial services for rural Ugandans, especially the rural poor. One of their suggestions caught my attention in particular: (iii) Third, to increase the introduction of new […]

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Tecno and Nokia: The tale of two brands

By Niti Bhan | Published: July 6, 2018

Chinese mobile maker’s original brand strategy succeeds in Africa: Transsion’s Tecno This year, Nokia got shoved out of the top 10 most admired brands in Africa list, not bad for a company that had lost its way in emerging markets 7 or 8 years ago. As an old (in all senses of the word) Nokia […]

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