Piles of cash and a town of solutions in Kenya, Nigeria (Summer School)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
This is Planet Money from NPR.

**Robert Smith** (0:29)
Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School World Tour, the only international economics degree where the invisible hand points to the departure gate. It's the final boarding call. Better run. I'm Robert Smith. This summer, we are on a quest to find lessons we can learn from other countries that just might work back here, where we live. In each episode, we'll have fascinating case studies and a hometown tour guide that also happens to have a degree in economics. Our destination today, Kenya, specifically a small town that taught the world a better way to do economics. We'll also have a stopover in Nigeria, where they've come up with a novel way to grow small businesses, free money.
It works. Just make sure you take notes along the way. Anything we mentioned might appear on the final exam, which will allow you, Traveler Extraordinaire, to get a souvenir diploma festooned with all the passport stamps.
Helping us through customs in Nairobi is Tavneet Suri, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.

**Tavneet Suri** (1:34)
Hi, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Robert Smith** (1:35)
You are fifth generation Kenyan?

**Tavneet Suri** (1:38)
Technically fourth. It depends how you count.
My family moved from India in the late 1800s with the British and the British took a bunch of people to build roads and railways in that part of the world. Always amazes me that when they got done with roads and railways, they asked them, do you want to go back? And they said, no, we'll just stay.

**Robert Smith** (1:57)
Well, I mean, I've been there. It is a lovely place. It's understandable.
But that is not why summer school is stopping in Nigeria and in Kenya. It's stopping there because this is a place where economics isn't just theory. It's real life. There is commerce everywhere. Hundreds of people on each block selling different things. And you must appreciate this as a business school professor. There are so many case studies around.

**Tavneet Suri** (2:24)
You know, I love being back in almost any African city. I always feel there's a vibe to them that's quite different. There's people on the streets. There's people trying to sell something. There's people trying to jump on a bus, go somewhere, do something. You can kind of see the entrepreneurship of all of this right in front of you, right?

**Robert Smith** (2:43)
And this becomes so much more important when you realize that, unlike most of the world, places like Nigeria are still rapidly growing in population. I think by 2050, Nigeria will have more people than the United States. So you have this vibrant, growing country with lots of young people.
That could become a lot larger part of the global economy.

**Tavneet Suri** (3:07)
Absolutely. And with their demographics, sort of the number of youth on the African continent is extremely large. By 2050, 35% of the youth, think 18 to 25-year-olds, is going to be in Africa, right? And so it will be a place where there'll be a large labor force at some point.

**Robert Smith** (3:28)
In other words, the perfect place to stop for economic students on a tour, not only the future of the global economy, but an incubator for new ideas. That's what we're going to hear about today. Ways to have a richer, healthier population with more businesses and more jobs. Sounds great.
First up, we will take a look at a program in Nigeria that tries to solve that business part of the equation by creating a mashup of Shark Tank and the lottery. And we'll have our business school professor break it all down for us after our break.

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**SPEAKER_1** (4:40)
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