Nonconsumption should be a synonym for opportunity in the dictionary.
That’s why, in this third and final part of my “Innovative frameworks for women’s entrepreneurship” series, I’ll explore the relationship between nonconsumption and entrepreneurship for women in Nigeria.
What is nonconsumption?
As a quick refresher, nonconsumption refers to the inability of an entity (a person or organization) to access, purchase, and/or use (consume) an opportunity, product, or service required to fulfill an important Job to Be Done. This inability to consume may be due to various barriers like time, cost, skill, etc.
Nonconsumption is everywhere and can easily be spotted if you know what to look for. Here are three quick tips on where to look:
- Look for over-engineered products: These products are typically too expensive, complicated, and inaccessible for most people to afford. They are targeted to the wealthiest few in society, creating mass nonconsumption.
- Examine struggles, anxieties, and frustrations: Keying into people’s points of struggle, anxieties, and frustrations helps entrepreneurs zone into existing dissatisfaction with existing products or services, therefore identifying opportunities to design new ones.
- Find common aversions: Look for workarounds around you. People’s actions and reactions to existing products and circumstances help entrepreneurs identify areas where people are not consuming.
Why nonconsumption?
When I say that nonconsumption is synonymous with opportunity, I mean that if entrepreneurs can successfully turn nonconsumption into consumption, they create profit, growth, and jobs—opportunities for themselves and others.
When entrepreneurs tap into nonconsumption, they have to design a new product or service that’s cheap enough, simple enough, and accessible enough for the vast majority of society (nonconsumers) to use. To design this new product or service, entrepreneurs must develop a new value network and a new business model whose cost structure will allow for profitability. In building this new value network and business model, there’s the natural creation of jobs.
In short, tapping into nonconsumption is a chance to make money, but also a chance to scale entrepreneurship and develop livelihoods through the process of developing a solution. It’s a win-win for consumers and entrepreneurs.
Why women and why Nigeria?
Of course, nonconsumption is not specific to women or Nigeria. However, it’s particularly helpful to both women and Nigeria because of the nonconsumption opportunities that already exist there.
In the past two articles (here and here) of this series, we’ve already established that there aren’t as many women entrepreneurs as there should be due to a variety of societal and infrastructural barriers. To further that point, I’ve examined six initiatives across the US, Canada, India, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan that have invested in integrating more women into the workplace as entrepreneurs, leaders, and workers in “less traditional” sectors. Each of these initiatives was developed by governments or activists who identified a gender gap (what we see and label as nonconsumption) in the workforce.
To address this nonconsumption, these initiatives are tackling barriers by providing funding, skills training, mentorship programs, and advocacy for better policies and regulations. They are creating a systemic solution to a struggle they’ve identified and doing so successfully. In the US, for example, the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grant program funded nine community-based organizations last year to increase women’s participation in apprenticeship programs and nontraditional occupations, impacting more than 3,000 women. On the other side of the world, as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the government has implemented initiatives to increase women’s participation in the workforce, and female participation in the labor force has increased from 23.2% in 2016 to 34.5% in 2023, which surpassed Vision 2023’s initial target of 30%. There is a long way to go, but initiatives such as these are helping women go from being “nonconsumers” to “consumers” in the workforce.
Now, what if we were to combine the goal of addressing women’s nonconsumption of entrepreneurship with the goal of building and scaling entrepreneurship overall in Nigeria?
The potential impact is immense for all parties involved.
Nigeria is ripe with opportunities. We took a deep dive into Nigeria’s solar industry in our 2023 report, and now we’re examining healthcare, agriculture, education, and financial services in our current work. Our early research has already identified struggles in healthcare, specifically in Nigeria’s eye care system—people’s inability to consume eye care and, more specifically, eye care products like glasses. There are about 71 million Nigerians who need glasses and can’t afford them. If an entrepreneur can create a simpler, cheaper, more accessible solution to help Nigerians who are visually impaired obtain glasses and the care they need, they’d be helping millions of nonconsumers…but they’d also be tapping into a scalable opportunity for themselves and all those they choose to employ.
In other words, nonconsumption opportunities in Nigeria don’t just tackle goods and services for the mass population, it also tackles the nonconsumption of entrepreneurship by women…and that’s the kind of sustainable prosperity market-creating innovations are capable of achieving.
