I came into the African Founders Webinar on ‘Bringing last mile businesses into the digital economy’ with a familiar framework in my head: fintech as infrastructure, financial inclusion as access. What I left with was something more uncomfortable, a recognition that access without visibility is not inclusion at all.
Listening to Olapeju Nwanganga, founder of Ploutos Page, a company helping Nigerian small businesses and market traders grow with simple, human-centred bookkeeping and financial tools, I found my assumptions quietly dismantled.
The trap of familiarity
Before the session, I had thought of Nigeria’s market women as an “underserved segment”, the kind of language that keeps people at a safe analytical distance. Nwanganga reframed that entirely. These are women who collectively move millions of naira every year. “They are unbankable not because they are unworthy, but because they are unseen” she said. That sentence stayed with me long after the room emptied. It is a distinction that matters: the problem is not the people, it is the architecture.
Inclusion begins with meeting people where they are
One of my deepest takeaways was Nwanganga’s definition of digital inclusion. I had assumed, as many do, that inclusion is primarily a question of device access. Get someone a smartphone, and the doors open. She challenged that directly: “Inclusion begins with meeting people where they are, not where the technology is”.
ÓWÀ (Openmarket Women Amplifier) by PEPCODE, her company’s digital bookkeeping app, is designed precisely around this principle. Low digital literacy is not a barrier to work around, it is the starting point for design. Ploutos Page agents sit with traders, speak local languages, and build financial records over time. The result is what she calls a “phygital” model; part physical, part digital, and it works because it respects the social fabric already in place.
Trust is not an obstacle – it is the infrastructure
I had always understood trust as something to be overcome in the rollout of digital tools, a friction to be managed. Nwanganga reframed it as infrastructure in its own right. The agent network was deliberately built to mirror the social world of the market: familiar faces, familiar languages, familiar patience.
This insight has practical implications for anyone thinking about technology in informal economies. You cannot skip the human layer. And more importantly, you should not want to. The consistency of a woman who has sold tomatoes every day for a decade is, in Nwanganga’s words, a bankable asset. “We make them digitally visible” she said, “and visibility changes everything.”
Purpose without viability is not enough
Perhaps the lesson I will carry furthest is the one she offered to young African founders: clarity of purpose is not sufficient without a viable business model. Nwanganga’s own principle was clear from the beginning, enter a market only if there is a real problem to solve, and only if you can be profitable doing it. Not passion alone. Both.
This is a standard I will hold myself to. Social impact without sustainability is not a solution; it is a dependency. Sitting in Cambridge, surrounded by institutional architecture built over centuries, I was reminded that the most durable systems are the ones that integrate the people they are meant to serve. Not as beneficiaries, but as participants whose existing knowledge, labour, and consistency are finally being counted.