Practitioner Knowledge in African Markets: A Reading List Worth Knowing

The assumptions that shape how organisations approach African markets come from somewhere. The confidence in formal records. The expectation that data describes what is actually happening. The instinct that the person who appears in a report and the person who determines outcomes are the same person. None of these assumptions were invented by the organisations holding them — they were formed, over decades, in a specific literature about how markets and development actually work.

This is a reading list worth knowing. Not everything worth reading on African markets — that list is longer than any essay, and most of it is dated within a year of publication. This is a list of the works that explain, better than any single report, why practitioner knowledge is systematically missed and what it would take to reach it. They are not recent, and that is deliberate: the argument each one makes has been on the table for years, and the same gap they describe is still the one that determines whether a decision works in practice.

Each entry is annotated: what the work argues, and why it matters for the kind of decisions Kofa is built to serve.

Why a reading list, and why these works

The Brief publishes practitioner knowledge, not book reviews. So a reading list needs a justification, and it is this: the argument Kofa makes in practice has intellectual foundations that were never built by Kofa: the claim that the knowledge which determines outcomes lives in people rather than documents, the claim that formal instruments are structurally blind to the informal dynamics that decide whether a programme works, and the claim that proximity, years of being inside the work, produces a kind of knowledge no dataset can replicate. Each of these claims was argued, carefully and years ago, by someone who had no reason to be arguing for a software platform.

That matters. Because when an organisation hears these claims from a company that exists to act on them, it can reasonably wonder whether the claims were built to fit the product. Reading the originals answers that question. The ideas predate the product. The product is a response to the ideas, and to the gap between what the ideas describe and what most instruments can reach.

The works on this list describe a gap that has been visible for decades: the knowledge that determines outcomes lives in people and informal systems, and the instruments designed to capture it — the map, the ledger, the statistic, the survey — are structurally blind to it.

The map is not the territory — James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

Scott's subject is states, not markets. His argument applies directly to how organisations read them. High-modernist schemes — planned cities, forced resettlement, standardised agriculture — failed not because they were executed badly, but because they were built on legible, simplified representations of reality that ignored what Scott calls mētis: the local, practical knowledge that cannot be written into a plan, because it is gained by being inside the work.

The planner's map shows a district. It is legible, standardised, and wrong in the ways that matter. The territory is full of relationships, disputes, seasonal rhythms, and informal arrangements no map was designed to record. The scheme fails not because the planners were incompetent, but because they treated the map as if it were the territory.

For organisations making decisions in African markets, the lesson is direct. The research that describes a market — the surveys, the statistics, the sector analyses — is a map. It is legible, comparable, and defensible. It is also, at the precise points where the decision is most uncertain, describing something other than what will determine the outcome. The knowledge that would resolve the uncertainty does exist. It is in the territory — inside the loan officer, the cooperative leader, the logistics manager — and the instruments being used to reach it were never designed to get there.

The economy that never reaches the ledger — Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

de Soto quantified something that had been suspected for a long time: the poor in developing economies are not poor in assets. They hold enormous value — houses, businesses, land, standing in communities — but cannot convert it into capital, because it sits outside the formal legal system. Without a recorded title, an enforceable contract, a recognised identity, the asset cannot be borrowed against, insured, or transferred. de Soto called it dead capital: value that exists but cannot work.

Property law is the surface. The real point is what the formal system recognises — and therefore what it can and cannot see. In many African markets, the informal economy is not a small shadow beside the formal one. It is the operating economy: the system through which goods move, credit circulates, and trust is transacted. The ledger records the part that is documented. The part that determines outcomes is documented nowhere.

What the numbers actually rest on — Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers

Jerven did something that most consumers of development data never do: he audited the numbers themselves. What he found was that many of the statistics anchoring development decisions — GDP, growth rates, sector composition — rest on far less than they appear to. Outdated base years. Surveys that have not been conducted in years, with the old figures carried forward. Estimates built on estimates, adjusted with assumptions, presented with decimal places that imply a precision the underlying data never had.

The point isn't that data is useless, but that knowing what it can hold matters — and what it cannot. A statistic is a formal record: it captures what the formal system measures, on the schedule the formal system measures it. The informal economy, the seasonal dynamic, the relationship that determines whether a programme takes hold — none of these enter the dataset, because the dataset was never built to receive them.

The implication isn't that numbers are useless, only that they describe the formal record — and the formal record is a map. The decisions that fail in African markets are rarely the ones that lacked data; they are the ones that treated the data as if it described the territory.

How people actually manage — Collins, Morduch, Rutherford & Ruthven, Portfolios of the Poor; Banerjee & Duflo, Poor Economics

The financial diaries project did something unprecedented: it followed poor households for a full year, recording every financial transaction as it happened. What the diaries revealed contradicted the received picture. Poor households do not live passively, hand to mouth. They manage money actively and with considerable sophistication — saving, borrowing, insuring, and juggling through an array of informal instruments: rotating savings groups, moneylenders, family networks, traders who extend credit. None of this activity appears in formal financial records. All of it is real, deliberate, and invisible to instruments built to measure formal finance.

Banerjee and Duflo reached a related conclusion from a different direction. Through field experiments across dozens of countries, they found that the poor are not irrational — they make reasonable decisions under severe constraints. The behaviour that looks like a failure of judgement from outside is, from inside the constraints, a rational response. The lesson for anyone designing products, programmes, or portfolios: the behaviour that determines outcomes cannot be inferred from the outside. It has to be observed from where it happens.

Institutions are the operating system — Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons; Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail

Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating something that ran against the prevailing wisdom: communities can govern shared resources successfully without the state and without privatisation. They do it through institutions — local rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions — built on relationship and reputation rather than documentation. The tragedy of the commons is not inevitable. It happens when a particular kind of institution fails — and the institutions that succeed are often informal ones, invisible to anyone reading the formal record.

Acemoglu and Robinson made the broader historical argument: the difference between nations that prosper and nations that do not comes down to institutions — extractive or inclusive — and to who captures the returns. The institutions that shape outcomes in African markets are often the informal ones: the networks, the reputation systems, the relationship-based rules that determine who gets access and who does not. They are the operating system. The formal institutions are the interface — and the interface does not always describe the system.

The through-line — knowledge that lives in people

Read these seven works together and one conclusion becomes hard to avoid. Scott's map cannot see the territory. de Soto's ledger cannot see the operating economy. Jerven's statistics cannot see what they rest on. The diaries and experiments cannot see behaviour from outside the constraints. Ostrom, Acemoglu and Robinson cannot see the informal institutions that determine outcomes. Each work describes the same gap from a different discipline: the knowledge that determines outcomes in African markets lives in people and in informal systems — and every formal instrument built to capture it is structurally blind to it.

That isn't a failure of research quality — it's a property of the instruments. A survey captures what people are willing to say publicly. A statistic captures what formal systems record. A report synthesises both. None of them were built to reach the loan officer's discretion, the community leader's knowledge of a dispute, the transporter's arrangement that holds a supply chain together. That knowledge exists, and it is reachable only through the people who hold it — it lives in people, not documents.

This is the gap the Kofa platform is built to close. The brief defines the question and the operating reality it depends on. The coordinator network reaches the practitioner who holds the relevant knowledge — through trusted relationships, not cold outreach. The prep room ensures both sides arrive prepared. The session captures the knowledge in full, with conditions and qualifications intact. And the decision asset preserves it — searchable, retrievable through Ask Kofa — so the intelligence that changed one decision is available for the next. The ideas on this list describe the problem; the platform is the response to it.

The Brief is the applied version of this list. Each of its essays takes one of these ideas and follows it to a decision: what the informal economy means for a research programme, what a loan officer in Lagos knows that a credit model cannot, why the best practitioners are not on LinkedIn, and what a decision asset preserves that a conversation does not.

Aminu Rabiu

Founder, Kofa Insights Limited