Worth a Read

Being a Yankee means appreciating creative (and usually astoundingly simple) solutions to problems, be they unique or ubiquitous. Thus, I'm pirating borrowing a format from the intelligent authors of Marginal Revolution.com and presenting my own "Markets in Everything" post.

The Economist reports from Africa on the proliferation of personal banking services:

They have taken branches to the unbanked, either in prefabricated form, or in vans that make regular visits to under-served areas. Other countries are doing the same. In remote areas where delivering cash is hard, mini-machines have been installed in corner shops where customers print out a slip confirming they are in the black and present it to the shopkeeper, who provides the cash. Some rural branches and ATMs rely on solar energy and satellite phone connections.

How cool is that?! Wait, it gets even more amazing.

Standard Bank supplies an isolated branch on an island in Uganda's Lake Victoria by having planes drop bags of cash from the air.

Who says money doesn't fall from the sky - I'd love to know how much security that requires. Anyway, this is the type of innovation (and risk taking) that powers economic growth and freedom. Sadly, it is not all whiz-bang progress.

According to the World Bank, in 40 out of 48 countries in the region, it still takes over a year—and a long list of procedures—to enforce a contract.

A year! 12 months! 365 days! I don't have any data, but I'm guessing most contract disputes in the US and other industrialized countries are resolved in a matter of weeks or months. Actually, I'd bet that most are resolved before they ever get to adjudication. This is important because contract disputes, and enforcement of contracts, can be a tremendous dead weight loss for the parties involved and for the economy and society as a whole. See this post (fourth paragraph, but read the whole thing) for a brief glimpse of what I think about the state of litigation in America .

Bottom line, conditions are improving in Africa because of creative people and a little bit of risk taking. Although compared to the alternative of continued poverty, maybe the risk isn't that big.


Don't you love the irony of me blogging about innovation in a format that I effectively stole from another blogger. Ah, the glory of the Internet!