Piles of cash and a town of solutions in Kenya, Nigeria (Summer School)

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Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School World Tour, the only international economics degree where the invisible hand points to the departure gate. It's the final boarding call. Better run. I'm Robert Smith. This summer, we are on a quest to find lessons we can learn from other countries

that just might work back here where we live. In each episode, we'll have fascinating case studies and a hometown tour guide that also happens to have a degree in economics. Our destination today, Kenya, specifically a small town that taught the world a better way to do economics. We'll also have a stopover in Nigeria where they've come up with a novel way to grow small businesses, free money.

It works. Just make sure you take notes along the way. anything we mention might appear on the final exam, which will allow you, traveler extraordinaire, to get a souvenir diploma festooned with all the passport stamps.

Helping us through customs in Nairobi is Tavneet Suri, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Hi, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. You are fifth generation Kenyan? Technically fourth. It depends how you count. You know, my family moved from India, in the late 1800s with the British.

And the British took a bunch of people to build roads and railways in that part of the world. Always amazes me that when they got done with roads and railways,

they asked them, do you want to go back? And they said, no, we'll just stay. Well, I mean, I've been there. It is a lovely place.

It's understandable. But that is not why summer school is stopping in Nigeria and in Kenya. It's stopping there because this is a place

where economics isn't just theory. It's real life. There is commerce everywhere. Hundreds of people on each block selling different things.

And you must appreciate this as a business school professor. There are so many case studies around. You know, I love being back in almost any African city. I always feel there's a vibe to them that's quite different.

There's people on the streets. There's people trying to sell something. There's people trying to jump on a bus, go somewhere, do something. You can kind of see the entrepreneurship of all of this right in front of you, right?

And this becomes so much more important when you realize that, unlike most of the world, places like Nigeria are still rapidly growing in population. I think by 2050, Nigeria will have more people than the United States. So you have this vibrant, growing country with lots of young people

that could become a lot larger part of the global economy. Absolutely. And with their demographics, sort of the number of youth on the African continent is extremely large.

By 2050, 35% of the youth, think 18 to 25-year-olds, is going to be in Africa, right? And so it will be a place where there'll be a large labor force at some point. In other words, the perfect place to stop for economic students on a tour. Not only the future of the global economy, but an incubator for new ideas.

That's what we're going to hear about today. Ways to have a richer, healthier population with more businesses and more jobs. Sounds great. First up, we will take a look at a program in Nigeria that tries to solve that business part of the equation by creating a mashup of Shark Tank and The Lottery. And we'll have our business school professor break it all down for us after our break. On the streets of Denver, 19 disabled protesters blocked buses to demand accessible transportation.

The right to be in the world. That's what the movement was about. On the Sunday story, how an often forgotten group of activists in 1978 helped spark the modern day disability rights movement. Listen now to the Sunday story from the Up First podcast on the NPR app. Waylon, it seems like everything is being called a recession indicator these days.

Yeah, like the box of Hamburger Helper in my pantry. Or the new Apple Neo book. Or the resurgence of press on nails or lipstick or no lipstick. I've lost track.

There is only one way to know if these are actual economic warning signs, though. Listen to the indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, students, stay together on this tour. That's why I have this big Planet Money flag.

We are back with Planet Money Summer School on our way to Kenya, but with a stopover in Abuja, Nigeria. Professor Tavneet Suri is along for the ride. Professor, what should our students think about as they listen to this very first case study? Okay. Imagine you're a small business and imagine you have great ideas.

Of course. But you need a bunch of money to sort of build out these ideas. Who would you go to for that money? Would you go to a bank?

Would you go to a venture capital fund? Would you go try and raise money through some other means? How would you get that money? Great question.

And the same question faced by small businesses in Nigeria, where the government came up with a very clever solution. As one economist said, quote, is this the best development program in history? As a student, you decide. Planet Money's Alex Goldmark and Noel King tell us the story.

In 2011, Lariat Al-Hasan had a paint business in Abuja, Nigeria. She sold house paint. She sold industrial paint. She sold textured paint. She sold paint that fills in the cracks in your wall. The paint company was called Lark Lux Paint, and it was really, really small.

The employee I had was just me. I was the production manager. I was the marketer. I was the delivery person. I was everything except the security.

That was the whole company, her and a security guard.