The LeadAfrik Public Economics Hub: 33 finance tools, three free courses, and how they fit together
A quick guide to what's on the platform: 33 finance and economics calculators across personal money, wealth, investing, business, tax, and macro; three structured free courses (SQL for analysts, reading a financial statement, African Macro 101); and the architecture that ties them together.
The LeadAfrik Public Economics Hub is now live with three new surfaces: a 33-tool finance calculator suite, three structured free courses, and a public-economics analysis archive. Everything is free. Nothing requires registration. Tools that depend on local rules are region-aware out of the box; the rest are currency-agnostic and work the same in Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, London, or New York.
This page is a quick tour: what shipped, where it lives, and how to use it.
The tools suite
Thirty-three tools across six categories — personal money, wealth & retirement, investing, business & SME, tax, and macro & analyst tools. Every tool ships with transparent inputs, sensitivity views, an FAQ, and the math made visible. No black boxes. Every tool is statically rendered and loads instantly. A representative sample:
Rent vs Buy
Deterministic plus a Monte Carlo mode that replays the housing decision across 1,500 futures with random walks on appreciation, rent inflation, and investment returns.
DCF Valuation
Terminal value, WACC, and a 5×5 sensitivity table on WACC × terminal growth. The model every analyst builds in their first month, available to anyone.
Take-Home Pay
Region-aware: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, the US. Income tax plus social security on a single payslip view.
Public Debt Sustainability
The debt-dynamics equation everyone quotes. Three independent stress shocks. Useful for analysts and citizens both.
FIRE & Coast-FIRE
When can you stop saving, when can you stop working? Inputs encoded in the URL, so a calculation is a shareable artifact.
Cash Runway
Months until zero, with revenue-growth sensitivity. The number every founder watches first.
The tax tools are region-aware: switch between Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the UK, and the US, and the bands, social-security rates, and standard deductions update to the right regional schedule. Most of the rest are currency-agnostic — KSh, USD, EUR, GBP, NGN, ZAR — pick yours.
Some are unusually deep for free tools. Rent vs Buy includes a Monte Carlo mode that runs the decision through 1,500 randomized futures, surfacing the full distribution instead of a single point estimate. DCF Valuation includes a sensitivity table on WACC × terminal growth, with terminal-share-of-EV flagged as a diagnostic. Debt Sustainability runs three independent stress shocks on top of the baseline path.
Three courses, fully written
Three structured free courses are available now. Each is shipped — modules written, examples worked, exercises with show-answer toggles. Nothing in them is “coming soon.”
Data Analysis · 12 modules · ~10 hours
SQL for Analysts
From SELECT to window functions to performance. The complete grammar an analyst needs to query, shape, and trust real datasets. Closes with three guided projects on a public dataset.
Finance · 10 modules · ~9 hours
Reading a Financial Statement
Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, working capital, ratios, common-sizing, the notes, earnings quality, and a guided 10-K walkthrough. Built to take a beginner to analyst-grade fluency.
Economics · 8 modules · ~7 hours
African Macro 101
How African economies actually work. Monetary policy, fiscal sustainability, FX regimes, inflation dynamics, capital flows, IMF programs, sovereign debt restructuring. Recent African case studies (Zambia, Ghana, Chad, the 2022-23 sudden stop) woven through.
African Macro 101 fills a real gap. The standard macro textbook assumes conditions that don’t hold across most of the continent — credible central banks with deep bond markets, freely floating currencies, broad tax bases. African economies operate under tighter constraints, and the policy tradeoffs that follow are different. The course teaches the structure that actually applies — currency mismatch, high pass-through, fiscal dominance, shallow capital markets — and works through what each implies in practice.
How the platform is organized
Three top-level surfaces, plus auxiliary products by the same author:
- Finance Tools — calculators, region-aware where it matters
- Learn — structured curricula across data analysis, finance, and economics
- Analysis — long-form analysis on African public economics
- Data, Documents, Snapshot — datasets, source material, and a monthly Kenyan macro snapshot
- Other products — Tukomacho (anonymous civic reporting), PINI (address infrastructure), and Rentflow (property operations) — separate products by the same builder, surfaced under one platform
Design principles
- Transparent inputs. Every result is built from inputs the user controls. The math behind a number is shown, and where simplifying assumptions are made, the FAQ on the tool says so.
- Region-aware where it matters. Tax bands, social-security rates, standard deductions, and macro defaults default to the right schedule for the user’s region — and remain editable for special cases. Generic mode is always available.
- Sensitivity, not certainty. Tools surface the shape of an answer as inputs move. The point is judgment, not a single number.
- Shareable artifacts. Many tools encode their inputs in the URL — change the inputs, copy the link, the recipient lands on the same calculation. A calculation becomes a shareable object, not just a session.
- Citations and method. Region-aware tools cite their source schedules (KRA Finance Act, IRS, SARS, HMRC, etc.). Each FAQ surfaces the methodology and the boundary conditions where the tool stops applying.
Roadmap
Public roadmap, as of this writing:
- Finance Course #2 — Bond & Equity Pricing — drafting now
- 3-Statement Model lite — drives a 5-year projection from a few inputs
- Embed widgets — strip-chrome iframes so any site can host a tool
- Educators page — citation block and classroom-use invitation
- Methodology pages per tool category, with citations to source schedules
- Regional depth — Tanzania, Ghana, Egypt, Morocco
- Per-tool editorial essays — the “when to use this” piece below the calculator
Feedback
The roadmap is partly built and partly responsive — the tools and courses that get added next are the ones readers tell us are missing. Specific bugs, missing regions, math you’d challenge, or topics you wish were covered: info@leadafrik.com.
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