From Crisis Data to African Commerce

A decade of building humanitarian data systems across six countries taught me something I couldn't have learned in Silicon Valley. I watched teams use geospatial intelligence to predict crises, trust infrastructure to move cash through markets that didn't exist on formal networks, and real-time data systems coordinate responses across 200+ organizations in the world's most fragmented operating environments.

And then I noticed something: the problems we solved in crisis response—fragmented information, broken trust, invisible supply chains—are the exact same problems that define Africa's massive informal economies. That pattern shift sparked a new chapter. I started asking different questions: What if we applied humanitarian systems architecture to African commerce? What if founders who understood the constraints of operating in these environments built the infrastructure layer?

That insight became Vendoh and MAKKET—two ventures built on the principle that Africa's informal economies don't need to be disrupted. They need to be digitized by people who understand them.

Africa's informal commerce is a $2.3 trillion economy operating almost entirely offline. Street traders, market vendors, service professionals, and micro-entrepreneurs move more capital through person-to-person transactions than most formal financial institutions touch. Yet this entire ecosystem remains invisible to formal data systems, inaccessible to digital platforms, and unprotected by the infrastructure that digitized commerce in other regions.

The irony: the skills that humanitarian data architects use—geospatial intelligence, trust infrastructure, real-time data systems, data privacy, data interoperability, and designing for low-connectivity and low-literacy populations—are exactly what's needed to unlock this market. I built those systems for environments where infrastructure is unreliable, trust is earned not assumed, data is fragmented, and users are offline-first. Those same design principles apply directly to African informal markets.

But here's the deeper truth: the problem isn't that technology doesn't exist. The problem is that most tech solutions are designed by people who've never been inside an African market. They import Western marketplace models wholesale—models that assume formal addresses, stable internet, digital payment accounts, and standardized pricing. None of that exists in the contexts where 90% of African economic activity happens. When solutions fail in these markets, it's not because Africans don't want to digitize. It's because the products were built for different constraints.

A founder with a decade of field experience—someone who's built systems for environments where infrastructure is a variable you have to design around, not a given you can assume—has an unfair advantage. Not because we're smarter. But because we've learned something that theory alone can't teach: how to build for the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were.