Lessons from African Fintech for the Gig Economy
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to share my research on the past decade of mobile ecosystem development across the African continent with Dr. Antti Saarnio, founder of Zippie; co-founder of Jolla (developers of the Sailfish OS, among other things). “We want to test our product first and foremost in Africa because there is […]
The Quiet Digital Revolution: Indigenous Innovation in Intelligent Information Systems
Big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are the buzzwords of the day, along with the obligatory blockchain and bitcoin. Much is being written on their potential to solve Africa’s problems, or India’s challenges. In turn, each has been promoted as the next big thing to address poverty and its discontents. Yet, we note, that […]
What happens when the informal economy is not criminalized? : Case of Hargeisa, Somaliland
In Hargeisa, the role of the informal economy during and after conflict has been vital to conflict prevention and peace-building. A recently released report by Cardiff University and Somaliland research partners on their work related to the role of urban informal economies in conflict zones offers us perspective from another angle. A little thin on […]
Lessons from the Informal Economy: Managing on Irregular Payments in the Gig Economy
Last week, an unusual report was released in Great Britain. Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), together with the Resolution Foundation, addressed the question of earnings volatility in the UK, a first for a developed country with a formal economy. Their research and analysis made use of anonymised transaction data from over seven million LBG accounts. That […]
Financial Patterns at the Last Mile of the Farm to Fork Value Chain
This value web illustrates the last mile of the farm to fork agricultural value chain in the state of Maharashtra, India. We’d mapped it during our project/s for the Dutch government back in mid 2013, where we’d introduced human centered design thinking for sustainable agricultural value chain development. Subsequently, I led a multidisciplinary team conducting […]
Rural Household Financial Management on Irregular Incomes
While all farms are not alike, and scale and variety and geography differs, the pattern of household financial management holds its fundamental logic across continents. As we saw previously, an experienced farmer tends to fall somewhere in between a salaried employee and an odd job labourer in their ability to predict with any reasonable degree […]
The Informal Industrial Ecosystem: An Introduction to REculture
This article introduces and explains some things I’ve been seeing in the informal industrial ecosystem in the developing world context for almost a decade now. First noticed in 2009, I then named it REculture, a neologism to capture the vast and complex ecosystem I saw in the revenue generating facility of recycle, replace, repurpose, reuse […]
What can we learn from an informal market?
I took this photo of Rinku taking photographs during our visit to Busia’s bustling cross border market as a means to document our own work documenting the borderland’s informal trade ecosystem. Sometimes we’re so immersed in our work that we forget to look up and recognize we’re participants too. Document everything, I tell people interested […]
Ecodesign, Ecolabels and the Environment: How Europe is redesigning our footprint on earth
What do chopped fresh green beans have in common with high definition flat screen TV’s? And how does this relate to design? In Europe, they’re both considered consumer products whose journey from raw material to shopwindow requires energy to process—emitting greenhouse gases that can have an adverse impact on the environment—and are considered to possess […]
Goal Directed Research for Innovation Planning in Emerging Markets
What differentiates the research conducted to inform the design of an innovative product or service, in an untapped market? Michael Kimani asked me this question during a recent Skype conversation and I promised to write out the answer. Goal directed research for innovation planning seeks to discover opportunities for new products and services for a […]
