Less Technologically Advanced Societies are not necessarily backward or primitive: Assume at your own risk
This illustration by Jeroen Meijer of Jam Visueldenken of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, was created for our team during a workshop to capture the insights from a feasibility study on agritech we had completed for the Dutch government’s sustainable agricultural value chain development at Wageningen University’s Economic Research unit back in mid 2013. I’m pulling it […]
The Perfect Storm: A Continent, A Phone, A Business Model
In the mid 1990s, in a small city in northern Finland, engineers and designers began work on the product development of a mobile phone that would eventually become one of the best selling Nokia models ever – the 3310, released in Europe and the Far East in the year 2000. The continent of Africa was […]
The Prepaid Economy as a Commercial Operating Environment
I have been looking for information the global prepaid mobile subscriber market since yesterday morning. Initially, all I wanted to know was the percentage of prepaid subscribers in China, as I wanted to compare operating environments in major mobile markets like India and China, against the fast growth emergent one in sub Saharan Africa. What […]
The African Continental Free Trade Agreement and the Age of Interoperability
I have been writing on cross border mobile financial flows across the African continent since early 2015, when the partnerships and agreements made between African telcos to provide interoperability between their mobile money services first began to hit the headlines. In my last post back in August 2016, I asked if Cross Border Mobile Money […]
Mobile Money and the Informal Economy: A Paradigm Change
One of the most powerful pieces of data analysis I have come across recently has been the Banque de France’s working paper on the role of financial innovation in the informal economy. In my opinion, the importance of their conclusions are no less than the famous “price of fish” paper of a decade ago – […]
Kenya’s informal economy clambering on to the information highway through their smartphones
Sometimes cliches are the only way to communicate the sheer breadth and depth of the transformation now undergoing in the informal sectors, such as trade and light manufacturing, thanks to affordable smartphones and data bundles. I began calling it digital and not online yesterday when we discovered many people didn’t recognize the word “online” in […]
Africa’s emerging digital, social, mobile economy is neither formal nor informal but a bridge in between
Let’s call it the prepaid economy, I told Michael in our regular weekly call the other day. We were exploring the emergence of commercial activity on digital platforms in Kenya, and debating whether it could still be considered as an element of the existing informal economic ecosystem, or, was it something wholly novel and different? […]
Tips on managing African fake news articles and websites
Today, I was faced with the challenge of having to choose between two conflicting quotes attributed to the same spokesperson, during the same press conference. Attempting to uncover an authoritative source for the content in order to discern which of the two was authentic led me down a rabbit hole of fake news sites allegedly […]
Emergence of a decentralized digital economy? Snippets from Nigeria and Kenya
Continuing the conversation from the recent posts on app enabled demand redistribution as well as digital platforms being used by informal sector economic actors to boost their own productivity and efficiency, I thought to share snippets from these two recent articles I just came across, as cases in point. From Nigeria, West Africa: How WhatsApp […]
Lessons from African Fintech for the Gig Economy
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 […]
