It is impossible to see trends and have perspective from the trenches - asemota
Tags: writing
Published: 2022-09-30 15:44:36

####   Original Tweet from [@asemota](https://twitter.com/asemota)
{% embed https://twitter.com/asemota/status/1575767445792468992 %}
It is impossible to see trends and have perspective from the trenches. Poverty is a problem.

I took a drive this morning to charge my phones as I have had no electricity since last night. I saw people rushing off to work. I started counting the businesses open at 6:30 am 

All the petrol stations were open. Those workers had to come there before all others. The buses were all running and they were full. Madina market was already alive with traders. Mobile Money agents were up already. Nobody works harder than all these people but they aren’t rich. 

I realized something too that (except for fuel) most of the services provided by these people didn’t double in price because of devaluation or inflation. These people were largely providing services to other people who couldn’t afford these price increases. It was an epiphany. 

I haven’t increased the salaries of my driver and cleaner but their costs have increased. I decided today to give them raises and make up for it elsewhere. I can do that but can others do the same? What other options do the people have if income doesn’t increase? Crime?? 

We have a productivity problem because we also have a market problem. I was also looking at all the dead businesses and incomplete structures as I was driving. You can’t accurately calibrate economies but you can do some things that can cause a ripple effect. Education does that. 

Ever since my conversation with [@ybenneh](https://twitter.com/ybenneh) where he highlighted something quite profound about how more educated women have changed household incomes and improved the quality of life of families, I can’t stop thinking about it. Africa needs a bigger middle class. 

The best way to create a bigger middle class is to educate more people to do the right things. We are not stressing creativity in our education and are only creating robots who become more of a problem than a solution. We need better businesses and new ideas. 

I looked also and found that most pharmacies were also open. Hospitals never close. Healthcare is a massive market but it is also very very flawed. 

I came back home and realized that I could see all of these things because I was free to drive as my head wasn’t buried in work. 

I am not going to solve Africa’s problems but at least I can help make myself and the people around me more prosperous with increased productivity. 

Many things around us are not optimal. That is an opportunity and not a problem. 

We don’t have African economies that are robust enough because we don’t have enough entrepreneurial diversity. All the problems of the poor are business opportunities. We want poor people to solve these things themselves but they can’t. The chaos of trying creates dysfunction. 

Standardize some things a little and see how many higher quality jobs it will create. We have a low wage problem because we have a low quality job and low productivity problem. 

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