Africa’s Delivery On Demand Apps are Transforming the Informal Economy

When women in rural Rwanda can buy sanitary napkins and contraceptives, on demand, simply by pushing a few buttons on their phones, you know the digital informal economy is here to stay. And, its not just imported apps and social enterprises pushing this digital commercial activity. The “uberization” of the African informal economy is well underway across the entire continent, inspired in part by the visible success of the now ubiquitous ride hailing apps.

The concept of using your phone to access a product or service, on demand, has taken root as a viable and feasible business model for startups from Angola to Ghana to Nigeria, and Rwanda, of course. And, its spreading beyond the usual suspects to yet-to-be recognized nations like Somaliland as well as it’s far less stable neighbour, Somalia. The impact of this will be felt long after Uber itself has lived or died, as the case may be.

For the vast majority of the workforce in the informal sector, this approach to business development increases their reach and customer base, with net positive impact on their income streams and cash flows. You don’t have to sit and wait passively for a customer to show up if she or he can ping you for an order on your phone. Your discoverability has been exponentially boosted by technology.

Its far to early to gauge the impact on the entire informal economy’s productivity, but certain sectors are already evidencing the effects:

Transportation – of people, of vegetables, of cargo – you name it, you can now find an app to transport it. Startups are responding to the wide variety of local needs in addition to launching Uber clones in their local metros and regions.
Services – grocery shopping, laundry, housecleaning, plumbers, electricians, artisans et al – all of these are coming online, albeit unevenly across segments and geographies depending on the individual startups and their capabilities.
Goods – From consumer products to fresh produce, live goats to tractors for rent; the low costs and barriers to entry of an app that collates and coordinates demand and supply is an easy win for entrepreneurs who can work out the kinks in their operations.

In addition to what the apps can deliver to your doorstep, this “uberization” of the informal economy is also transforming mindsets and behaviour, of both the buyer and the supplier. There are two approaches to leveraging technology to boost your business – doing it yourself via social media platforms, thus building your brand; and downloading an app that takes care of promotion and discoverability for you.

Each has its pros and cons, but from our earliest discoveries whilst conducting user research among social commerce merchants and customers in Kenya, we can see the differences emerge between traditional traders in the informal marketplace, and the tech savvy traders straddling the virtual and the real. Long established business development strategies that worked in the cash intensive informal economic ecosystem are being forced to transform in response to these tech enabled ‘interventions’- whether to the benefit of all is also too early to tell. But if the patterns of mobile phone adoption are any indication, there’s a tsunami of change underway.

Time to acknowledge the social cost of mobile and apps driven disruption

Abandoned makeshift recharge cards stand (Source: Punch Newspaper, Nigeria)

From Lagos, Nigeria comes this moving human interest story that looks at the downside of modern technology and it’s impact on livelihoods. For those who must hustle to make a living, send the kids to school, or put food on the table, smartphone driven digitization of the services they used to provide are disrupting their incomes.

“On the negative side, it has seriously affected our business with about 40% drop in passenger traffic. There is nobody among us (cab drivers) that would say he’s not feeling the pain.”

Whether its Uber and Taxify grabbing customers from traditional taxis, or the ease of an online purchase of airtime eating into Mama’s recharge card sales, the long awaited and much hyped transformation of African economies by ICT is arriving at a much higher cost than noted anywhere in media, or in research reports on mobiles for “social good.”

Literate youth quick to pick up new skills have no choice but to adapt and adopt. Its the older traders, the taxi drivers, the less literate, the long established service providers in the urban informal economy who are shouldering the brunt of this disruption.

“Even the prices charged by ‘those phone things’ are not realistic. I just pity the people who are rushing to them. A time is coming that they would increase their fares. And by that time, people wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, because they would have killed the competition. They just want to destroy the taxi business, which many of us are using to take care of our families,” Baba Ayo added.

Whose responsibility is this anyway?

Disruption is what every techno bling startup seeks, blaring it in their press releases, as they launch an app for this and that. What falls by the wayside is consideration of the social cost of this disruption – much more expensive in developing countries like Nigeria where there is no social safety net, no welfare department, and certainly no old-age pension for those whose livelihoods are lost to look forward to.

“I have been selling recharge vouchers for about 10 years and I can tell you that the situation has never been this bad. It’s as if someone commanded people to stop buying airtime. I accused some of my customers of patronising other people, and some of them said they usually top-up their phones online whenever they run out of airtime,” she explained.

The entrepreneurial will adapt, or move on to other services that apps have not yet replaced. The article is illustrated with photographs of abandoned recharge seller’s makeshift stalls as the line of business fades away in the big city.

But who will think of all the rest who may not have the energy or youth to start over, and whose responsibility is it to ensure that technological progress is not exclusive?

This post is a reminder to us all of the tradeoff we make when we choose to innovate or disrupt in societies where the margin between hunger and full belly is as slim as this year’s latest smartphone model.

Untapped opportunities in Francophone Africa for design of apps and smartphone solutions

Bacely Yorobi shares challenges at the AfDB Innovation Weekend, Oct 2015 Photo: Niti Bhan

Bacely Yorobi shares his challenges at the AfDB Innovation Weekend, Oct 2015 Photo: Niti Bhan

Bacely Yorubi frames the opportunity space for local app design and development in The Toronto Star:

“Lots of young Africans who’ve studied elsewhere and returned home have expectations of mobile services that don’t yet exist,” said Bacely Yorobi, an app developer from Ivory Coast. “So they’re the ones coding and putting new African-made apps out there.”
[…]
“Africans don’t like to put their money in the bank, but they will put it in their phone,” said Yorobi.
[…]
“We have everything we need to build an app, but we don’t have the support to bring it to market,” said Yorobi, during a trip to Paris to court investors.

I find it all the more interesting from the francophone West African perspective, as the nascent tech industry races to catch up with their anglophone neighbours in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Given the waves being made by world class outfits such as Cameroon’s Kiro’o Games, or Senegal’s rapidly maturing tech ecosystem, one might discover they’ll outpace the competition given time and support.

Bacely’s comments also make me wonder why the global giants pushing financial inclusion in Cote D’Ivoire and other WAEMU countries aren’t looking for local partners and developers, given their ongoing struggles for traction. Perhaps its time to discover that not everything imported from abroad is always the best solution.

Emerging Markets Competition – this time its technology

Around twenty years ago, when the Indian and Chinese markets first opened up to global brands, many were surprised to discover domestic incumbents were stronger than they had imagined.

Proctor & Gamble’s laundry detergents battled for the Indian housewife’s attention and share of wallet. It wasn’t just their usual competitor Unilever either but indigenous upstarts like Nirma, who’d carved out the low price category all by themselves. Other FMCG brands faced varying degrees of pressure, with a wide variety of outcomes, some of which still haven’t settled down. Even Coca Cola, the planet’s favourite refreshment, wasn’t immune to the local preference for Limca and Campa and Thumb’s Up.

Now, as the African emerging markets similarly capture global attention, there’s a new trend in pushback. Uber’s Nairobi entry hasn’t been unchallenged, as local apps leverage their greater local knowledge of the way things work. Ben Bajarin has already noted that in each of the major emerging markets of the developing world, its local incumbents in e-commerce, apps and hardware who take the lead.

Being overlooked for decades as a serious market seems to have had the same effect in the key sub Saharan economies as being closed off from the outside world had on the Indian and Chinese markets. Local solutions have grown and flourished. Market entry will not be a cakewalk and its a dangerous assumption for new entrants to make.

How can I end this short note without mentioning MPesa, Kenya’s inimitable and ubiquitous mobile money transfer system? Mobile payments have overtaken credit cards as the preferred cashless mode for transactions.

Technology is the new consumer product.

Reflecting on the mobile internet in Kenya

Poster in shop, Kagumo, Kenya 18th October 2011

After the past three weeks of focusing on cyber cafes and internet access in urban and rural Kenya, we’ve been questioning the value of the “mobile internet” statistics provided by operators to the CCK. Muchiri pointed out that since most of our feedback seemed to revolve more around SIM operated routers installed by cybers, or mobile broadband modems sold either to regular home and business users or even, in the smaller towns, used to link networked computers in small cybers to the internet, what did the information actually communicate?

A thousand shillings cheaper than in Nairobi, seen in Kagumo, Kenya

At the shop we were in, Jacqueline (who is saving for her own laptop for Christmas) explained to us that it was cheaper to buy a data bundle or use the modem, than to browse on the phone using the Ksh 2/min offer directly. Extremely knowledgeable about the most cost effective ways to browse using whichever device you may have, she uses her phone for social networking constantly and prefers it to the cyber which she only visits occasionally. However it was she who pointed out to us that she didn’t think that it was internet enabled phones alone that were affecting the cyber’s business but also the fact that affordable devices (desktops, laptops and modems) were increasingly popular and easily available.

If so, then the 98% of Kenya’s internet users who are on mobile internet may not be doing it through mobile phones alone as is so often assumed but via a variety of SIM based devices. A detailed breakdown of devices under the heading of ‘mobile internet using SIM’ as reported to the authorities might begin to offer a clearer perspective on user behaviour and modes of access.

Purpose – Platform – Price: 3Ps for an African Mobile App

The competition is increasingly about the customers, and what tasks they seek to complete on their devices. Simply building the right apps/content/service to meet that need won’t be enough: it will become a matter of getting the purpose, the platform and the price just right for each demographic. Market creation and customer education will drive each other in tandem. ~ Mobile in Africa: From SMS to Android

Now that Muchiri has spoken at Strathmore University’s Innovation Week on marketing tech innovations where he used this framework to analyse the example of mPesa in Kenya, we thought it was time to flesh it out a little more and share it on the blog for your thoughts and feedback. We are looking at this now specifically from the point of view of a service or application available on the mobile platform.

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