Effort at the Wrong Level, Part Two

Back to Grace and her table, where part one left her. Seven levels shape what she earns and only one of them binds at a time. The first six sit inside her own economy, and the first of those is the one she owns outright.

1. Craft

Grace counts cash faster than most people can follow. She identifies a false note by touch. She knows which customers return and which will argue over a hundred naira. Each evening she reconciles terminal against cash box against notebook, and where it does not balance the difference comes from her own money.

None of it is written down. If she travelled tomorrow nobody could run her table properly, because the knowledge sits in her hands rather than in a document. Economists call this human capital, value stored inside a person rather than in a machine. The same holds for a surgeon's judgement, a mechanic's ear and a farmer's sense of when the rain will come.

The work here is repetition and honest feedback. Nothing substitutes for it.

Be blunt about the reverse because the rest of this can be misused. This is the level you can influence most directly and the one where external explanations are least useful. Someone who has not yet learned to do anything particularly well is not being held back by interest rates, regulation or geopolitics. Their constraint sits here, and of the seven it is the most solvable.

That is the good news at this level. Above it, other people get a vote.

2. Offering and distribution

Skill explains why Grace survives. To explain what she earns you have to ask what she is actually selling, and it is not cash.

She is a bank branch. She opens before the bank opens and closes after it closes. She is four minutes away rather than forty, and she does not demand three documents before releasing your own money to you. What she sells is nearness, hours, speed and trust. Kenya reached this conclusion earlier than anyone, with mobile money accounts there now above 53 million.

But a distribution advantage is not permanent, and Kenya shows that too. The commission pool paid to M-Pesa agents has been roughly flat for three years at around 37 billion shillings. The agent count has not. It rose from about 173,000 in 2020 to 333,011 by March 2026, and average annual earnings per agent duly fell from 144,355 shillings in 2024 to 112,244 in 2026, roughly 9,353 a month before rent and wages.

Not one of those agents became worse at the job. Proximity stops being scarce once three others are on the same street.

The work here is packaging, pricing, placement and proof, then finding the next advantage before this one is copied. Not more skill. Additional skill here usually avoids a harder question.

3. Enterprise

One kiosk is a business. A hundred thousand is a different problem, and most people meet that problem long before they run anything that large.

The consultant who cannot take a holiday. The clinic where patients will only see one doctor. The tailor whose customers trust her hands and nobody else's, who cannot grow past what two hands can sew. The business is real, demand exists, and the value has not been separated from the person producing it.

The network I worked on opened with about a thousand agents in September 2019. Two years later it was reported to be processing around four billion dollars a month. The thousandth agent was expensive to add. The hundred-thousandth was far cheaper at the margin. That gap is operating leverage. It explains why these businesses are punishing early and hard to catch late.

What made it work was not the application. It was that when Grace's terminal failed, somebody she could name answered the phone.

The work here is written process, delegation and hiring. Longer hours make this worse, because they postpone the moment the organisation is forced to work without you.

4. Capital

Grace must hold money before she can earn anything. If she runs dry at eleven in the morning she is closed until she restocks, and customers who walk to the next kiosk may not return. Her income is limited by the size of her cash holding, not by her effort.

Working capital is the money a business must hold simply in order to trade. Cost of capital is the price it pays for that money.

The distinction that matters at this level is between the money terms you can negotiate and the prices you cannot. Grace can choose where her float comes from. Savings, a cooperative, a supplier's credit, an advance from the company behind her terminal. She can negotiate tenor and security. She can shorten the gap between paying out and being paid. Those are real decisions and they compound.

Take two agents with identical skill, identical hours and identical location, facing the identical national interest rate. One funds her float from savings. The other borrows monthly at whatever the cooperative charges. Within a year their circumstances are not comparable, and nothing about their ability or their environment explains the gap. Only the terms do.

A business earning a fifteen per cent margin and funding itself at thirty is not a struggling business. It is a business working for its lender.

The work here is cheaper or better structured funding, and shortening your cash cycle. Selling harder into an expensive float only enlarges the problem.

5. Economy

Grace can choose her lender. She cannot choose the rate the whole market is priced off. That is the line between this level and the last one. Capital is the part of money you negotiate, the economy is the part that is quoted to you.

Nigeria's policy rate was cut to 26.5 per cent earlier this year and held there, with commercial lending well above it. Every agent in the country faces that number. None of them negotiated it.

The same is true of everything else at this level. In early 2023, when the naira was redesigned and cash disappeared, Grace became the most important person on her street. Her competence had not changed. Queues that formed at bank doors formed at her table, and her fees rose because scarcity permitted it. Fuel prices determine what her customers have left. A weaker currency raises the cost of the terminal she is saving towards. And her hundred naira fee, unchanged for two years, has been shrinking the whole time. Nigerian headline inflation stood at 15.43 per cent in July 2026. She did not reduce her price. Her price reduced itself.

The work here is pricing that adjusts, costs that can be cut quickly, and less exposure to what you cannot control. This is also where people reach for a moral explanation of who is succeeding. Frequently the honest explanation is conditions.

6. Institutions and rules

Conditions arrive without an author. Rules have one.

Nigeria has roughly two million banking agents and 8.36 million registered POS terminals, moving 10.51 trillion naira in the first quarter of 2025 alone. In October 2025 the central bank ruled that every one of those agents must become exclusive to a single principal, with a compliance deadline of 1 April 2026. Many had deliberately spread across two or three networks so that one outage would not close them for the day. That protection was withdrawn by a document none of them were consulted on, and two million people restructured their businesses inside six months.

Ghana ran the clearest version of the same thing. A levy on electronic transactions, introduced in 2022 to raise revenue, ended up charging the very mechanism that had brought millions of Ghanaians into the financial system. Its revenue projection proved so optimistic that the government cut the target by more than ninety per cent within the year, and the levy was repealed in 2025.

Regulation first appears as compliance. Examined properly it is market architecture. Licensing decides who may compete at all, and identity requirements decide who can be served in the first place. Policy is only what is written; institutions determine whether what is written is administered predictably. Two countries can adopt identical laws and produce entirely different economies.

The work here is obtaining a licence, partnering with someone who holds one, or engaging seriously with the people who write the rule. Persistence against a regulation is not resilience. It is expense.