We have just days remaining in Nigeria before we move to Abidjan; we would like to visit your firm in Lagos and Abuja. Let’s drive growth through innovation. Experience great ideas, and embrace your business by understanding it better. At Fasmicro Group, we do not recite numbers and tell you what you already know: we deliver unparalleled insights through uncommon perspectives shaped by our experiences as entrepreneurs in the markets. Our moments are unique because things we share with clients are shaped by our direct exposures to the markets. We have served bank CEOs, founders, military generals, government ministers, and a President. We would like to serve you. Connect or use email below.

Our Advisory Services solutions are structured as follows:

• Discovery Innovation Presentation: This is a two-hour presentation where I will present what is happening in your market, customized for your company, and then offer insights on how you can plot your strategies to win. This goes beyond industry statistics and typical SWOT analysis. We work to help clients see their markets in new ways, providing roadmaps on how they can unlock opportunities. It is an intense talk, combining technology, finance, political economy and strategy. As technology redesigns markets, I break the implications in short, medium and long-terms.
  • Case: How can a (mall) real estate developer understand that ecommerce is a tangential threat since malls can be disrupted by digital commerce in future? My client now considers triple-play designs where malls can be converted into offices or homes, in case the moment comes.

• Discovery Innovation Workshop: This could take up to a day, but minimum of four hours is required. Besides the two-hour State of the Industry presentation, we work with clients to discover unique ways they can look at their businesses.
  • Case: We have a framework, engineered internally, that helps our clients go through the process of innovation discovery. Our synthesis is to see how technology can run and transform firms, even as we recommend business models that will survive disruptions.
• Advisory Services: Most times, after our presentations and workshops, clients usually engage us for Advisory Services. This is totally decoupled from the first two. In other words, you can engage us for either the presentation or workshop without the advisory services. Yet, we always welcome the moments when clients ask us to come and lead the talk. Because we are already practitioners, making things happen is always the most exciting part of our works.

contact: tekedia@fasmicro.com

A woman resigned from her work, but this particular resignation was not typical. She was someone the world looks unto her agency to control and prevent diseases. Brenda Fitzgerald was the director of one of the most important agencies in the world: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Nearly every country derives its disease control and prevention frameworks from this U.S. entity.

But Brenda was a worker. Yes, just a worker – the people that go to work and leave values at home. All they care for is put 40 hours per week and wait for the glory in the bank account. Brenda bought stocks of tobacco companies. The woman whose main job was to battle tobacco was funding Tobacco.

Brenda Fitzgerald, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), resigned abruptly today. She stepped down on the heels of a report from Politico that she had purchased stock in a large tobacco company 1 month into her tenure leading the nation’s top public health agency, which devotes itself to persuading smokers to quit and warning kids not to take up the habit.

“On August 9, one day after purchasing [between $1000 and $15,000 of] stock in global giant Japan Tobacco, she toured the CDC’s Tobacco Laboratory, which researches how the chemicals in tobacco harm human health,” Politico reported.

The purchase preceded Fitzgerald’s 7 September 2017 signing of an ethics agreement promising to recuse herself from any activity that could pose a financial conflict, Politico reported. Fitzgerald, a former commissioner of public health in Georgia who took the reins at CDC’s Atlanta headquarters last July, did not sell the tobacco stock until 26 October 2017

I see her action as extremely repulsive not just for buying tobacco but even thinking that such could be normal. Thousands of CDC staff work daily to eliminate tobacco products in cities and communities, and yet we had someone as head of CDC so disconnected that she found favor with Tobacco. Her actions were unbelievably shameful. The good news is that she is gone, to possibly continue parking Tobacco. Yes, to make money. But thank Politico that she would not be near where decisions affecting the health of millions would be made.

From politics to healthcare administration, we have people like Brenda. They are workers, only connected to work, just for the money. They have no core values. They are paid to fight death but in the night they produce weapons for warfare. They see numbers instead of sons, daughters, fathers and mothers when they make decisions. We do not need them in public services.

We waste a lot of farm produce in Africa, and knowing the quality of each produce remains hard. Due to quality asymmetry, the buyer and seller cannot close deals without physical inspections. Most times, things happen because a good orange for you may be average for me depending on prior oranges I have seen. For some, it may even be a poor orange. How do you make this science with the taste of Africa’s unique situations?

We have an idea: build a sensor which when you attach it to a smartphone, a farmer can make that process a science. That way, a merchant can pay for produce even when not in that vicinity. Instead of sending images in extremely challenging low networks, we send data points which can be reconstructed at the other end, explaining the state and quality of that produce.

I want farmers to focus on their works. I want merchants to help them find new markets. I want them to come into contracts largely based on science, not speculation.

That is what I am working on, to provide common sense tools that would help African farmers communicate with merchants, restaurants, families, etc on state of the produce. I want to remove the huge marginal cost where you expect merchants to inspect before they buy. Technology can do the inspection, providing reliable data on quality to make trade happen.

Of course, you can use our sensor when you go grocery shopping. It becomes your eyes and helps you make better decisions. You can eliminate non organic food because our sensors would tell you chemicals in that produce.

We are in the lab, designing, testing, validating and examining crops. We are getting close to this. The promise: advance new architecture in African agriculture.

Agriculture is the lifeblood of Nigeria’s economy. Forget hydrocarbons; that one is for the money men. More than 60% of working Nigerians are employed in agriculture. Unfortunately, the agricultural practice in the land is heavily subsistence in nature with practically no productivity gain in years. The implication is a great stasis requiring government to feed farmers. Yes, you read that well: government needs to send food to farmers to prevent severe hunger.

But change is coming, and we are seeing a fundamental reboot in the sector. Government is working now to fix one of the root causes of the agricultural paralysis: limited agro-insurance. According to Punch, Nigeria plans to increase agro-insurance from the paltry current 500,000 farmers to 3.8 million farmers (too bad the reporting did not give timeline). Sure, the new target is still small, but that is progress.

The Federal Government is planning to increase insurance coverage for the agricultural sector from the current 500,000 farmers to 3.8 million farmers.

The Managing Director, Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, Mr. Aliyu Abdulhameed,while speaking at a forum in Abuja, noted that the move would help increase the level of output for the sector.

To achieve this, he said NIRSAL had commenced discussions with Royal Exchange Assurance, Nigeria Meteorological Agency among others for the development of a technology-driven Hybrid Index Insurance product.

Most private insurance companies have not paid attention to agro-insurance because the process is extremely challenging because of the small sizes of our farms. Yes, when you put men and women on suits to administer such programs, finding profitability becomes challenging. The only strategy for decades was to ignore agro-insurance in Nigeria, leaving it mainly to NAIC (Nigerian Agricultural Insurance Corporation), the government agro-insurer. Of course, even NAIC does not have scale to do much.

So, we have remained where we are, focusing on mobile apps innovation when the most important innovation in agriculture remains elusive to farmers for decades. But modern technology is changing that.  Yes, you can administer the programs and still find value even for small farms. If the government can unlock insurance, a catalytic element of modern commerce, it would reboot Nigeria by making farming a business.

We need that glory because if we can fix agriculture, we would fix poverty. And if we fix poverty, our democracy would be magically strengthened.