Perspective

One year of tracking prepaid Africa

One dark Arctic evening early in January 2011, I started playing around with Tumblr as a way to track news on emerging Africa. Dirk Knemeyer and I had just discussed doing a series of articles on the emerging opportunities in Sub Saharan Africa to be published weekly over the course of the spring and I thought this might be a fun way to research and manage tidbits of interesting happenings.

Who would have ever imagined I'd reach the end of the year with The Prepaid Economy: African Edition and not only have it invited to be showcased by Tumblr in their Business section but organically gain almost 2000 followers without a whisper of a link or a tweet. Thanks.

How do you compete in a market where charity distorts pricing?

Strategy guru Michael Porter's 5 forces framework is quite well known to anyone attempting to assess or analyze the landscape of an operating environment for an industry or organization. Increasingly, since I've begun working out of Sub Sahara I've been sensing the challenge of a 6th force - one that is overlooked when consumer markets are considered particularly in the mass majority demographic. It is insidious however and hinders the sustainable practice of commerce. It is the dominant logic of charity and aid which leads to free give aways by so many seeking to help a poor African out.

Lets take the example of solar power as given in this recent BBC article:

The end result is DIY solar kits that can recharge phones and batteries. They look makeshift but they have the potential to make a huge difference to people thousands of miles away in Kenya.

As the director of KnowYourPlanet, Mark Kragh's day job is to resell solar panels to small businesses and hobbyists. But in February he will travel to Kenya to distribute specially-made kits he is giving away as charity, and to show local people how to make more.

What if someone decided to give away solar panels for free to the small businesses and hobbyists who make up Mr Kragh's customer base? How do you suppose that generous act of charity would impact his business?

Similarly, whether its the jua kali inventor/maker customizing solar power installations for each of his clients or the many social enterprise ventures that dot the landscape, each in their own way are trying to earn a living even while the work that they do helps improve the quality of life for their customers.

On one hand we talk about growing sustainable businesses and nurturing entrepreneurs as a critical means of social and economic development - 'development through enterprise' - yet on the other, these very same fledgling ventures are blindsided by a market force that has the power to distort pricing and disable competition.

Where will the support come from for these companies to establish and grow marketing channels, distribution networks and a win win profitable solution for all stakeholders? The majority are local establishments who employ local people and thus add value to their communities.

Well meaning enthusiasts who come in with hand outs are going to have the same effect on the market as any competitor who practices 'dumping' - it will undercut the market and cripple any sales or marketing strategy if the alternate to purchasing a local product in a shop is a free giveaway from a charitable individual or organization. Furthermore, they are not a business to provide any after sales service or maintenance or customer support, their goal is to be in and out having done 'good' during a flying visit.But the aftermath will create enough ripples in the market creation process that companies will have to deal with for a long time afterwards.

Interestingly, Mr Kragh intends to visit Kenya - one of Sub Sahara's most mature solar power markets instead of Senegal where he'd originally gotten his inspiration from. If I was part of the solar mobile charger and lantern manufacturers association in Kenya or even Nakumatt or the electrical supply shop cooperative or whichever relevant body, I'd say they should petition to put a stop to activities of this sort or send them along to a location who needs it more than they. After all, it is the season of giving rather than receiving and one must always help one's neighbours.

 

The late CK Prahalad, the BoP's next billion and me

The most recent issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management is a BoP special and a key article is this posthumous one from the late CK Prahalad, father of the so called Bottom of the Pyramid. The BoP is a source of breakthrough innovation the dear departed gentleman proclaims and design thinking will help us crack the challenge, but as I browse through the PDF my suspicions increase that this may not have been written by him in 2009, only to be published years later so much as some half written article that was eventually completed by his faithful acolytes.

On one hand, I'm ever grateful to the nominal citation in the second paragraph but on the other, it never ceases to amaze that a learned gentleman from the traditional management school of strategy for corporate business has embraced the user centered design process together with deep dive immersion into the lower income demographic to conduct exploratory design research so whole heartedly and so completely in such a short amount of time. May his soul remain immortal, as we say, but his assistants should consider remaining focused on their own core competencies.

Once upon a time...

In four short months, it will become 7 full years since I first started blogging. Unlike many of those who were already there before me and many who've come after, I did not stay put on one URL or blog address but instead, wandered all over the internet. Today my writing is fragmented and spread out it bits and bobs throughout the webz, and sometimes, if I stop to think about it, I do regret not having continued on with the original Perspective blog on this typepad address.

Yet neither have I stayed put geographically - when I started writing I was living in Chicago and when it became a fulltime focus on what design and business were all about I had moved to San Francisco. In the years since I've written from my desk out of Singapore and Helsinki.

I've experimented with Posterous and a group blog - REculture has inspired a print magazine. My Tumblr to track the economic rise of Sub Saharan Africa (begun in January 2011 as a tool to collate material for the African emerging technology series on the Involution Studios blog) was recently invited to join Tumblr's showcase of recommended blogs. I've written extensively on an open source project for a client on the Semacraft blog - it was a challenge for me to shift to a more formal professional blogging style away from the personal pondering I'd do my own spaces. For a short while I blogged in Finland - no trace remains of that experience except for that available through the Internet Archives. And for some godforsaken reason that doesn't make sense anymore I deleted 5 years of work from this domain. My homepage today is simply a blogspot without a personality.

So why am I back here and where is this need to reflect and ponder through the written medium emerging from again? For the past 12 months I faced technical challenges each time I approached a computer in order to serve my inner need to write my thoughts - that was my way of gaining clarity and my means to make sense of the world around me. I stopped writing - the physical barriers to typing were effectively more of a block to writing than any mental 'writer's block' that I could have faced and the intervening months of forced silence have changed me inside.

That internal image of a lone writer tapping away at the keyboard, alone in a room with a computer and internet, has gone the way of the dodo bird - extinct in its own way but the sheer pleasure I feel when I sit down like this and let my fingers fly across the keys and see the words emerge, like magic, still has the power to soothe my soul and nothing and noone can take that away from me.

Lets see where this goes...

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