Digital literacy plus “sharing economy” platforms can offer formal employment for African youth
Back in February of this year, I made a note on the inherent potential of Uber (and related apps) to deliver the data necessary for the informal taxi sector in Kenya to clamber onto the path to formalization. Today, I came across an article reflecting on the potential for formalization in India that quotes Nandan […]
Mpesa takes on Banks with Mobile wallet linked Prepaid Card
On June 10th, Kenya’s leading mobile payments platform, Mpesa, announced it was piloting a Lipa na Mpesa prepaid card linked to mobile wallets. The card is an interesting product in a Kenya’s payment market turf wars. Banks versus a dominant Telcos, Safaricom. According to Techweez, “The card, mirrors a user’s M-Pesa account, meaning whatever amounts […]
Borderland Biashara: Mapping the Cross Border, National and Regional Trade in the East African Informal Economy
And, we’re back! With apologies for the long delay in posting on the blog, we’d been busy wrapping up our groundbreaking design research for development programming project for Trade Mark East Africa this past month or so. As you can imagine, the last few weeks of any project suck all the bandwidth out and leave […]
Biashara Economics: Get attuned to the cycles in your business – Lesson #4
Just as egg wholesalers know that business spikes during the school holidays due to increased demand, the ladies who trade in clothes, old and new, know that clothing is a discretionary purchase. In the low season, some switch to selling necessities like charcoal, or fresh veg. People still need to cook and eat. Mama Margeret […]
How to segment the informal sector
This is a research interest that I’ve been pursuing ever since the very first fieldwork for the prepaid economy project that was prototyped in rural Rajasthan state in India back in December 2008. The challenge of discovering, then testing and refining the framework for segmenting the informal sector of the economy – particularly by purchasing […]
Your Valentine’s Day roses come from Kenya
They land at dawn, frosty and foggy, in Schiphol every day, and are quickly whisked off to be auctioned in lots to be flown in the next three hours to all of Europe’s capitals. Its Valentine’s Day, and the roses, the best come from Kenya, on East Africa’s coast.
The Kenyan informal sector’s well-trodden paths of upward mobility
Studying the dynamics of the informal economy of a particular region in Western Kenya has been an eye opening exercise in questioning one’s own assumptions and frameworks. Other times, I noticed answers to questions I’d never even thought of asking (an outcome of holding implicit assumptions). One of these was career paths and ambitions. The […]
Reframing the informal sector in the African consumer market: The real African middle class
This is Ruth’s shop, on the side of the highway, approximately 5km on the road to Kisumu, from Busia in western Kenya. Not quite directly part of the borderland’s economy, that trades incessantly with each other, these businesses still manage to feed off the energy of the hustle and bustle of biashara, as it flows […]
Emerging African women entrepreneurs #informaleconomy
At the other end of the high tech geeky startup spectrum increasingly providing a platform for African women is the informal retail and wholesale trade sector. Like their West African sisters, the women traders I met in the border market of Busia, Kenya (next door to Busia, Uganda) and its nearby environs (~ 5km radius), […]
Infrastructure has a direct relationship to how much your rural business can scale
This is a micro-wholesaler and retailer in a staple commodity. Infrastructural constraints limit the stock she can manage at one go – seen as the sack with her name on it. This indicates that it was sourced from some distance away, as this is the matatu’s informal package tracking service. It could have come from […]
