Perspective: Critical Analysis of The African Hype Cycle by Gartner
The very fact that this hype cycle exists is a signal of the increased importance and visibility of the African continent’s place in the global landscape for technology. Released recently by Gartner, the 2015 Hype Cycle for ICT in Africa, is far more interesting for its depiction of the perspective and worldview of Gartner’s analysts […]
Lessons for Formal Finance from Informal financial services
On one of my many field explorations on rural financial services, I found out, that for one mama biashara, as soon as payment checks in, she withdraws all her funds from her local coffee SACCO account, and spreads it out via micro-deposits across her more than 5 local informal savings groups (from right to […]
Introducing The Global Prepaid Economy
This week, that venerable newspaper The Financial Times, published an original piece of writing on the World Economic Forum’s Agenda blog. Its not a reprint from their own publication. It proposes the end of “Emerging Markets” (EM) as we know them: Now, commentators say, it is the world’s mental map that is in dire need […]
Roadmap for reverse innovation – how to leverage context for disruption
Vijay Govindarajan and Amos Winter have an interesting article in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review. They identify the barriers to successfully integrating reverse innovation from emerging markets into the product pipeline for mainstream consumer culture. Their key paragraph echoes the issues of people, pesa and place I’d written about earlier: Our research suggests […]
Purchasing Patterns in Cash Based Markets and Informal Economy
When cash flow is irregular and not always unpredictable, both in amount and frequency, such as it is for the majority earning a living in the informal economy, buyer behavior is not quite the same as for mainstream consumers with access to credit cards and regular paychecks. I’ve quite often made reference to how operating primarily […]
Why the Search for the Middle Class is a Waste of Time and Money
Once we stop focusing only on the search for the mythical middle class, we see the very real changes that have taken place, globally, over the past 25 years. The Pew Report in the previous post focused primarily on the middle income/middle class, overlooking in their haste that even this segment of the world’s population […]
Floating Upwards: The Bottom of the Pyramid Segment is No More
Pew Research Center’s latest results on global income distribution show some rather large shifts among the lowest income segments. The Bottom of the Pyramid or Base of the Pyramid (BoP) segment, defined as those who live on less than $2.50/day has just lost a significant percentage of the population. While one can quibble that $2.50 […]
Creative ways to financial inclusion, inspired by observing practice
Needless to say, mobile money has been a wild success in scaling an expansive agent network for converting cash to e-money and enabling person to person money transfer. Speaking at a recent conference, John Staley, Chief Officer – Finance, Innovation and Technology at Equity Bank had this to say: “We should move the conversation from […]
Ten years after a second chance at life – 7/7 London
When just the difference of a few minutes, or a minuscule shift in time or space, may place you literally in the path * of danger, you realise the value inherent in the every single moment you do have on this earth. We have just this one life to live. What is truly important? What […]
The values gap in banking the unbanked
Back in 2008, after my first deep dive into the African consumer market, on behalf of Samsung, I’d identified something I called the “values gap” as an intangible barrier between the first world’s consumer brands, and the mindset and worldview of the majority market, then referred to (erroneously) as the “Bottom of the Pyramid.” The […]
