They may be works of fiction and art, but the “Black Panther” blockbuster and the “cosmic” compositions of jazz legend Sun Ra represent a genre that could offer inspiration for how we rebuild in a post-pandemic future.

Afrofuturism is an artistic movement that re-imagines worlds through the lens of black culture, including science, technology, and the arts. While it most commonly appears in science fiction, the genre extends across literature, music, and philosophy. It essentially paints more realistic images of a future from the perspective of a segment of Western society that has long been marginalized.

Nearly two years of global pandemic and the increasing ravages of climate change have led many to turn to art to glean some hope that things might get better — or to consider how they might get worse.

Afrofuturism has for decades offered visions of how to build fundamentally different worlds and societies. Now, more than ever, society needs new approaches and ideas for confronting global challenges, and Afrofuturism is proving to be a vital tool for thinking about near-future possibilities. Futurists ask how tomorrow’s hoverboards and flying cars will be made. Afrofuturists ask who will build them. Due to its focus on human struggle, Afrofuturism also provides critical perspectives on the last year of the pandemic.

The term “Afrofuturism” was coined nearly 30 years ago by a white author named Mark Dery in an essay called “Black to the Future.” In his writing, Dery looked at how some speculative fiction has been shaped by the African diaspora. This is the basis for Afrofuturism.

Dery asks: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers — white to a man — who have engineered our collective fantasies?”

The success of the “Black Panther” movie adaption of the Marvel comics brought Afrofuturist themes to a mainstream audience. The fictional African nation of Wakanda is depicted as the most technologically advanced in the world, with magnetic levitation public transport systems and virtual reality operated aircraft.

Modern music artists such as Beyonce and her sister, Solange, have led a resurgence of interest in jazz composer Sun Ra, whose music and performances imagined an intergalactic world combining science fiction and ancient Egypt.

While the development of Afrofuturism has occurred mainly in the US, the discipline has global appeal. It also need not focus solely on the African experience. Instead, it should be a jumping-off point for creating multiple new areas of speculative thinking and culture imbued with non-Western perspectives.

This could take on a Middle Eastern or even Chinese connotation. Consider the popularity of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” series of science-fiction books. The decidedly Chinese works have garnered international appeal, with recommendations from Barack Obama and a Netflix adaptation in the works.

The “Parable of the Sower” series is a prime example of how Afrofuturism can help us grapple with seemingly insurmountable problems. The novels were published in the early 1990s by science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. They take place in a dystopian California ripped apart by climate change and social inequality. Those who have the means live behind highly fortified fences, while the rest of society is consumed by violence and drug abuse. Fundamentalist political leaders run campaigns with the promise to “make America great again” (that’s right, Butler coined the phrase).

Butler’s protagonist flees a burning Los Angeles to form a new community guided by a belief in science that will lead humanity to “take root among the stars.” The rise of Donald Trump and the outbreak of the pandemic meant Butler’s work has enjoyed a spike in popularity. Indeed, anyone reading her in 2020 must be disturbed by her futuristic visions of society ripped apart by climate change, political disunity, and pandemic.

Afrofuturist approaches to core questions about who builds the technology of the future, how it will affect society, and who will benefit are the most salient contributions of the genre. The dismal global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is a stark reminder of the primacy of this approach.

In August, shocking details of Johnson & Johnson’s relationship with South Africa to manufacture coronavirus vaccines came to light. As many as 32 million doses of the vaccine, “filled and finished” in South Africa, were exported to the EU in recent months. Given the low vaccination rates across Africa, and South Africa in particular, this news is shocking.

The saga sounds like it was borrowed from a work of Afrofuturism. A wealthy Western company helps set up medical capabilities in a developing country not to aid the local population in need of vital medicines but to lessen the labor cost for products earmarked for Western markets. If we want to believe the adage that “another world is possible” in the wake of the pandemic, we need to lean heavily on the creativity of the Afrofuturist canon.

Developing countries continue to be battered by the pandemic because of scarce resources to fight the virus and general mismanagement of the crisis. The effects of climate change will compound matters in the near future. We need all the insight and forethought of the Afrofuturists that we can get to navigate the challenges ahead.

How Afrofuturism Can Inspire a Better Post-Pandemic World was originally published in Momentum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the technology improves and prices fall for renewable energy, more countries in emerging markets are hoping to go green. China and the United States, in particular, are vying for influence in these markets. But both miscalculate what is needed. This gap in understanding reveals just how challenging the transition to renewable energy will be. The path to widespread adoption of green energy in developing countries lies as much in upgrades to — and the not-very-sexy matter of — transmission infrastructure, which has long been overlooked, as it does in sustainable power generation.

China is leading the push into renewable energy in the Middle East and Africa with a flurry of partnerships and ventures with key players in the clean-energy sector. The state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation, for example, recently acquired Dubai-based wind and solar developer Alcazar Energy Partners. The deal, estimated to be worth $500 million, will give China a significant foothold in the Middle East clean-energy sector.

Indeed, China rightly senses that there is a good deal of money to be made from developing countries’ hunger for green-energy innovation. Consider China’s recent partnership with Egypt’s El Nasr Automotive Manufacturing Company to test Chinese-made electric vehicles. El Nasr is importing electric cars from China’s Dongfeng Motor Corporation to kickstart a joint venture that will eventually see Dongfeng’s vehicles assembled in Egypt. For now, it’s a small program involving testing cars in cooperation with Uber. But given that Egypt is the second-largest car market in the Middle East, after Saudi Arabia, it is understandable why Dongfeng would be interested.

There is, however, one caveat. Anyone who knows anything about Egypt will wonder how a fleet of privately-owned electric cars, not just those from Dongfeng and not just those supplied to Uber, will be juiced up. Charging stations all over Cairo? Hard to imagine. But hold on, there’s more to this.

For its part, the US government is exiting support for carbon-intensive energy infrastructure projects worldwide. Earlier this year, the Biden administration decided to draw down American funding for carbon-intensive initiatives. Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told the US Development Finance Corporation that limiting aid to high-carbon-energy infrastructure projects would be a powerful means of addressing the climate crisis and would help drive investment toward climate solutions.

On the surface, this sounds prudent. Who could disagree? On deeper reflection, however, the emphasis on high-tech generation also means neglect in investment for more prosaic elements of the energy-supply matrix.

That issue is the transmission and distribution infrastructure. Take Africa. Generally, the continent lacks a robust and extensive grid system. It is one thing to say that there will be an emphasis on the green-generation side, but what about how to distribute the power that is produced? Reports put the number of people lacking access to electricity on the continent at as high as 600 million. That’s more than the population of North and Central America together.

Both the American and Chinese approaches reveal a lack of understanding of what markets need to go green. Taking stakes in major clean-energy projects and testing electric vehicles on the streets of Cairo sounds terrific, but neither will kickstart a green-energy revolution if power can’t be transmitted across individual countries. Indeed, how will charging stations for electric cars even get their power? And frankly, without a concomitant dedication to building transmission and distribution networks, plans for green-electric generation will be stillborn.

Worse, it threatens to aggravate the developed-developing world divide. In the West and Asia, governments and industry are rushing to build out green-power generation while mandating electrification of cars in 20–30 years. Places like Africa, however, will continue to be dependent on the internal combustion engine well beyond 2050. And as leading car manufacturers in Asia, Europe, and North America pivot increasingly toward electric vehicles, that means the average age of fossil-fuel powered cars in Africa will eventually rise. Notably, older cars are more polluting.

The developing world, and especially Africa, needs basic infrastructure in the form of better electric grid systems, in addition to high-tech green-power generation. For the very foundation of the power grid is damaged in many countries, which means renewable energy projects will never get going at scale. For if South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized nation, struggles with the basics of power infrastructure, imagine the situation in Chad or Mali. Thus, if the US and China are serious about renewable energy — for both anti-climate-change and commercial reasons — they must start by building the basics of the electricity infrastructure.

With population numbers in emerging markets set to explode over the coming decades and the risk of climate-related disasters on the rise, time is running out. Failing to fully address the needs of the Global South will erode any gains made in the developed North. The leading economies of the world should see their interest mirrored in that of poorer nations.

Power outages are a way of life in Africa’s most industrialized country. Over the last decade, South Africa’s electricity grid has come apart at the seams and failed to deliver dependable power. As renewable energy gets cheaper, South African cities such as Cape Town have demanded the right to find their own sources.

The primary culprit in South Africa’s power woes is the aging national electricity provider, Eskom. After years of mismanagement of state funds earmarked for critical infrastructure repairs, Eskom’s plants are regularly unable to operate at full capacity. The result is rolling blackouts that last from two to six hours per day. The power cuts have proved disastrous for the economy, with costs estimated at between $3 billion and $8 billion in 2019.

That year, desperate to find a solution, Cape Town announced plans to purchase its own power from independent renewable power producers. The falling cost and exponential growth of renewable-energy technology have made this possible. Amazon recently announced it will build its own solar farm to power its data centers in South Africa, thereby insulating itself from outages on the national grid. If companies can do it, why can’t cities?

The answer is mired in a complex web of regulations and restrictions. The Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy, in consultation with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa, has the sole power to decide where South African citizens get their energy, how it is sold, and what source is used to generate it. In practice, this gives Eskom, the state-owned provider, a monopoly over energy production and supply.

In August 2020, Cape Town demanded that the ministry grant it the authority to purchase renewable energy from independent power producers. Those producers would first deliver power directly to Cape Town via the grid, and if they generated more electricity than Cape Town needed, any surplus would flow out to the rest of the country.

The request ended in a court battle over constitutional questions about who gets to make such decisions. Given South Africa’s history of human rights violations and the strength of its constitution, the case has evolved into a larger fight for the rights of citizens to have dependable power.

Cape Town didn’t win that case, but the debate it started created political pressure. In October 2020, the government announced an amendment to electricity regulations to allow municipalities to find their own methods of generating electricity or purchasing it from independent producers.

However, the minister still has the final authority to sign off on any new electricity agreements involving cities. Moreover, President Cyril Ramaphosa underlined his commitment to a “centralized state-owned enterprise” model in February’s state of the union address, in which he outlined various ways his government was going to procure more power for the country. The energy battle between South African cities and the national government is entering a new and arguably more aggressive phase.

Since the October amendment was publicized, several cities have made plans to go it alone. Durban, South Africa’s third-largest city, announced its plan in January 2021. The city aims to get 40% of its energy from sources other than Eskom by 2030 and wants to use only clean energy by 2050. And the sleepy university town of Stellenbosch, in the heart of South Africa’s wine country, has submitted a request to the national government to “investigate the use and generation of alternate electricity supply.”

In August 2021, the government announced that private power plants could produce up to 100mw without requesting a license. The previous limit was only 1mw. This is a major concession to renewable and independent providers. In the near term, the decision will affect energy-intensive companies such as mining operations since they will be able to generate their own electricity. But the dam is breaking and the government appears serious about green energy. Eskom is even considering spending R106 billion ($7.2 billion) on wind and solar energy by 2030.

If Cape Town and other cities win the right to purchase their own electricity, rural areas in the country could benefit as well because private companies will have financial incentives to produce more renewable power. More electricity production should help everyone.

Cape Town’s ongoing battle over clean energy is symbolic of political tensions between national and city governments that green tech is only accelerating.

By and large, city governance models are more agile than their national counterparts. For example, cities have been at the forefront of implementing the Paris climate agreement. Their ability to influence national and international politics will grow as more people continue to move there. Yet as South Africa demonstrates, national governments aren’t going down without a fight.

The issue of who controls the power supply is a critical space to watch in this regard. In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pushed a bill that grants the state power company priority in dispatching power. The changes he’s requested, which passed into law on March 3rd, will target private power suppliers that focus on renewable energy.

While the battle over energy sovereignty will almost certainly spread to more cities, not all areas will follow Cape Town’s approach. The Western Cape province, where the city is located, is blessed with ample wind and a relatively high number of sunny days. Renewable energy works well in this part of the world. Other cities may not be able to purchase their own renewable power so easily.

But clearly, the combination of an urbanizing population and the widespread availability of renewable power is challenging the way the modern nation-state controls energy policy. We can expect national-municipal splits like the one driving Cape Town’s energy crisis to become the norm, not the exception.

Last month, the West Africa Economic and Monetary Union announced it was replacing its currency, the CFA franc, with the “eco.” In this way, the francophone members of the region are seeking to chart a future truly independent of France. To achieve that, however, they may also want to look toward a landscape increasingly defined by blockchain and cryptocurrency technology.

The CFA franc was established in 1945 by Charles de Gaulle as an instrument of monetary and financial control over France’s African colonies. It has been used by Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo for more than seven decades. Six Central African countries — Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea — also use a similar but different version of the CFA franc, but there is no word yet on whether they will follow suit and ditch it.

The question for the former colonies is this: Will a new currency increase prosperity? Or is there yet another step to consider?
The official reason given for doing away with the CFA franc is to encourage new growth and markets, but the move is as much about decolonization, and establishing monetary and financial independence.

In establishing the CFA franc, France set some fairly exacting conditions. After gaining independence, countries using the currency were obliged to keep all their foreign exchange reserves in France. This was reduced to 65 percent in 1965 and to 50 percent in 2005. In return for retaining half the reserves of its former colonies, France pays them 0.75 percent in interest.

The arrangement was highly convenient for postwar France, as it meant the former colonies were effectively providing cheap loans. In addition, France could use the deposits from Africa to help shore up its own currency. The CFA franc, meanwhile, benefited from French backing, which gave it stability.

But times have changed. Today, the arrangement might well be described as a form of monetary ransom. There is no data available for the amount of African reserves held at the French treasury over each of the past 70 years. Yet it is safe to say that France surely benefited from the arrangement. As an indication, Ivory Coast’s reserves alone totaled roughly the equivalent of $6 billion throughout 2018.

Under the new plan, the West African Monetary Union will maintain a peg to the euro during the transition to the eco. But French representatives will no longer sit on the board of its central bank.

Now that the former French colonies have a new currency, the key to putting the past firmly behind is to innovate it in ways that money has not been treated before.

This monetary uncoupling comes at a time of rising anti-French sentiment across the region. French troops who were initially welcomed in Mali in 2013 are now viewed in a far less positive light. French flags now are regularly burned in the streets as the French are increasingly seen to have overstayed their welcome and even to have been engaging in neocolonialism.

The Senegalese development economist Ndongo Samba Sylla sees the CFA franc as a tool that France has used to dominate its former colonies. The currency, he said, “operates as a political tool to control African economies and polities, and also as a device for transferring, with minimal risk, economic surpluses from the African continent to France and Europe. The mechanisms laid during the colonial era remain essentially unchanged.”

Reform of the CFA franc is now underway, but what else must these African countries do to ensure that the mechanisms of colonialism are left well and truly in the past? How can they build a truly independent monetary and fiscal policy while continuing with the process of decolonization?

The first major decision — whether to create independent currencies for each individual country or to keep the monetary union established by the French — has already been made. The eight-member West African economic bloc will remain in place and the currency essentially left intact, albeit with a new name. The more difficult issue is one of unity. Just as the varying degrees of political unity and fiscal coordination in the EU affect the EU’s monetary policy and the stability of its euro currency, unity in West Africa will determine whether the eco succeeds or fails.

The economic trajectories have not been encouraging. While there has been growth, nine of the 14 CFA franc member-countries are classified by the UN as “less developed.” For some, per capita GDP is actually lower now than in the 1970s.

The way forward for these West African nations lies in carefully comporting themselves toward global demand. First, incentives for international manufacturers to import new technology will bring much-needed capital and quality jobs. Next, and just as importantly, embracing digital currency technology could help ease fears among foreign investors of monetary surprises such as devaluations and currency controls. A digital eco operating on a secure blockchain platform would also be a useful currency to serve the interest of mobile workers across the region, benefitting not only francophone Africa.

Indeed, a new financial architecture underpinned by monetary innovations afforded by cryptocurrency principles — free of the possibility that governments might manipulate the currency — will go some way toward assuaging concerns that have plagued African nations’ management of their currencies. This is not to say that it will be easy to accomplish. However, a development that has not been widely appreciated outside the continent has been the rise of fintech. Africa has the talent to figure it out.

Now that these former French colonies have a new currency, the key to putting the past firmly behind is to innovate it in ways that money has not been treated before. The eco offers an opportunity for their economies to prosper by leapfrogging conventional norms through blockchain technology. They should be bold and break through the paradigm as they have broken with France.

West Africa has ditched its colonial currency. Now the future is crypto was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The world’s most profitable company, Saudi Aramco, is going public and the ramifications are going to be seen in some unusual places such as China, which sees the oil trade as a way to challenge America’s supremacy in global commerce.

After months of speculation, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company officially announced its plan to go public this month. Last year, the company made US$111 billion in profit, and the price eventually set for its initial public offering could value the company at as much as $1.7 trillion. The Aramco IPO is critical to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s plans to modernize his country’s economy with a raft of initiatives, including the creation of a new “future” city in the Saudi desert, along with investments into future industries essential for the creation of a knowledge-based economy.

The lead-up to what will be the world’s biggest ever IPO has shone a spotlight on the company’s place in the global economy — not because of how much money it makes but because of who is interested in investing and why. Could foreign investors use Aramco to initiate major changes to the global currency system? The Chinese appear to think so.

Just before the IPO announcement, it was reported that China was considering acquiring a major stake in the company. Chinese state-owned entities led by the Beijing-based Silk Road Fund were in talks to invest $5 billion to $10 billion in the IPO. Prince Mohammad has always been open about wanting to attract major foreign stakes in Aramco. But China’s involvement in Aramco is fraught with its own complex geopolitical undertones.

Long before Donald Trump came to power and began a trade war with Beijing, China was making noises about challenging the US dollar’s dominance as the world’s universal currency. This would give China more control over its own economy and help with long-term economic projects designed to challenge the US as the world’s sole economic superpower. But unseating the dollar is much easier said than done.

Through infrastructure projects across the emerging world, China is extending its economic influence in a way that repositions global trade flows away from the West and into China. The ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, for example, is underpinned by several Chinese financial institutions like the Silk Road Fund, which extend credit to entities in Africa to Central Asia. Some of this money goes into infrastructure projects often carried out by Chinese companies, which inevitably leads to some poorer countries becoming trapped in debt to Beijing.

The Aramco public offering gives China an opportunity to gain a foothold at the center of the global oil industry. Oil is arguably the most important commodity traded in dollars, and disrupting the barrel-to-dollar peg could have profound consequences for China’s plans to join (or replace) the dollar as the global trading currency. A Chinese stake in the world’s largest oil company, therefore, would give Beijing power to influence how the commodity is traded. Meanwhile, the Chinese can also quietly position themselves as possible financiers of the Saudi crown prince’s transformation plans.

But let’s be clear: The renminbi is not about to replace the dollar as the global trading currency. Nor is Saudi Arabia likely to risk a major confrontation with its most important ally, the United States, and agree to Chinese demands for the renminbi to become the oil market’s trading currency.

Moreover, when it comes to global currency reserves held by central banks, the dollar is king. According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2017 the Chinese yuan made up only a tiny amount of allocated foreign-exchange reserves, whereas the Financial Times reports that more than 60% of global currency reserves are held in dollars. And despite China overtaking the US in gross crude-oil imports in 2017, Beijing has not managed to persuade major oil-producing nations to take that crucial step toward transforming the oil trade and abandon trading in dollar.

But cracks are starting to appear. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia threatened to sell its oil in currencies other than the dollar if the United States passed legislation that would expose OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) member states to American antitrust laws. Never before had Riyadh reacted so dramatically. The bill never came into force, but if Saudi Arabia ditched the dollar, its position as the world’s primary trading and reserve currency would be seriously undermined and would reduce America’s economic power in global trade.

China is also playing a long game. Through various investments across the Persian Gulf region, the Chinese have been primarily interested in securing their own access to oil. With the ongoing US-China trade war, it’s highly unlikely Beijing would risk any serious escalation with Washington by using China’s clout to change the status quo and push for a change in oil trading in the Gulf. But China has made it clear that it wants the yuan to be a global trading currency and is strengthening relationships with oil-producing nations from the Persian Gulf to Russia.

The intention is clear: Beijing wants to push for change and is only waiting for the right time. And as much as the Chinese might want to use the Aramco IPO to effect this, the reality is that it won’t work out this way. Nevertheless, when the moment does actually come, China will be sure to be ready.

“I have a tendency to go on for a while,” Osarumen Osamuyi told me as we began our discussion about financial inclusion in Africa. He was right. Every question I asked spurred a sprawling and detailed response that took into account the past, present, and future of the technology scene in Nigeria and other African markets.

The Nigeria writer and editor of the popular technology website The Subtext began his career in the tech industry at the Nigerian technology publication Tech Cabal as an intern in 2015. Rising through the ranks, he started writing a daily newsletter after getting bored with reviewing mobile phones (“They are all the same,” he told me). He quickly discovered his passion in closely watching the startup scene develop in Nigeria.

Although Nigerian tech companies used to be clones of larger international brands, he noted, new startups are charting their own path and creating products suited to local markets. Osamuyi also serves as the head of investments and research at an early-stage pan-African venture capital firm called Ventures Platform. You can’t talk about technology in Africa without a conversation about financial inclusion and the explosion of mobile money accounts. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation about this space.

Joseph Dana: There is much discussion about how financial inclusion and bringing people into formal financial services is a positive and transformational development. Do you share the optimism?

Osarumen Osamuyi: The general attitude towards financial inclusion tends to be: “We have people who belong to an unbanked class and what we need to do is move them to a banked class”. This view treats global standards as objectively good and they should be foisted on people in the informal economy. I find it to be simplistic for a couple of reasons and I will give you a few examples.

Take the Bebapay experiment, when in late 2013, the Kenyan government announced a ban on cash payments for bus fares in an attempt to move consumers from physical cash to a prepaid card that relied on Google’s NFC technology. It was going to provide visibility for matatu (minibus taxi) owners and make the experience more seamless — in theory. It failed in large part because the two sets of stakeholders who mattered the most — end users and bus conductors — had little incentive to use it. The prepaid card was inflexible and often locked in value, while cash could be used to buy other things. It was a worse experience for them because they were not the primary consideration.

The same applies more broadly to other payment products. In Nigeria, Mastercard has been marketing a QR-based payments product called MasterPass, and Visa has been marketing one called m-Visa. They have gone to merchants, got them to put up QR codes, and in theory consumers should come in and scan the codes to pay for goods and services. But I find that to be ridiculous for a couple of reasons. In China, this makes sense because the average Chinese consumer understands what a QR code is and scanning QR codes is often a show of intent to either move forward in a user flow or to accomplish something.

That isn’t necessarily true in Nigeria. So you find a couple of merchants who have these things put up and nobody ever uses them. There is no incentive to use them because the benefit in terms of user experience is not justified by the cost of downloading one more app or bringing out your phone to scan the code. For the most part, cash is still the preferred means of conducting transactions.

I am skeptical that solutions assuming going cashless is, in itself, objectively good are going to work because many people in the informal economy aren’t convinced that going cashless solves any of the problems they care about. They are mostly right.

JD: Would there be widespread adoption and use of cashless platforms if the process was less annoying and cumbersome?

OO: Part of the problem is a network issue. If I took, say, NGN500 ($1.40) today and went to the pharmacy to buy a Red Bull, no matter what happens the merchant will accept my NGN500 because it’s a cash-based economy. That doesn’t necessarily apply to debit cards, or even bank transfers. There is often friction introduced because for many people their mobile phones are primarily communication devices and there has not been a massive shift to seeing them as utilities. They’re mostly operating on communication infrastructure at the present moment.

Another challenge is reliability. There is no guarantee that if you’re using unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) systems, which have become wildly popular in Nigeria, they’re are going to work. There have been times when I needed to pay for something via USSD and the transactions failed. Uber drivers, for example, would not receive their bank alerts of my payment until 12 hours after the transaction was completed. It’s a hard problem to solve, but I’m convinced that we can figure out approaches to building these services that empathize with the customer as opposed to trying to impose what we see as objectively better technology.

JD: Do you think the Chinese are eager to make a play in the financial inclusion space based on their footprint with smartphones and infrastructure in Africa?

OO: Yes, and I wrote about this in The Subtext recently. Three of the most popular phone brands in Africa — Tecno, Infinix, and iTel — are manufactured by a Chinese firm called Transsion Holdings. The company is now venturing into financial services by bundling a payments app with their phones that lets users access loans, transfer money, buy airtime, pay bills, and so on. In a similar way, Opera — which is now owned by a Chinese consortium and recently took in a $50m investment from Bitmain — operates the most popular browser in Africa, and has launched OPay to provide many of the same services.

That’s an interesting thread to pull on. Why are global companies trying to develop a relationship with the average African consumer and starting with financial services? In my view, this is because it’s a good way to gain value immediately, but also because financial services or payments are about trust. So, it’s a way for these firms to insert themselves into the lives of consumers who do everything offline. I like this approach. As opposed to apps like Uber, which are convenience functions, these services are solving problems faced by low-income consumers today.

“Developers need to be much more focused on the consumer and what their needs are.”

The way I like to describe it is that if my house is dirty, I don’t need a cleaning app, I need a cleaner. Without focusing too much on what the technology is, developers need to be much more focused on the consumer and what their needs are. In other words, studying user behavior patterns and sitting down with them and being humble enough to accept the ways they complete daily tasks.

JD: It’s hard to predict the future, but based on the trends you see and are familiar with, where will financial inclusion be in five years?

OO: I am generally bullish about the space, and I strongly suspect that because of the entrepreneurs I am meeting today we will see some acceleration in the adoption of technology products. Let’s talk a bit more about China or international players like Opera. Opera is trying to replicate a Chinese news aggregator app. Part of the play there is trying to get users comfortable interacting with their services and then slowly introducing ways to make payments. That’s why I find their OPay interesting. Within the browser, users can already pay bills, and send and receive money. Soon they will likely be able to request, receive, and pay back loans, so it’s essentially a wallet within the browser. That will enable e-commerce in a frictionless manner.

Part of the reason I think mobile money accounts and bank accounts are dormant for many users is that the platforms don’t do much besides receiving money, store money, and enable users to send money somewhere else. That makes sense for someone in the formal economy, but, again, the mechanisms of the system that bank accounts or mobile money accounts will have to replace have trading networks integrated with them. They are social networks and ecosystems of activity that go beyond the ability to store value and transfer that value to multiple wallets.

We are moving on from stage one innovation, which is copying things that look interesting in other markets, and beginning to develop solutions that take local nuances into account. So, I expect that in Nigeria and Kenya especially, we should begin to see many more people integrated into organized financial ecosystems.

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By Emphasizing Services, Mobile Money Could Explode in Africa was originally published in emerge85 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mobile money is on the move in Africa but the rising tide is not lifting all boats. Driven by a slew of new applications and platforms, more people than ever are signing up for mobile money accounts. Yet, users have been reticent to take the next step and sign up for additional services such as insurance and investment accounts. With growing user bases, the opportunity for new services is massive. The only hurdle is finding the right model that balances limited fees, ease of use, and broad appeal. One insurance company has a plan that mixes all of these elements with a hefty investment in educational awareness designed to teach millions about the insurance industry.

In fact, the traditional definition of insurance is changing in Africa. What is evolving promises inclusion, coverage, and transparency for more Africans than at any other point in history. As technology accelerates financial inclusion efforts across emerging markets, a natural question for investors and entrepreneurs is what form the next shift will take. Most analysts and experts predict the next big shift will involve blockchain or insurance, or both.

According to 2016 findings from the United States census bureau, more than 90% of the American population had some form of medical insurance. Less than 10% of Africa’s population has any type of insurance product. Mobile money and smartphone banking are chipping away at traditional barriers to entry in Africa such as over-reliance on paying premiums in cash. Building on these banking platforms, companies are rushing to offer other services, chief among them insurance. Give a person a mobile money account and it’s not hard to offer some form of insurance, the thinking goes. BIMA, a company headquartered in Stockholm with operations across Africa, is making this a reality and looking towards a future where tech, financial inclusion, and preventive healthcare collide to form one product offering.

“When we started, we noticed that insurance penetration was extremely low in emerging markets, particularly in Africa,” Mathilda Strom, deputy CEO of BIMA, told me. “We quickly realized mobile technology could create the big opportunity to solve this issue, and particularly the challenges facing insurance companies.”

Hurdles to inclusion

From the start, BIMA recognized that companies were struggling to provide affordable insurance products due to the cost and effort in collecting premiums. If a company, for example, is required to collect small cash payments from customers on a weekly basis, profit margins are nonexistent. Thus, large segments of bottom-of-the-pyramid customers are simply ignored.

The next challenge was addressing the high fees associated with small payments. The majority of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid in Africa make several micropayments in a given day or week. However, traditional banks still levy high fees on these micropayments, forcing most to turn back to cash.

Mobile money operators and companies such as BIMA understand that this reality must be reflected in any viable business model on the continent. As such, monthly premiums with BIMA can be divided into subscription micropayments that are deducted from mobile airtime credit. This ensures payments are manageable and seamless.

“Mobile money providers have typically, up until this year, been against subscription payments. They would only offer products where you must make the transaction then and there on your phone, even for products requiring continuous payments,” Strom noted. “Only this year have we started to see that mobile operators are realizing mobile money can be used like a bank account, where you have direct debits that are coming out in a more painless way from your accounts. It’s a challenge for them, banks, and bigger institutions because of the trust factor they have spent years trying to create — customers who are just getting used to converting their cash to digital currency in their first bank or mobile money accounts are afraid of what will happen to their money when they can’t see it.”

BIMA’s business model is built on a technical solution dependent on digital currency used for micropayments to insurance operators. Customers register on their phones with a few simple questions instead of medical exams and forms. Claims can also be made through BIMA. Since the company works directly with mobile operators and insurance companies, it essentially acts as the broker.

Growth through education

The other component of BIMA’s model is focused on product literacy. Using a network of agents, it facilitates face-to-face education to potential customers about the insurance industry and how it operates. Since launching in 2010, BIMA has spread this model across 15 markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The company claims to have reached 23m subscribers, 75% of whom have never had an insurance product before. With 575,000 new customers a month, it has sold 33m policies and raised $110.6m in capital. In Ghana, for example, one in 10 adults is covered by an insurance policy provided by BIMA and Tigo, a mobile phone operator.

“It was not just about telling people there is now an insurance product on the market that’s affordable. For people who’ve never had insurance before, we couldn’t expect them to just adopt it,” Strom pointed out. “We can’t just use an SMS with 160 characters, send it to millions of people, and suddenly everyone is insured. There is much more that goes into education about financial services. In most of our markets, people don’t understand the concept of insurance, so they’ll ask us questions like, ‘This is life insurance, but what happens if I don’t die?’ Those questions can’t be answered through a simple SMS.”

Overcoming the challenges

“We needed a solution that’s about people and technology working together,” Strom said. “From this starting point, the product design and journey had to be extremely simple and uncomplicated. We essentially created one price point for everyone in the market.”

This is a radically different approach from how the insurance industry has traditionally operated. Instead of handing over reams of information and then having a company provide a bespoke premium, BIMA chose simplicity to gain access to untapped markets. For any customer between the ages of 18 and 65, the premium starts at $0.60.

Typically complicated with endless questions and pages of forms, BIMA streamlined the registration process to ensure new customers weren’t turned off at the start and trusted the company’s process. BIMA asks for a customer’s name, age, name of beneficiary if it’s a life or accident policy, the age of that beneficiary, and a declaration of good health. That’s it. And the best part is it can all be done over the phone through SMS or with an operator.

“The phone part is really crucial,” Strom noted. “If you just had agents out there but you had an extremely complex product and a really difficult registration process, the education would not work and would fall on its side. Then you need to couple that with agents who are from the community, who are speaking the same language and the same phraseology and stories, and they need to be able to pitch and talk to these customers as if they were peers and explain this to them. So there are multiple dimensions for the education to be successful.”

Next developments

The company is now looking at the underlying health risks for people in need of insurance products. Through field research and experience, it has identified the need to provide health checks and services such as blood pressure monitoring. “I see this happening with more and more providers,” Strom noted when asked about the future of the industry. Insurers will need to work with healthcare providers offering treatment instead of just paying for it.

“There’s so much potential in this market. With such a large number of people uninsured, there’s going to be fragmentation before there’s consolidation. I think there’s going to be a ton of people who go out there and start to get experience in insurance through lots of different channels and distributors. Some will unfortunately have bad experiences because if it’s not a core product of the distributor they might not care how it’s delivered. That could have a short-term detrimental impact. But I think in the long term, the more this is in people’s faces and the more they experience it, the better it is for the industry as a whole.”

BIMA demonstrates how traditional approaches to insurance are transforming as a result of smartphone banking. Getting new customers to understand and use insurance remains a major challenge across African countries but technological innovation mixed with simple education awareness campaigns are shifting the goalposts. It’s easy to see why analysts and experts expect a boom in insurance — and blockchain — platforms in Africa’s near future.

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Is Insurance Possible When You Make $2 a Day? was originally published in emerge85 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the eighth floor of a nondescript building in Cape Town’s central business district, a group of coders is overseeing a quiet revolution in Africa’s mobile money space. They have a simple goal: Increase financial inclusion by removing fees. And they’re doing it with an app called Wala. With the explosion in mobile money following the success of Kenya’s M-Pesa, companies have been signing up new customers around the continent at a fever pitch.

In Nairobi, often referred to as Silicon Savannah, smartphone applications come and go at breakneck speed, each promising to expand financial inclusion through user growth and seamless transactions between merchant and buyer. Despite the growth in apps and companies working on financial inclusion, 94% of financial transactions on the African continent are still made in cash. Are high fees to blame?

The problem with mobile money

Wala is a Cape Town-based startup with operations in key African markets including Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Africa. The company was co-founded in 2014 by Tricia Martinez, an American with a background in economics from the University of Chicago. Martinez has the air of a tech coder and entrepreneur. With exposed brick, an open floor plan, and a ping pong table, I thought I had walked into a San Francisco office space when I visited Wala. The only identification was Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain out the window. Martinez, dressed in the standard tech wardrobe of jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, was sitting at her desk, which was exactly the same as the rest of her staff.

“After I finished graduate school at the University of Chicago, I decided to travel to Uganda to start my first company using technology to provide universal basic income,” Martinez told me as Wala coders quietly poked away at their computers around us. “I was focused on cash transfers to consumers at the very bottom of the pyramid. We were dispersing payments with a goal of seeing how subsistence farmers would invest their money. We were tracking a lot of data, seeing if they were investing it in their kids’ school fees, their healthcare, and building their businesses and expanding their farms.”

The safety of money was a primary concern. Transferring money from aid partners in the United States, Martinez noted that farmers would cash out quickly instead of keeping the money in a mobile wallet. “We knew we were creating impact and helping these people invest in their lives and communities, but there was no safe, affordable, and accessible place for them to grow and store their money.”

Why were villagers cashing out as soon as they could even though that meant storing large amounts of fiat currency? Taking a closer look, Martinez realised the problem was with the banks and their high fee structures. Villagers reported that banks in Uganda were difficult to work with, had rough customer service reputations, and charged high fees for every transaction.

“The way the banks operate in emerging markets is by charging high fees,” Martinez continued. “And that’s the biggest barrier: Consumers are disincentivized from participating in the system. They say: ‘I can use cash because I don’t have to pay fees’. It’s easier. And that’s the problem.”

A solution hiding in plain sight

Every four years, the World Bank releases a Global Findex survey that’s the most complete report on demand for global financial services. The latest report, released in April, found impressive growth in demand for financial services worldwide and a slight uptick in new account creation. As the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI) outlined in a recent paper, the Global Findex report highlighted a number of serious challenges in the sector. Aside from the large number of dormant accounts in places like India, CFI found that the cost of maintaining an account was still too high and thus excluded a large number of people across Africa. Wala recognized this problem from its experience on the ground. Its business model is designed to find a way around the current fee structure, and it has stumbled upon an unlikely way to do it.

“The biggest issue we saw was that we needed to remove the cost problem and from there we could start really driving financial inclusion,” Martinez explained. “It’s not about just giving bank accounts to anyone, that’s the wrong answer. A bank account isn’t a solution. It’s about creating a more efficient solution that removes the barriers for these consumers.”

The challenge is not solely unbanked populations across Africa but underbanked Africans that are not using existing banks accounts due to high fees and inefficient banks. Wala’s solution was to use blockchain technology to create a new money model that would have zero fees and be easy to use. According to Wired’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, the standard definition of blockchain describes a “shared, decentralized, cryptographically secure, immutable digital ledger”.

In April, Wala launched Dala, its own cryptocurrency wallet, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. A month and a half later, Dala had over 100,000 active users. Martinez walked me through how Dala works.

“Wala users download the Wala app, and every user gets a Dala wallet. Users deposit money and it goes into their Dala wallet. So, for example, someone would see that they have five dala based on whatever amount of South African rand or shillings they deposit,” she explained. “Dala enables them to move value anywhere instantly for free. They can use it inside the Wala application, where they can buy airtime, data, and pay electric bills or school fees all at no cost. Traditionally mobile money users would pay high fees to pay bills or buy airtime. We launched with no fees at all, and honestly had no idea it would grow so fast.”

According to Wala’s website, the Dala network resembles the structure used by cryptocurrency exchanges. “To engage,” the company website outlines, “a user will create an on-chain payment channel with the Dala network and commit a certain amount of tokens to the channel. The user is then able to transact with all other members participating in the network.” Essentially, the company is making money from fees collected through operating the network and engaging enterprises in the retail, energy, and infrastructure sectors looking to use Dala. At this stage, user growth appears to outweigh concerns about fee collection.

Most consumers in Wala’s markets are spending less than $0.80 on average per transaction, yet some mobile money providers still levy fees. In fact, Martinez argues, the smaller the amount of money, the higher the fee in some cases. This model disincentivizes participation in mobile money. People don’t use the platforms because they’re expensive, not because of access issues.

The challenge of cryptocurrencies is building the right ecosystem that people want to use. Anyone can issue a cryptocurrency but unless there is broad uptake, there is no value. With its surprising growth numbers, Wala is one of the first startups in Africa to solve the ecosystem challenge. The question now is how can it expand to new countries.

“We already have over 100,000 merchants on the ground to do cash-in-cash-out. So the minute we launched Wala and Dala, users could actually buy things with Dala. They can soon go to these merchants throughout Africa and cash in or cash out and say “I want to buy Dala, here’s R10.’”

The next step for the company is signing up enterprises that are willing to pay employees in Dala. That will allow Wala to move closer to achieving its vision of creating a digital currency for Africa that enables consumers and enterprises to move value anywhere instantly.

Consumers don’t even know they’re using crypto

Wala simply created their own cyprtocurrency to enable a new fee payment structure, encourage growth on their platform, and expand users’ ability to use mobile money. The surprising part is most users don’t ever know that they are using a cryptocurrency at all. According to Martinez, cryptocurrency and blockchain is confusing, so to avoid that confusion Wala never mentions their use of blockchain.

“Our consumers have been using tokenized assets their whole lives: airtime. Airtime was the first way consumers moved value. It’s not a currency but that’s why M-Pesa launched because people were sending airtime to each other as a form of payment. We’re doing the exact same thing, it’s just called Dala. We don’t even need to explain it to them. They instantly adapt and get it. As long as you have an exchange rate so they can see what it’s equal to in their local currency, it makes sense to them.”

Given the popularity of Wala’s products, the future looks bright for real-life blockchain applications in the financial inclusion sector. According to Martinez, South African regulators are “probably the most progressive in the world right now” when it comes to blockchain because they are stepping back and letting the technology develop. It’s one reason why Cape Town has emerged as a powerhouse of fintech development in Africa.

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Can Cryptocurrency Eliminate Mobile Money Fees? was originally published in emerge85 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We live our lives on the internet, and concerns around data protection will continue to intensify around the world. In the United States, major technology companies such as Facebook and Google have come under fire for their data collection practices, specifically the way they share user data with third parties. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently testified before Congress and the European Commission to outline his plans to establish strong data protections on his platforms. Whether the US government will take any significant action remains to be seen.

While the data protection debate is focused on large technology giants, the discussion could have an enormous impact in emerging markets. In Africa, many countries lack any form of data protection legislation or government regulation, as the development media platform Devex highlighted this week.

The few African countries to address the issue have focused legislation on cybercrime and, in cases such as Uganda, controlling political dissent on social media and taxing those platforms. Few, if any, have addressed individual data rights and protection. Africa is one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for internet communication and technology. Cheap smartphones and infrastructure improvements are allowing millions of Africans to get online for the first time. This is having an enormous impact on how Africans save, spend, and remit money, while facilitating myriad opportunities in healthcare, insurance, and government services.

Adopted in 2014, the African Union’s Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection aims to protect citizens’ information and examine how data policies overlap with national security concerns. The document is unique for a regional bloc and reveals that the African Union understands the gravity of the data protection issue. That said, few member states have adopted it. Only 10 of the 55 African countries have signed on to the convention, three more have ratified it, and others have used it to write their own legislation.

Before moving to innovative solutions in emerging markets beyond Africa, it should be noted that the European Union’s (EU) recently passed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for EU residents does wield influence in Africa. Not only has the GDPR demonstrated how governments can forcefully take action on data protection, it also “applies to any institution that collects data from EU citizens including many in Africa”. Given the economic ties between the continent and Europe, especially in North Africa, businesses will have to adapt to the GDPR regulations in some form or another.

As such, emerging markets should look to the discussion in India around the Aadhar identification system as an early test case for clues on path forward on data protection. Considering the gravity of the data protection problem, governments have an important role to play in facilitating an equitable solution.

What began as a measure to streamline the delivery of state benefits and services, Aadhar has transformed into a biometric database for all Indians. The Indian government has forcefully argued that an electronic identity system will reduce corruption. Despite the stated benefits of the Aahdar system, it was never meant to be compulsory. Since Aadhar has been incorporated into government services, however, it has become de facto mandatory.

As Samanth Subramanian noted in a report about Aadhar for emerge85, “… the Supreme Court [began] hearing a collection of civil society petitions about the Aadhaar initiative, whether it endangers Indian citizens’ right to privacy and if its mandatory nature is justified. The verdict will have widespread repercussions for the Aadhaar scheme and for data protection in India more broadly. It will also hold familiar parallels for other countries around the world that face dilemmas involving data security, institutional efficiency, and citizen welfare.”

Whatever the Indian Supreme Court rules on Aadhar will arguably have more bearing on how other emerging market countries develop data protection laws than developments coming from the US Congress or European Commission. While the largest technology companies are mostly located in the West, emerging markets are forging their own unique relationship with data. China’s looming influence is another model that African countries such as Uganda could seek to emulate.

One thing is for sure, emerging markets shouldn’t be singled out for lacking data protection standards while the West faces similar problems and has an equally difficult time finding lasting solutions. Data protection is a global problem, and the way emerging markets choose to handle it has just as much weight as US or European responses.

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India’s Data Protection Laws Will Have a Major Impact in Africa was originally published in emerge85 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For all of the buzz around mobile money, one of the most fascinating aspects of the smartphone revolution in emerging markets is insurance. The rapid proliferation of cheap smartphones has given rise to a competitive microinsurance market extending from Ghana to the Philippines. This is especially true for those earning lower incomes at the bottom of the economic ladder. This sector of society faces endemic risks. Instead of having to hide money under the mattress for an emergency, mobile insurance now offers millions of low-wage earners their first entry point into the regulated financial space.

MicroEnsure, a company based in the United Kingdom with offices and projects around the world, is one of the leading microinsurance lenders in emerging markets. Partnering with telecommunications operators, MicroEnsure has made the process of signing up for insurance as easy as buying mobile airtime. We recently spoke with Peter Gross, MicroEnsure’s director of strategy, to get a sense of the challenges and opportunities facing the company in Africa and South Asia. He began with a story from the Philippines that captures the changes underway in the insurance industry. In 2010, he was stationed in the country training to lead MicroEnsure’s Ghana office. Ahead of a meeting about credit life insurance, he recalled feeling a little uneasy about the product offering.

Shifting perceptions of insurance

Credit life insurance is when a customer takes a loan from a bank, say for a year, and should they die during that year the insurance company pays the family out. Gross was worried customers would be unfamiliar with such a product and the concept would be hard for people to grasp.

“I was worried about these low-income consumers,” Gross told me over the phone. “So I went out and I pulled a woman aside in the lending group and asked her, ‘Do you know about any insurance on this product?’ And she said ‘Oh yes, if I die, the insurance company pays back my bank so it doesn’t come after my family. But also in case I’m hospitalized, in case I have an accident, in case my property burns down’. And then another woman walked over and added, ‘Oh and remember, for your husband too.’”

Gross went on with his story in a more excited manner. “And then a third woman came over and said, ‘Remember guys, that woman in the next village who had a claim paid so fast last month and it really saved her life.’ And then a fourth woman came over — because you know, the conversation was getting interesting now — and she said, ‘Actually, there are years where I don’t need a loan, but I take one anyway just to get the insurance coverage.’ And it hit me: This is not just a product that is a grudge purchase for people as insurance has always been for me, this is literally selling debt for people to get access to this product they couldn’t access otherwise.”

An untapped customer base

MicroEnsure has registered more than 60m customers in 15 countries in the span of 15 years. The company operates in 12 countries with a focus on African and Asian markets. It is widely seen as a pioneer in emerging market microinsurance due to its approach of using highly scaled channels such as banks and telecoms companies to facilitate its insurance products. MicroEnsure claims its partners’ brand recognition and loyalty increase as a result of MicroEnsure products. It’s also the company’s focus on low-income customers that sets it apart from competitors. This customer base continues to grow and, as Gross points out, needs insurance products more than most.

“We found that low-income consumers actually have a high demand for good insurance, so you just have to package it the right way. They are always thinking of risk mitigation because they have to use it on a frequent basis to deal with financial shocks. The problem is those coping mechanisms can create huge setbacks. Taking a kid out of school is a massive loss of economic opportunity for a family in the long term just for the savings of a few dollars in the short term. Not having insurance effectively allows people to fall back into poverty for often very simple financial shocks.”

The breakthrough

MicroEnsure was started by Richard Leftley, who came up with the idea after volunteering in Zambia in the early 2000s. The company’s first iterations flopped and, according to an interview last year with How We Made It in Africa, it wasn’t until Leftley and his team looked at low-income mobile users that they found a workable business model. They found that in Ghana, low-income users would buy airtime from several different mobile operators and use various SIM cards because the strength of the mobile signal varied from place to place. For the mobile companies, their inability to retain customers had a negative impact on their bottom line. MicroEnsure said it could help solve this problem. It approached one mobile carrier, Tigo, and argued that by offering free insurance, the company would be creating a valuable incentive for users to commit to the network. Every time a user tops up to a certain level, they would have the option of free microinsurance.

“They’re still spending the same amount of money topping up their phones, but now getting a reward from Tigo to top up more. So Tigo wins because it gets more top-ups. The customer wins because they get free insurance and address the risk they were worrying about, and basically they are not spending any more on [airtime] only more on one network,” Leftley said. “So the cost of insurance is more than offset by the increase in top-up revenue.”

Gross explained the background of the Tigo deal in more detail. “What technology did there was force us to simplify the product, because if we were going to put it in front of a million consumers, we couldn’t have 20-page documents and lots of complex exclusions and individual medical underwriting and all these things that insurers are famous for. We had to make it work like any other mobile product. And so we cut out all the exclusions. We made the policy wording three SMSs long as opposed to 20 pages long.”

Competition from China

MicroEnsure burst onto the startup scene just as China’s technology prowess began to take shape. Today, Chinese competitors present a challenge to MicroEnsure’s business, especially in Africa. “The way in which China can leverage capital, intellectual property, and talent to create massive scale overnight is a threat to anyone in these markets,” Gross noted. “China invests in Africa; the West gives to Africa — there’s a big difference. In the United States, it’s either a donor or defense model for Africa.”

One challenge Chinese companies (and every company operating in Africa) have to deal with is navigating the regulatory hurdles of the insurance industry. While India may be one market from a microinsurance standpoint, Africa has 55 different regulatory climates. Kenya, Gross pointed out, has one of the best regulatory environments on the continent thanks to the success of M-Pesa. The result is a highly competitive market landscape and some of the best talent on the continent.

“After M-Pesa’s success, hundreds of other mobile money schemes launched in Africa with the assumption that if you build it, they will come — and they didn’t come,” Gross said. “You can’t just credit SafariCom’s success to executional prowess. There’s got to be something about the Kenyan market that allowed it to flourish and take off.”

There have been many successful startups since M-Pesa burst onto the scene, and MicroEnsure can count itself as one. But the company is based aboard. The ground is ripe for a truly local startup to embrace the innovation taking place in the global technology scene and translate it into a local solution, whether in Niger or Botswana.

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Would You Like Some Insurance with Your Airtime? was originally published in emerge85 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.