My Writings – Erick Mokaya's Blog

On Remittances and Payments in Africa

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast by featuring Ham Serunjogi, the founder of Chipper Cash, an intra-Africa money transfer service. I here share a few notes and thoughts since it is an area I am interested in. By the way, relatably, Ham is Ugandan and went to school at Aga Khan, Mombasa, Kenya (I am proudly Kenyan 😉

What sucks? Sending money within Africa. Intra-Africa money transfer is a pain point. At 8.9% of the money sent, Africa has the highest remittance costs in the world. For every 100 dollars sent, around 9 dollars ends up as a cost.

Source: Migration and Development Brief 32

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Takeaways From Earnings Calls: Historic Traffic Levels In Cloud

Here is an excerpt of an article I wrote for Seeking Alpha:

We read transcripts of earnings calls each week and one key theme we have picked up in the last few weeks is the cloud. Several companies keep insisting on how they have been pushed to do more in the cloud. We explore this and more in this week’s edition Takeaways from Earnings Calls.

Historic traffic levels in cloud

While the cloud was already expected to be a booming business in the next decade or so, the expectation was for steady growth. What has happened in this pandemic though is that most companies have been forced to move their businesses to the cloud at a rate much faster than normal. This has resulted in high levels of traffic as adoption rates skyrocket.

More at https://seekingalpha.com/article/4354545-takeaways-from-earnings-calls-historic-traffic-levels-in-cloud

On Racism in Scandinavia

You are probably sitting at home and watching things unfold in The States with wide-eyed disbelief and wondering at the extent of racism being displayed in public spaces. Let me disabuse you. Institutionalized and systemic racism exists everywhere. Systematic discrimination has become normalized to varying degrees everywhere. In many countries, especially those in Western Europe and Scandinavia, it is not visible to the naked eye, hence it is harder to identify and crack down upon. It is best understood as an invisible wall coupled with a reinforced glass ceiling that you cannot pin down. But it is there, everpresent and we have run into it more times than we care to admit.

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