- Dayo here.
Hi everyone at CHI.
Thanks again so much for all of your attention
and great questions during my presentation on Monday.
I am here because we ran out of time
and I wasn't able to address everybody's questions.
So I've got a few here from your index cards.
And I thought I would run through just my thoughts briefly
on some of the great questions you guys have asked.
So, just to refresh your memory
I spent some time talking about formality bias
in political and economic systems with a focus on Africa.
Just exploring how sometimes we take for granted
that it should be heads of state
or heads of large ministries or bureaucracies
that are responsible and able to make change.
When, in my opinion, and in my research,
I found that informal systems,
human networks, actually are extremely powerful and robust
in responding to major shocks.
They're a form of resilience that is endemic across
what I'm calling lean economies,
which, as many of you pointed out,
not only encompasses Africa,
but encompasses places like the Caribbean,
and other parts of Latin America, as well as India,
and including parts of the West.
So, without further ado,
I'm gonna try and address some of the questions
that you guys have around the speech that I gave,
and what's next.
So, one of the questions is,
I should read the whole thing,
and I don't have the names of people,
but the question reads
"I think you're right that it's essential
"to understand and work with informal systems
" in the short term, but in the long term,
"don't we want informal systems
" to transition to formal systems
"so that nepotism, arbitrariness, and individual pregidous
"can make way for the rule of law
"and more systematic forms of justice?"
That's a fantastic question.
And I agree with you.
I think I answered it briefly
during the on-stage discussion,
but in short I think
I'm a little too impatient on some level
to wait for these formal systems
to become alive to the potential of informal systems.
And I'll give a couple of examples where
the formal and the informal worked together successfully
when the formal sector recognized and appreciated
what was going on in the informal sector
and institutionalized it.
The first great example is M-Pesa
where this was something where people
were doing it informally,
trading airtime back and forth.
And it was the telecom in partnership
with an aid agency from the UK that actually stepped in,
provided seed investment and structure
for the M-Pesa mobile money transfer system to grow.
So that's one great example.
The second example is from Malawi,
a series of health clinics
that had a huge crisis in Malawi around orphans.
An entire generation was wiped out
by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 90s.
And so a lot of people were on antiretrovirals,
and so helping people know they needed to come back
to the places for medical care was a top inititiative.
And at the same time,
there were not a lot of great public health records.
It was all paper.
And at the clinic I went to, I took photos
of stacks of paper higher than your head
trying to keep track of people.
So what these folks did was
they bought a bunch of old touchscreen
first-generation hardware from eBay,
if you can believe that,
upcycled them, brought them to Malawi,
and created a touchscreen interface for these points of care
that allowed for processing time for any individual patient
to go from 20 minutes, down to 30 seconds.
And so this improvement in efficiency
was enormously successful.
It scaled to 44 different health clinics
and then the Ministry of Health,
having observed this incredible kind of
upcycling, local-software-hardware-hack,
adopted it as a best practice across all of the clinics
that the government operates.
And so that's an example of the informal,
people who wanna run through walls
or outside the traditional establishment
proving a concept such that a government
could actually take ownership over it
and scale it the way only governments really can do.
So I think that's an example of
addressing some of what you're talking about
in this question here.
So, the second question is
"As a Brazilian, I live in a mix of formal and informal.
"Main difficulty is that they do not work well together,
"although work well alone.
"How Africa is solving that?"
Well, I guess the question kind of speaks
to the answer I just gave, which is that
giving the space to entrepreneurs
and innovators on the outside to do what they're doing
by creating an enabling environment is important
because they can do more when they have the latitude.
And, frankly, it's even things like having good roads
actually ends up being incredibly impactful.
I don't tend to like the term social entrepreneurship,
because in a lean economy,
all entrepreneurship is social, right?
You have a job, you've got a family,
you've got people that depend on you,
you're in a tightly-packed network of interdependence.
The fact that you're employed,
whether or not it's for something that's socially good,
actually makes a difference.
So, it's why things like regulations,
and access to finance, and good roads
are things that the public sector can do
that actually end up supercharging the informal sector.
And it's when those things don't work
that the informal sector is really hobbled.
So, in Brazil, I'm not as familiar
with the economy and the political issues
or the business environment there.
But you can imagine having things like land tenure,
and the ability to just build assets around property.
That's something that really only the state can do.
And when land tenure and land rights
are sort of formalized, then it unlocks opportunity
for the informal sector.
Likewise, I think lending to small businesses
and allowing them not to have the same logic
to be a big corporation
but allowing them to borrow money and build assets,
even if they don't look like a major US corporation
is another way that governments can encourage
the informal sector to make change.
The last question I'll answer is,
"I love your concepts in adjusting the frame,"
Thank you.
"What I'm wondering is how I can be adapted by innovators
"given that most of them are doing it
"largely for financial gain.
"But it does not seem that Kanju can offer the ROI
"most people need to live in expensive areas
"like NYC or SF where the developers might live.
"Thank you."
What an interesting question.
So one, I think that the frame itself is kind of inaccurate.
There are world-class developers and software engineers
who live outside of New York City and Silicon Valley.
A lot of them live in Nairobi.
Some of them live in Cameroon.
Some of them live in Morocco.
What's amazing about the internet and places like GitHub,
and all of the different developer resources
and ecosystems that exist,
is that anyone can access them at any time.
And what I found is there was really a kind of unfamiliarity
with those places that really keeps investors
from going to find the next M-Pesa
or the next major innovation
that can scale and change the world.
So I would say, it's almost about
a failure of imagination and a failure of exposure
that would lead someone to assume
that you can't make money with a major exit
from a start-up company and based in Africa.
I think, more and more, capital is realizing
that there is an opportunity.
And you saw,
oh God, what's the statistic?
Hundreds of millions of dollars raised in private equity
and venture capital specifically targeting East Africa.
And I think that makes a world of sense.
And it's again, not just in the consumer-tech industry,
but also in areas like solar.
Right, if you build a really reliable system
that gets people to pay for solar installations,
that scales well,
you've created a lot of value, not just social value,
which, of course, that is true,
but real monetary value,
that on some level, given the labor costs are low,
could actually be much more profitable in the long run.
So, I've seen the talent firsthand in places, again,
from Cameroon to Morocco to South Africa,
it is there.
It is there, it's all over the world, not just in Africa,
and certainly not just in Silicon Valley.
So it's about exposure,
and willingness to deal with situations
that might not be as legible as they are in the West,
where you might have a small business
that's got a great value propsition
but they haven't figured out everything they need to know
about a balance sheet and a slick deck.
And so yeah, trying a little harder can pay big returns.
Last question is that
"Young girls and women don't have as much access
"to computer technology.
"That's a big deal."
It's something that really, really makes a difference.
Access to knowledge changes lives,
it's changed my life.
And I think the fact that I'm a woman
born in the United States and not a woman born in Nigeria
may have something to do
with my ability to access knowledge.
I think it's a travesty that we don't do more and better.
What I will say, is that what's nice about
both creating technology and using it,
is that it's gender-neutral.
And so there's a lot more work to do,
especially around things like
who has access to the finances in a home
that allows for buying a smartphone,
or even a feature phone.
We've also seen that women
share phones more often amongst themselves.
Where a single phone actually gets passed around
from person to person so everyone
got a little bit of ability to access the web.
And so, creating design experiences
that reflect and respect that reality,
for example, making sure your login is a really simple flow,
because someone might be logging in constantly.
And if a woman encounters friction, she may not return.
So, I think there are things that you can do
across the board that will support women
in terms of making the internet easier to access.
And things like price, will follow along with that.
But in terms of a content side,
just making sure the internet feels valuable to women
I think is really one of the first steps.
And so, that's about empowering women
to create things on their own.
So, that's my two cents about all your great questions.
Thank you again, very much for having me.
And I hope you guys enjoy the rest of CHI.
Bye.