Bob Currin is Managing Director of AfricaScope and is the research and strategy consultant for the company. Bob is responsible for providing consulting work to a wide variety of public and private sector organisations across Africa.

Bob is currently very closely involved with a project with FinMark Trust aimed at making financial markets work for the poor in South Africa and numerous other African countries and in Pakistan. Bob has worked on access to finance projects in South and Southern Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and Pakistan. Bob is currently active with an SME survey in Zambia as well as one in South Africa with the Department of Trade and Industries and FinMark Trust and in the proposal stage for similar surveys in Tanzania and Uganda. A similar study is in the planning stages for Pakistan.

He has been responsible for the development of many leading spatial information report packages and helping organisations better understand their markets using spatial data solutions.

Bob holds a Bachelor of Economics degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban and is also a graduate of the Senior Management Program at the University of Chicago

Throughout his career he has focused on consumer, business to business and spatial data consulting to various Public and Private sector organisations

Major clients include FinMark Trust, Eskom, Standard Bank, ABSA Bank, PostBank and Telkom as well as a wide variety of fast moving consumer goods companies.

Bob has written many articles on consumer behavior and initiated the South African ConsumerScope – published with SABC every second year since 1994. In addition to these he has been involved in:

• the South African Business Survey review
• developed the Business Sophistication Measure (BSM) for use in classification of the small business market
• co-developed the sampling methodology for small business surveys in South Africa
• worked extensively on “Making Financial Markets work for the Poor” – with FinMark Trust
• developing a Measure of Financial Sophistication – FinMark Trust
• SME Gauteng Pilot study – FinMark Trust
• numerous workshops on financial market development – Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda
• pioneering spatial marketing in the financial sector