Zimbabwe Primer: Major Urban Consumer Concentrations

Since Zimabwe is in the news: a quick analysis on the consumer class in the major cities of Zimbabwe.  Read more here.

Why Do Economic Links Matter in Tackling HIV/AIDS?

For the One Campaign, Fraym created a Connectivity Index, which measures how people and goods move across Africa, to display how significant the economic interaction is between high-burden countries and their neighbors. A reduction in access to treatment in economic hubs like Johannesburg and Lagos could have negative impacts across the continent.

Read more here.

Why Nakumatt Went Down in East Africa

Using geostatistical techniques and on-the-ground expertise, Fraym explores why supermarket chain Nakumatt failed in East Africa with a case study in Kampala.  Read more here.

Who’s Ready to Adopt Digital Financial Services?

Fraym's analysis of digital financial inclusion in Africa for the IFC.

African consumers are the global leaders in the adoption of digital financial services like mobile money. Yet traditional banks and emerging digital providers both continue to grapple with how to expand financial inclusion.  It can be expensive and difficult for financial services providers to figure out the most useful product offering and understand the market. Most providers find themselves with two options: expensive primary data collection or blindly introduce a product to the market and see what happens.

At Fraym, we’ve been thinking about how to approach this in a more strategic and efficient way. By harnessing our comprehensive demographic, expenditure, and geospatial data, we can determine who’s ready for a digital financial services product – the optimal customer – and where providers should target.

Read more here.

Electrifying sub-Saharan Africa

New analysis by the Fraym team:

600 Million Unconnected in Africa – Who Can Pay for Off-Grid Power?

Chickpea salad (on toast, cause, we don't go nowhere without toast)

I woke up this morning craving it, asked Katie P for the recipe, and voile:

What you need:
1 can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed (obviously)
2 tablespoons very thinly sliced black olives (chopped even)
2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley (depends on how you like it)

1 tablespoon finely chopped Thai green chilis or jalapeno peppers (optional but c'mon we all crave the kick!)
Zest and juice from a lemon (if you’ve got one of those sad, juice-less lemons, that sucks for you)

Couple of good pinches of salt (I like a nice sea salt or kosher salt)
A few grinds of coarse black pepper

A dash of cumin (optional); or Shaan/MTN chole mix
A few glugs of olive oil (you know what I mean)

Mix everything but the olive oil in a bowl. Very lightly smash the chickpea mixture with the back of a fork. You’re not looking for a hummus-like consistency but something closer to a coarse chop with a few smaller bits to hold it together. Add the glugs of olive oil, mix it lightly and you're done!

This is awesome as a sandwich on toasted bread, and it needs nothing else on it, but, if you want to live on the edge, throw in some harissa, I bet that would also be delicious.

Courtesy of Katie (via ‘wichcraft).  

What’s so special about Kenya’s Generation BUMP?

The young African consumer class is a highly prized demographic. Yet finding them can be tricky. Fraym recently used geospatial data to identify and locate Nigerians who are 18-34 years old, educated, and have money to spend. We found 29 million of them and dubbed this valuable demographic slice, Generation BUMP.

What about Kenya?  The Kenyan economy is growing rapidly, while its capital Nairobi is a stand-out performer on the Fraym Urban Markets Index, ranking 10th on the continent for metropolitan economic activity, consumer power, and trade and travel connections. Using neighborhood-level data across the country, Fraym identified Kenya’s Generation BUMP.

Kenya’s Generation BUMP is estimated at roughly 4.5 million strong, with just over 1 million living in Nairobi. But more than just sizable, this group is:

Banked. More than twice as likely to have a bank account (83 vs. 39 percent)
Urban. Three times as likely to live in an urban setting (65 vs. 22 percent)
Mobile. Phone ownership is nearly universal among Kenyan BUMPers at 98 percent (vs. 83 percent for non-BUMPers).
Plugged-in. Media consumption is starkly higher. They are more than twice as likely to regularly watch television (76 vs. 34 percent) or read newspapers (45 vs 18 percent).

Watch this space for more geospatial demographic and consumer analysis in other markets.

Impact of Boko Haram on Urbanization

Much attention has been placed on the rapid population growth in metropolitan Lagos. As one of Africa’s megacities and the growth engine for much of western Africa, that focus makes sense. However, the rate of urbanization actually has been much faster in historically less urban states, particularly due to the Boko Haram conflict.

As countries in the Lake Chad Basin continue to defend and rebuild areas affected by the Boko Haram insurgency, food insecurity is swelling across Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. The terrorist organization has caused over 20,000 deaths and displaced 2 million people since 2009 due to both violence and the inability of communities to maintain their farming-based livelihoods.

Where are these dislocated populations going?

See the Story map at Fraym.io

The Great Scooter Convergence in Nigeria

Nigeria has been in the press lately as a poster child for inequality as the income gap between the wealthy and the poor is, by some measures, widening. The World Bank estimates that 86 million Nigerians, almost half the population, live in extreme poverty.

Another way to think about inequality is to look at differences in asset ownership: do the poor possess assets that are associated with middle and upper-class standards of living?

We compared a decade’s worth of asset ownership data from household surveys and discovered an unexpected finding: ownership of scooters and motorcycles across different socioeconomic classes have converged.

Read more here.

Corridors Are the Key

Today at Youth Connekt Africa ECA's Executive Secretary Vera Songwe noted the need to focus on cities and corridors for greater impact in job creation with data and analysis from Fraym.

How are people’s lives changed by a new highway?

Fraym’s high-resolution time series mapping in Accra, Ghana for the AfDB.

Read more about this analysis and the AfDB’s results in the 2017 Annual Development Effectiveness Review.

Where are Nigeria’s most dynamic consumers? Introducing Generation BUMP

Kupanda Capital wanted to sharpen its approach to building media and creative companies in Nigeria, Africa’s largest consumer market. They needed to understand which demographic segments were driving these sectors and where they were concentrated. Kupanda partnered with Fraym to use our proprietary geospatial platform to identify young, educated consumers with spending power.

What we found is a special group of Nigerians who are highly Banked, Urban, Mobile, and Plugged-in. We found Generation BUMP.

Kupanda is now using Fraym data at the neighborhood level to pinpoint where these 29 million valuable consumers reside across Nigeria. Watch this space for more analysis from Fraym locating this dynamic demographic in other African markets.

Technical note: To answer this question, Fraym harmonized and enhanced data from a variety of large representative household surveys and other data sources (including UN population, USGS Landscan, and the GeoData Institute) and then applied layers of analytical and econometric methods (including survey-to-survey imputation, small area estimation, and geospatial interpolation).

Fraym's Africa Urban Markets Index

Africa is in the midst of a massive and historic transformation. Rapid urbanization, rising incomes, a youth bulge, and the diffusion of technology are combining to create exciting future centers of economic growth and opportunity. Richard Florida wrote in Rise of the Creative Class that “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource” and that “denser cities are smarter and more productive.”

Yet, very little data are available about Africa’s burgeoning urban clusters. Most economic, social, and consumer data are provided on a national basis or through costly one-off surveys. Fraym’s proprietary data platform can do better.

For anyone wanting to pinpoint Africa’s largest, wealthiest, and most networked populations, we created the Fraym Urban Markets Index. The Index estimates and ranks every geographic cluster on the continent with at least 300,000 people (n=169 cities) on three dimensions:

• Economic activity. What is the GDP for the city’s actual geospatial footprint? 
• Consumers. How many people live in a home with a car, motorbike, television, or refrigerator? 
• Connectivity. How networked is the city by trade and air travel? 

Three highlights from the Index:

• Cairo, Cairo, Cairo. The clear winner is Egypt’s capital, which tops the overall index and each of the three dimensions. While Johannesburg (2) and Lagos (3) are not surprising, some of the other Top 10 may be more unexpected, like Luanda (4), Kinshasa (5), and Khartoum (8). 
• West Africa > East Africa. In fact, the consumer class of Lagos is roughly the same size as all thirteen cities in the East African Community combined. 
• The Franco-underdogs. Several lesser-known Francophone cities far outranked better-known English-speaking capitals. Douala (23), Yaoundé (24), Ouagadougou (26), and Bamako (28) all outranked Lusaka (30), Kampala (37), Harare (51), and Kigali (61). 

Read the full Fraym Urban Markets Index paper with methodology and more takeaways (including a few other surprises) here.

Reading Updates for the Month: January 2017

A technology heavy reading list for the month.

How Statistics Lost Their Power - And Why We Should Fear What Comes Next
The Guardian, The Long Read
Thursday, 19 January 2017

The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
Vice, Motherboard (originally published in Das Magazin)
Saturday, 28 January 2017

The Great A.I. Awakening
The New York Times Magazine
Wednesday, 14 December 2016