Trade is the network
Trade is not a verb or a noun. Trade is a living, breathing network of give and take. When Doc and gang wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto all so many years ago, the first chapter described teh “bazaar” – that markets are conversations was a revelation to the first world in the generations since the end […]
Where life got in the way of blogging
It’s easily been 5 years since I last wrote a personal note on the blog, of this sort that “regular readers” would recognize, were there any left reading this blog after a decade of blathering on? The fragmentation of demographics by social media is the last straw for the advertising industry that emerged in the […]
Biashara economics: You can’t afford to let go of the reins – Lesson #3
The nature of biashara, which is primarily trade and commerce in a cash intensive economy, is such that margins are extremely thin, and there is a fragile line of trust, credit, and credentials which keeps the flows humming. M-Pesa changed that in some very fundamental ways, allowing the tightly furled buds to bloom. Trust, now, […]
The imagery of contemporary tech startups from the African continent
No matter what Google’s search results may show, this is NOT the image of mobile innovation, technology startups, and the African continent’s ICT infrastructure. This is a photograph staged by Oxfam to show a Maasai moran – a young man from one of the pastoralist communities living in the arid lands of Eastern Africa. This […]
Biashara Economics: Diversify your portfolio – Lesson #1
Biashara’s growth strategies include the need to diversify one’s customer base from B2C to more B2B. In small markets, that’s the only way to grow revenue without hitting the cap on the actual number of people who can buy your tshirts. It’s when you are able to nurture a stable team of customers who purchase […]
Introducing the concept of Biashara Economics, underwritten by a value web of trusted relationships
The true value of social network lies not in its actor’s activities but in their relationships to each other. When social networks attempt to monetize their users, they tend to identify them as discrete individuals rather than interconnected actors all acting in a wave at a concert. The ripple effect seen in biashara informed us […]
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 […]
Uber’s app lowers barriers to formalization for unorganized taxi industry in Kenya
This interesting article in the Kenyan news made me think about the role that an app like Uber could play in markets where there’s a high proportion of informal & unregulated business activity. As with much technological advancement, resistance comes with change. Mpesa and the internet were once thought to be passing fads and have […]
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 […]
