One of the questions I get very often is, “I’m stuck and feeling frustrated, what does a real career path in nonprofit communications look like? It doesnt feel like I’m making much progress.”

This question is only exceeded by “How do I work for an international NGO?”.

When I started my career, I remember googling for weeks and reading hundreds of blogs and Medium posts, just to get a coherent answer to these questions.

This is my attempt at an answer and is majorly focused on the nonprofit sector, even though some of it overlaps with the private sector.

Many comms people I know entered the profession purely on their writing skills.

In Taking Big Bets on your Comms Career, I wrote:

While at first it feels like you are just being given more tasks, but what is happening is you are being introduced to the full machinery of communications. And as the NGO succeeds, your career begins to grow.

This is important, because nonprofit careers are often tied to funding cycles.

In the nonprofit sector, funders have a bias toward continuity. They often prefer to renew or expand work with organisations they already fund, especially when the project is delivering results. You could call it “phase two” funding.

If you are lucky, the NGO you work for impresses the funder. What then happens is the NGO gets “phase two” funding to scale what worked in the previous cycle.

A bigger project gets a bigger comms budget. And now you as the comms person gets to hire an extra hand. Assuming, of course, you’ve been strategically letting them know you need more capacity ahead of time.

If you’re a comms person working with a small but mighty NGO with a lot of potential, it’s on you to let your leaders know about your need for extra comms capacity, ideally before the next fund comes in. And make sure to remind support them when they are writing proposals.

Sometimes things do not pan out. Your NGO might keep struggling for funding, and you may be stuck as the only comms person for years.

But let’s say you picked a good NGO and they got more funding, meaning you go from a one person team to a team of 2-3, and now you manage a full time comms assistant and a graphic designer consultant.

This is where you start to exercise your leadership muscle. It’s not as glamorous as you think. Mostly, you learn how to brief people properly so they can execute without your extensive supervision. You also learn how to review their work without rewriting everything yourself, how to manage deadlines, how to protect the content quality you built when it was just you on the team. And so on.

After a few years, you eventually move on and get a not-so-entry-level job with a bigger NGO, and repeat the same dance.

Eventually, if you are lucky, you get a job with an INGO in your country: Oxfam, Mercy Corps, Doctors Without Borders, UNDP, CRS, WWF, BRAC, and the rest of the alphabet soup.

This is a big deal for your career.

Working in the local office of an international NGO means you are now inside (or close enough to) the multilateral ecosystem. ATS systems will no longer reject your CV like it is poison when you apply for international roles.

But you’re also now in the multilateral system, so welcome to bureaucracy 201. Here you learn that nothing is ever “just a blogpost”.

Some blogposts need input from the technical lead, approval from the programme lead, sometimes edits from the donor, clearance from the country office, and a logo and attribution check from global. Sometimes, someone will ask you to simplify the blogpost a bit more but the same person would also add four new acronyms to the draft.

By the time it is approved, the event it was promoting has been forgotten and everybody has moved on, including the organisers.

Compared to your early days when you were the alpha and omega of your organization’s entire digital ecosystem, here you’re just a cog in an often-times slow moving, big wheel. It’s a bit of a culture shock.

One understanding that helped me is that, in nonprofit comms, visibility is never simply visibility. It is donor management and partner politics. External comms products are proof that work happened, and sometimes acts as evidence for the next grant.

This is why one LinkedIn post can suddenly have twelve reviewers.

Communications jobs in the nonprofit space also have two major tracks: institutional comms roles and project-based comms roles.

An institutional comms role means you are working in the organisation’s official communications department. You report within the organogram, probably to a senior comms officer, head of comms, or director of communications.

These are the people with direct control over the organisation’s corporate channels: social media, newsletters, website, media relations, brand, leadership messaging, internal comms, and so on.

A project-based comms role is different.

It means a team within that organisation got dedicated funding to deliver a project. The project could be, for instance, a research programme in Nigeria. Maybe an adaptation project in Honduras, or a gender and climate initiative across three countries.

Depending on the size of the project and the funding, the institutional comms team may not have enough capacity to support it properly. So the project hires a comms consultant or comms specialist.

If you’re hired to support such a project, you will probably report to that project’s programme lead or project manager, not the Head of Communications.

This is the bedrock of comms consultancy in the nonprofit space. And it means many things for your career.

One of them is that the feedback you get may be quite pedestrian.

Your supervisor may not be a comms person. They are usually only interested in your outputs i.e. whether you sent the newsletter, whether the event has been announced on social media, whether you’ve designed the report and uploaded it on time, how many blogposts you’ve written this month etc.

They often are not too bothered about positioning, narrative, or whether you are growing into a better comms professional. It’s not malicious, comms is just not their area of expertise.

This is where a lot of comms careers plateau. And the dangerous thing is that you can look successful while plateauing.

You can be as busy as ever and getting commendations from your colleagues. But you are still being used mostly as an output machine. And because nonprofit work feels meaningful, it can take longer to admit that the role is no longer stretching you.

It’s not strange to see people stuck as comms specialists, comms associates, or comms managers for many years.

Life as a comms consultant

Working as a comms consultant in the nonprofit space is also a mixed bag.

When it is good, it’s very good.

You can have multiple contracts with multiple NGOs, or even with different departments in the same NGO. You might be working with the gender team on promoting a research project while also supporting the policy team to plan and deliver a roundtable.

In good seasons, you’ll have multiple contracts, consecutive pay days, and without the restrictive overhead that can come with being a full-time staff in an INGO.

But the cons are real. For one, when there’s a budget crunch, consultants are often the first to go. So your job security is fictional.

The roles are also often poorly scoped. You might be hired to support a project at 60 percent FTE but end up working like a full-time employee. So it becomes 100 percent of the work at 60 percent of the pay.

This combination of overload and job insecurity is why many consultants eventually start looking for full-time roles.

The good news is that consultancies can be a doorway.

Being a consultant with an INGO gives you proximity to where the action is. If you and the team work well together, and the project keeps getting funded, it is not unusual to be offered a full-time staff position.

Or at least, you leave with strong referrals.

Comms vacancies within INGOs usually expect INGO or multilateral experience which is why I said consultancies are a doorway.

Career progression in nonprofit comms is precocious.

When you’re mid-career, most of your career progression happens in two ways.

One: someone senior leaves, and if you have been around long enough and the leaders trust you, you get asked to step in.

Two: you leave for another organisation.

That is mostly how people get promoted.

If you are ten years into your comms career, you are probably considering / applying for roles with “senior” in the title (Senior Communications Officer, Senior Communications Manager, or Communications Lead).

But senior comms is a tricky place to be in the nonprofit sector.

In many organisations, there are not many layers between “Senior comms person” and “Head of comms.” Once you become senior, the next step is often not another natural promotion. You’re looking for the top job.

Complicating things further is how nonprofit roles are funded. In the private sector, a growing company can create new comms roles because the business is expanding. In nonprofits, new roles often depend on grants, donor budgets, new projects, or if the organisation restructures.

Project-based roles complicate this even further. A project can hire a Senior Communications Specialist because the donor budget allows for it, but that does not mean the organisation has a long-term leadership path for that person. You may be doing senior-level work, managing complex outputs, advising technical teams, and holding a lot of responsibility, while still sitting outside the institutional comms ladder.

This is also why titles can be misleading. In nonprofit comms, “senior” does not always mean you are being prepared to lead a department. Sometimes it simply means you are experienced enough to work independently and deliver without much supervision. You may have the title and the workload, but not necessarily the authority, budget, or progression path that should come with seniority.

So progression is not always a clean ladder. Your boss has to leave. A new project has to create a lead role. The organisation has to win enough funding to expand the team. Or you have to move somewhere else where the slot already exists.

This is why many strong nonprofit comms people remain “senior” for a long time. It’s because the structure around them has no obvious next step.

Communications leadership

It’s a mistake to think that if you are very good at doing comms, leading comms is just the next step.

It is not exactly the same job.

Doing comms means you can produce the thing. Leading comms means you can tell whether the thing is needed at all.

And with a cap on resources (both human and financial), it’s your call on what those resources get channeled to.

As a comms leader, you are being trusted with the organisation’s reputation, relationships and public identity. You are trying to tell the strongest possible story without annoying the donor, distorting evidence, or burning out your team.

You are often the first person thinking about how to frame the project, and the last person still cleaning up the comms after everyone else has moved on.

When you finally become comms lead for an international nonprofit, you get closer to the dream that probably pulled you into the sector in the first place: shaping the stories of true change and impact and helping a serious organisation effect change in the world.

You get to influence which stories people finally hear, and how those stories are told. Some of my most fulfilling work, for example, has come from commissioning consultants to gather stronger evidence, so the best version of a story is what eventually gets published.

You are also a gatekeeper of sorts. The buck stops with you on which stories should be pushed, which ones need to be softened, and which ones should be left out entirely because they may create more problems than they solve for the organisation.

I know we comms folks complain a lot about the quiet nonsense that sits behind every “quick” announcement, and about how badly comms is misunderstood and underappreciated. But that irritation comes from care, not cynicism. Most of us are annoyed because we know comms can be truly transformational, more than people allow it to be.

So yes, nonprofit comms can be a real career path. But it is not always a neat ladder. You dont simply go from officer to senior officer to head of comms. It is a slow journey from producing things to exercising judgment.

And to me, that is the real communicator’s path: learning, over time how to care deeply about important stories without losing sight of the institution you work for, the evidence you owe the public, but more importantly, the people our work is meant to serve.

1000+ communicators read Inclusion Notes every month. Help us grow by sharing with your network.

**A big bet is a focused commitment to solving a high-stakes problem where an entity believes concentrated effort and resources can deliver outsized benefits.

Since 2025, “big bets” have been a prevalent theme in the nonprofit space. Budget cuts, AI, and increased regional conflicts, have made nonprofits review their chances of surviving the present business landscape.

And look at how the largest nonprofits are responding.

Gates Foundation has kicked off a 20-year sprint, intending to spend more than $200 billion by 2045 and close its doors forever. Mercy Corps is testing stablecoins, blockchain-enabled transfers, and digital payment systems, betting on cheaper and faster delivery of humanitarian services. The Rockefeller Foundation now describes its work through “big bets” to solve major problems across areas like energy, food, health, and finance.

In short, organisations are stepping out of their comfort zones and taking bold bets on the future. This is not just good management practice, but how any entity can survive in the marketplace.

Now compare this with what I experienced a few weeks ago while speaking with a few comms colleagues.

We discussed budget cuts, AI disruption, declining media pickup of our stories, and shrinking attention spans of people. Everyone agreed the profession is changing.

Then I changed the conversation a bit. I asked what are you doing about it, and what I heard was variations of, “well we’re posting more on LinkedIn”, “we’re doing a newsletter refresh”, “we’re creating more Canva templates for staff”, or my favorite, “I’m learning to use AI more”.

And this is the contradiction.

If the world has changed and comms as a profession is also changing with it, then we’re betting too small.

The entry points of the profession are vanishing

Many comms people I know entered the profession purely on their writing skills.

NGOs would hire fresh graduates who were handy with words to help them write blogposts, op-eds and proposals. Then the workload grows. Creating and managing the social media account gets added to their plate, then launching a newsletter, then events, getting press coverage for the event, then ghostwriting speeches for the MD, then stakeholder management, and then crisis management.

This pathway has produced many senior comms people, me included.

But that entry point is nearly gone because with even the free version of ChatGPT, employers now produce dozens of articles overnight.

You might argue, “but it will sound like AI-slop”.

Yes, but here’s an important career lesson: Value is not what you believe is valuable. Value is what the person with the budget is willing to fund. And for many small NGOs, a blogpost is a blogpost, no matter how “AI” it sounds.

I’ve spoken with program leaders and managers who’ve shared with excitement how AI now does all their drafting and writing work. For NGOs who are often budget strapped, the value proposition of a hiring a “writer” is no longer obvious.

Dont get me wrong, good writing is still incredibly valuable. But being “the person who can write” is no longer enough.

Scale of the Crisis

There are also other headwinds facing the comms profession.

• AI has made content cheap. I’ve said that already. A 1000 word op-ed is now one prompt away.

• Newsrooms are shrinking, journalists are overwhelmed, so media coverage is actually harder to secure.

• Public trust in institutions is fragile. If your NGO or nonprofit is publicly funded or partners with governments, you’re working with a trust deficit.

• Audiences are harder to reach. Social media algorithms are unreliable and change every quarter so it’s harder than ever to build a corporate brand online without extreme effort.

• NGO budgets are tighter. Comms teams are smaller, and when organisations do hire, the application pool is flooded with hundreds of AI optimised CVs, so hiring managers switch to hiring based on referrals.

The list goes on.

Some of these are downstream of AI. Some are just problems whose time has come.

Building your edge in the age of AI

I’ve been building with AI tools since January - I’ve built personal apps and games, hobby websites, and automated my email and curation systems.

Without mincing words, I can tell you that AI is making parts of communications work less valuable.

And that’s not something to have a meltdown over.

One of my comms mentors would say, “Businesses exist to solve problems for others but the existence of a business also guarantees that the business will keep facing its own problems. That is why they hire employees”.

And the comms employee is not there just to write the press release, no.

In fact, while the tools will keep changing, organizations will still need comms people who can:

• spot crises early and help the organization avoid them, or manage them when they arrive.

• build an engaged audience in a difficult or competitive industry.

• bring the imagination and creative judgment needed to stand out in a sea of AI sameness.

• sell something clearly and persuasively, whether it is an idea, a physical product, or a mission.

I encourage you to make it a practice to speak with leaders often, interviewing them on their most pressing challenges. The old career paths are fading away (remember the writer example I shared earlier?); you need to gather new career intelligence so you can map your own journey.

So let’s move to the strategic bets:

Bet #1: Become commercially useful

Comms people especially in the nonprofit space often get trapped in output mode: publishing blogs, designing flyers, posting to socials, sending newsletters.

Today, anyone using AI can do all the above with the push of a button.

You must start thinking of the true value of comms and your role in it:

• Can I grow an audience?

• Can I shift sentiment positively towards an institution?

• Can I influence people to act? It could be buying something, donating money, signing up for a cause etc.

• Can I spot, anticipate and reduce risks?

• Can I sell a difficult idea?

Pick one, it doesnt matter which, and become the best person in the nonprofit space at it.

For example, in the attention economy, building an audience is now an existential need for organizations and businesses.I’m not talking about “going viral,” but building a consistent connection with people who keep the organization in business, be it funders, customers or partners.

For comms professionals, being highly skilled in audience-building today is a career moat. Someone who can turn expertise into a following, a community, or a media presence is extremely valuable. Either you’ve done this for an NGO before or you’ve been able to build your own audience. Either one signals commercial value to an employer.

Bet #2: Get specific and specialise

Domain expertise builds up your capital in 2 dimensions - skill and reputation.

Employers do not hire abstractly, rather they hire to solve a problem within their organization or industry.

A research organization wants someone who can translate evidence without distorting it. There is a reason many of the best-known science communicators are scientists themselves.

Hiring an industry expert who’s also a skilled communicator beats hiring a generalist comms person. Domain expertise has always been an advantage and will be even more important in the coming years.

I used to tell my mentees that a comms person is a problem solver. But I have started to edit that line. The future-proof communicator is not just a general problem solver. They are problem solvers with domain fluency.

A simple way to make this mental shift - imagine you’re a fixer (like Olivia Pope in Scandal) and organisations only call you when they have problems. What type of phone calls would you be receiving?

If it’s still generic, you’re not being strategic with your career. You should aim to receive calls like:

• “We are entering a difficult public conversation and need to avoid reputational damage. We heard you’re an Issues and Reputation Strategist who knows how to manage sensitive moments.”

• “We need policymakers to understand and use our evidence. Someone told me you’re a Policy Engagement Communications expert, and this is your bread and butter.”

• “We want our experts to become more influential in our industry. We heard you’ve built credible online profiles for some experts in this field.”

The job title is not as important as the problems that need solving.

Build a reputation for solving specific comms problems within specific industries. Go deep in that thing, deeper than anyone else.

That’s the career bet.

Your positioning must be specific, at the edges of AI capability and truly valuable to organisations in your industry.

Bet #3 Abandon job title thinking

Job titles decay.

“Social media manager,” “content marketing manager, “Creator Partnerships Lead” etc did not exist 25 years ago.

Many comms people today barely use newswires, even though newswires were a mainstay of the profession three decades ago.

Now, it’s happening again - the tools, the channels and job titles are changing at the same time.

It doesn’t make sense to build your career aiming for a specific job title that may not exist in a few years. Instead, build it around problems that organisations will still have:

• creating demand for their products and services

• spotting and managing reputational risk early

• leaders unable to explain complex ideas and build strong relationships with their audience

• institutions with a trust deficit, struggling to earn the attention and trust of the public

• technical employees with limited industry influence despite having the expertise

This type of positioning also opens you up to pathways that are connected to communications, but not always seen as core comms: partnerships, events, policy engagement, and advocacy (the real kind, not the type that is just managing a social media account).

Communications is about helping organizations build the relationships they need to survive and grow. Sometimes that relationship is with customers. Sometimes it is with regulators, funders, policymakers, partners, or the public.

Great content can do a lot. But great content plus other adjacent tools, like partnerships, convenings, campaigns, and coalition-building, can do much more.

A good communicator who can also build partnerships will rarely be out of a job.

“Build human capital that AI cannot replicate like “client relationships, institutional knowledge, management capabilities, or the ability to walk into a room and make shit happen.” ~Mark Ritson.

The problem I see is many people are crippled with the fear of, “What will AI do to communications?”

I believe it’s the wrong question.

What you should be thinking deeply about is, what problems have businesses always had and what new problems is AI introducing? That is the right instinct.

As the tech gets better, your career will be determined by your skill level and reputation.

The question I will leave you with is, are you willing to make a big bet on the kind of professional you need to become?

Epilogue

What skills are employers demanding from comms people?

I collected every comms job that crossed my feed for 7 months. I wanted to stay up to date on job trends and insights on what skills are indemand, what tools are mentioned, and compare salaries. When you lay 103 JDs side by side, patterns emerge. Some confirm what you’d expect but there were genuine surprises.

The carousel with the insights is here.

The dataset itself is here (download and run your own analysis).

1000+ communicators read Inclusion Notes every month. If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please share with your network.

In this essay, Morgane argues that while creators, explainers, and citizen journalists now shape how many people understand the news, communicators still need to stay close to original reporting. It is a useful reminder for early and mid-career communicators: judgement is built by engaging with the source, not only with someone else’s interpretation of it.

Subscribe now

When I asked my Master’s students how they consume the news, their answers were almost unanimous:

-- YouTube explainers, TikTok commentary, Instagram carousels, WhatsApp forwards, and the occasional podcast. Almost none of them mentioned opening a newspaper website or watching a traditional news bulletin.

Their habits perfectly mirror what the data has been telling us for years but hearing it directly from a classroom of 23‑year‑olds made it far more real for me.

The young and trendy media landscape

This shift is not happening only in my classrooms in Paris. Research shows a continued decline in engagement with TV, print, and news websites, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and aggregators grows. The Guardian recently reported how online creators are reshaping Africa’s news ecosystem, with influencers in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria blending commentary, humor, and personal storytelling in ways that feel more relevant to younger audiences than the evening news. In Nigeria, 65% of people use Facebook to share news, followed by WhatsApp and YouTube. Pew Research Center found that a growing share of Americans now “come across” the news rather than actively seeking it.

The data shows a profound transformation: news is increasingly mediated through interpreters rather than consumed at the source.

But commentary, explainers, and “POV” content are not the same as original reporting though.

While these types of content serve to make complex issues digestible, relatable, and often entertaining, they are interpretation and not original analysis. They rely on someone else having done the work of reporting, checking sources, contextualising, and challenging.

For communicators, this distinction is necessary to make because our professional judgment is at stake.

Why this is important for communicators

Communicators who depend only on news interpreters or citizen journalists weaken their ability to understand the full context behind a story, anticipate how different audiences might react, identify emerging issues before they trend, and evaluate the credibility of a narrative. But perhaps most important, it puts you at risk of crafting messages that are aligned with someone esle’s summary of reality.

Interpretations are filtered and could be full of stereotypes and biases. If we rely solely on creators, curators, and influencers, we risk losing the depth, nuance, and accuracy that come from engaging directly with good journalism.

If you’re always downstream of other people’s interpretation, how will you ever build your judgement?

Being well informed is the foundation of a communicators’ job to make sure that our comms is relevant, credible, and ethical. It is how we stay connected to the zeitgeist and how we serve our organisations, partners, and publics responsibly.

A practical “news diet” for early‑ and mid‑career communicators

My advice to early-career communicators is you do not need to read everything but you need a balanced intake of original reporting. A simple daily routine can make a significant difference:

• Local news: What is happening in the community where your audiences live

• National news: Politics, economy, culture, and policy debates

• International news: Global trends, geopolitics, and cross‑border issues

• Sector‑specific news: The outlets and journalists covering your field

• Creators’ interpretations: To understand how audiences are reframing the news

Choose the formats you enjoy: newsletters, podcasts, short articles, long reads, documentaries. Follow journalists whose work you trust. Mix depth with breadth.

The goal is not volume but analysis.

Our responsibility to journalism

Communicators and journalists are interdependent. We depend on the reporting of journalists to do our work. Our role in turn is to support them by offering quality pitches, by respecting their craft, and by helping amplify their work rather than bypassing it.

As technology continues to transform how we communicate, the most valuable thing we can do as communicators is to stay close to the source and keep building our judgement.

Thank you, Morgane, for sharing such a timely reflection. You remind us that while the way people consume news is changing, the communicator’s responsibility remains the same: seeking context and questioning interpretation. Good judgement does not come from shortcuts.

1000+ communicators read Inclusion Notes every month. If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please share with your network.

Share

The industry is putting early career comms people in impossible positions.

Comms vacancies are asking juniors to perform strategic judgment before the industry has given them the conditions to build it. Which has forced early career people to position as “comms strategists”. Early career communicators now have “strategy” on their CVs, take courses, download frameworks, ask AI for campaign plans, follow X and LinkedIn experts.

They are simply playing the job market game.

But courses, frameworks, AI prompts, etc dont make a strategist.

Case in point, having sat on the other side of the interviewing process, I’ve noticed hiring managers apply more rigour when interviewing for a role that demands true strategic work. Nobody needing serious comms work would entrust their strategy to someone in the early innings of their career. I also dont think you should want that kind of responsibility that early on.

This is why apprenticeships were precious and insanely valuable.

Juniors had the opportunity to be bad at things for a while till they got better. You had access to more senior colleagues would sit with you and explain why your big idea is a mismatch for your campaign, and why your audience segmentation is out of sorts.

Instead, early-career comms people are now either expected to run whole comms functions too early, or locked out of job opportunities because every role now wants 5 years of experience (that’s not an exaggeration, I’ve been compiling job vacancies for the last 7 months and it’s a recurring pattern).

Due to economic forces and pressures on internal teams, apprenticeships (internships, management trainee programs etc) are becoming less common, unless you work in a comms or PR agency, and even those are fizzling out.

The industry is more or less creating the conditions for weaker comms.

Today, even though we have access to near infinite knowledge, courses, templates, and AI tools, people still struggle to deliver great comms. Which reinforces the point that the value of a communications strategist is the judgement they bring to the table.

There’s that word again, judgment.

We talk about judgment all the time, but we rarely explain how to build it. And yet, if you look closely, career progression in communications is largely a story of increasing judgment.

In lower-complexity environments, you can get away with “conveyor belt comms.”

Conveyor belt comms: You receive tasks, produce outputs, follow instructions, and optimize for delivery.

Judgment-led comms: You operate within a great deal of uncertainty and unknown unknowns. You’re required to diagnose the situation, interpret risks, manage trade-offs, advise people, and decide what not to do.

In conveyor belt comms, the decisions are mostly downstream, the margin for error is limited and you simply execute whatever is sent to your desk.

But the moment you step into a more complex role or inherit responsibility from someone more senior, your lack of judgment will quickly expose you.

I’ve worked across advertising, media, and communications. I’ve seen junior and senior professionals use the same frameworks but their outputs come out completely different. The difference is in judgment.

Fortunately, you can acquire judgement just like you can acquire knowledge. Here’s how I’ve been building mine over my career.

The judgment building loop.

• Deep learning gives you principles.

• Real practice tests those principles.

• Proximity to expertise corrects your blind spots.

Then the loop repeats.

1. Deep personal learning

Learning is often lonely work.

Poring through case studies. Reading books, annual reports, strategy documents, policy briefs etc to understand how serious organizations frame their work. Keeping a swipe file of excellent headlines, posts, op-eds, campaigns, emails, speeches, and media pitches. Listening closely to interviews, panels, political speeches, or press briefings to study framing, persuasion, and messaging.

You’d be surprised by how many people dont do this or rush through it like a to-do list.

One advantage of deep reading and learning is that you encounter ideas in context. Beyond reading about the outcome and what worked, you understand why it worked, where it worked, how it could have failed, the different things people have experimented with, etc.

My friend would say, you read for the principle, not just the outcome. That’s a cool way of saying, sometimes the only thing you can extract from an idea is the principle and not the exact practice.

For example, from Sam Walton’s biography, I learned that he made sure every new Walmart store he opened introduced something different from the other stores. And it wasn’t just for the novelty factor, he practiced a discipline of continuous improvement.

You probably cant copy that literally but you can adapt the principle.

For example, I try to introduce something new into my LinkedIn posts each month. Primarily to avoid boredom while staying consistent with my voice. And downstream of that decision is realizing that, if it’s exciting for me, it will be exciting for my readers.

That’s what real learning looks like - you translate ideas and make them your own, not just imitate them.

One of the horrific things I’ve seen, asides from the decline in longform reading, is that more people now rely on book summaries and AI generated bullet points. People on twitter will tag @grok and tell it to summarise an article. This is a dangerous habit.

Summaries are useful for recall but they are terrible as a replacement for learning. The value of a good book is not just the idea it contains, it’s the repetition, the variation on the idea, the accumulation of examples and diverse context.

This is how the human mind internalises patterns. And also how I’ve built my judgement, through pattern matching and recognition.

2. Personal practice

Reading is the foundation for mastery. But the situations you face in communications work are rarely textbook. You cannot carbon copy strategies from a book or social media and expect them to work for you. No, you have to experiment in the real world.

So please, move from bookmarking posts and highlighting ideas to actually running experiments with them. Many of your experiments will fail and that’s okay. Document it, refine the idea and then try again.

Frameworks are not instructions. You should treat them like lenses and there is more than one way to interpret them.

The quality of ‘experiments’ you run is directly influenced by the quality of what you read. Ever since I missed out on an incredible job with a dream organization simply because I lacked the necessary judgment the role demanded, I’ve started taking my personal experiments very seriously to glorious results.

As you experiment and notice what works, two things start to happen:

- your intuition improves

- and you begin to trust your own thinking

This is the loop that leads to mastery in your comms career (or any other career if we’re being honest).

3. Proximity to expertise

There are limits to what you can do alone.

At some point, you will get stuck in your own patterns. If you’ve been working for several years, you will find yourself repeating the same ideas, leaning on the same playbooks, and strategies, especially when some of these tactics were successful.

If you plan to stick to one organization in the same industry throughout your career, this may not be an immediate problem. But if you want mastery and a skillset that translates across any company or industry - nonprofit, private sector, government - you have to periodically unbundle what’s working to build something better.

This is where proximity to people with deeper expertise matters. They disrupt your loop. They expose you to playbooks and ways of thinking you wouldn’t have considered on your own or even from reading.

Get mentors, shadow experts and senior colleagues. Become a sponge and absorb as much wisdom as you can from them.

While the industry remains uneven in many ways, especially for early career comms people, and while we’re all figuring out how exactly AI fits into the future of our profession, I want you to remember that the core value of the comms strategist is judgment and if that’s your long term career goal, you should run this loop on yourself.

Let the AI supply the templates. As long as the strategic judgement sits on your side, the odds remain in your favor.

Epilogue

I’m a Hollywood Writer. It’s Not Over for Us

This piece by screenwriter David Scarpa is worth reading beyond the film industry. His point is that AI becomes most threatening when human creative work has already started behaving like a machine and I think that should make comms people sit up. If our work is only frameworks, templates, and familiar language, we will be out of a job soon enough. But if it is built on sharp observation, context, lived experience, and strategic judgment, AI becomes less of a replacement and more of a tool.

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please share with your network. Inclusion Notes keeps growing every week and it’s due to people sharing it with their friends and colleagues.

I once attended an interview where I was asked scenario-based questions on managing crises, shaping a corporate narrative, and advising leadership under pressure. The usual stuff.

For a few seconds, I was blank.

You see, I had never handled any of those scenarios.

Yes, I had run digital and offline campaigns. I had grown social media channels and even gone viral a few times.

But when the interviewer asked, “A regulator publicly challenges your organization at 9 a.m. Could you walk me through the next few hours of your reaction” I reached for common sense and fragments of things I had read online in my response but it did not click with the interviewers.

I ended up not getting the job but it was a wakeup moment for me. Beyond my knowledge gap, what that interview exposed was also a career hazard. I had over-indexed on a narrow slice of communications functions and mistook it for the whole discipline.

I’ve seen many people also have this similar experience. When many early comms people say they “work in comms,” they often mean one of two things: content or social media. While this is not wrong, it is incomplete.

Communications is not one job. It is a system of ten core functions that operate together (the number varies depending on the scholars you agree with). If you only build your career on one or two functions, it becomes harder to advance later.

My comms mental model

My friends know I’m a sucker for mental models. So here’s the one I use.

Think of communications as ten core functions organized into three buckets.

The buckets are memory aids while the ten functions are the real work.

Narrative and Craft is where ideas become language and language becomes meaning.

Channels and Influence is where narratives meet the world.

Resilience and Intelligence is the company’s early warning and “immune” system. It ensures durability.

As you can see, comms is broad. And as you grow in your career, your experience is supposed to expand across the 3 categories.

In many organisations, these functions overlap. In smaller teams, the same three or four people may handle nearly all of them. The point of this model is help you understand the lay of the land in comms.

Imagine growing up on a large island but living your entire life in one small corner and never leaving. Imagine one day, you are asked to become the mayor and lead the people. How prepared would you be if you had never left your own corner of the island?

Let’s take a few examples to see how these functions work together:

A multinational NGO is accused on a popular podcast of misusing donor funds. The allegation spreads across social media before the organization has even heard the episode.

Issues and Crisis Management is the leading function and they will decide: Is this credible? What is our exposure? Who should be the spokesperson? What do we say and when?

But the function cannot operate alone. Monitoring and Analytics must map how fast the narrative is spreading and where. Media Relations must prepare reactive statements and reach out to trusted journalists. Internal Comms must brief staff before they read about it on X. Executive communications must prepare the CEO for a possible live interview.

Let’s consider another scenario - a climate research institute has produced a dense 120 page technical report. It wants policymakers to act on it within six months.

Here, Public Affairs will take the lead. Someone must translate research into policy asks, map decision-makers, and design engagement moments. But they also need help from the people in Narrative and Craft.

Content and Editorial must distill 120 pages into a four-page brief and a one-paragraph framing line that will be used by a committee. Executive Communications must equip the director with language that resonates in private meetings. Digital channels must support the push with targeted amplification.

For a third scenario, let’s consider a company undergoing restructuring and rumors are circulating among staff. Morale and productivity are dipping.

The function to lead on this is Internal Communications. Employees need clarity before they need inspiration. But Internal Comms depends on Brand and Reputation, because the internal story must align with the external one. It depends on Monitoring, because pulse surveys and sentiment analysis will indicate whether messages are resonating with staff. It depends on Executive Communications, because leaders must show up in credible ways.

From these examples, you can see that no serious communications challenge is solved by one function alone. Each usually has a lead but also requires support.

If your experience is limited to only one or two functions, it becomes harder to lead comms effectively. Like the saying goes, a man with a hammer will consider every problem a nail. And this is the career risk.

We all start at the bottom floor, and our tasks are usually content production or social media management. These functions are visible and measurable because they produce outputs consistently. Crisis may not appear for years. Public affairs may sit with another team like Partnerships. Monitoring may be outsourced.

Five years later, you are now a mid-career or senior comms professional but no experience with high-stakes moments. In job interviews, scenario questions reveal the gap.

The solution is deliberate range building. That is, you must go out of your way to experience all the buckets and functions.

At the entry level, that could mean asking to sit in on a crisis debrief even if you are not on the core team. It could mean shadowing a stakeholder mapping session. The mental model helps you review the functions you have limited experience with.

For mid-career professionals, it means rotating your exposure. If you lead digital, can you co-lead a media strategy for one campaign? If you manage content, can you partner with the public affairs team for one legislative push? Yes you still have to do the job your line manager cares about in the short term, but you should never abandon long term thinking for short term results.

Expand your circle.

AI, used well, can support this range building. Use it to simulate crisis scenarios and have personal dry runs. Ask it to simulate hostile journalists, skeptical board members, or regulatory reviewers. Ask it to pressure test your responses. When you think you’re ready, let it generate mock interview questions that test your readiness across the 10 functions.

Whatever function you’re currently in, using AI will make you produce faster. But please do not use AI to narrow yourself further. Communications is not content. It is a system of functions that manage influence and risk across an organization.

If you are in your first three years, do not aim for mastery of one function. Aim for exposure across the 3 buckets. Pick one of the ten functions you have never worked on and design a small project around it in the next six months.

If you are mid-career, map your last two years of work against the three buckets. If one bucket is empty, correct it.

Senior leaders have a lot of responsibility here as well. Please help early career professionals understand the lay of the land early, rather than constraining them to one or two functions.

Again, communications is not content. It is not social media. It is not media relations. And while there’s currently a lot of excitement about “storytellers”, comms is also more than good storytelling.

Comms is a system of ten functions operating across Narrative & Craft, Channels & Influence, and Resilience & Intelligence.

Remember that.

Interesting reads

Being mid is the worst thing you can be

Really great article on positioning. Being mid gets you ignored, while the extreme, distinctive, or memorable get amplified. For creatives and comms people working on strategy, this is important reading. Joe links economics, platform dynamics, and brand strategy into one clear idea: being average is now a liability. Stop trying to appeal to everyone and become unmistakably “the most” at something specific.

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please like the post and share with your network. Inclusion Notes keeps growing every week and it’s due to people sharing it with their friends and colleagues.

Every civilization had its communicators; the scribes, heralds, town criers, diplomats, and editors who shaped the stories nations told about themselves.

The modern communications professional stands in that lineage. Yet, in today’s corporate hierarchies, the role is often seen as cosmetic.

The craft of communications has built empires and ended wars. It is a hard skill disguised as a soft one. It requires fluency in psychology, power dynamics, timing, and tone. Like architecture or cuisine, it’s a discipline of craft learned through apprenticeship, repetition, and reflection, not charisma alone.

It also demands years of deliberate practice, pattern recognition across thousands of scenarios, and the kind of embodied judgment that can’t be taught in a workshop.

Inspired by Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and Robert Greene’s Mastery, today’s newsletter examines the path of mastery for the comms professional.

Every great communicator, whether in politics, corporate affairs, or global development, walks a version of this path. The titles may differ, but the journey is remarkably consistent: apprentice, journeyman, adept, and master.

1. Apprentice | Learning the Language of the Trade

Common job titles: Communications Intern, Junior Copywriter, Assistant PR Officer, Social Media Associate, Editorial Assistant. (Caveat: Titles are not consistent across industries. Don’t confuse your title with your stage. Some “assistants” have become adept, some “managers” are still apprentices.)

Every craft begins with imitation.

In this first stage, you’re not expected to innovate but rather, to copy with precision.

Apprenticeship is about learning the grammar of the industry - the difference between a holding statement and a positioning memo, how to structure a media brief, when to escalate and when to hold. You build what cognitive scientists call “chunking”, the ability to recognize patterns instantly because you’ve seen the components hundreds of times.

The apprentice’s goal is fluency, not fame. What folks call, putting in the reps.

Consider Bozoma Saint John. Before her high-profile brand leadership roles at Pepsi, Apple/Beats, Uber, and Netflix, Saint John has described early years doing whatever needed doing at Spike Lee’s SpikeDDB e.g. fetching coffee, fixing machines, marking up scripts, absorbing how great campaigns are made by doing the small things well.

This stage is unglamorous but essential to building muscle memory.

The apprentice learns tools, like media monitoring systems, content management platforms, stakeholder mapping frameworks. But more importantly, they learn to see the “lay of the land”.

To level up:

• Develop consistency: deliver reliable, accurate, timely work.

• Seek mentors who model excellence.

• Volunteer for unseen tasks such as editing, summarizing, synthesizing. These train your eye for structure, which becomes the backbone of judgment later.

2. Journeyman | From Execution to Exploration

Common job titles: Communications Officer, PR Executive, Content Strategist, Digital Marketing Specialist, Media Relations Coordinator, Speechwriter.

If apprenticeship is about obedience, the journeyman phase is about experimentation. You’ve mastered the fundamentals and can finally execute without supervision.

You write the press release without three rounds of edits. You run the stakeholder workshop. You manage the product launch end-to-end.

This is where taste develops through trial and repetition.

The journeyman stage is messy. You lead projects but haven’t yet developed a distinctive approach. Research on skill development calls this the “conscious competence” phase. You can do the work well, but it requires deliberate attention.

Many professionals end up here and plateau. Only a handful advance.

The trick to advancement in this stage is: diversification and reflection.

The best journeymen deliberately seek varied experiences. Draft speeches for executives with wildly different styles. Manage a crisis in one domain, a culture transformation in another. Handle media in three different regulatory environments. Each context adds new patterns to your library.

For all the complaints about the PR agency, it is heaven for journeymen. You get to try your hands on different projects, across different industries, with different clients.

But you do not have to work in an agency to experiment. You just need courage and curiosity. And when you find yourself in a rut in an industry, it’s time to change employers.

To level up:

• Diversify your experiences.

• Keep professional journals (sort of like analytical logs). What worked in that campaign? What assumptions did I make that proved wrong? What would I do differently? This metacognitive practice, documented in studies of expert performance, accelerates the transition from execution to insight.

• Stop seeking applause and start seeking concrete feedback.

3. Adept | Seeing the Invisible Principles

Common job titles: Senior Strategist, Head of Communications, Comms Lead, Head of Content, Brand Lead, Corporate Affairs Advisor, or External Relations Specialist.

Something changes when you reach the adept stage. You begin to sense the invisible architecture of communication, like the power of silence, the psychology of framing and sequencing.

You can diagnose communication problems the way an experienced architect spots structural issues in a blueprint intuitively, often before others recognize something’s wrong. You make complex decisions that appear simple. You balance what’s said with what’s deliberately left unsaid or implied.

This is when you start developing your own frameworks distilled from your accumulated experience.

Take Richard Edelman, the head of Edelman, one of the world’s biggest independent PR firms. Over two decades ago, when he reframed public relations as trust management, he wasn’t polishing old language; but rather exposing the underlying dynamics of influence. His annual Trust Barometer turned a communications product into a strategic tool for leadership.

At this stage, you also begin mentoring others. Not because you’re required to, but because teaching clarifies your thinking. Explaining why a message works forces you to articulate principles you’ve been operating on instinctively.

To level up:

• Study allied disciplines: organizational behavior, behavioral science, diplomacy, design thinking.

• Hone situational awareness - learn how power, timing, and perception interact.

• Develop your philosophy of the craft: What do you believe communication is for?

4. Master | The Craft Becomes You

Common job titles: Chief Communications Officer, Director of Strategic Communications, Senior Advisor, Thought Leader, or Founder of a communications firm.

This is every professional’s Eldorado.

The master has moved beyond technique and embodied the discipline.

Your intuition operates where formulas fail. In crisis moments when others are paralyzed by ambiguity, you can move with clarity. Not because you have a playbook for every scenario. But because you’ve internalized principles so deeply that you can improvise elegantly within constraints.

Masters lead through their work, with their satisfaction coming from developing others who will surpass them.

This is where legacy thinking emerges. Not legacy as vanity, but legacy as responsibility i.e. institutionalizing wisdom so the next generation doesn’t start from zero. Master communicators write the frameworks that become industry standards. They create training programs that shape how organizations think about communication. They mentor across disciplines, recognizing that craft excellence in one domain can illuminate another.

How to level up:

Mastery presents a paradox. Contrary to popular belief, mastery is not a final stage. Every master eventually returns to apprenticeship in a new domain, for example, writing a book, launching a venture, mentoring across disciplines. True mastery is recursive. You begin again, better.

Comms is Craft

Organizations are facing increased complexity. Polarized audiences, algorithms, stakeholder expectations that shift overnight etc. The “soft skills” approach isn’t working. We need professionals who’ve developed the judgment that only comes through years of deliberate practice.

When we treat communication as a craft with clear developmental stages, several things change:

• We stop hiring for credentials alone and start assessing where candidates actually are in their craft development. An apprentice with five years of experience isn’t the same as an adept with five years of experience.

• We build better development programs. You don’t teach an apprentice the same way you challenge a journeyman or develop an adept. Each stage requires different experiences, different feedback, different growth opportunities.

• Lastly, we create clearer career pathways. Professionals can assess their own development and identify what they need to advance, not just what title to chase, but what capabilities to cultivate.

Epilogue

We are heirs to a noble lineage, from scribes who recorded the rise of civilizations to editors who shaped the modern public sphere. To call communications a “soft skill” is to misunderstand what keeps organizations thriving.

For peers, today’s newsletter is diagnostic, helping you identify where you are and how to begin to level up. For leaders, it can help you design environments where your comms team can thrive - pairing apprentices with masters, allowing journeymen to experiment, etc.

We inherit the craft but we also shape its future, 10,000 hours per person.

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please like the post and share with your network. Inclusion Notes keeps growing every week and it’s due to people sharing it with their friends and colleagues.

One of my favorite science talks in the world is this TED talk by the CEO of Duolingo (who also happens to be a Professor).

On the surface, it’s not a science talk. It feels like funny conversation, sprinkled with a few clever insights about learning a language. You laugh and nod along, only later to realize he’s been teaching you behavioral science the whole time.

That’s the mark of a great technical talk.

It sneaks past your defenses. You don’t even realize what's happening until you’re already hooked.

Earlier this year, I ran a storytelling workshop for 40+ scientists and researchers. The first section of the training featured insights from this talk so I'm sharing some of the lessons with you.

Anatomy of a good science story

Every good story can be broken into 2 sections:

• back end = technical rigor

• front end = emotional and cognitive accessibility.

Put another way:

• Back end = what happened, in technical terms.

• Front end = why it matters, and to whom.

I'm a firm believer that the audience should interact with the backend as little as possible. Let the front end do the heavy lifting.

If you had to type code or DOS commands every time you wanted to send an email, you would hate it because it would be cumbersome. That’s how most technical talks feel - too much code, not enough design.

So you can see why it’s better to keep the backend of your story partly hidden from the audience.

Analyzing Prof Luis Von Ahn's talk with my framework, it becomes obvious why it's so good.

Every great technical talk has a frontend and a backend. Especially if you're speaking to superiors, non-technical people, or the public, it helps to think of your story this way.

And this does several things for you.

1. Reminds you that you may have all the elements for your backend, but the front end doesn't exist yet.

Researchers, analysts, technical people often show up with a polished back end. The experiment is done, the data analyzed, the theory solid. But the front end doesn’t exist yet.

Your job is to create it.

2. Understand that time is not your friend

Attention is scarce. Whenever you're engaging an audience whether through a talk or your writing, you have 60 seconds, maybe less, to get them interested. Why? Because you're competing with WhatsApp notifications, emails, YouTube, and SMSes.

Do NOT start with your data (unless it's shocking data). Start with something that connects emotionally: humor, a surprising fact, or a personal story.

Prof. Luis Von Ahn did this very well - he opened with a good joke and he kept engaging the audience. If you were in the audience, you'd be almost scared to peek at your phone so as not to miss anything.

3. Big idea framing

People like big ideas. They make the world feel both simpler and bigger at the same time.

Instead of juggling a hundred details, you get one clear concept that organizes everything else. It gives people a handle to carry your ideas home with them. Big ideas also lift us out of the ordinary. They give us a sense of scale, possibility, or meaning that makes the details feel part of something grand and inspire that sense of wonder we had as kids.

It's also robust enough to let you get creative with the storytelling.

Leaving the backend in the backend

The hard work is knowing what to leave in the back end. Technical people fear oversimplification. The common pushback I hear is some variation of, “But it’s more complex than that.”

Of course it is. Isn't everything in life complex? Love, mastering a skill, winning grants.

So it helps to think of this as translating technical parts of your work for the audience.

How do we do this without dumbing down? Replace jargon with metaphors, analogies, or visuals.

For instance, instead of saying “high-resolution downscaling models,” say:“It’s like zooming in on the weather forecast until you can see your own street.”

A lot of analogies and metaphors come intuitively. Like this brilliant one by Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director of GAIN.

But if you're stuck or struggle to come up with metaphors and analogies, Vincent Pierri gives a very simple framework that works.

Authors I love to read who are geniuses at analogies and metaphors - David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Morgan Housel and Malcolm Gladwell.

Taking the red pill

To get a little meta, you'll notice I did the exact same thing with this newsletter. I could have given you a bullet-point checklist on “How to Tell a Technical Story.”

Instead I began with something personal to me - my favorite TED talk. I used analogies (websites, DOS, containers). I titled this post "Anatomy of a Great Technical Story", (framing it as a big idea). That's the front end at work.

And it must be working. I’ve delivered multiple talks this year using this framework, and each time they tell me they want me back.

The lesson remains - always lead with the story. The science serves the story, not the other way around.

Trust me it works.

Interesting Reads

A summary of the most effective learning techniques based on research study findings.

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please like the post and share with your network. Inclusion Notes keeps growing every week and it’s due to people sharing it with their friends and colleagues.

If you’ve been working for over a decade, you’ve already seen the world change in ways no one predicted.

When I joined the workforce, flip phones were still in fashion, social media was considered a distraction, and the most powerful companies on the planet were oil and gas giants. In the space of 10 years, entire industries have been upended and new jobs titles created.

It’s tempting to try and predict where we’ll be in the next 5-10 years. But with AI transforming nearly every sector in real-time, that feels like a fool’s errand.

So instead, let’s look backward at how “research” as a career path came to be. History may not offer clear forecasts but it gives us patterns and from patterns emerge clues, warnings, and possibilities.

The Care of Knowing

It is the year 900CE. A Benedictine monk dips his quill into ink and begins to copy a manuscript he did not write, in a language he only half understands.

Centuries later, on the dry plains of northern Nigeria, a healer observes which herbs attract flies and which dont, committing the results not to paper but to memory.

Across oceans, an aristocrat in an embroidered coat peers into a brass telescope, sketching the strange moons of Jupiter.

And now, in a co-working lab in Nairobi, a young woman, Dr Lara, trains an algorithm to predict rainfall patterns based on satellite data and centuries-old farming calendars.

They are all, in their own way, researchers though the term would be foreign to all but Dr Lara.

What unites them is the desire to know and understand the world.

Research as a career, something you can apply for, get paid to do and eventually retire from, is a recent invention. Historically, researchers have been philosophers, priests, physicians, or simply eccentrics with enough money to indulge their curiosities. The idea that society should pay someone to ask questions, with no immediate promise of useful answers, represents one of the most remarkable shifts in civilization of the past few centuries.

The Ancients and Their Idle Hours (900 BCE to 200 CE)

Consider Aristotle, that relentless cataloger of the natural world in fourth-century Athens. By day, he might tutor the young Alexander (who would later become "the Great"), but his real passion was observing everything, from the mating habits of bees to the embryonic development of chickens. Aristotle was perhaps history's first recognizable research obsessive, the kind of person who would dissect a squid just because he needed to know how it worked.

Yet Aristotle was not a "researcher" in any sense we would recognize. He was a philosopher, supported by wealthy patrons and the occasional royal stipend, pursuing knowledge as a gentleman's calling.

Founded around 300 BCE, the Library of Alexandria was less a library than a think tank; a place where the rulers of Egypt gathered the world's knowledge and paid scholars to expand it. Here, Eratosthenes remarkably calculated the circumference of the Earth using shadows and geometry, while Euclid organized mathematical principles that would be taught in classrooms for the next two thousand years.

But even these scholarly superstars were essentially court appointments, intellectuals in residence whose job security depended on royal favor. They were pursuing knowledge in service of imperial prestige rather than as an end in itself.

Medieval Manuscripts and the Monastic Method (500 CE to 1500 CE)

The fall of Rome scattered the ancient world's intellectual apparatus, but the impulse to understand did not disappear. It simply moved into the monasteries and madrasas where monks and Islamic scholars preserved, translated, and occasionally expanded upon the classical texts. Here, research became intertwined with religious devotion.

In the Islamic world, figures like Ibn al-Haytham were conducting experiments that would not have been out of place in a modern laboratory. Working in eleventh-century Cairo, Ibn al-Haytham developed rigorous methods for testing hypotheses about light and vision, using dark chambers etc. His insistence that theories must be verified through experimentation rather than accepted on authority, established him as perhaps the world's first true empirical scientist, five centuries before the European Renaissance.

Yet Ibn al-Haytham was a court astronomer and mathematician, supported by the Fatimid caliphs because his work had practical applications for navigation and timekeeping. His research was a byproduct of his official duties.

The founding of universities in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford during the eleventh and twelfth centuries marked the beginning of something new: institutional spaces dedicated primarily to learning and teaching rather than prayer or governance. But these early universities were essentially trade schools for the medieval professions of training lawyers, doctors, and priests. The idea of university faculty conducting original research was still centuries in the future. Professors were paid to transmit existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge.

The transformation of research from hobby to profession required a fundamental shift in how society viewed the pursuit of knowledge. And that shift came from one unlikely rebel.

The Galileo Moment (1543 to 1700)

Galileo Galilei represented something genuinely new in human history: a person whose primary occupation was discovering things that no one had known before. When he published his observations in 1610, he was asserting that the systematic observation of nature could reveal truths that contradicted ancient authority and even religious doctrine.

This was a dangerous proposition, as Galileo learned when he was placed under house arrest. But the first domino had already fallen. By the time of Galileo's death in 1642, the idea that knowledge could advance through systematic observation and experimentation had taken root across Europe.

The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, represented the institutionalization of this new approach to knowledge. When twelve men including Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren gathered to create a "college for the promoting of physico-mathematical experimental learning," they were essentially inventing the prototype of the modern research institution. Their motto, Nullius in verba ("take nobody's word for it"), declared war on the authority-based knowledge of the medieval world.

In 1662, the Society appointed Robert Hooke to devise and demonstrate experiments at the Society's weekly meetings, making him, in essence, the world's first staff scientist.

Lastly, the Society's Philosophical Transactions, launched in 1665, established the model of scientific publication that persists today: researchers would conduct experiments, write up their results, and submit them for evaluation by their peers. This created both the infrastructure and incentives necessary for research to become a self-sustaining intellectual ecosystem.

The German Engine (1810 to 1914)

The transformation of research from aristocratic pastime to middle-class profession required an educational revolution. Wilhelm von Humboldt provided it in 1810 when he reimagined the University of Berlin around a radical premise: professors should create knowledge, not merely transmit it.

Humboldt's radical vision was that universities should unite teaching and research in a single institution. This "Humboldtian ideal" as it was called, spread across Europe and America like wildfire, fundamentally changing what it meant to be a scholar. Suddenly, students weren't passive receptacles for ancient wisdom but apprentices in active discovery.

The German system also led to the creation of the modern PhD degree, formalizing the training of researchers which required students to conduct original investigations under faculty supervision. This mentorship model still governs scientific training today.

By the late nineteenth century, the word "scientist" had been coined by William Whewell in 1833 to describe this new class of professional knowledge-creators.

The period also saw the creation of specialized scientific societies and journals for each emerging discipline, providing researchers with communities of peers and venues for publication.

The Manhattan Project and Golden Era (1942 to 1975)

There's no way to discuss science without war, particularly World War 2.

By the twentieth century, it became evident that scientific knowledge could determine the fate of nations. The Manhattan Project, a sprint to create the world's first atomic bomb, took 130,000 people, $2.2 billion (in 1940s dollars), and showed that with sufficient resources researchers could achieve the near impossible.

This was the birth of "Big Science".

The creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950 marked something revolutionary: for the first time, a major government systematically funded curiosity-driven research simply because it might eventually prove beneficial.

The Cold War supercharged this commitment to research. The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 triggered massive American investments in scientific education and research infrastructure. Universities expanded rapidly, creating thousands of new faculty positions. National laboratories were established to pursue everything from particle physics to space exploration. The number of people employed as professional researchers grew exponentially.

This period ~ 1945 to 1980 ~ became the golden age of research careers. Funding was relatively abundant, job security was strong, and scientists enjoyed enormous public prestige. The Apollo program, which put humans on the moon, represented the climax of this era. But the golden age also had complications. The massive expansion of research training created far more PhDs than the system could absorb in permanent positions.

Digital Natives and Algorithmic Assistants (1990 to present)

The Internet, initially developed by researchers for researchers, transformed how knowledge is created and shared.

Projects like the Human Genome Project and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN demonstrated that the most ambitious research goals now required international collaboration on an unprecedented scale. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, involved researchers from six countries working together to map human DNA, sharing their data freely online. The result was accelerated discovery that would have been impossible under the old model of competitive, secretive research.

And then we have AI, perhaps the most transformative development of the digital age.

Machine learning algorithms can now analyze datasets far too large for human comprehension and identify patterns that would elude human researchers. DeepMind's AlphaFold, which solved the fifty-year-old problem of protein structure prediction, represents a new kind of research breakthrough: one achieved primarily by algorithms rather than human insight.

This raises profound questions about the future of research careers. If machines can conduct certain types of investigations more efficiently than humans, what role will human researchers play?

Recycled Patterns

From this brief history lesson, three forces have consistently shaped research careers:

• Relevance by Association: Over the past 200 years, “researcher” has survived by attaching itself to powerful institutions (universities, states, industries).

• Who Pays Shapes the Questions: From kings to caliphs to corporations, research has always followed the incentives of its funders. The fantasy of pure, disinterested inquiry remains a fantasy.

• New Tools Rewrite the Rules: The telescope, the printing press, the microscope, the internet, each expanded the frontier of what could be known, and who could know it. AI will transform research too.

• Demand Outpaces the System: The postwar surge in Ph.D.s produced more researchers than academia could absorb, exposing the rising costs of higher education and the fragility of research careers. Precarity has been baked into the enterprise ever since.

The Future

We dont know how much research careers will change. But if I could take one bet, it’s that we will see more of the creator-researcher hybrid.

The Creator-Researcher Era

In this world, researchers build their own brands. They share live research diaries, answer questions from subscribers, and get cited by journalists and schoolteachers as often as by peers. Tenure matters less than trust. Authority is earned through clarity and public engagement.

Winners: Researchers who communicate well, think across disciplines, and build loyal audiences.

Epilogue

We return to Dr Lara in the lab, working on her laptop.

Lara is paid to be curious, funded by a society that has decided (however inconsistently) that asking questions is valuable even when the answers are not immediately apparent.

The medieval monk copying manuscripts by candlelight could hardly have imagined that his distant descendants would be funded by democratic governments to investigate the fundamental nature of reality.

As Lara finally switches off her laptop and heads home through the empty campus, she carries with her both the accumulated wisdom of centuries of human inquiry and the uncertainty of a profession in transition. But somewhere else in the world, another researcher is just beginning their day, peering into a microscope or training an algorithm, continuing the ancient human project of trying to understand what we do not yet know.

If you enjoyed reading this deep dive, please let me know so I can do more like it. Also, please like the post and share with your network. Inclusion Notes keeps growing every week and I want to make it as helpful and engaging for you as possible.

In early August, a UN report went viral revealing that most UN reports go unread. Fewer than 5% reach 5,500 downloads. Ignoring the irony of this revelation appearing in yet another report, the diagnosis is useful. And it affirms what many people have whispered for years. 

However, this is not only a UN problem. It’s the trend across the research industrial-complex which has been optimized for the wrong metrics. 

In Why you should be active on social media, I wrote:

It is a sobering fact that some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited. Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.

While this is hugely problematic, it also presents a massive opportunity. 

In a 2022 newsletter titled "The AI Unbundling", tech analyst Ben Thompson argued that the history of human communication can be understood as a long process of unbundling the idea propagation value chain - creation, substantiation, duplication, distribution, and consumption, by removing bottlenecks at each step.

The printing press removed the duplication barrier, the internet shattered the cost of distribution. Newspapers, music, movies, books and publishing, retail and commerce have forever been transformed with category incumbents losing, and new winners emerging.

And now AI is dissolving the final bottleneck: the act of creation and substantiation itself. By automating substantiation (turning loose ideas into structured outputs) AI is transforming not just content creation but the core value engine of entire industries.

Every industry will face the same pressures of zero marginal cost, commoditization, and unbundling. Including the research industrial complex.

Traditional knowledge centres like research institutes, universities, think tanks, and UN agencies invest heavily via budgets, staff time, and career incentives into Creation and Substantiation. 

• Creation: research proposals, data collection, rigorous analysis. 

• Substantiation: report writing and publication.

Over the years, these institutions have built world-class capabilities and reputations in these two categories but everything downstream remains underfunded and under-resourced. 

Now with AI, the moat these institutions built is eroding. Tools that once required teams of experts and months of work, such as literature reviews, draft reports, and data visualizations, can now be replicated (at least passably) in minutes. This doesn’t mean quality research is obsolete but it does shrink the competitive advantage of those whose value proposition was producing research and delivering them via reports. Writing, analysis, and synthesis, once considered scarce, are becoming cheap and abundant.

The implications of this are enormous and presents a fundamental shift in supply-demand dynamics within the industry. 

The research industrial complex is experiencing the same unbundling that hit media, retail, and finance. The question is who will capture the value in the new stack?

So where does the leverage sit now?

Obviously, the major opportunities today are in the areas that have been underfunded and the industry has least innovated:

If knowledge generating institutions are to remain relevant, we have to tip more resources down the value chain.

1) Packaging: present results in ways people who need them can use them. Decisions are made with tools and shared narratives, not just reports. Good packaging gives an insight a life beyond the project itself, so others can use it in conversations and decisions you may never be part of.

2) Distribution: research organisations will not outspend large corporations on media. But they can out-earn attention by publishing a consistent, searchable trail of knowledge products designed specifically for the internet + AI era. 

3) Adoption: engineer the “yes”. Barriers to adoption are often operational friction and risk. This is something I’m still thinking about. 

4) Consumption: News moves quickly; research-backed insight tends to last longer. But even a strong insight fades if people encounter it only once. Repetition matters. Newsletters, convenings, internal training, and embedded partnerships give people repeated chances to remember an idea, use it, and eventually make it part of how they work.

Knowledge-creation centers need to become just as serious about sharing knowledge and supporting decisions as they are about producing research. Their relevance will depend on whether they can keep pushing their ideas till they take hold and shape what people actually do.

That means treating Packaging, Distribution, Adoption, and Consumption as part of the work itself, not as what happens after the research is finished. Each requires its own methods, incentives, and skills. The process will not always be neat. Often, it means piecing together different channels, relationships, and formats until an idea begins to stick. That may be less elegant than publishing a report, but it is much closer to how change happens in the real world.

Take agriculture. For decades, weather and soil research was locked up in technical bulletins few farmers ever read. Then came a shift downstream. Insights were packaged into SMS-based weather alerts and WhatsApp advisory bots, delivering guidance in plain language. Distribution piggybacked on existing infrastructure i.e. partnerships with telcos and community radio, which let the message reach millions. People adopted the solutions because the advice was specific and low-friction (“plant next week, fertilizer prices rising in 10 days”). And because messages were received predictably with the planting cycle, consumption became routine and not one-off.

This illustrates how research becomes infinitely useful when it is embedded in existing systems and tied to the decision rhythms of end users.

So the big money question now is how to translate this into the research space: how to make evidence not just available to policymakers, but woven into their routines, so it shapes decisions the way weather alerts shape planting.

It sounds like more work and it is. AI + Internet is a new continent and the opportunities are for those willing to reinvent themselves.

Seasons and Times

There are several signals that this is the right time for reinvention:

Emerging Institutional Realities

Funding mechanisms like Horizon Europe now place explicit emphasis on societal impact, not just number of citations. Applicants are expected to articulate their value beyond academic outputs, how a project addresses EU priorities, contributes to SDGs, and leads to societal benefits. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) now requires narrative case studies to determine how much money a university gets. If your work can’t show impact in the real world, the system won’t pay you.

Even the ongoing UN reforms (and the cited report at the beginning of this piece) mention reducing the number of reports published and being more strategic about knowledge creation. Basically, people now have to increase the shelf life of their reports.

The winners in this transition will be knowledge institutions that understand they're not in the report generation business but the decision-support business. They'll build direct relationships with the people who need their insights, create repeatable systems for packaging and distributing knowledge, and measure success by behavior change rather than number of reports published.

Emerging Individual Researcher Realities

Two major headwinds I see across academia and the broader research community.

1. The career ladder is collapsing sideways for early to mid career researchers.

In the United States, roughly only one-third of faculty are tenured or tenure track. In medical schools it is closer to one in five. Several states have moved to weaken tenure further. For Global South scholars, the squeeze is harsher: there are fewer protected roles, more precarious contracts and promotion pipelines are narrowing. What’s the translation for early-career scholars, especially outside the Global North? Do not bank your future on a single internal promotion narrative.

2. Paper reviewer overload is intensifying.

Publish-or-perish incentives have created a surge in paper submissions to journals. As the manuscripts multiply, journals keep putting out calls for competent eyes. The labor to read has become a kind of invisible tax on the labor to write. And the trend will get worse. 

AI tools now make it easier for researchers to research, analyse and submit manuscripts faster. To keep up, publishers are experimenting with automation in peer review. We’ve seen this before in HR: CVs generated by bots, screened by bots. The losers were the early career job seekers without connections. In research and academia, it will be early-career scholars and Global South researchers who are squeezed out.

So yes, publishing your way to the top will get harder. 

Researchers and evidence-producing institutions must instead create new pathways: building demand for evidence, cultivating audiences beyond journals, and positioning their expertise in broader public and policy debates. This is not a retreat from scholarship, but a return to its core purpose ie to make knowledge public in times of heightened complexity and noise.

We’re in a world that desperately needs it.

Epilogue

If there's one thing I'd love you to leave with, it's that it's no longer business as usual. The knowledge economy is experiencing its "Innovator's Dilemma". The landscape has shifted and over the next few years, we will witness dramatic shifts in academia and research, especially in the development sector. 

For individual researchers, you need to update your playbook on building a research career and driving impact as well. For institutions, you need to update your playbook so your work remains relevant as the new world emerges.

Interesting reads

The Philosopher-Builder

I love the way this essay explores the ends vs means question. It critiques the way many modern inventors and builders pursue scale, efficiency, or market capture without asking the deeper ethical question: What is this for? It argues that technology is never neutral, it encodes values. So to build without a guiding philosophy risks embedding exploitation or control into our systems by default.

When I started working on financial inclusion in 2017, mobile money was still an industry obsession.

We had more than 21 licensed mobile money operators but adoption was stuck around 1-2%. Mobile money startups were banking on the Kenya playbook and expected mobile money to also take off in Nigeria, but the fates (and CBN) said no.

What happened next is a case study in how innovation finds unexpected pathways.

Instead of mobile money, Nigeria's secret weapon turned out to be a trio of innovations:

• mobile banking

• NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP)

• and eventually, agent banking/POS machines.

In spite of all the infrastructural challenges, financial literacy gaps and a bevy of issues bedeviling the nation, today ~74% of adults use financial services whether formally or informally.

That's just shy of the CBN's 2024 goal of reducing exclusion to 25%. But what's a 1% difference, eh?

But percentages don't capture the human drama of this transformation.

It's impressive we're here today. I recall vividly the drama when people lost access to their accounts until they registered for a BVN in 2015. Some banks were yet to even launch banking apps back then, you had to go physically to the bank and queue for hours. Today, the financial inclusion ecosystem has birthed a unicorn, and agent networks have exploded across the country.

It's been an interesting journey, to say the least. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so please enjoy the trip down memory lane:

A few interesting observations:

• Nigeria’s inclusion story is regulatory-led, and it mostly worked, (even though I'd argue we took the long but safer route).

• NIP and Agent banking did a lot of heavy lifting for financial inclusion growth. In fact, NIP is the bedrock for a lot of innovation in the ecosystem today. Your banking apps, savings app, investment apps, PalmPay, OPay, it's all thanks to NIP.

• Regulation + political will = IMPACT. This is evident in the growth of agent banking. The guidelines came out in 2013 but agents did not scale until the Bankers' Committee launched SANEF... in 2018! Policy is just documentation until champions with authority and resources buy in.

• The year 2018 was particularly intense: so many policies dropped that year, I couldn't fit them all into the infographic. Sometimes change happens slowly, then all at once.

• Policy whiplash is a pain in the ass - the 2022 currency redesign and the ensuing cash crunch showed how fragile financial inclusion gains are when cash substitutes are not fully ready.

What strikes me most about this journey is how wrong the initial assumptions were. Initially, we wanted to replicate Kenya's story in Nigeria's market, but Nigeria was busy writing its own playbook. A playbook fit for ~200 million people.

As network effects kick in, more people will get access to bank accounts. The focus needs to shift, from tallying accounts to turning those accounts into engines of economic participation.

After all, a bank account is not for decoration.

Something exciting happened when I started writing about financial inclusion in 2022. 

People started asking me questions about things happening in the industry. 

When the naira was redesigned, people sent me questions about how best to prepare, what this meant for their savings, their business, the economy etc. 

When the Central Bank revised banking fees, same thing. Whenever a new CBN policy drops, someone enters my DM to understand how it affects them.

I said this to highlight what I believe is a gap in the research and academia community. We dont have spaces where the public gets to interact closely with the research community. A space where everyday questions can meet expert insight.

Oh wait, we do. 

It's called social media.

Invisible experts 

There are two kinds of researchers: the monk and the messenger.

Most researchers operate like monks.

Solitary. Disciplined. Devoted to truth. They sit with hard questions, stewing over them until something profound rises to the surface.

It’s noble.

But the problem is, invisibility doesn’t scale. And right now, the world can’t afford invisible experts any longer.

The great fragmentation

The traditional model of publishing and dissemination was built for the pre-internet era. A time when information was scarce, and distribution was expensive.

Back then, a few gatekeepers controlled what knowledge made it into the public domain. If you had something important to say, you went through Nature, Science, or, if you were lucky, got interviewed on a national newspaper or TV station. Publishing took time. But in exchange, it carried authority.

That system is gone.

Today, we live in a world of infinite content and zero distribution costs. Anyone with a smartphone can publish to a global audience. And they do.

51% of people across 47 countries now get their news from social media platforms, not traditional media. In the US, that number is even higher. 

This isn’t just a shift in how news spreads. It’s a restructuring of how knowledge moves through society.

Information no longer flows downstream from mass media, but instead bubbles up from every corner of the internet.

When people stumble across a hot statistic, they share it, often without checking the source.

When they need answers, they Google and click whatever’s on the first page.

They’re not going to peer-reviewed journals. They’re not combing through carefully vetted science sections in newspapers.

They’re getting their information from the same platforms where their nephew posts vacation photos, right alongside conspiracy theories about vaccines and 5G.

The trust gap

58% of people say they can't tell truth from lies online anymore. (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025).

That's more than half of the world's adult population wandering through an information wasteland, at the mercy of armchair experts.

A few weeks ago, my close pal warned me to stop using any toothpaste with fluoride. He went on to explain all the health risks and he was genuinely concerned. 

I was exhausted. Because I've had this conversation with several people now. 

When I asked where he got the info, he shared a Twitter thread. (I won’t share the link, I’m not in the business of giving misinformation more oxygen.)

It took a lot of back-and-forth to change his mind. Sometimes it's harder to convince people because there just isn’t enough expert content explaining these things. A lot of the good stuff is often buried in technical language or hidden behind paywalls.

And while it's frustrating, it also reveals a huge opportunity for experts.
Experts have the chance to become trusted, go-to voices in their fields. On the very platforms where misinformation currently thrives.

Serendipity 

The most unexpected gift of sharing your work online isn't educating the public. It's the possible collaborations that it produces. 

Since I started publishing my work and thoughts on social media, I’ve rarely struggled with ideas on what to write about cos people keep sending me interesting interviews, opinions, and events in the industry for me to weigh-in on. 

It made my job so much easier. 

Social media is the closest thing we have to a global town square. When you share your work online, you're sending up a signal flare.

Get your storytelling reps in

I've delivered two public presentations this year, currently planning a third, and a lot of my examples + case studies came from my experiments on social media. 

If you're serious about storytelling, you should be using social media like your lab. Every post is a chance to test whether your analogies land, which explanations confuse, which aspects of your work genuinely excite people.

The feedback is immediate and honest. Sometimes brutally honest 😂. But this is a gift. The audience online is visceral, not tame. They'll tell you when your explanation doesn't make sense, when you're being too technical or too simplistic.

Better to learn these lessons in a tweet than in front of a funder or a classroom full of students.

Reclaiming joy in the work

Research can be a lonely business. You can spend months or years pursuing a question that might lead nowhere, surrounded by the only 12 people who understand what you're doing. 

But when you share a breakthrough moment online, even a small one, suddenly you're connected to a community of people who are genuinely excited about your work. 

(It is a sobering fact that some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited. Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.)

Again, this is an incredible opportunity. 

People don't just want facts anymore. They want to trust the person delivering those facts. 

Experts call it "cognitive trust", when people don't just believe your conclusions but trust your thinking process. 

It's not enough anymore to say "studies show." People want to see the studies, understand the methodology, watch you grapple with uncertainty, and see you change your mind when new evidence emerges. 

Social media, for all its flaws, is the only place where this kind of intimate intellectual relationship can develop, at scale. When you share not just your published paper but the three failed experiments that led to it, when you admit that you spent six months barking up the wrong tree, when you show the messy, uncertain, gloriously human process of discovery.

This vulnerability isn't weakness. It's the very thing that makes science trustworthy. 
But it only works if people can see it happening.

So, would you let them in? 

Epiologue

As AI gets adopted by more people, we must not ignore the benefits of un-assisted writing. This is especially urgent for technical people.

I'm launching my first free book today.

Here’s why.

We wouldn't wait until a kid is 17 to introduce them to reading.

Yet, we wait till their late teens to give them any real insight into how they might want to spend their adult lives.

This is beyond backwards.

There's no Method to Our Madness

Picture this: You walk into a gym and see a six-year-old figure skater, up before dawn, working on her routine.

Do you think, "Poor kid, she should be playing with dolls"?

No.

You think, "That's how excellence is built."

You meet a twelve-year-old who's already created three apps and is debugging code like it's their native language.

Do you worry they're missing out on their childhood?

No, you'd probably think, "That kid is going to do big things."

You watch a seven-year-old violinist whose fingers move across the strings with muscle memory.

You don't pity them for their "lost childhood". You recognize that they've found something that sets their soul on fire.

But careers?

We treat careers like some mystical revelation that will descend upon our children sometime between their primary and secondary school, hopefully before college, preferably during an inspiring lecture.

Mastery takes time, and time is not renewable.

Every year kids waste wandering around career-blind is a year they could have been developing the deep understanding, intuition, and the native fluency that comes from early, sustained exposure.

You want to know what's really tragic?

I've met 30-year-olds who still don't understand what they're naturally good at because nobody bothered to help them identify their own patterns.

I've watched brilliant people spend decades in careers that slowly suffocate their spirits because they chose based on salary projections and parental expectations instead of understanding what actually energizes them.

This is the product of today's wisdom around career discovery.

I know because that was me.

When I was 13, I demonstrated strong aptitude in maths and quantitative reasoning.

The natural conclusion was I should go into the sciences. And so began a meandering journey through confusion, struggle and failure.

It would take me over 10 years before I found my true fit, not in science but science storytelling.

Looking back, all the indicators were there. Alongside my maths aptitude, I also had

⏩strong verbal reasoning

⏩aced every English project

⏩read several grades above my level

⏩a voracious appetite for science books (I went through everything in my Dad's library, including the Encyclopedias)

But I never knew there was a path that married STEM and my love for stories aka science storytelling.

Our sanitized lies are counter-productive

"Follow your dreams."

"Do what you love."

"Find your passion."

You know what this advice is?

It's career guidance for people who believe in unicorns.

It's the equivalent of telling someone to "just be yourself" when they're asking for dating advice.

It sounds profound until you realize it's completely useless.

Real career guidance looks like this:

"Here's what a surgeon actually does during a twelve-hour shift, and here's the kind of person who thrives on that intensity versus the kind who would burn out in six months."

It also looks like: "This is how AI is transforming accounting, and here's why business acumen is becoming more valuable than number-crunching in this field."

It sounds like: "If you're the kind of kid who loses track of time when you're building with LEGOs, here are seven careers that channel that same focused problem-solving energy."

We need to stop treating careers like mysterious black boxes that our kids will somehow figure out through divine inspiration.

We need to start treating them like what they are: complex ecosystems that require specific skills, mindsets, and temperaments to thrive in.

This means showing kids - really showing them - what different careers look like from the inside.

Not the glossy, Instagram-ready version, but the actual day-to-day reality.

⏩the problems they'll solve

⏩the frustrations they'll face

⏩the kind of thinking that gets rewarded

⏩the personality traits that flourish.

When we do this early, when we give kids time to observe and explore different ways of thinking, we're expanding their self-awareness.

We're helping them understand the difference between what they think they want and what actually energizes them.

And that brings us back to my book

This is something that has disturbed me for years and I finally decided to do something about it.

After 50+ hours of research and design, I've created "Science in the Age of AI", a career discovery resource, ideal for both curious kids and their parents.

"Science Careers in the Age of AI" gives you:

✅ Day-in-the-life insights for 25+ science careers (the stuff they don't teach in school)

✅ Personality traits to watch for – so you can spot your child's natural strengths early

✅ Kid-friendly language + engaging visuals (because if it's boring, they won't read it)

✅ Movie recommendations that bring each profession to life

✅ AI impact analysis – which careers are growing vs. shrinking

This is not about creating little workaholics. Or forcing kids into predetermined paths.

The goal is to give them the same advantage we give young athletes and musicians: early exposure, honest information, and time to develop their natural inclinations.

And I'm giving it away free because this isn't about making money. It's about making change.

Download your free copy here

And let me know what you think and how you’re using it.

How do you solve poverty for the world’s most vulnerable citizens?

Over the last decade, the Silicon Valley–style answer has been to build a fintech startup: raise capital, roll out free transfers, chase a million users—and then, inevitably, look to middle-income customers to subsidize poor ones.

A handful of Nigerian fintechs have found success with this formula, but this has not changed the reality for most poor Nigerians - high fees, hidden charges and poor UX means the promised prosperity offered by financial inclusion remains elusive.

There is, however, another model—and to see it in action, we must travel to Maricá, a coastal municipality east of Rio de Janeiro.

Sitting atop Brazil’s lucrative offshore oil reserves, Maricá receives generous royalties from the federal government to compensate for oil drilling activity. Yet until a decade ago, about 40 percent of its 250,000 residents still lived below the poverty line.

(Sounds familiar 🙂).

In 2013, the city launched an experiment in financial inclusion.

A community bank called Banco Mumbuca was established with an interesting innovation. The bank launched the mumbuca, a municipal currency pegged one-to-one with the national currency (1 mumbuca = 1 Brazilian real) but usable only within Maricá.

Rather than relying on third party payment processors like Visa, Mastercard or PayPal, Banco Mumbuca built its own digital-payments platform on e-dinheiro, issuing both plastic debit cards and a mobile app to their customers.

The second element in this story is the Renda Básica de Cidadania (RBC), the city’s conditional basic-income program.

This cash transfer program is funded by royalties from Brazil’s oil money and pays qaulified citizens a monthly stipend that sustains them above the poverty line (~US$84/month). The citizens receive their stipends from the community bank, and the stipends are paid in mumbucas with zero deductions ie. citizens receive their full money.

This 100 percent pass-through is a core feature distinguishing this experiment from private fintech and mobile-money platforms that often charge withdrawal or transfer fees.

But wait, no-fees transactions? But how would the community bank sustain itself without charging retail customers?

Well, citizens get to either spend or convert the mumbucas back into the Brazilian reais at local merchants.

Neighborhood stores, market sellers, and service providers are eager to accept mumbucas because people who receive them from the government each month can only spend them in Maricá. That means monthly, consistent, reliable business for local merchants.

Economists refer to this as a combination of complementary currency systems and the local multiplier effect: government funds enter the system through basic income, circulate entirely within local businesses, and get reinvested into local jobs, credit, and services--multiplying impact without ever leaking into external markets.

It's a win-win scenario for the community.

Merchants and businesses that accept mumbucas pay a modest 2 percent fee on each transaction, which is collected by Banco Mumbuca to fund its operations. However, merchants who convert mumbucas to Brazilian reais within the first five days of the month incur no fee, encouraging prompt settlement and improving liquidity.

That modest levy covers the bank’s operating costs, funds other community goods like underwriting interest-free loans, home-improvement financing, scholarship programmes, lines of credit for small entrepreneurs, solidarity-economy workshops and social-credit schemes.

Phew!

In many ways, Maricá didn’t just launch a cash transfer program. It built universal basic financial infrastructure. Access to payments, credit, and liquidity became a public utility, not a privilege.

My Next Guest Requires No Introductions - Scale

The results have been remarkable.

By 2023, over 40 percent of Maricá’s population - and more than 57,000 local businesses, from corner stores to pharmacy chains - were using mumbucas for everyday purchases. Residents pay utility bills by phone, saving the municipality significant collection costs, while merchants reinvest their earnings into wages and local production.

As more people adopt and use mumbucas, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle of community prosperity.

Maricá’s “people’s fintech” model offers a powerful blueprint for inclusive development. Nearby cities such as Niterói (with ~1.3 million inhabitants) and Cabo Frio are now exploring their own versions of solidarity fintech.

At the national level, Brazil’s nationwide Pix instant-payments system, has slashed transaction costs, in a bid to simplify real-time transfers for individuals and governments alike.

There are a few things that makes Maricá’s approach especially compelling for me.

Perhaps, most important would be the similarity to Nigeria as a country with oil and gas reserves and communities receiving royalties.

• Maricá converted resource revenues into social equity tools.

• They dedicated a slice of local oil or mineral royalties to a people’s bank.

• They created zero fee transaction platforms and subsidized transaction costs for low-income users.

• They reinvested transaction revenue into social programs.

The results speak for themselves: more people lifted out of poverty, more public resources reinforcing joint prosperity.

Epilogue

Maricá challenges common convention: fintech does not need to serve profit alone.

Digital finance can be the heartbeat of grassroots growth.

When a business seeks to do good, its business model must match its mission. For socially minded fintechs, that means putting the community at the center of the equation.

On the other hand, government support gives enough runway for these fintechs to mature without the pressure of rapid expansion or profit-first mandates. Maricá's community bank is not sprinting towards an IPO; it exists to build resilience, strengthen livelihoods and keep wealth circulating locally.

For leaders wrestling with poverty in resource-rich regions, Maricá’s experiment offers both inspiration and a concrete playbook: bank the unbanked and let the people reap the returns.

Interesting reads

The uncertain future of cash in Australia as access reduces, sparking anger

Australia is experiencing a significant reduction in bank branches and ATMs, leading to concerns about access to cash, especially in rural areas. While digital payments are on the rise, cash advocates argue for the necessity of physical money for security and daily operations. The government is considering legislation to ensure cash remains available, balancing the digital shift with the needs of all citizens.

Traveling across Nigeria back in 2019 had a profound impact on me.

I witnessed firsthand how people coped with financial exclusion, with varying degrees of success.

I needed to tell those stories.

In 2022, my contract at Lagos Business School was coming to an end after 5 years of relentless brainstorming, media campaigns, and managing donor expectations. I finally had time to reflect on the things I'd witnessed and experienced.

And so, I started Inclusion Notes.

I set out to tell small-scale stories with potentially large-scale impacts. One of my favorite stories to write - Up North - captures my vision for this newsletter.

I've had a blast so far and I hope you've enjoyed reading these stories too.

In 2023, I joined CGIAR and my focus shifted to climate change and human security, which would seem like a separate universe.

But to my surprise, both fields share crosscutting issues. The most vulnerable people:

• have limited or no access to loans,

• face systemic barriers to markets,

• possess limited literacy,

Further complicating things, the solutions that stand a chance of making a difference in their lives are stifled by over-regulation.

These are what experts call "wicked problems"—systemic, vicious cycles.

It's been 8 years now working in international development and I've come to understand that these problems require big and bold swings.

So in the spirit of big swings, I'm expanding the scope of this newsletter beyond financial inclusion stories.

New Direction

Going forward, I'll also be teaching storytelling for impact.

Here's the rationale:

If you discovered something that could transform the lives of 1,000 people, how would you tell that story? What if it would transform 100,000 lives?

With such high stakes, your storytelling needs to be compelling, right?

Scientists make life-transforming breakthroughs all the time. Every year, journals publish hundreds of exciting scientific findings. However, the people those making these discoveries are rarely skilled storytellers.

A media-savvy researcher with great storytelling skills? That's practically a unicorn.

This isn't surprising.

Science comes with abundant jargon that makes it exclusive. People make similar complaints about lawyers and their legalese.

But this exclusive language isn't intentional or malicious.

I've worked with some of the best scientists—curious, passionate, kind souls who've been immersed in their fields for years. Jargon is simply their language.

For decades, the quest has always been to make science more inclusive to the non-scientific community. With the growth of AI tools, this is now easier than ever.

And so my mission, as I've chosen to accept it, is to join the effort to make science discoveries more inclusive. I'll do that by teaching scientists, researchers, analysts, and innovators how to craft and convey their discoveries to reach more people.

It’s exciting that we finally have a malaria vaccine and that cancer can be detected earlier than ever. But we need to share the failed trials, the eureka moments, the funding battles, the ethical debates and the hopes of the families who will benefit. Because facts stored in the head may impress, but stories that touch the heart move us beyond mere awareness to action.

This expanded vision aligns with the spirit of Inclusion Notes, which at its core is to tell under reported stories of challenges and solutions. This is how I can amplify my impact on a larger scale.

If you're a communications professional considering a career in STEM, international development, R&D, also join me on this journey. There's a lot for us to learn and share together.

What to Expect

I've been experimenting with this idea on LinkedIn for nearly three months, and the response has been exciting. However, LinkedIn has its limitations.

Through this newsletter, I'll explore my passion for science and share all I know about making evidence resonate deeply to ensure people pay attention.

Climate change, financial inclusion, poverty and hunger - experts have been working on these problems for decades and they’ve made important breakthroughs. We just need them telling their stories.

Financial inclusion remains my first love, and I'll continue writing about it, though stories will no longer be limited to Nigeria. My next story will examine financial inclusion in a Latin American community.

So going forward, Inclusion Notes will cover:

• How to tell better science stories (for researchers and communications professionals)

• Stories about financial inclusion from around the world

• Some job opportunities (when I see them)

I promise to maintain the same quality of writing you've come to expect.

Thank you for staying with me over these three years. It only gets better from here.

What does rural wealth look like?

It’s a difficult thought experiment. Rural livelihood has become synonymous with deprivation, subsistence, poverty and limitation.

However, in the heart of Nyanza, Rwanda, Rebecca is redefining what rural wealth looks like in Africa. Once a small-scale farmer managing just three plots of chilli, her ambition and access to finance have transformed her business into a thriving two-hectare farm.

With credit from a fintech company based in Nyanza, she expanded her operations, employing five full-time staff members and over 15 part-time workers during the planting and harvesting seasons, significantly increasing her income.

Her story is not just one of personal success; it’s a vision for what prosperity in rural Africa can and should be.

Beyond survival: a model for sustainable rural wealth

The concept of rural wealth in Africa has adopted a narrow lens, characterized by subsistence farming, informal economies, and precarious day-to-day survival.

It is crucial to transform this narrative to a vibrant model of sustainable and scalable prosperity. Rebecca’s journey illuminates the path forward, with profound insights into how we can re-imagine and revitalize rural economies, breathing new life into communities across the continent.

1. Access to Custom-Fit Capital

Financial inclusion (one that is heavily focused on the accessibility and usability of financial services as a ladder to increased productivity and income) is the backbone of rural economic transformation. With credit from a fintech company, business support advisory from her cooperative, and on-site guidance from a chilli aggregator, Rebecca was able to scale her business beyond subsistence farming to a thriving enterprise.

Rebecca’s cooperative played a critical role in connecting the fintech to a robust network of women chilli farmers. The fintech leveraged this unique access to facilitate the development of an alternative credit scorecard, utilizing the cooperative’s comprehensive records. This innovative scorecard assessed the farmers’ financial potential based on various factors such as agricultural performance, repayment histories, and active community participation. By quantifying individual achievements and contributions, the fintech was able to provide fit-for-purpose credit for the chilli farmers.

The results were impressive: Rebecca and other chilli farmers who received funds from the fintech maintained zero default rate, attesting to the importance of innovative financial products.

If more rural entrepreneurs had access to affordable credit alongside prompt extension services, inputs and guaranteed markets, the cycle of poverty could be disrupted.

2. Job Creation and Community Upliftment

Rural prosperity should be viewed not merely as the triumph of an individual, but as a wave of positive change throughout a community.

Rebecca’s ambitious expansion of her business paved the way for employing four dedicated full-time workers, showcasing how small enterprises can transform into powerful engines of opportunity in rural landscapes. Through the cooperative, Rebecca has improved her business management skills – maintaining accurate records and paying taxes on time.

This shows the immense potential for creating meaningful and dignified employment opportunities in rural areas, where innovative and scalable businesses can thrive and transform communities.

3. Tech-enabled Agribusiness Growth

The integration of fintech into agriculture, as seen in Rebecca’s story, has the potential to revolutionize rural economies.

Imagine farmers harnessing the power of mobile banking, utilizing alternative digital credit scoring, and exploring the world of e-commerce. There is a pressing need for more innovative financial services to be introduced in rural areas across the continent, as this will enhance access and usability of financial services for farmers and promote economic growth.

4. Diversification and Value Addition

Rural wealth should not be limited to subsistence crop cultivation. By adopting value-added strategies such as processing, packaging, and direct-to-consumer sales, individuals can significantly enhance their income potential.

For example, if Rebecca produces chilli paste, she could increase her earnings while also creating additional job opportunities within her community. This approach not only improves her financial situation but also contributes to the overall economic development of the region by fostering local enterprises and promoting sustainable growth.

5. Women as Pillars of Rural Economies

Women like Rebecca are vital agents of change in Africa's rural transformation. Despite their critical role, they often face deep-rooted systemic barriers that limit their access to essential resources such as finance and land ownership.

To fully unleash their potential, targeted interventions are necessary. This includes empowering these women with the capital they need, providing them with valuable training, and connecting them to important markets. By taking these steps, we can not only support their success but also drive significant economic growth across the continent.

A Future of Thriving Rural Economies

Rebecca’s story is just one among many.

Her success is proof that when rural entrepreneurs are given the right tools—finance, knowledge, and market linkages—they can generate real wealth, not just subsistence earnings. Rural wealth in Africa should mean thriving farms, businesses that employ and empower communities, and economies that are self-sustaining rather than reliant on external aid.

This is the vision for Africa’s rural prosperity - capital access, innovation, and inclusive growth. With these pillars in place, the next generation of Rebeccas will not only feed nations but also build wealth that endures for generations.

Tolulope Babajide is the Gender Network Manager for FSD Africa, a pioneering financial sector development agency transforming Africa's financial markets with innovative finance solutions. Their work is at the heart of financial inclusion in Sub Saharan Africa. Connect with Tolulope here.

Earlier in September, Brian Chesky, AirBnB CEO, stood before a rapt audience and delivered a speech that inspired Paul Graham to write this article called Founder Mode.

Brian's speech, and Paul’s subsequent article, viral and controversial, have injected Silicon Valley with a long-missing sense of excitement once again.

I opened with that example to show you that a conference, when done right, can be a crucible for ideas.

Sadly, there's a large consensus on the 'uselessness' of conferences. Call it fatigue, call it jadedness. But several hours of uninspired keynotes, presentations that feel like ads, and horrible coffee is not a good way to spend your day.

For those who attend conferences just to network, these may be trivial issues.

But for those of us who dream of hosting events that ignite genuine transformation in the financial sector, this mediocrity is untenable.

Big stage, bored room

Many conferences fail because their objective is skewed — they exist primarily to showcase products, services, or worse, to tick the box of corporate obligation.

A conference is, or ought to be, a theater of ideas — a place to build consensus, spread awareness, and inspire. If you have that many people in the same room, it is a huge missed opportunity to bore everyone to death.

I've seen people try to build an entire conference around a single speaker. This is another misstep.

A single perspective, however brilliant, cannot sustain the weight of diverse ideas, nor can it produce the rich dialogue that truly ignites progress. A conference must be a symphony, not a solo performance.

Start with the Theme

Everything begins here. A theme should feel like the opening chapter of an epic—a narrative that draws attendees into a shared journey.

In 2019, Clayton Christensen and Efosa Ojomo published The Prosperity Paradox, a masterwork that explored unlocking markets and fostering shared prosperity. Its resonance with our work at SIDFS was immediate, and by December, we hosted a conference inspired by its core ideas.

We spotlighted the success of Dufil Prima Foods, the creators of Indomie Noodles, drawing compelling parallels between their approach to market-creating innovations and the strategies needed to overcome Nigeria’s financial inclusion challenges.

I dare say it was a success. We had over 350 people in attendance, the feedback was positive, think pieces were written and we closed the year with a big win of an event.

And then, nothing happened.

For months, I puzzled over this, as I had imagined our conference would be the spark that should ignite lasting change.

Until a few weeks ago. I heard a financial leader reference market-creating innovations in a presentation even as he drew on the Indomie example.

I beamed like the Cheshire Cat. 5 years later and we have a believer!

I have since realised that conferences are one of the toolsets we use to achieve a common industry goal. You just have to play the long game.

Inspire, or Don’t Bother

The financial industry, with its dazzling potential, cannot afford the monotony of dull gatherings. We cannot afford to host events that make attendees mentally switch off till it's time to exchange business cards.

Conferences should not merely inform but inspire, offering attendees a vision of what could be - whether in their own field or in other industries and regions.

The financial inclusion target has been moved twice. It will probably be moved again (or they might just give up setting targets altogether).

Financial exclusion in Nigeria is intricately tied to poverty. To put it another way, it's a wicked problem. And wicked problems have a way of wearing everyone out till they give up and move on to another project.

To rally an industry toward an inclusive financial future—a goal that eluded us in 2020 and 2024—requires an injection of hope, an infusion of belief that this wicked problem of exclusion can be unraveled.

Conferences are the perfect stage for this alchemy.

Bonus point

Give your attendees cool merch - I still have the mouse and pad I got from an MTN event a decade ago. Same thing with a mug from a tech event in 2016. Grand ideas and insights are good, but you see good merch is eternal. 😁

Nigeria’s financial inclusion journey is a tale of two realities.

The first reality is headline-worthy.

From 2016 - 2022, Nigeria became Africa’s hottest fintech market, with over $2.7 billion flowing into fintech startups. Today, the country boasts five unicorns, three of which—Flutterwave, OPay, and Interswitch—are fintechs and have expanded beyond Nigeria’s borders, cementing the country’s reputation as a tech powerhouse (pdf).

This has paid off. In those same years, more than 15 million new bank accounts were opened. On the surface, this looks like a success story - more funding, more fintechs, more people with access to financial services. It’s everything you would expect from financial inclusion, right?

But when we put boots on the ground to examine the impact of these investments on citizens, the second reality emerges.

In 2018, Nigeria became the poverty capital of the world, with 87 million people living on less than $1.90 a day. Today, that number has grown. The World Bank reports that Nigeria’s poverty rate has risen from 40% in 2018 to 46%, with the number of people living in poverty at 104 million.

There's more bad news. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures poverty beyond basic income, revealed that 133 million Nigerians are multi-dimensionally poor. This means they earn barely any money, and also lack good education, healthcare, and humane living standards.

And there's the paradox: as the number of bank accounts has risen, so has poverty.

This raises an uncomfortable question: Isn't financial inclusion supposed to alleviate poverty?

So what exactly is going on?

First off, let's clear the air. Financial inclusion is more than having a bank account.

True financial inclusion means integrating financial services into people's lives in ways that improve their financial health, help them manage financial emergencies, and create more opportunities.

It's a nuanced definition, away from the simplistic “inclusion = bank account”.

But somewhere along the way, financial access (essentially, counting bank accounts) became synonymous with financial inclusion. This wasn’t by design; it was a matter of necessity.

How?

Let’s start with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The former governor prioritized financial inclusion, making it one of the administration’s key objectives. The target? 80% inclusion by 2020. When that didn’t happen, it shifted to 95% by 2024—a target we’re far from meeting. With a need to show progress year-on-year, the Central Bank focused heavily on the most measurable aspect: bank accounts.

This made sense. It was a straightforward metric that could be tracked and showcased, even if it wasn’t telling the whole story.

Next, look at the startup ecosystem. With the Central Bank focusing on account numbers, fintech entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. Venture capitalists, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle at the ground floor, came hunting for the next M-Pesa. Millions of Nigerians are outside the banking system, and whoever could bring them in would reap the financial spoils.

But there was a catch. For the funding to keep flowing, these entrepreneurs needed to show traction — and the easiest result to show was how many bank accounts they opened. It’s scalable, trackable, and easy to sell to investors.

And so over time, the narrative shifted. It became about numbers, not impact—bank accounts opened, not lives transformed.

Finally, there’s the media. When you’re advocating a nuanced subject like financial inclusion, it’s easy for the key messages to get lost. Media doesn’t handle nuance well. And so, instead of diving into the complexities of what true inclusion looks like, the focus zeroed in on the most straightforward narrative: the growing number of bank accounts and the race to meet the CBN's targets. The bi-annual Access to Finance survey by EFinA became the definitive measure of progress.

This abridged history lesson is crucial to understanding how we got here.

The Central Bank, entrepreneurs, and the media—three key players—have, perhaps unintentionally, brewed the perfect storm.

In the process, the real narrative and purpose behind financial inclusion got lost.

This is not diminishing the pivotal roles each of these players had in the growth of Nigeria’s financial ecosystem. Today, the number of Nigerians with bank accounts is at an all-time high. That is impressive.

But that narrative has had its time in the sun.

Poverty will not be solved by bank accounts alone. Many people open accounts, but they don’t necessarily keep using them.

Over the last few years, we’ve built infrastructure that has transformed Nigeria’s economy. Just imagine—if the fintech boom hadn’t occurred, how bad would Nigeria’s economy be today? How would the COVID-19 crisis have played out?

This same infrastructure has the potential to uplift millions more.

This is the next chapter in Nigeria’s financial inclusion journey, where the goal isn’t just getting people into the system.

Now, the focus should be empowering them.

Last year, 800 million people received US$669 billion from their family members abroad (link, PDF).

That's 800 million people relying on remittances to augment their food, health and basic shelter needs.

For farmers, funds sent by their relatives living abroad means even much more especially in the wake of climate change.

While the dramatic devastation of a hurricane can make refugees of people overnight, more often, the impacts of climate change on a farmer is a gradual erosion of their livelihood. Another failed harvest, another harsh drought, a newsworthy flood, and bam! the farmer’s family is plunged deeper into poverty.

Earlier in 2024, El Niño's impact on farmer's across Southern Africa reached a peak, leaving countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia facing food insecurity.

Zimbabwe's president had to declare a national state of disaster, seeking humanitarian assistance from the international development community. Since November of last year, much of Zimbabwe has been grappling with widespread crop failures. In the hotter regions, staple crops like maize have been written off.

Lifelines from across borders

Farmers are relying more on remittances to survive such crises.

Research shows (PDF) that a significant portion of remittances is invested in agriculture, highlighting the proactive role migrants play in climate adaptation.

Remittances have become a vital source of capital for farmers who may otherwise struggle to secure loans or credit. And the more farmers rely on remittances to survive, their financial inclusion becomes imperative. This is where the Ministry of Agriculture has one of its biggest opportunities.

As a sidebar, I believe the Ministry of Agriculture needs to be more involved in financial inclusion efforts in Nigeria. This includes discussions, trainings and advocacy at the local and national level. Most conferences and workshops focus almost exclusively on the Central Bank, financial institutions, and rarely the agriculture sector.

Farmers are among the most financially excluded, the most underserved, and offer the biggest untapped opportunity.

The fact that many farmers already receive remittances from relatives working abroad is a clear signal - there’s real demand for affordable and easy to use financial services tailored to their needs.

And here’s where the Ministry of Agriculture has a golden opportunity. By strategically investing in remittance flows, they can tap into a powerful tool for economic growth and climate resilience. In many cases, remittances are the only financial lifeline that enables farmers to invest in the technologies and practices needed to adapt to the changing climate.

But the impact of remittances doesn’t stop at the farm.

More than a Farm Project

When a farmer receives ~$100 month from abroad, that money ripples through the local economy. It’s spent at local businesses, fueling commerce and creating a virtuous cycle of economic activity. This is already happening in ad hoc, informal ways. What’s needed now is strategic intent—an approach that accelerates this process and scales it.

This means lowering transaction costs and providing more convenient remittance channels that make it easier for farmers to receive and use these funds. By prioritizing remittances, the Ministry can ensure that farmers have the financial resources they need to adapt to climate change and continue feeding the nation.

This strategic focus would produce profound knock-on effects –boosting local businesses, driving social development, and ultimately creating long-term positive impacts across rural communities and the national economy.

I’ve written before about how Mali is already doing this.

It's a win-win for everyone.

To be clear, this is no easy task.

Government ministries are not exactly renowned for their ability to collaborate, and adding the Ministry of Agriculture into the mix is like switching the game to hard mode. The challenges of coordinating across multiple bureaucracies are vast.

Yet, the potential benefits are too significant to ignore —stronger rural economies, improved food security, and greater resilience to climate change.

The stakes are high and we should swing for the fences.

Interesting reads

The century of climate migration: why we need to plan for the great upheaval

Climate change is having a profound impact on global migration. As climate disasters escalate, millions will be forced to leave their homes, making migration a critical part of the solution to the climate crisis. Aside from being very well written, what stood out the most was the realization that migration has historically shaped societies, spurring collaboration and development. In fact, national identities and borders are the anomaly.

I really enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once.

The movie’s talented cast, story and inventive fight sequences won our hearts (and 7 oscars!). 

But most of all, I loved the focus on interconnectedness - how every action, decision, and event in one world holds the power to influence other worlds, setting off a ripple effect across the multiverse.

Sounds a lot like development work. 😁

Most development initiatives are intertwined, drawing learnings from one or several focus areas (like education, financial inclusion, climate change, health, migration and refugee crisis, etc), and applying them to challenges in other focus areas, across different contexts and industries while building upon existing knowledge and solutions. 

And if we do our job well, our efforts in one focus area profoundly impacts other areas. 

A few months ago, I learned about an untapped opportunity to improve financial inclusion, enhance smallholder farmer’s resilience against climate change and (excitingly) also ameliorate Nigeria’s foreign exchange woes even if slightly.

This is what today’s newsletter is about.

From Rome with Love 

Early June, during one of our policy roundtables in Rome, Italy, one of the conversations centred on climate research, and untapped opportunities to help local farmers fight against climate impact. 

A speaker from International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) highlighted remittances and how it could support climate resilience on a local level.

This piqued my interest, given my financial inclusion background. 

It was a very long and technical conversation, so here are my cliff notes seasoned with some of my own thoughts: 

Remittance Gold 

As local farmers face the fallout of climate impact, help is coming from a surprising source - the diaspora. 

Migrants are increasingly contributing to climate adaptation and resilience through their remittances and investments back in their home countries. In 2022, Africa received over $147 billion (with Nigeria receiving $20 billion)! 

A considerable portion of these remittances goes to smallholder farmers who invest the funds in their primary source of livelihood - agriculture. In many cases of crop failure, farmers frequently turn to their diaspora relatives for assistance. (Believe it or not, this is climate finance 😊). 

What’s interesting is that migrants are not even aware their contributions align with climate finance. They’re simply supporting their families back home. 

For the farmers too - a local farmer may not know the climate change terminologies but he sure understands the impact of prolonged droughts, soil degradation, crop failure induced by migration patterns, and all the ways climate impact manifests at the bottom of the pyramid. 

These factors all combine to impair local farmers’ ability to feed themselves and their families.

So having this financial support is a critical lifeline. 

Amplifying Informal Solutions

The beauty is that this international support network has largely evolved independent of government intervention (this happens a lot within the informal sector with citizens often developing creative solutions to somewhat existential challenges). 

And so, the major task is not to devise new strategies but rather, identify how to enhance these creative solutions and make them sustainable.

If climate finance is already happening at the grassroots, how do we improve the financial flow from diaspora to the local farm, and ensure the funds are invested with climate-smart strategies in mind. We could borrow a page from Mali.

The Federal Government of Mali partnered with the EU and IFAD to help Malians in diaspora invest in agriculture back home. By providing migrants with tailored financial instruments that support climate-related investments and rural development in their home country, these diasporans are being co-opted into the effort of driving sustainable development.

And who doesn't like that feeling of doing some good in the world?

Extra points for making some profit while doing no harm.

This behaviour can be further incentivised by reducing remittance fees and promoting financial inclusion and literacy for interested investors. 

It would also attract more foreign exchange inflows, something the country is in urgent need of given the current economic landscape. Of course, recipients also have to be able to receive these funds conveniently, timely and use it for the intended purpose. Which brings us full circle to the importance of financial inclusion. 

This could potentially be a hat trick solution if well executed. And with the global liquidity crisis as well as donor fatigue in the global development space, we could use more hat trick solutions.

As we’ve seen, using remittances to enhance climate resilience and sustainable agriculture while driving financial inclusion illustrates how addressing one challenge can have a ripple effect across other sectors. 

Sounds like interconnectedness to me.

Everything, everywhere, all at once.

What I’ve Been Reading

The evolution of agency banking in Africa

Agent networks are currently the last mile infrastructure of Africa's financial inclusion drive. They enable cash transactions, peer-to-peer transfers, and bill payments, making financial services accessible to the bottom of the pyramid. As these agent networks mature, a transformation is underway. This article is both a history lesson and an exploration of how financial institutions are evolving, exploring new business models, and becoming architects of thriving financial ecosystems.

Quick life update: I haven’t published a newsletter in months because I was job hunting.

August of last year, I left my role as Communications and Advocacy Manager at SIDFS and spent a few months resting, networking. And then entered a very wonky job market.

Last month I officially joined the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) as a communications consultant! If you’d told me in 2016 when I began my communications career that I’d be leading public relations and advocacy for international climate change efforts, I’d have recommended you see a shrink. But here we are.

I’ve settled in nicely at work and so I hope to resume my monthly publication schedule.

Over the coming months, the newsletter will expand beyond financial inclusion in Nigeria to also cover interesting stories about how climate change is affecting Africans.

And so with that, on to today’s newsletter!

======================================

Late last year, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about financial inclusion progress in developing countries.

While we both agreed that measuring bank accounts is a flawed metric for financial inclusion, he believed that development organisations (like the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) etc.) are not the best actors to lead financial inclusion efforts, especially in Nigeria.

And I understand the sentiment - since 2014 Nigeria’s progress has plateaued as the number of excluded people has remained virtually the same. When compared with the amount of funding these development organisations (dev orgs) have received, it seems like they’re underperforming.

He also raised other criticisms - dev orgs are often under pressure to raise more funding which compels them to prioritise short-term outcomes and quick wins to justify requesting more funding. The fragmented nature of dev orgs and their competing priorities also leads to inefficiencies and duplicated efforts, etc.

But after over 5 years working on financial inclusion, permit me to disagree.

The issue is not that development organisations are ineffective but rather their efforts have been hard to scale.

Driving sustainable financial inclusion 

Since the launch of the first National Financial Inclusion Strategy in 2012, significant reforms have been made by the CBN to transform the banking industry to make it more enabling for innovation. Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed the advent of instant transfers, USSD and mobile money, agency banking, 3-tiered KYC, Payment Service Banks, a fintech boom etc. all outcomes of reformed policies.

Development actors have then built holistic financial solutions on these innovations through controlled experiments in different communities.

For example, the Advancing Local Dairy Development in Nigeria (ALDDN) project which I wrote about last year is an impressive initiative that leverages agency banking, payment service banks, and several partnerships with private companies to drive financial inclusion among local dairy farmers.

Another noteworthy example is the Strivers project (pdf) by Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. With pilot editions in India and Nigeria, the initiative identified highly motivated small-scale entrepreneurs and merchants, and provided them with tools, comprehensive trainings and loans to catalyse their business growth.

The objective was to enable them expand their business operations and hire 2-3 new employees.

Imagine the impact of supporting ~20,000 entrepreneurs to expand their businesses, each hiring 2-3 new employees. That gives us approximately 60,000 newly employed individuals simply by implementing an evidence-based approach to providing loans.

This program also included a financial inclusion component whereby the entrepreneurs and merchants help their new employees open bank accounts (or mobile money accounts) where they’d receive their salaries. I’ve written before about the impact of digitising a person’s source of funds. 

In Digitising the Informal Economy, the Bankly Way, I wrote:

Digitising people’s source of income works because there’s a higher chance for digital money to stay digital (due to default or status quo bias). It’s way more difficult to compel someone getting paid in cash to digitise their money.

Dev orgs runs hundreds of these initiatives and experiments in different communities across the world. And that’s where the buck stops for them. 

With these successful pilots, dev orgs document months (sometimes years) of actionable insights and feedback. These provide actionable data for government to replicate these projects at scale within their respective locales. 

However, governments often fail to pick up the buck.

No money, more problems

One reason why governments fail to replicate these experiments is the cost of scaling them. The capital and logistics required are significant.

It also doesn't help that financial inclusion competes with other items on the government's agenda. Many of these competing priorities tend to yield more visible and immediate results, which politicians rely on to appease their supporters.

In a world where quick wins are demanded, it can be challenging for the long-term and sustainable efforts of financial inclusion to receive the necessary attention and resources. 

Additionally, corruption and mismanagement of funds further hinder the execution of these large-scale initiatives. 

Epilogue

Development organisations are not perfect but it’s important to recognize the significant reforms and innovations they have brought to the table. Their evidence-based approach to designing and executing financial inclusion at the grassroots have also been successful.

The missing piece of the puzzle remains scaling their efforts. 

So who’s game? 
===============

Great tweets