Week 10 - Why is an actuary studying sociology and specializing in governance?

One thing I have been particularly appreciative of my journey of knowledge and career is that I never lost the freedom to persistently keep asking the question "Why"

Though the journey has not been a straight bullet (more of the classic random graph drunk man's walk), I have always had the freedom to keep looking at the North Star and question if am still walking towards my true desire.

The Bachelor degree in Actuarial Science was motivated by a problem I could experience for those dear to me and my society - Just one tragic event and a family's dreams could came shattering down like a house of cards. Just a flick away from desolation. Could there be an answer on how to create a safety net to catch the loved ones midway before they crash to the ground? I immersed myself in the study unraveled the logic behind the safety nets (law of large numbers), how to design them to be sustainable (theory of insurable interest) and replicating this on and on to many other types of risks unraveling themselves along the human life cycle.

It was at undergraduate that I got taken away by the idea of securing a shelter over a person and a family's head. My dissertation was precisely on the financial solution of making this dream come true - a mortgage and asking whether a different design of mortgage would make this safety net more realizable (at that period of time in the late 1990's and early 2000's - my uncle who had raised me as my father figure had literary paid a mortgage for his entire career with interest rates reaching obnoxious levels of 35% leading to financial institutions stretching the number of years for the mortgage repayment literary for a working lifetime that could subdue other real desirable lifetime needs of educating the children and investing for retirement.

At masters again with the freedom to ask the why I had come half moon circle - my elegant formula's appealed to less than 2% of my society who took up formal insurance. What was their mainstay? Perhaps - I had been blind to understanding the primary safety net - that of the ability to produce to have some livelihood, some economic well being to support family life that we seek to protect. In a mainstay agricultural , basic commodity reality I asked what can finance do to protect basic livelihoods in the first place. Enter masters in mathematical finance and exploring safety nets of commodities.

I was taken by creating safety nets around commodities - that their variability in economic value would not negatively impact the family.

Again, though elegantly formulated - these financial ideas were light years away from finding a place in my local reality.

A common thread however connected my two -decade long quest in knowledge and practice - The idea of agency. The idea of focusing on the underlying human need for a safety net. From the basic physical safety net of a shelter, to the identity safety net of economic productivity, to the legacy safety net of life and health insurance.

Agency - the human desire underlying the expressed social need. In my PhD I find myself back to my pet peeve - dignified housing. The very basic and visualized safety net of a human person.

The north star continues to illuminate the path - Effective safety nets to support the dignity of a human person when life tragedies strike

In this journey of sociology and governance, I seek to rediscover the agency behind the social need for the most basic of human dignity safety nets - a roof over your head but very keen to contextualize it within my time (the 21st Century) and my space (global south, sub saharan, Kenya, Nairobi)!

It is a journey back to basics

After all - to be original you have to go back to the origin~ Antoní Gaudí