The Business Book Club presents: KasiNomic Revolution with GG Alcock

Join Business Coach and Speaker, Jacques Velleman, as he chats to GG Alcock about his third book KasiNomic Revolution.

GG Alcock was born white and bred Zulu. He was raised in a mud hut in one of the most poverty stricken and violent parts of KwaZulu-Natal, Msinga. GG’s community activist parents, Neil and Creina Alcock, raised their two sons in a Zulu community, living in a hut with no running water, electricity or modern conveniences; instead growing up like young Zulus, hunting and herding in the hills. Home schooled, GG is fluent in Zulu and intimate with local African cultures, while also conversant in many other South African ethnic languages.

Having realised from an early age that there is no glamour in poverty GG uses his unique skills and experience to highlight and grow informal low income mass markets in Africa while also growing his collection of adventure toys!

KASINOMIC REVOLUTION

The informal business sector is the next great frontier of Africa and it is undergoing an economic revolution – a new world of small people doing big things, transforming the continent. Prepare for this new generation, prepare for the Afripolitan Generation.

A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity. 

Kasi is the South African term for the township – a teeming conurbation of homes and businesses, entertainment venues and social meeting places. 

GG Alcock uses the term KasiNomics to describe the informal sectors of Africa, whether they are in the township, a rural marketplace, at a taxi rank or on a pavement in the shadow of skyscrapers. Brought up in a rural Zulu community, GG has learnt and shares the lessons of African culture, language, stick fighting, lifestyle and tribal politics, along with shared poverty and community, which have prepared him for accessing the great informal marketplaces of Africa. He is uniquely placed to uncover the extraordinary stories of kasi businesses which not only survive but excel, revealing a revolutionary entrepreneurship which is mostly invisible to the formal sector.  

KasiNomic Revolution is a story of kasi entrepreneurs on one side and, on the other, of great corporate successes and failures in the informal community. KasiNomic Revolution is at once a business book, and at the same time a deeply human book about the people and lives of rural and urban informal societies. 

KasiNomic Revolution is about the lessons of marketing, distribution, culture and modernity in an informal African world. 

Prepare for a KasiNomic Revolution!

ENTRANCE: A preloved business book for donation to The Soweto Library.