Product Description
KasiNomic Revolution: The Rise of African Informal Economies
Author: GG Alcock
Format: Trade Paperback
The informal business sector is the next great frontier of Africa and it is undergoing an economic revolution – a new world of small people doing big things, transforming the continent. Prepare for this new generation, prepare for the Afripolitan Generation. A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low income populations.
The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity. Kasi is the South African term for the township – a teeming conurbation of homes and businesses, entertainment venues and social meeting places. GG Alcock uses the term KasiNomics to describe the informal sectors of Africa, whether they are in the township, a rural marketplace, at a taxi rank or on a pavement in the shadow of skyscrapers.
Brought up in a rural Zulu community, GG has learnt and shares the lessons of African culture, language, stick fighting, lifestyle and tribal politics, along with shared poverty and community, which have prepared him for accessing the great informal marketplaces of Africa. He is uniquely placed to uncover the extraordinary stories of kasi businesses which not only survive but excel, revealing a revolutionary entrepreneurship which is mostly invisible to the formal sector.
KasiNomic Revolution is a story of kasi entrepreneurs on one side and, on the other, of great corporate successes and failures in the informal community. KasiNomic Revolution is at once a business book, and at the same time a deeply human book about the people and lives of rural and urban informal societies. KasiNomic Revolution is about the lessons of marketing, distribution, culture and modernity in an informal African world. Prepare for a KasiNomic Revolution!
About the Author
GG Alcock was born in Msinga, then one of the most poverty-stricken and violent parts of KwaZulu-Natal. GG’s activist parents, Neil and Creina Alcock, raised their two sons in a mud hut with no running water, electricity or modern conveniences and they grew up like young Zulu boys, herding goats and hunting small animals. Zulu reared and bred, the boys learnt the essence of how to survive in a harsh world – valuable skills that have undoubtedly contributed to GG’s success as an entrepreneur. GG has been at times a shebeen owner, political activist, community worker and African adventurer. Fluent in Zulu and conversant in most South African ethnic languages, GG was the founder of Minanawe Marketing, a leading activations business in the kasi sector. GG’s first book Third World Child: Born White, Zulu Bred tells his story and that of many of his people – a literary journey of a third world tribal society learning to embrace the first world of the twentieth century. GG’s second book KasiNomics: African Informal Economies and the People Who Inhabit Them casts a light on the invisible matrix at the heart of South Africa’s informal economies and the people who live in them. KasiNomics takes you down those rural pathways – weave between claustrophobic mazes of shacks, browse a muti market, attend a spirit returning ceremony and save money with gogo in a stokvel, among many more people and places. His third book KasiNomic Revolution: The Rise of African Informal Economies is about the lessons of marketing, distribution, culture and modernity in an informal African world. GG is a regular speaker on a range of topics – from business to motivational to trend talks on subjects including entrepreneurship, the informal market, diversity and culture, marketing communications to the mass market and the route to market strategies for the informal sector. GG’s freelance service offering includes unique consumer insights, marketing strategies, creative concepts and experiential activations campaigns in the mass informal and kasi markets of Southern Africa.
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