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 […]
How do we make a business case for an innovative concept given the data scarcity for the African mass market?
Anzetse Were writes some thoughtful points on the challenges facing private sector innovation in Kenya, and Africa. Two of her points caught my attention, in particular: With regards to the private sector, an interesting point raised is that innovation targeting it must have a business case for adoption otherwise the innovation won’t be absorbed. Innovation […]
Key Competitive Advantage for Frontier and Emerging Markets
There’s a nuance, I’ve discovered, in the application of user centered design methods for entering the frontier and emerging markets of the developing world where a significant proportion of economic activity is confusingly labeled “informal”, rather than unformal as the case tends to be. In more advanced consumer market contexts, where there are umpteen data […]
Prepaid Mobile: The Business Model that Empowers
It feels like a long time since I last pondered the nuances of the prepaid business model, until I came across some words written by Indian social media researcher Swati Janu. She documented her observations on the infrastructure of insecurity from the tenements of New Delhi. There’s value in reflecting on how our understanding only […]
Detailed breakdown of Uber’s business model in Kenya puts spotlight on weaknesses
Latiff Cherono has just published an indepth analysis of what exactly it takes for an Uber driver in Nairobi to cover the cost of doing business. Here’s a snippet, In this post, I try to understand the root cause of the disconnect between how the customer (who defines the value), Uber (the service that controls […]
Africa’s Middle Class: Development economics and marketing demographics conflating the holy grail
The most developed nation on the African continent, south of the Sahara desert, is considered to be South Africa with its financial and transportation infrastructure and systems, a legacy from history. In the first decade of the 21st century, the black middle class – known as Black Diamonds in marketer jargon – came into prominence […]
Poverty is Dynamic and Flexible, Just like the Informal Economy: Evidence from India
…the concept of poverty today is fundamentally different from that of poverty three decades ago, and that safety nets need to be tailored to meet the needs of a society in transition.~ The Hindu, 2 Aug 2016 When quantitative data provided by the India Human Development Survey (the first large panel survey in India) provokes […]
Is Uganda’s rural, informal economy helping people climb over the poverty line?
I stumbled across this dataset on the World Bank’s open data website yesterday, and couldn’t resist making a table to convey the message. Uganda’s poverty headcount halved in the decade between 2002 and 2012. Their statistics are rated well enough that this doesn’t seem to be too far off the mark. In the three years […]
Dynamic vs Static Metrics: Attributes for an African Measure of Competitiveness
For analysts everywhere, the challenge of considering each economy in its own right seems to be far too much trouble, and so they tend towards sweeping generalizations which lump all metrics under one label – “Africa”. Some find even that far too exhausting and aggregate Africa along with Europe and the Middle East. These regional […]
Questioning Convention: Comparison Metrics for Competitive African Markets
Taking the question of appropriate and relevant metrics by which to assess competitiveness (rather, attractiveness) of the emerging African consumer markets further, I decided to dig up some analytical infographics to compare and contrast their approaches. Urbanization is a current favourite, and here are two similar looking visuals from two different perspectives. The first is […]
