The agent's kiosk is a wooden box with a phone in it, wedged between a fruit stall and a barber. There is no vault, no guard, no marble. There is a float of cash and a SIM card, and between them they do most of what a bank branch does — for a fraction of the people a bank branch ever served.
We keep meeting the assumption, back home, that this kind of thing trickles down from the rich world to the poor one. Here it ran the other way. Mobile money worked because the banks had not bothered — there was nothing to disrupt, only a gap, and the gap got filled by a text message before anyone in a glass tower thought it was possible.
The lesson Nairobi keeps handing us is uncomfortable and useful: the most advanced version of a thing often shows up first where the old version never arrived. You do not study the future in the places that have everything. You study it here.
