by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 29, 2022 | Consumers
A trade bloc is negotiated by heads of state, but it is judged, eventually, at a market stall and a checkout. East Africa’s consumers have heard the promise of integration before and mostly experienced it as unchanged prices and the same queues at the same...
by The Fikiria Desk | Jan 13, 2022 | Consumers
Most people never see the machinery that moves their money, and that is usually a sign it works. In much of East Africa the opposite has held for cross-border payments: the machinery is visible precisely because it strains. A trader paying a supplier in another...
by The Fikiria Desk | Jan 1, 2021 | Consumers
Trade agreements are written in the language of tariffs and schedules, but customers experience them, if at all, as a price on a shelf and a product in reach. That is the gap East African consumers face today: trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area has...
by The Fikiria Desk | Sep 4, 2020 | Consumers
For most Ugandans the payments revolution already happened, and it lives in a SIM card rather than a bank branch. People send school fees, pay a supplier and receive wages by phone as a matter of routine. What changes on 4 September 2020 is not the tool but the...
by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 29, 2020 | Consumers
A sovereign wealth fund is written in the language of balance sheets, but the household in Djibouti City reads its life in prices: the cost of a data bundle, the reliability of the power supply, the fare on a shared taxi. This week the state established a fund to...