I fell in love with how money moves before I understood why. My father was an accountant and my mother an engineer, so I grew up in a house where one parent cared about where every cent went and the other cared about how systems actually work. The mechanics of finance made sense to me early, and I've never stopped finding them interesting.
I studied economics, which taught me the theory of money. Then I spent six years as a backend engineer building the practical side: payment rails, wallets, settlement logic, and the unglamorous infrastructure that decides whether a transaction clears or fails. Most of that time has been in Nairobi, with roots and ongoing ties in Malawi, which means I've seen two very different mobile money markets from the inside.
What obsesses me is the full arc of fintech, from legacy banking systems to mobile money, to blockchain, and now to autonomous agents that can hold and move value on their own. But my real focus is narrower: African fintech, and mobile money in particular. I'm trying to understand how these systems can drive growth across the continent, whether the lever is policy, technology, or a hypothesis that nobody has tested yet.
I write here because most commentary on African fintech comes from people selling something or people who have never built in it. I'm trying to write the thing I wanted to read when I started: specific, grounded in real systems, and honest about what didn't work.
When I'm not doing that, I'm usually thinking about science fiction economies. How does the Star Wars galaxy actually clear payments across systems? What does Dune's spice economy tell us about single-commodity dependence? Turns out imaginary economies are a surprisingly good way to think about real ones.