French soldiers in North Africa named the art of making something from nothing.
Système D is a French expression in which the letter D stands for débrouillardise, meaning resourcefulness, the ability to improvise solutions with whatever is available. The term originated in the French colonial army in North Africa around the 1850s, where soldiers had to cope with inadequate supplies and unfamiliar conditions.1
The noun débrouille and its derivatives entered the French lexicon formally in 1872.2 During World War I, the French foot soldier, nicknamed the poilu, became the embodiment of la débrouillardise. A 1918 dictionary of soldier slang defined Système D as "making something out of nothing, seizing every opportunity or bit of good luck when it arises, taking advantage of circumstances, the terrain, men and anything you can get your hands on."3
Journalist Robert Neuwirth adopted the term in his 2011 book Stealth of Nations to describe the global informal economy, which he estimated at around 10 trillion dollars annually. He used "System D" as a reframing of what economists typically called the shadow or underground economy, arguing that the resourcefulness of informal entrepreneurs was not a failure of development but a parallel system of commerce.4
Equivalents exist in dozens of languages. In Portuguese, desenrascanço describes the same improvisational survival skill. In Hindi and Urdu, jugaad carries a similar meaning. In Swahili, jua kali, meaning "hot sun," describes the informal sector where people work outdoors without formal infrastructure. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the phrase "Article 15" refers to a fictitious constitutional clause that instructs citizens to simply manage on their own.5