Insights

Digital Innovation Insights Across Africa

Case studies from real engagements, with the numbers where we are allowed to publish them and an honest gap where we are not.

1 Jun 20232 min read

Data Driven Decision Making

Gut instinct is cheap to use and expensive to be wrong with. Why so many decisions still rest on it, and what changes once the evidence is finally within reach.

ReadData & Analytics

15 May 20233 min read

Blockchain ABCs

Blockchain is discussed almost entirely through cryptocurrency. That is a small part of it. Here is a plain account of what a distributed ledger is, and the narrower set of problems where it genuinely beats an ordinary database.

ReadBlockchain

1 May 20231 min read

From Data to Decisions: The Impact of AI on Credit Risk Management

A lender could not price risk on borrowers with no formal credit history. We trained a model on their historical loan book. Defaults fell 30 percent.

ReadFinancial Services

15 Apr 20231 min read

Understanding Your Customers: A Case Study of Adoption and Product Improvement

A client wanted to know why take-up of a new product was slow. Part of the answer was the product. The rest was the channel: WhatsApp, where the customers already were.

ReadProduct Strategy

1 Apr 20231 min read

Behavioural Finance: A Case Study of Segmenting Customers for Success

A bank held years of transaction history and still could not describe its own customers. Segmenting on behaviour rather than demographics changed how it approached each group.

ReadFinancial Services

15 Mar 20231 min read

Shaping the Future of East Africa's Financial Industry

A fintech wanted into East Africa. We worked with financial institutions in Tanzania and Kenya to find the gap in the market, then scoped the build with the client's own engineers.

ReadFinancial Services

1 Mar 20231 min read

Farming's Next Frontier: A Case Study of Simple Data Tools Transforming Operations

An agriculture client was collecting farmer data on paper and using almost none of it. The fix was small: digital reporting, and one dashboard the operations team actually opens.

ReadAgriculture

15 Feb 20232 min read

Unlocking the Power of Informal Savings: A Case Study

Before launching a digital savings product, one provider needed to know how savings groups already work. So we asked. 156 respondents, representing roughly 1,500 members, and what came back reshaped the product.

ReadFinancial Services

1 Feb 20231 min read

From Mine to Market: A Blockchain Concept Note for Transparency in the Gold Industry

Investors buying Tanzanian gold have no way to verify where a parcel came from. A concept note for tracking provenance from artisanal miner to dealer, with geolocation and a timestamp at every hop.

ReadBlockchain

18 Jan 20233 min read

Empowering Farmers Through Alternative Data: Afropavo's Approach to Financial Inclusion

Smallholder farmers are locked out of credit because they have no documented financial history. Rwebu Mutahaba and Dr. Said Baadel on turning day-to-day farm activity and mobile money records into a signal a lender can act on.

ReadAgriculture