Category Archives: Rural
A design challenge for agric service innovation in rural Africa
Find a way to embed principles of sustainable good agriculture for the smallscale farmer in a socio-economically beneficial way. How would we do this? Where do we begin? The answers to these questions and more will be forthcoming on this … Continue reading
Part 1: Why are we publishing our original research on rural economic behaviour in 5 parts online?
A recent article in The Economist on the economic value of owning cattle in rural India made me to realize just how little is understood about the rural economy. Here’s a snippet: That is because most people find spending easier … Continue reading
The Role of Livestock Data in Rural Africa: The Tanzanian Case Study
The World Bank finally notices the humble goat, four of which will buy you a new Nokia featurephone in Malawi. Funded by Bill and Melinda, this report takes a closer look at the domesticated animal as a financial instrument and … Continue reading
Food security: time to think of the small scale farmers
This article was written by David Indeje (@DavidBurudi) and was first put on the internet on West FM. It has been republished here with his kind permission. Agriculture is the essence of life, but it seems leaders are not getting … Continue reading
Exploratory User Research in the Rural Economy
When I first began developing the attributes by which to select representative user profiles for the original fieldwork to begin understanding the “prepaid economy”, that is, household financial management in rural India, The Philippines and Malawi, it was based on … Continue reading
Promoting Africa’s Informal Sector
Organising the informal sector and recognising its role as a profitable activity may contribute to economic development. This can also improve the capacity of informal workers to meet their basic needs by increasing their incomes and strengthening their legal status. … Continue reading
Snippets of note
The fifth most important barrier to financial inclusion is individual level informality, a constraint cited by 15 percent of the unbanked population in Nigeria. Respondents who cite informality reasons for financial exclusion tend to be more educated and rurally based … Continue reading
Static income vs dynamic income
It was when attempting to clearly distinguish between patterns of cash flow in the formal vs the informal economy, using the concept of the degree of control granted to the end user over the variables of time (duration, frequency, periodicity) … Continue reading
Who is Farmer Pedro?
If we were to arrive at a synthesized view of your average subsistence farmer, lets call him Pedro, how would we describe him? What is Farmer Pedro’s story? He grows enough to keep body and soul going, his first priority … Continue reading
Risk mitigation strategies in the uncertainty of the informal economy
What is the role of flexibility as an inherent design principle for transactions in the informal economy? Why is it so critical to the success or failure of business models in this operating environment? What does flexibility primarily tend to … Continue reading
The Prepaid Economy Blog 