I. The Size of the Thing Nobody Is Counting
Walk through any market in Lagos, Kigali, Accra, or Nairobi on a weekday morning and you are walking through the largest, least-capitalized economy on Earth. It has no ticker symbol, no CEO, no pitch deck. It is simply called "informal" — a bureaucratic word for tens of millions of individually rational businesses that formal finance has decided, collectively, not to see.
The scale is staggering once you total it up. Across the continent, roughly 85 percent of employment is informal, offering workers limited job security and little access to social safeguards. Among Africa's vast youth population — the fastest-growing workforce in the world — the picture is even starker: youth employment is overwhelmingly agricultural and roughly 90 percent informal, with a third of employed youth living below the international poverty line.
