The same idea has been set down at least three times, by three people working in three different registers.
One is a Peruvian economist who spent decades inside property law. One was a Harvard professor, one of the most influential management thinkers of his generation. One is a man who explains how business works to a phone camera.
They write for different audiences and reach for different evidence — land registries in Lima, company case studies in Lagos, a few plain sentences to a feed. Whether any of them read the others is impossible to say — and it doesn’t much matter. What matters is the shape they keep arriving at: an underbuilt economy is rarely short of value, and rarely short of demand. It is short of the system that lets the two reach each other.
That gap has a name. The gap is friction. And friction, it turns out, is the market.
The economist
Hernando de Soto spent years on a question that sounds simple: why does capitalism compound wealth in some countries and stall in others? His answer was not culture, or natural resources, or schooling.
It was paper.
In The Mystery of Capital, de Soto argued that the poor of the developing world are not poor in assets. They own homes. They work land. They run businesses. He put the value of the real estate they hold — but hold informally, without formal legal title — at more than nine trillion dollars.
He called that wealth dead capital. A house you cannot prove you own is still a house — but it cannot be borrowed against, insured, or pledged. It shelters you, and it does nothing else. The asset is real; the record that would let it move is missing. Multiply that by a continent and the loss is not a rounding error. It is the difference between an economy that compounds and one that merely survives.
The wealth was always there. The system to mobilise it was not.
The professor
Clayton Christensen came at it from another direction — not why the poor stay poor, but why so much spending meant to help them fails. He reached a structurally similar answer.
The instinct, faced with a poor country, is to fix its visible problems directly: build the road, fund the clinic, push resources at the gap and wait for prosperity to follow. In The Prosperity Paradox, written with Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon, Christensen argued that this mostly does not work. What works runs the other way.
He called it market-creating innovation: take something once reserved for the few and make it affordable and reachable for the many who were priced out — the nonconsumers. Build that market, and it pulls the infrastructure in behind it. When Tolaram set out to sell instant noodles in Nigeria, it did not wait for reliable power, clean water, and working logistics to appear. It built them — because the market it had created could not run without them.
It is de Soto’s lesson told forward instead of backward. Demand was never the constraint; it sat dormant among the nonconsumers all along. The constraint was the absence of a system willing to reach them — and that system, once built, drags the roads and the rails along behind it.
The commentator
Masinga Mansevani holds no chair and has published no estimates. He talks about business — how it works, what kills it, where the money actually is — to a camera, on TikTok and YouTube.
His version is the bluntest of the three:
“Starting a business in Africa, I would not start with a product. That’s the first mistake. I would start with a system problem. Because Africa is not poor — Africa is poorly optimized. There are gaps everywhere. Logistics, payments, trust, infrastructure. And the one who solves friction owns the market.”
Strip away the apparatus and it is de Soto and Christensen, said plainly. Demand exists — there will always be demand for a product. Supply exists. What is broken is the passage between them: distribution, and trust. Build the system that carries a product cleanly from the person who has it to the person who wants it, and you have something that does not stop paying.
Why it bears repeating
An idea only one person has ever expressed is fragile — it might be a quirk of one mind. An idea that an economist, a management scholar, and a man with a phone all reach for, in vocabularies that share almost nothing, is harder to dismiss. Not because they corroborate one another like witnesses — they may well have read each other, and there is no way to know — but because the idea keeps surviving translation. It can be put in the language of property law, in the language of corporate strategy, and in the language of a ninety-second video, and it stays intact. Ideas that survive that kind of retelling are usually pointing at something real.
And notice which telling is the most useful. “Formalise property rights” and “create markets for nonconsumers” are both correct. “Solve the friction” is correct and it tells you what to do on Monday. The idea did not get truer as it got plainer. It got usable.
What it means to build
If the idea is right — and it has outlasted a great deal of retelling — then the work is not quite what it first looks like.
The opportunity in an underbuilt economy is not to spot an unmet demand and sell into it. The demand is visible to everyone, and visible things are not where advantage lives. The opportunity is the friction itself — the missing record, the broken passage, the trust that will not travel. Whoever builds the system that removes a piece of that friction does not merely enter the market. For a while, they are the market.
That is the lens Badrama is built to use: not a product hunting for customers, but a system built for the friction — with the customers already on the other side of it, waiting.
The friction is not the obstacle in front of the business. The friction is the business.