Roger Strukhoff

If you want to sell some stock in the US, you just call your broker or go online and accomplish the task in minutes. It’s fast, efficient, and represents a fair market price for what you are selling.

But what if you want to sell some livestock in Africa? You must travel to a centuries-old market somewhere, then get in line to haggle with a buyer who needs what you have less than you need the money he’ll pay for it. It’s slow, inefficient, and probably does not represent a fair market price for you.

Julius Akinyemi aims to change this situation through an effort he’s launched at the MIT Media Lab called the “eRegistry.”

Taking his cue from the original Adam Smith’s original work, The Wealth of Nations, Akinyemi has outlined his vision in an article entitled, Demystifying the Wealth of Nations.

Noting that “economists from time immemorial have questioned and researched why some nations have been able to grow wealth and some have not,” Akinyemi believes that “transforming an underdeveloped economy to a developed economy requires long term strategic mapping as well as a huge amount of capital outlay.”

The eRegistry will have data mining capabilities and localized economic models that promise to deliver what Akinyemi calls “communal wealth” to all the corners of the world without the traditional huge amount of capital outlay.

Handheld Devices Are the Keys
In Africa, as in the rest of the developing world, handheld devices are providing the keys to this potential kingdom. Countries that never had the cumulative wealth to bring PCs and laptops to the masses are able to bypass that problem today with the ubiquity of cellphones and smart handheld devices.

Smart sensors in these devices can register assets quickly and easily. Akinyemi also believes in the potential of a virtualized, third-party Cloud Computing infrastructure to provide the versatile, flexible, and efficient cost structure to tie users together and create online markets.

He told me in a recent interview, “With an information exchange platform as a base architecture, we have an application layer with which we can develop applications for local commodity trading. In other words, with this, I can trade my cow or cocoa through mobile devices.”

He provides another example, of farmers who cultivate their land, “put in a lot of capital, hire the laborers, but see cash flow only at harvest time. But with this platform, then can buy futures, thereby providing cash flow when they really need it throughout the year.”

A Big Vision for a Big World
Julius has been a member of the United Nations ICT task force. He holds an Intellectual Property patent, was CEO/Founder of Applied Technology Solutions, and has held top-level IT positions with PepsiCo, PanAm, and Wells Fargo.

The Nigerian native earned his MBA at Ohio University, and has been the Resident Entrepreneur at MIT since early 2008.

To this success-oriented, diverse background he brings a passion to empower billions of people worldwide in developing nations to “invent new opportunities for themselves and their societies,” as he says.

His vision for the eRegistry is to “leverage the convergence of existing technologies to register people,” events such as births, deaths, marriages, and life events, and assets. “In many places in Africa, you know these assets are not only houses and land, but oftentimes goats, cows, and other livestock,” he said in a discussion with me.

He writes further that “through economic modeling, (we can) mobilize the currently dormant trillions of dollars in local assets in developing nations to generate capital in the local economy via Asset Securitization.”

“With this model, a new Digital Global Common Currency will emerge that will enable global, open capital sourcing.” At the heart of this vision is the idea that “the eRegistry will enable us to build an Entrepreneurial Information Exchange Platform that could be analogous to a real-time, global commerce commodities trading floor.”

Akinyemi is not wearing blinders. He still travels to Africa and other developing nations frequently, and sees the way things are and ought to be. He notes that in so many places in the world, at least one of the “pillars of prosperity” (property rights and the civil laws and courts to protect them, capital generation, innovation and entrepreneurship, and adequate infrastructure) are missing.

But yet, he understands—and firmly believes—that there is no single solution to these problems in any particular country. Traditional valuation systems and cultural traditions must be taken into account, or even the best-intentioned efforts will fail, he believes. In his words “I want to create a “sea change” in developing economies that moves ordinary citizens from day-to-day survival mode to strategic wealth creation and growth through asset ownership and registry.”

His goal is to leverage local customs by way of innovative technological development to create the eRegistry. As he notes, the Internet, seen by so many as a key to economic success in the 21st century, “did not come from a single technology but from the timely convergence of multiple streams of technological development.”

Akinyemi cites the IMF, World Bank, and UN—as well as the private sector—as potential funding sources to implement this vision. He plans to engage “local governments that are ready” as co-sponsors, and wants to develop an economic education platform he refers to as “EconoForce” for citizens to learn about asset and capital management. He is on course to launch the eRegistry in a few African nations, as well as other places in the world, in 2010. Stay tuned...