The Infrastructure Illusion

In 2006, only 26.7% of Kenyans had access to formal financial services. No banks in their villages. No branch within walking distance.

By 2021, that number was 84%.

Kenya didn't build thousands of bank branches. They built something else entirely.

In 2007, Safaricom launched M-Pesa. A system for sending money via mobile phone. No bank account required. No physical infrastructure needed. Just a phone and a network of human agents who could convert digital to cash.

The results were extraordinary. Two million users in the first year. Sixty million by 2025. MIT economists found 2% of Kenyan households were lifted out of poverty as a direct result.

Here's what M-Pesa proved: Money is just information on the right channel.

Physical banks exist to move information. Who has what. Who owes whom. Where value flows. M-Pesa asked: what if phones could carry that same information?

Kenya skipped the bank branch era entirely. The infrastructure they needed wasn't buildings. It was bandwidth.

M-Pesa did what The Technical Translation describes. It translated complex financial systems into channels anyone could access.

That's what Flow Engineering looks like at national scale. Don't build pipes where signals could travel. Find the channel that already exists.

You don't need the building. You need the information it was carrying. The Information Flow shows what becomes possible when you separate signal from structure.