My refrigerator died last week, and with that, my family and I lived with an “ice box” in its place, using frozen bottles of water as the source of cooling until today, when the new refrigerator was installed. Refrigeration is a service billions of us take for granted. Living without it for a week helps one ungrant that taking (or however that is supposed to be phrased). All of this...
Despite the fact that stock markets have been operating for over 400 years, how exactly they work at the level of individual participate and individual role is rarely documented. Here in the 21st Century most of the accounts are how to make money as an investor, two or three steps away from the actual transactions taking place within the exchange. Which is why it was so fascinating to find and...
Last month I was in Tanzania visiting three Africa Eats‘ investees: Swahili Honey, Goldenpot, and Rogathe Dairy. Below are three short videos showing off their factories. All of these companies have grown more than 10x since I first met them, some of them growing that fast in two years. See the post on fast-growing SMEs to see each of their growth stories, and click on the other companies...
I came across the word “transmogrify” today and wondered if the author first learned it reading Calvin & Hobbes, as I don’t recall ever seeing the word before that. Luckily for us denizens of the 21st Century, we can ask Google’s Ngrams the popularity of a word back a few centuries: Turns out no, the word isn’t new to Calvin & Hobbes. It was used to describe...
1.4 billion people live in Africa. But that population is far from evenly distributed. The southern edge of the Sahara is clearly visible in West Africa, as is the enormous population in Nigeria. Then over in East Africa it is even denser in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and over into Rwanda around Lake Victoria and Lake Kivu, and yet denser still down in Malawi. See the original post on www...