Insights — Quick Reads

On a recent episode of Couchonomics with Arjun, the host spends an hour in productive disagreement with DrumWave founder André Vellozo, and the exchange is more useful than most consensus. It opens on a scene: a Brazilian citizen has an espresso in Dubai. A ride, a payment, a coffee. Value generated at every step, flowing to everyone except the person generating it. Arjun, wearing his consultant's hat, plays the pragmatist throughout; Vellozo keeps returning to a single claim. The friction between them is where the ideas get tested.

Their first disagreement is about who any of this is even for. Arjun presses hard: yes, people are more aware of data now, but awareness is not understanding. Most of us grasp that data exists and that it carries risk, privacy and fraud and breaches, while having no real feel for its value. And the people who do understand the value, he argues, are the already privileged, the ones who read the articles that other privileged people write.

The genuine prize, if there is one, sits with the people who have never once been told that their daily activity is worth anything.

A recent analysis in Kenya's Business Daily put a number on something practitioners across the Global South have known for years: the continent's data economy is on track to reach $290 billion by 2030, yet Africa captures less than three percent of the value the global data economy generates today. It reads like an African story. It is more useful read as the leading edge of a pattern.

The same shape of gap runs through Southeast Asia's informal digital economies, Latin America's smallholder agricultural data, and the millions of income streams across the Global South that generate exhaust data every day with nowhere for it to go.

Data is the new oil, the saying goes, and like most clichés, it survives because it is basically right, and mostly misapplied. Crude oil, sitting in the ground, is worth nothing on its own. It becomes valuable at the refinery: the point where crude is converted into the specific, usable fuels that power an economy that did not run on it before.

Most of the conversation about data treats extraction as the finish line: more sensors, more platforms, more data lakes, more collection.

Every extractive industry follows roughly the same sequence: find the deposit, test it for commercial viability, secure the rights to develop it, and only then does the real work begin, moving what has been found to the markets and the people positioned to use it.

Applied to data, the first three steps are the quieter, more technical part of the work: identifying where genuinely unexploited data value sits within a market or sector; testing whether that value survives contact with governance, verification, and independent scrutiny; and building the standard-setting and legal-technical foundation defensible enough for a regulator, a community, and an investor to agree on at the same time.