The Gig Is Up
The project that started Seaplane Armada: turning five years of dense financial-inclusion research into a three-part documentary series, built from a week of field recording across Nairobi.
The Situation
This was our first major job as a company, and the project that Seaplane Armada was effectively built around. The connection came through our work on Slate Money: a journalist connected to one of that show's hosts reached out on behalf of BFA Global, a research and consulting firm focused on financial inclusion and fintech in developing economies. BFA had partnered with Quartz Africa on a major research initiative and had produced a roughly 60-page white paper distilling five years of work, much of it centered on Nairobi, on how mobile technology was reshaping financial inclusion and the gig economy. They knew the research was strong. They also knew almost nobody outside the field was going to sit down and read a 60-page white paper, and they wanted a format that could actually reach the stakeholders and researchers who cared about the findings but would never make time for the document itself.
The Approach
BFA came to us with clear information they wanted covered, but very little sense yet of structure or story, which meant the earliest work was collaborative development: creative sessions where we helped narrow the focus specifically to their Nairobi research and identify which threads inside the white paper could actually carry a series. Together, we shaped a three-episode arc: The Last Mile, on the logistics of getting goods to people in remote and underdeveloped areas, Rise of the Side Hustle, on the growth of informal entrepreneurship, and The Gig Upgrade, on the rise of app-based gig work and what it means for the future of employment in the region.
We then flew to Nairobi for a week of field recording, conducting ~36 interviews across the city: the CEO of Jumia, often described as the Amazon of Africa, app developers, small business owners, rideshare drivers, a massage therapist who ran her entire house-call business through an app, and BFA's own researchers and policy experts on the ground. We conducted much of this ourselves, which meant getting genuinely conversant in the subject matter fast enough to ask real, informed questions on the spot. Alongside the interviews, we captured hours of ambient city sound, street life, and texture, the raw material that would later let the show feel like a real place rather than a slideshow of expert quotes. Every night of the trip, we logged, transcribed, and made selects from that day's tape, so we came home with an organized, POworkable archive rather than an undifferentiated pile of recordings.
Our host was a journalist with a great deal of reporting experience in the space, and we worked with him remotely on editorial framing, making sure every claim in the finished episodes was fact-checked and that the way we'd cut interviews together held up journalistically, not just dramatically.
The Craft Challenge
The real job was making genuinely dense material — things like financial inclusion research, mobile technology penetration, gig economy logistics — land as something a listener would actually enjoy, not endure. Each episode was anchored by at least one dedicated sound design sequence built around a single concept rather than another stretch of talking heads. The strongest example walks a listener through exactly how a package physically reaches someone in a remote village outside Nairobi, recording policy experts as they placed a real order and narrated the entire delivery process live, layered with sound design to make an abstract logistics concept feel concrete and almost cinematic rather than lecture-like.
We also leaned into details that were genuinely surprising to a Western audience, including how SIM cards function as a form of personal identification in parts of Kenya, letting people without traditional bank accounts hold and transfer money through their phone. Finding and foregrounding details like that, the specific, human, slightly unexpected facts buried inside five years of academic research, was a big part of what turned a white paper into something people would actually want to listen to.
The Outcome
BFA was genuinely happy with the result, and so were we, which is the outcome we're always chasing: work that serves the client's actual purpose and holds up as something we're proud of artistically. The finished series let someone unfamiliar with fintech in developing markets, and with zero prior investment in the subject, have a genuinely good time listening, while giving BFA a real, shareable asset their stakeholders could listen to on a run instead of setting aside hours to read a dense report. It remains one of the clearest examples in our body of work of what "podcastifying" a piece of research actually looks like in practice, and it's the project that proved this company could exist.
Seaplane Armada turns dense research and field reporting into documentary series people actually want to hear. If you're sitting on findings nobody's reading, get in touch at theadmiral@seaplanearmada.com
