Empowering the girl child: Simple means
This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
Mobile phones, social media and the Maasai: Time to refresh the image
At first, I did not know what these two young men were upto during an enforced halt on our way to Kisii at the end of February this year. The road had been blocked by the local community demonstrating about land rights just a few kilometres outside of Narok, in the heart of Maasailand and […]
Taking the long view – an emerging markets perspective
I read somewhere recently about the difference between those driven by quarterly earnings and Wall Street valuations and those taking the long view on business returns. The latter tended to have a more cohesive strategy and patience to create a market and demand – so very applicable to the challenges of addressing the lower income […]
Staple diet
This post was written by niti bhan and rss originates from www.nitibhan.com
What does it mean when Chinese manufacturers enter the social enterprise space?
“The market has been destroyed for solar” or so I heard today from someone who prefers to stay anonymous but I’d hazard a guess knows a fair bit about what is happening on the ground in East Africa from the point of view of social enterprises. Interestingly, I’d brought up the question of whether “It […]
The customer is the king; the beneficiary will remain a pauper
We weren’t beholden to our customers until we starting thinking like a business. We didn’t hold ourselves accountable until we started treating our ‘beneficiaries’ as customers. No investor took us seriously until we dropped the ‘social enterprise’ label. ~ Ben Lyon, Founder, KopoKopo, Nairobi, Kenya When I wrote “Why so much ‘BoP’ marketing fails […]
Brazilian machinery taking the lead in East Africa
Dominic Wanjihia showed us this chaff cutter made in Brazil he’d picked up for 35,000 Kenyan Shillings (around USD400 or thereabouts). He’s using it to test and run his biogas generators at his workshop. Brazil? Not Indian or Chinese? What about the jua kali makers, don’t they make one far cheaper? Brazil, he said. They’ve […]
Where are the appliances designed to be used with renewable energy sources?
LPG powered fridge for sale in Eastern Cape, South Africa Almost 2 years ago in early 2010 I wrote about the opportunities for disruptive innovation in the emerging markets of the then developing world. One of the 5 case studies was that of the following concept: Re-imagined household appliancesRefrigerators have come to the forefront of […]
Scarcity as a driver for innovation
Frugality and affordability are very much in the news of late, what with the most recent essay on Change Observer and this post on Paul Polak’s new blog both highlighting similar concepts but from the point of view of very different markets. It seems to imply the trend towards frugal design or extremely affordable yet […]
How do you compete in a market where charity distorts pricing?
Strategy guru Michael Porter’s 5 forces framework is quite well known to anyone attempting to assess or analyze the landscape of an operating environment for an industry or organization. Increasingly, since I’ve begun working out of Sub Sahara I’ve been sensing the challenge of a 6th force – one that is overlooked when consumer markets […]
