Practical guides, African wisdom, and family finance stories for people building a lasting legacy.
There is a belief about family businesses that is so widespread it rarely needs saying out loud: the business exists, at least in part, to give every relative a job. A nephew finishes school with no plan, so he joins...
There is a structure that Uganda's old business families use so routinely they barely discuss it, and that ordinary families with two rentals and a plot almost never consider: holding the assets through a limited...
Every January, a predictable thing happens to millions of households. School fees land in the same month the Christmas spending ends, the family is short, and someone walks to a money lender to borrow, at money-lender...
Somewhere on your phone is a group with a name like "Abaana ba Mzee" or "Okello Family Worldwide" or simply the family surname and a string of emojis. It contains your siblings, your cousins, an uncle who joined twice,...
Raise the subject of life insurance at a family gathering in Kampala, Nairobi, or Kigali and you will meet the objection quickly. Insurance is gambling. You pay and pay for a misfortune that may never come, and the...
Leviticus 25 is one of the strangest chapters in Scripture to modern financial ears, and one of the most practical once you see what it is doing. It legislates three things no modern economy would dare put in writing: a...
Sit in any clan meeting, any SACCO annual general meeting, any conversation between a father and a son about what to do with a bonus, and you will eventually hear the sentence spoken as if it were scripture: land never...
On 7 January 2020, in a Nairobi meeting room, the creditors of Nakumatt Holdings voted to kill it. Ninety-two percent of them approved the liquidation, and the vote to dissolve the company and sell whatever remained was...
Named pots work because of how your brain treats labeled money. Richard Thaler's work on mental accounting showed that people spend money differently depending on the account it sits in, even when the money is...
Wills get all the attention in legacy planning, and wills have one enormous blind spot: they only work when you are dead. Between full health and death there is a third territory, the stroke ward, the dementia years,...
For most salaried Ugandans, the largest single pile of money they will ever have in one place is not in a bank account or under a mattress. It is sitting at NSSF or inside an employer's pension scheme, growing quietly,...
Every family that takes wealth seriously eventually asks whether it is handling that wealth well. Most reach for the wrong measuring sticks: the size of the portfolio, the tithe record, the building fund plaque with the...
Somewhere in Onitsha or Alaba or Aba today, a trader is doing something no venture capitalist would do. He is preparing to hand a portion of his capital, a slice of his supplier relationships, and some of his own...
In 1841, two brothers from a German linen-trading family, Clemens Brenninkmeijer, born 1818, and August Brenninkmeijer, born 1819, set up shop in the Dutch town of Sneek and named the business after their initials: C&A...
The corpus has already made the argument: school fees are estate planning. Education carried about 25.5 percent of measured wealth transmission between generations, roughly double what bequests carried, in Pfeffer and...
In 1761, a cabinet maker named Kaspar Faber began producing pencils in the small town of Stein, just outside Nuremberg (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). Consider what has happened since. The Holy Roman Empire, which governed...
Your brother needs money. Not an emergency handout, but real capital: stock for his shop, a semester of fees, the balance on a plot. You have it, or you can find it. You are now standing in the most dangerous spot in...
Ask a family what it owns and you will hear about the land, the house, the vehicle, maybe the savings. Ask what it can do and you get silence, because no family keeps that register. Yet the second list is the stranger...
Every founding generation tells itself a version of the same story. I will burn so that they can shine. The missed birthdays, the blood pressure, the marriage running on fumes, the body held together by painkillers and...
Ask what a family passes down and people point at things: land, a house, a business, school fees paid. The corpus has spent two hundred articles on those channels, and one finding sits under all of them like a...
Succession planning literature is written about companies with boards. But that is not where most African family businesses live. They live in a stall in Owino, a salon in Ndeeba, a hardware corner in Kisekka, a...
This corpus already made the construction case. Marriage Is Wealth Infrastructure (wave3) walked through Pfeffer and Killewald's decomposition of how wealth position moves between generations: homeownership 28.4...
This corpus has already told the story of the Madhvanis of Kakira: the family that built roughly a tenth of Uganda's economy, lost everything to Idi Amin's 1972 expulsion, and came back to rebuild it. A skeptic could...
Every family has one. The business that ate three years of savings. The land deal where the title belonged to someone else. The forex scheme a trusted friend brought, the "investment" that was a pyramid. And in most...