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Spend enough time around venture capital in emerging markets, and you keep hearing the same ambition: modernising the informal economy.
Look at Nairobi, Kenya. Tens of thousands of neighbourhood kiosks sell bananas, tomatoes, and cooking oil, yet getting those goods from a smallholder farmer to a shop can involve four or five informal brokers, each taking a cut. Much of the trade still runs through wholesale markets, driven by handwritten ledgers, cash, and little technology.
To a software investor, this looks like friction waiting to be swept away by software. If you can aggregate demand on a mobile app, run a fleet of delivery trucks, build modern packhouses, and disintermediate the brokers, you can lower consumer prices, pay farmers more, and capture a fat margin in the middle.
Originally published by TechCabal.