Co-working in Kigali

One of my first stops in Kigali this week was visiting Jon Stever's Office. I've been exploring co-working spaces in London for the past couple of months so I was intrigued, and thought that I may be in need of a quiet place to work at some point away from the bustle of the Ministries. Plus it's always cool to hang out with former ODI fellows, especially ones who helped invent motorized polo. And it's a great space. Clean, modern, white walls, the fastest internet in town, a ping pong table...

Jon was interviewed recently for the Kigali Sun:

Co-working is so many things. Co-working is about cool entrepreneurs and freelance professionals working together and sharing world class office facilities. Co-working is about joining a community with shared values that innovates and grows together. And, co-working is about enabling entrepreneurship and innovation.

Our initial membership includes an awesome tech company, HeHe Ltd; a top local accounting and auditing firm, FAST Global; a tech support group managed by a well-known Kigali DJ; a really talented graphic designer, Union Multimedia; a web designer that created the popular Living in Kigali website; a creative outreach officer for the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego; a very experienced financial literacy consultant; and a great general contractor. 

In other words, our initial membership already constitutes a complete entrepreneurial and creative ecosystem. Moreover, only two weeks after our trial opening we’ve recorded several instances of collaboration. Several Office(r)s have hired other members for work and have referred each other to paying clients through their network of contacts.

If you're a freelancer or start-up based in Kigali, make sure to check out The Office and watch out for events and happenings on Facebook (www.facebook.com/TheOfficeRW) and Twitter (@TheOfficeRW)

Exploring the Portaloo Product Jungle

The Great BBC series African Dream profiles entrepreneur Moses Nderitu, who went from being a TV producer to setting up Kenya's first portable toilet rental business almost by accident. He needed to buy a portaloo, but couldn't just ship 1 to Kenya, so had to ship 4. And then slowly started persuading people to rent them from him. And now employs 20 staff in his booming loo rental business.

Which is a lovely illustration of Hidalgo and Hausman's product space theory of economic development. The economy is a bit evolutionary, with lots of random leaps, but some products (and services) are closer together, and so it only takes a small leap (like Nderitu's). Some are much further apart. So the things that an economy can produce tomorrow depend a lot on what you can produce today (learning by doing and path dependence are not new ideas in development economics, but this is a sophisticated new data-driven way of looking at it).

Or as Rodrik puts it

think of the product space as a forest, goods as trees, and entrepreneurs as monkeys. Countries develop as monkeys jump from tree to tree. Trees further away are harder to jump to. Some parts of the forest are denser than others. What trees you have monkeys on today determines where your monkeys will be tomorrow. And it goes from there.