Edwin's Corner

This is really an article about a ledger and two ideologies that compete to control it. One ascribes to a stateless society, defined by self-governed voluntary institutions. The other looks to government and state machinery for answers. The State As of this writing, there are more than two hundred self-governing states in the world, this development became a reality over the last 200 years as former monarchs lost their influence and power, and sold a particular brand of government to the rest of the world. The world was taught after two world wars that one of the primary functions of a state was to offer security. The functionaries that arose from the creation of the state; be it the military, the police, the judiciary, administrators or the tax collectors were not self-supporting so taxes were essential to allow the state to function. However, recently, people have lost their trust on the system. The global financial crisis of 2007-08 raised questions ab...

The Insurance industry is undergoing a dramatic and necessary disruption.   This disruption serves two purposes, one, to allow insurance to be offered at a microlevel and to a market that was hitherto underserved and two, to ensure that the customer is more intimately engaged.   A few weeks ago I looked at how technology is disrupting the Insurance industry in Africa and how micro insurance promises to save Africa. If you missed it, read it here . In this piece, we want to suggest five ways an incumbent in the Insurance industry can change and survive. We will be using the example of the Kenyan market, one of the most vibrant in the African continent. 1.      Develop a digital strategy In doing this, lies the evolution of the strategy. We have seen it evolve from a static plan covering multiple years, to a flexible plan that adapts to a changing environment. Today, there is a rising demand for more strategic thinkers acr...

The ancient Chinese farmer, medieval Venetian merchant and the conquering Victorian company man had one thing in common. They took insurance. Arguably, our civilization has gone this far because men took risks and knew there was a fallback plan in the face of insurmountable odds. Generally, the insurance industry has grown over several centuries into a hydra of products and services, vastly complex and vaguely understood. However, through all its manifestations, the primary goal of insurance is to hedge against the risk of contingent loss. To this end, it has failed to ignite the African imagination. Historically brought by the white man as he colonized and disenfranchised Africa, Insurance has suffered shame in the hands of a misinformed continent. Only the affluent and middle class seem to grasp its power with penetration rates in the continent below 5% . Insurance agents have also failed to inspire its uptake with a general feeling that they are unreliable, u...

  I remember the first time a computer made an impression. It was in 1993, and I was living in Nanyuki an outpost town in Kenya (at least back then). I was ten, and I had gone to visit a programmer who had been hired by a research team studying Mount Kenya and the ecology around it. Although most details are hazy today, I remember the programmer, I really thought he was the most intelligent man alive and everything that came out of his mouth was the golden truth. I promised myself that one day I would own and operate a computer like him. I was one of the first students in Kenya back in 1997 to take up IT as a subject in high school, I honesty think that was a blessing because we had a volunteer from the UK who had experience in developing software, he took us through three of the four year in high school, it is through him that we really dug into C++, C and Pascal programming languages. It is from here that some of my colleagues eventually found themselves working...