Where I came from, what I'm doing, and why.

For most of my life, I was certain I was one thing. An economist. I had the degrees to prove it, the jargon to defend it, and the quiet pride of a man who had found his lane early and intended to stay in it. Then a strange year arrived and pulled the certainty apart at the seams. By the end of it I was an economist, yes, but also a founder several times over, a builder of software I had no business building, a man holding carbon fibre in a field at dawn, a lecturer back in the very halls I once sweated to graduate from, and — of all the unlikely things — a man yelling trivia questions into a microphone to make strangers in a bar talk to each other.

This is the website where I keep track of all of it — out loud, in public, so the people who care about my work can follow along, push back, or join in.

I come from teachers. My grandfather was a teacher. My father, for a chapter of his life, was a teacher too. Somewhere in my twenties my friends started calling me "the Professor" because I could not stop reaching for stories to make hard things land — a nickname I wore as a joke long before it became, decades later, an actual job. That conviction went dormant in me for years. It would resurface in a Strathmore lecture hall, and when it did it would feel less like a new ambition than like a debt finally coming due.

I trained at Strathmore in Nairobi. I did my Master's at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, where I learned economics in a third language and wrote my thesis on whether the explosion of mobile money in economies like Kenya's was quietly rewiring the most fundamental plumbing of monetary policy — the money supply itself. A very Kenyan question dressed in very Spanish econometrics. I worked at the best development-economics institutions in Africa — J-PAL, TaRL, Pharo, the Kenyan Wallstreet, and eventually CEGA at UC Berkeley. Somewhere along the way I founded my own consultancy. And somewhere after that, I built Forecast Arena, which is the thing I am most proud of and least finished with.

If I hadn't become an economist, I would have been a software engineer. I loved technology growing up. I walked away from it in high school because I am too much of a people-person to spend a working life alone in a quiet room — a fact I discovered one evening at 11:40pm in an empty school computer lab, building a project nobody but me cared about. I picked economics because it was the only field that promised both rigour and human company. It turned out to be the right call, but for the wrong reason: I assumed I was leaving the tech path forever, and as recently as five years ago I would have agreed with that assumption. I was wrong. The tools caught up. Forecast Arena exists because, fifteen years after I walked out of that computer lab, the gatekeeper between an economist with a clear vision and a working software platform finally dissolved.

My undergraduate thesis at Strathmore was about how M-Pesa could be integrated into Kenyan monetary policy — a Bachelor of Business Science in Financial Economics with a double major in economics and finance. I was already obsessed with the gap between the textbook economy and the lived one. I went to Spain for a Master's in Economics and Finance because I wanted technique. I came back with technique, yes, but also with the lesson that has shaped everything since: societies are built by institutions, not just by clever ideas.

Then COVID arrived. I had time on my hands. I took MIT's MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Design of Policy — DEDP — and discovered the world of randomised controlled trials. The fact that surprised me most was that Kenya wasn't behind in this field. Kenya was a world leader. I wanted in.

The next several years took me through Teaching at the Right Level, the Pharo Foundation, Marathon XP, and ultimately CEGA at UC Berkeley, where I worked on the Kenya Life Panel Survey — the longest-running longitudinal study in Africa. I learned the painstaking craft of how rigorous economic knowledge actually gets made on this continent. Three-hour surveys, careful field teams, decades of patience for a single line of insight.

And then, in California in an election year, I discovered prediction markets. I watched them out-forecast some of the smartest commentators on the planet, in real time, with no qualifications required to participate beyond being willing to put something behind your view. I had spent years searching for a way to hear a whole society think continuously — and here was a mechanism that did exactly that. The only problem was that most of these markets were being used to bet on celebrity divorces and wars. A precious instrument, spent on junk food.

Soon after, I came home. I became a father. My son Leo was born, and my time horizon stretched past the edge of my own life. I stopped thinking only in the first person. I started thinking about Leo's Kenya, and Leo's children, and what they would inherit. The idea that had been forming since California suddenly stopped being a clever product idea and became a personal mandate. Build the instrument. Point it at the questions that actually matter. Hand a slightly better way of seeing the future to a generation I will not live to see fully grown.

So that's what I'm doing now — and it isn't only one thing. This year I stopped being just one thing. The economist who knew exactly what he was — RCTs, models, the rooms at CEGA, J-PAL, TaRL, Pharo — went and became a first-time founder. Several times over, it turns out.

Forecast Arena is the deepest of the four. Africa's first Human + AI economic prediction platform. Its free version is live. Its mission is to put African voices at the centre of Africa's economic conversation — as participants, not subjects; as forecasters, not the forecasted. The bigger vision is an Africa that reads its own future through infrastructure it owns. (Inside Forecast Arena →)

Thatcher X is the one that surprised me most. Why should a flooded road decide whether a delivering mother's blood arrives in time? I traded economic models for carbon fibre and flight plans to help build the exclusive Kenyan partner of The Good Drone Company — around a cargo drone that crosses Kenya end to end on a single mission. Last month it stopped being theoretical: seven strategic partnerships signed in one evening at the US Embassy, and I was the MC. (Inside Thatcher X →)

Strathmore is the circle closing. A decade ago I sat in those lecture halls wrestling with ideas that felt impossible. Today I stand at the front of one, co-teaching Development Economics — RCTs and Theories of Change, the same theories I once feared. (Inside the classroom →)

Funkie Fresh is the lightest, and quietly the one I have the most fun with. We've never been more connected, or more quietly lonely. I started wondering whether a simple game could get strangers in Nairobi talking again. It turns out it can. (Inside Funkie Fresh →)

Different rooms, same instinct. Underneath all four is the same stubborn person trying to close a gap: between who gets to predict and who doesn't, between the medicine and the patient, between the theory and the evidence, between the stranger and the friend.

I have come to think of myself as operating under two names. There is Prince — the economist, the educator, the public-facing voice, the one who writes the outlooks and gives the talks and stands at the front of the room. And there is Jean, the builder and quantitative analyst, the one who disappears into code and data late at night, who cares about pricing engines and settlement pipelines and the precise architecture of things. For a while I thought I had to choose. I've stopped. They are not a contradiction. They are a partnership. Prince knows what to build and why it matters; Jean knows how to actually build it.

Alongside the platforms, I write The Economic Whisperer, where I try to make macroeconomic thinking accessible to the people who shape — or should shape — African economies. I sit, at the founding moment, as chairperson of PMAK, the Prediction Markets Association of Kenya. And I keep this website, because successful founders are the ones who let their audiences in — and because a continent thinking as one starts with one person passing the idea on.

If you want to follow what I'm up to: subscribe to the newsletter, check the field notes, or just send me an email. I read everything.