Idarus Ali
Idarus has spent more than fifteen years working across East Africa and the Middle East. Not from an office, but next to the people who actually run the economy: the market traders, the shopkeepers, the street vendors, the small businesses that keep families going.
That closeness changed how he sees the problem. Most of these owners can’t afford the software and the accountants that bigger companies take for granted, and for a long time nobody bothered to build anything for them. Idarus never accepted that. Being short of money should not mean being left behind, and the tools that help a business survive should reach the woman selling vegetables just as easily as the company with a finance team.
That is why he founded AskBiz. A business tool that runs from a cheap phone, in the owner’s own language, so anyone can see what they made today and know what to do tomorrow. No expensive hardware. No accountant. Just answers a trader can actually use.
Idarus holds a BSc in Computer Science and an MA in Applied Linguistics. One taught him how systems work. The other taught him how people really talk, and how easily they get left out. The research here comes from that same world, and it is written about the people too often missing from it.
Papers
The Accountant Who Saw an Empty Shop: Separating Visibility From Control in Micro-Enterprise Software
Most access-control systems assume trust is one dial: the more someone is trusted, the more they can see and the more they can do. This working paper reports what happened when a point-of-sale platform had to model a relationship that assumption has no room for — the accountant who should see everything and change nothing. For months, the honest answer was that there was nowhere to put them, and the failure was not a locked door but an unlocked one that opened onto the wrong account.
The Till They Couldn't Open: Designing Point-of-Sale Software for Low-Literacy, Cash-First Micro-Enterprise
Most point-of-sale software assumes a user who reads comfortably, stays connected, and trusts a new login before doing anything useful. This working paper reports what changed — concretely, and with the internal data to show it — when that assumption was dropped for a product used by small businesses across East Africa. One finding is not flattering: for most of this product's early life, most of its 'active' accounts could not actually be logged into at all.
Surviving on the Margins: A Structured Systematic Review of Micro Informal Business, Poverty, and Livelihoods in Kenya
Most Kenyans who work run a micro informal business — a stall, a kiosk, a boda boda — and most of them do not grow. They survive. This review reads the evidence through a survival-and-poverty lens and argues that what these firms need first is security of savings, of trading space, and of income, not formal registration.