Percentage of prepaid connections – global map 2013 data
Click on the image for the larger version. This is the mapped version of the latest data available on GSMA’s development website*, where you can sort through by region and country. The last available global map didn’t really break it down by country so much as continents, and even now, due to this being ‘development’ […]
Assessing the Impact of the Mobile Phone on African Consumer Markets
68% of @Twitter users in #Africa rely on this platform as a primary source of information on national news ~ The Mo Ibrahim Foundation Lets start with everyone’s favourite topic, the mobile phone of Africa. It used to be a secondhand candybar Nokia but today it could be anything from an iPhone to Samsung’s latest […]
Service design for the prepaid economy: Continuing the case of Google’s Bebapay in Nairobi
The previous post on the sluggish adoption of Google’s BebaPay, a cashless prepaid card introduced in Nairobi as a payment mechanism for public transportation, had me pondering the challenge of designing services for the informal sector. There are two main challenges that I see here, which don’t seem to have been taken into consideration during […]
The curious case of Google’s Beba Pay: a mobile payment app that users refuse to adopt
This week, news from Nairobi, that hotbed of mobile money innovation, opened up a Pandora’s box of reflections on payment plans, service design issues and the challenge of technology adoption in the mass markets of the African informal economy. None of these are ‘bad’ things in their own right, but taken together, they have resulted […]
Questioning the global mobile Apparatgeist (timely, from the archives 2010)
The Economist recently put forth an argument strongly reminiscent of Theodore Levitt’s 1983 HBR classic “The globalization of markets” (PDF) where he first framed the concept that global consumer preferences were converging, thus companies could develop, launch and market the same product across the globe – “Different cultural preferences, national tastes and standards, and business […]
A design challenge for agric service innovation in rural Africa
Find a way to embed principles of sustainable good agriculture for the smallscale farmer in a socio-economically beneficial way. How would we do this? Where do we begin? The answers to these questions and more will be forthcoming on this blog. I reach out and encourage you all to consider submitting your thoughts and opinions […]
In rural Africa, livestock and produce markets exemplify local, social, mobile ecosystem
Mama Mercy taking a call during our visit to her farm. Her new cow is brown & white. April 2013 Kenya If we can find and support the key enablers of the shamba’s day to day needs, I believe we could assist with increasing the pace of market reach and spread (new market creation). I […]
True Confessions: I was an earnest and idealistic Nokia fangrrl 2006 to 2010
OMG I can’t breathe! Photographed hyperventilating with the guy responsible for my phone’s design, Peter Griffith at the Nokia “Connecting the Next Billion” Emerging Markets Strategy Workshop in London, May 2011. If I thought I could get away with it, I would tiptoe out of the room right now. Michael Davis-Burchat has just yelled out […]
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 […]
