After being selected for the IDRC supported iBoP Asia Project Small Grants competition in 2008, I completed a series of social design projects on the informal rural socio-economic system. The Prepaid Economy project (2009) established the foundation of understanding household financial management on irregular incomes and unpredictable cash flows from a variety of sources that characterizes rural micro-enterprises. Managing a sophisticated portfolio of investments enable rural entrepreneurs to navigate seasonal changes to revenues, as can be seen the visualized example below, over the course of the natural year.
I continued this work, as guest researcher at Wageningen University’s Economic Research Unit, increasing the layers of my understanding of the last mile of the farm to fork value chain in a series of projects for the Dutch Ministry of the Economy and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs which were in the service of food security (September 2012 to December 2013). Two of our publications are shared below:
Interdependent Microsystems [Link to original PDF]
The Kenyan ‘farmer’ value chain was not just a neat box in the formal structure of a value chain, but a flexible, multipurpose node in the rural economy’s complex web of human interaction and exchange of goods, services and knowledge. Therefore we have called it the agricultural value web. This is the main conclusion from the inquiry on adoption of information and technology services with farmers in their rural communities. LEI Wageningen UR has executed this inquiry on behalf of the Dutch Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Economic Affairs. [Text source]
Weaving Knowledge Systems [Link to original PDF]
In this paper, we share our experience of developing and executing a user centered design workshop for an interdisciplinary team of policy makers, planners, funders and implementers of public private partnerships (PPPs) for programs on sustainable agricultural value chain development. For an audience who will neither practice the design profession nor tend to apply the user centered design process in their day to day work, what can we offer as the essential takeaways from a workshop spent immersed in the human centered design experience?
10 years later, this foundation of understanding the informal rural and urban economy which provided the basis for my professional practice in innovation and design for the emerging markets of the African continent, culminated in this short introduction to the impact of digitalization, as observed in Kenya (2010 to 2019).
