Situating one’s rant within business model typology for rural and low income markets
After yesterday’s post on stripping out social considerations to allow for a pragmatic economic assessment of viability prior to investing in infrastructure for service delivery to rural customers, I looked up literature on the general theme. Site selection as a keyword brought a slew of articles focusing on GIS technology, primarily from the lens of […]
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 […]
Financial Behaviour Patterns Observed Among Households in Rural Informal Economy in Asia
This is the original working paper of the research conducted on rural household financial management, in developing country conditions, pioneering the use of methods from human centered design for discovery, during Nov 2008 to March 2009, aka the Prepaid Economy Project. It was peer reviewed by Brett Hudson Matthews, and I have incorporated his comments into […]
How the African movable assets bill can unleash innovation opportunities for the rural economy
As Kenya joins Zambia and Zimbabwe in ratifying a Movable Property Security Rights Act, there’s a sense that the floodgates to innovation in access to finance might be taking place in rural Africa, south of the Sahara and north of South Africa. Kenya’s law also goes beyond the cows and goats and allows a borrower […]
Livestock as movable assets and financial collateral: Collected insights
Following in the footsteps of Zimbabwe, Kenya has just passed a law on the use of movable assets as collateral for loans. President Uhuru Kenyatta has signed into law a Bill allowing borrowers to use household goods, crops, live animals and even intellectual property to secure commercial loans in a move aimed at boosting access […]
A matter of timing: seasonal opportunities
These stalls full of water pistols and balloons sprouted overnight a couple of days before the spring festival of Holi (March 13th 2017) – these vendors are neither local nor regulars in the market complex. They’re here to offer seasonal products and might even have been invited by the local shopkeepers to provide attractive temporary […]
Time to reach consensus on the #informaleconomy debate
As yesterday’s post showed, the unforeseen outcome of India’s demonetization initiative on the rural cash economy arose due to the lack of disaggregation of all that tends to get lumped together under the umbrella label “informal”. Segmentation would lead to more impactful design of policy and programmes. WIEGO has an excellent review of the academic […]
Unforeseen outcomes of India’s demonetization shine light on the value of our design philosophy
Latest news on India’s demonetization informs us how the rural economy is bearing the brunt of this initiative. The action was intended to target wealthy tax evaders and end India’s “shadow economy”, but it has also exposed the dependency of poor farmers and small businesses on informal credit systems in a country where half the […]
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 […]
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 […]
