Lessons in Aid Inefficiency

Part of what drew me to Liberia was my interest in understanding best practices in international aid.   It's no secret that aid is often inefficient at best and ultimately counterproductive at worst.  Unlike others, I do not believe that this unfortunate fact is a justification to throw the baby out with the bath water.  I believe that there is a role for assistance, and if my path takes me in that direction, I want to know how to do it well.  I knew some of the mistakes that these organizations make are not obvious, and I wanted to be sure that I'd have the view from the other side to guide my career in development.

The project I've been focusing around philanthropic support for leapfrogging Internet technology has provided a fascinating window into these dynamics.  Step one for me was to find out what everyone else was doing in this arena. What did I find?  UNDP is funding standalone Internet infrastructure (VSATs) for all country offices of a single ministry.  The University of Indiana is looking into building a fiber-based Local Area Network for the University of Liberia. The government owned operator wants to build a fiber ring in Monrovia.  UNDP set up its own connection to Cote d'Ivoire's undersea cable connection.  USAID is investigating a project for backbone and last mile infrastructure - and to their great credit is working closely with the government across the sector and pushing for coordination.  Multiple other entities have applied for permission to build landing stations.  The potential for inefficiency, not just on the part of the aid community, is glaring.  I wasn't about to add another philanthropist led initiative to that list.

These discussions quickly led me to the conclusion that what's needed first and foremost is an industrial policy to coordinate all of this activity.  What concerns me about many of these efforts is that many relate to shared infrastructure, natural monopolies, and I saw an opportunity to guide these investments in a way so as to be ideal for the sector.  I believe the Government of Liberia has an exciting opportunity to shape the creation of Liberia's Internet infrastructure in a way that is not just efficient but also best for competition and ultimately Liberian's development.  The time is now.  Three submarine cables are coming along the coast of West Africa that can be connected to, myriad entities are looking to make investments, donors are looking for opportunities, it’s on philanthropist’s radar.  All of these pieces moving forward without government coordination risks investment inefficiencies and reactive regulation.  

It wasn't the sexy answer, but I feel strongly that it's the right one: to hold on infrastructure support until the government answers these complex questions.  I've instead pushed to redirected philanthropic interest in technology towards mobile applications for public service delivery and building the capacity within Liberia to build, support, and maintain the technology.  Ultimately I firmly believe that solutions should come from within, and I’d like to see our foundations partners focus on building the capacity to do so.

I presented these recommendations to the ICT Focus Group, a team composed of representatives from ministers responsible for telecommunications and ICT policy in Liberia, the regulators, and the national operator.  They were well received, but what was most telling was the reaction to my sentiments about the infrastructure component.  The frustration with donors was significant, and though they were preaching to the choir, they wanted to make one message clear and they wanted it relayed: make sure than donors understand that when they set up small piecemeal projects it's not efficient and often isn't sustainable.  (I recognize there's a much longer discussion to be had here about donor objectives, etc. and I have a feeling this is particularly pertinent to infrastructure).

On my end, I was happy to get the policy need on the table and hear support for it among these key constituents.  It's unfortunately not my mandate to help answer those questions, but I'm going to keep banging on the table about the opportunity and need for it.  I worry that if the government doesn’t prioritize and address these issues, and the investments will be made sub-optimally.  Let's face it, Liberia has a long way to go and a lot of other pressing and urgent needs.  I worry I'm being idealistic.

Which brings me to my next question.  What is the best way to react if the first-best solution, plugging into a coordinated approach driven by the government isn't realistic?  What's the second-best approach?

Helena

I was the last member of the intern house to arrive to Liberia.  By then, the arrangements for our laundry, cooking, and cleaning had already been made.   Sepah, who lives a couple doors down, would do our laundry for $10 per person per month.  Helena, who lives clear across town, would do our cooking three nights a week for $15 per person per month (not including the food itself) and another $35 per person per month for cleaning the house twice a week.

I opted out of the food (have I not yet posted on my inability to stomach Liberian food?) but wasn’t thrilled about the high relative to price of the cleaning.  $15 to cook but $35 to clean?  $35 x 7 = $245 per month to clean twice a week.  It felt like way too much. Momar’s mom in Senegal pays $60-$80 per month for a girl to live there and cook and clean every day.  It seemed like we must have been overpaying Helena by a factor of at least three.

Generally speaking I just let these things slide, because at the end of the day another $10 to me is nothing compared to what it is to the receiver.  But Helena wasn’t even doing a good job cleaning (you can’t walk across the house without needing to clean your feet before getting into bed).  It was never clear that she even came.

Meanwhile, Sepah arrived dutifully at our door every day, and spent hours washing our clothes by hand in the windows of sunshine or at least dryness between the downpours.  She was without doubt working significantly harder than Helena for significantly less.  Helena’s hourly wage must have been 8x Sepah’s.  It didn’t feel right.

Meanwhile, Helena asked for July’s pay in advance because she was moving into a new house and they needed the entire year’s rent at once (this is actually standard practice here… crazy!).  So one month working for us paid her rent for a year.

Two weeks ago we decided to let Helena go.  The going rate in Liberia is $60 a month, not $250.  We were getting ripped off, which might have been fine if we were happy with her work.  We decided we'd rather pay Sepah $60 to clean the house, who lived right next door and was always thre anyway. We called and called Helena for days to tell her but she never answered her phone.  Finally last week she arrived in the morning before we left and we broke the news.

In tears, Helena asked our guards to reason with us.  Personally I wasn’t very sympathetic.  When I told Achie how much we’d been paying her, he was shocked.  Helena got a sweet deal.  She got paid for two months of work the equivalent of 8 months of pay, and made enough to cover rent for two years. When I explained our reasoning, he agreed our decision was more than fair.

Helena returned to the house again this morning in tears.  Maybe she’d been counting on the extra money and already spent it.  Ultimately we decided to rehire her for $60 per month.

It’s a fine line.  While I’m comfortable paying a small “rich white person” tax, it’s not ok to rip me off egregiously.  I hear so many calls lately from the African development community to treat Africans with the respect and dignity they deserve.  Treat them as partners and not charity cases. 

They are right.  And following that logic, we were right to take a stand against Helena charging us 4x what she should have and not doing her job well.  Doing anything less would have been charity

My Depressing Visit with the University of Liberia

I frankly think capacity building needs to rise higher on the agenda of the development community as a whole.  The old proverb says it all “Give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish he’ll eat forever.”  All too often we’re so busy feeding people we don’t teach them how to feed themselves once we’re gone.

So it should come as no surprise that a key component of my recommendations for supporting technology in Liberia is capacity building. Not as sexy as blanketing the country with wireless broadband, but critical for creating an ecosystem around technology for the applications needed in Liberia to arise from within.

I visited the University of Liberia yesterday and met with Professor Robert Damalo, Director of Computer Information Systems to learn more about the existing programs and discuss what foundations could do.  That visit more of less ruined my day.

I’ve visited a few computer science programs in emerging markets, which are obviously not the same as developing countries, especially one like Liberia.   But somehow I expected to find more than nothing there.  There was nothing there.

I take that back.  There are about 30 computers that the student body of 20,000 uses.  They aren’t connected to the Internet, they’re almost exclusively used for Microsoft Office applications for homework assignments.  But really, if you had to share one computer with 667 others, would you ever bother trying to use it?

There is also a VSAT, a video conferencing unit, and a handful of thin client computers.  It’s all collecting dust.  An ICT department was opened in 2007 with the support of Socketworks and the goal of introducing IT and providing Internet access to the university (hence the VSAT).  The intention was so have the IFC pick up the bill for the Internet connection (a hefty $5000 per month thanks to satellite’s egregious rates).  The IFC came in, saw the Internet Cafes in town filled with students and interpreted it not as evidence of the demand for Internet, but rather the ability to pay for it.  No free Internet was needed at the school, they concluded, and refused to pay.  Not surprisingly the university can’t foot that bill.  Now Socketworks is trying to unload the assets to the University for $200,000. 

To my surprise and glee, one of the very forward looking and tech savvy ministers had long ago set up Google Apps accounts for the school.  He showed me the usage stats last week when we met: about 20 accounts, most of them never used.  No wonder, there’s no account creation process and no Internet access.  Now I get it.

They’d tried to get the faculty to start using the local network to get class information and materials online.  The problem is, the faculty has no idea how to use even the most basic technology to facilitate their teaching.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I wasn’t there to understand if the University as a whole had access to technology and the Internet.  I wanted to understand the computer-related programs and courses available.  I wanted to understand how far Liberia is from graduating students capable of building technology for their country.

About as far as it possibly could be is the answer, sadly.  There’s one intro to computer programming class, and it’s available only to math majors. Business students learn some IT via Microsoft Office programs.  That’s it. That’s all there is.

Professor Damalo has largely given up on establishing proper technology degree programs.  Instead he’s been pushing for a simple 3-month certificate program.  Since 2004.

I asked Professor Damalo what he thought foundations could do to help. Train people to fix computers, he said.  Train our staff to use computers. Train IT teachers.  He hadn’t even mentioned a computer science program, so I pressed him on it.

“Let’s just start with a certificate program,” he said.

He then got a call and I followed him to another office.  He’d been called in to fix a computer that had a virus.  This is what Professor Damalo does with most his time.

Did I mention that as I walked through campus past inexplicable piles of chairs and desks, classes were held under a pavilion outside because there weren’t enough functioning classrooms?

It’s clear that Liberia is not investing enough in higher education.  I think it’s a mistake.  I’ve met enough smart, ambitious, and enthusiastic young people to know that the ability to take advantage of it is there.   Who, if not them, will lift Liberia?  It’s such a cliché thing to say but here you really mean it when you say to a smart educated young person: “You are the future of this country.”

I returned to my desk thinking I should keep three words permanently above my computer screen: “don’t give up.”

What's Really Different About Liberia

Before I landed here, I posted a bit about what I’d heard about Liberia: how incredibly poor it is, how people live, how little economic activity there is. Now that I’ve been on the ground for three weeks now (time flies!) I can say that much of that was just plain misleading.

The fact of the matter is people living in poverty, people living off a dollar or two a day, people without running water, without proper waste treatment facilities, without electricity, in homes that could blow over in a bad storm – I’ve seen it before. It hit me first when I went to Mumbai with Google back in 2006 (see the posting here!). A drive by its enormous slums, the sight of millions of people (literally) sleeping on the streets, the children begging at every turn, and you’ve looked dire poverty in the eye firsthand. That same poverty is in abundance here, but in India it’s literally orders of magnitude larger in terms of absolute numbers.

What makes Liberia different isn’t the poor, it’s the lack of much of a middle and upper class above it. In so many other developing countries there’s enough wealth and expertise above the poor to establish businesses, to pay taxes to fund public services and investments, to justify the existence of nice hotels, restaurants, and to create enough demand for foreign companies to export their goods and services.

Here there’s a very thin veil of it, almost nonexistent. Any Liberian with the money or means or skills to leave did, and few of them have come back. Those who remained weren’t building businesses and skills; they were surviving. They weren’t sitting in school or university; they were fleeing their homes. As a result there is an enormous lack of capacity to do the work required to move this country forward, let alone support a tax base for redistribution and government programs or create demand for expensive imported goods.

It’s this lack of in between that makes Liberia’s struggle forward so challenging. The problems we are targeting in most other developing economies are premature here in Liberia. It’s not that we need capital for entrepreneurs to flourish, it’s that we need to provide training to create the entrepreneurial skills in the first place. It’s not that we need to figure out how to fix the incentive problem in health and education, it’s that we have to train doctors and teachers in the first place. The list goes on and on.

Building capacity from next to nothing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not something that happens in one incredibly capable President’s term either. Building this fundamental capacity in Liberia will probably take an entire generation. But hopefully, if this country can avoid slipping back into conflict, it will happen.

The process, as slow as it is, is definitely on.

I Just Want A Happy Life!

I’m not sure where to even begin with this one. I wanted my roommate Javi to write a guest post to do the story justice (because its his), but he refuses to write in English (he’s Spanish) so I’ll do my best to recount it.

Javi has been taking incredible pictures in Liberia (check them out here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=278304&id=858825494&l=e7a5e0e541 He’s quite brazen and takes the camera everywhere: to the markets, the street corners, the soccer fields, the neighborhood high school, and then just the other night, he scored a press pass to the big soccer game.

His camera has been the key that has opened the door deeper into Liberian society than I could ever hope to explore. With it he has been able to engage in conversations with people whose stories make it clear how far this country has to go to repair the damages of the war. Tragically, I can’t help but wonder if a whole generation will find itself unable to recover from the scars of the past.

One night last week at the soccer game, two young men approached Javi. Visibly intoxicated, they told him they were former child soldiers. They recounted doing cocaine, heroine, and marijuana at the age of seven -- and then going out and killing people. They showed him the scars on their arms from the needles.

They asked for a picture, and then looked at a young man in the distance, who shook his head sternly. He was their commander. Javi was taken aback at not just the fact that they still had a commander, but even moreso that these kids, who had killed so many people, were clearly terrified of him.

“This guy must be totally insanse,” Javi thought.

The young man walked over, leaned in uncomfortably close to Javi’s face and said, “I’m monitoring you.”

Now at that point it would have been game over for me. I would have gotten my a** out of there as quickly as I possibly could. But not Javi (does this mean Javi is insanse?). Javi put his camera away and walked back over to the guy and started talking to him. Not only had he been a commander in the war, but he had also served in Charles Taylor’s Anti-Terrorism Unit (essentially his personal army, long story there).

“Do you know what the ATU was?” he demanded to know.

“Yes, I do.” Javi said…

He showed him his scars: bullet holes in his legs, huge cuts on his arms, and of course scars from the needles. He was only 23 years old. That means that he was only 17 when the war ended six years ago. He couldn’t go back to his village. They know who he is, what he has done. They are terrified of him. He is branded a killer.

But the most disturbing part of it was the one thing he repeatedly said, in an angry, exasperated voice: “That life if over. I just want a happy life!”

“They didn’t just steal his childhood,” Javi said to us later that night as he told the story. “They stole his life!”

Mob Justice: Is it Just?

I missed a raging ethical debate during the drive this morning, thanks to whatever I ate in the past couple days that I shouldn’t have, which has kept me home for the day.  Our driver told my housemates that his community caught a thief last night.  And then they cut off one of his hands.

This isn’t the first I’ve heard of something like this happening in Liberia. Another friend was at a graduation party recently when people started yelling “Thief! Thief!,” which was immediately met by everyone running out, chasing down the culprit, and beating him.  The Liberian people are justifiably sick and tired of having not just their livelihood but also indeed their lives stolen from them.

There are signs around Monrovia urging against mob justice, but it’s not as if there is much of an alternative, at least not yet.  The police force in Liberia is nearly nonexistent, so there is little formal deterrent to crime.  Mob justice is an informal institution that has arisen due to the lack of formal institutions in Liberia.

Clearly it is a problem if crime becomes rampant due to the lack of consequence (and I understand this actually happening, which is particularly concerning given the numbers of ex-combatants), but is it okay for communities to be cutting off someone’s hand if they are caught stealing?  Should angry mobs be determining and carrying out criminal punishment?

I've only put a morning's worth of thought on this, and haven't had a chance to vet my thinking with anyone yet, but here goes. There is a practical and a theoretical way of thinking about this question.

Practically speaking, without the informal institution you risk the establishment of criminal norms and networks, but with it, you are risking the establishment of tensions within communities and norms accepting brutality. 

I’m inclined to argue that the government should take a stand against mob justice, despite the fact that it is playing a critical role the government does not yet have the capacity to.  Down the line when the capacity does exist, I think it will be easier to take on criminal networks than to remove the societal tensions and shift the unhealthy norms that will inevitably arise from current behavior. 

In reality of course, a government without the capacity to stop theft doesn’t have the capacity to stop mob justice either.  It will still play a valuable role deterring theft.  But I don’t think the Liberian government can afford to indirectly condone such violence by not taking a stand against it.

Though, that’s my thinking on a practical answer.  What’s the theoretical one?  Is mob justice just?  What does justice mean in a country lacking formal institutions?  Or is there some definition of justice that is universal?

When Credit Isn't the Constraint? Just a hunch...

One of my responsibilities for the summer is to write a report on several commitments made at the Clinton Global Initiative last year. There are three, one of which is the creation of a $30M fund to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by offering entrepreneurs loans to start their businesses. Recognizing the capacity constraints that run alongside credit constraints in a place like Liberia, the Liberia Enterprise Development Fund (LEDF) also provides training and other support for its clients.

In the two years since inception, LEDF has not made many loans, and many of those it has made are not performing. The impression I got when first talking to people here in the government is that they just fell short of their commitment due to mismanagement. After a few more conversations, I’m not so sure that’s the case.

There were clearly management issues, and big ones. But my hunch is that even if LEDF had been executed well, it still would have fallen short of expectations. I think this actually might be a classic case of targeting the wrong constraint. For all my raising issues about the idea of a binding constraint, I think I’ve encountered a real world illustration of what happens when you target the wrong problem.

Surely credit is an issue. But it’s not the only one, and the LEDF’s experience may be evidence it is not the biggest one. I suspect the bigger problem is actually that there are few people with the entrepreneurial ability and skill set to formulate and execute a business plan. They recognized this by pairing the loans the training and other support, but I have a feeling whatever was offered fell far short of what would have been needed to fill the gap between current capacity and successful new businesses.

We’ll see if my intuition is right. Thanks Harvard for giving me the tools to have it in the first place.

Internet Infrastructure in Liberia

I had a meeting yesterday with Ben Wolo, the Managing Director of Libtelco, Liberia’s national telecommunications company. I’ve spent much of the past week learning more about Internet infrastructure (just because I worked at Google doesn’t mean I understand these things very well!). After yesterday’s meeting, I now understand the set up behind the horribly slow Internet that I battle on a daily basis.

Liberia has next to no infrastructure. There is no connection to submarine fiber, no domestic Internet backbone, no exchange server, no data center, no copper wires. Everything connects to the outside world via satellite, and communicates from there via microwaves. What is exciting about the utter lack of infrastructure is the opportunity to build from scratch: to leapfrog the technologies on the decline such as copper wires and land lines. This is precisely what the private foundations are interested in supporting.

Now comes time to apply what I’ve learned over the past year. I can hear Dani Rodrik’s voice already. “Why aren’t investor’s doing it already? It might be that it’s not profitable – the economy isn’t developed enough to generate enough demand to make it profitable. That would certainly have been my guess. It might be a coordination failure: the demand isn’t there because the infrastructure isn’t there, and the infrastructure isn’t there because the demand isn’t there. I would have thought that easily possible. Maybe it’s credit constraints. It could be regulatory hurdles. I’m sure those exist too.

Turns out there is sufficient demand in Monrovia today to justify investment in fiber, a landing station to connect to submarine fiber, an exchange station, and a data center. The issue is not demand or a coordination failure. The issue is funding (the issue might also be regulation but I haven’t had a chance to explore that one yet).

Libtelco’s status as a wholly owned government entity creates these challenges. Public funding from the government would be difficult because of its limited budget and donor priorities. The Managing Director would have to convince public officials to support it. Libtelco raising commercial debt would be equivalent to Liberia raising commercial debt, which it cannot do due to its status as a heavily indebted poor country (HIPC). Libtelco could look for investors to take an equity stake, but that would require legislation since the government owns it. There may be creative options such as giving investors a revenue share instead of a share in the company.

There are many pieces that I still need to work through to determine the right answer for foundation support: the regulatory environment, the competitive environment, the appropriate ownership for the infrastructure, the politics, the list goes on. But it's exciting to know that the national telco is trying to do exactly what I was intuitively thinking needs to be done.

Thinking about ICT in Liberia

I’ve only been here a few days, but I’ve been thinking about the leapfrogging technology part of my internship for weeks now. I landed in Monrovia with ideas.

What little information I had on the big idea to support leapfrog technology investments was seemingly arbitrary and nebulous. They wanted to 1) develop a nationwide wireless communication platform 2) implement networking programs in government ministries 3) utilize technology to improve capacity of NGOs, schools, hospitals, and private sector and incredulously 4) build technology enabled industries (outsourcing). So I assumed that they probably weren’t sure what they wanted and that I had a blank slate to think about things.
So I asked myself, if I were to invest in ICT in Liberia, where would I do it?

The mobile infrastructure is actually will built out. There are four players, so there is a lot of competition and prices are on par or even lower than elsewhere in the region. You can even get Internet via EDGE and GPRS. There are about 750,000 mobile subscribers, and many of the phones are shared. This means mobile penetration is probably between 30-50%.

I know everyone always talks about focusing on mobile, but part of the power of mobile is the ability to connect to the Internet, even if it is invisible to the user (i.e. via SMS to a database somewhere). Liberia has next to no Internet infrastructure. So when I’m thinking about where to focus investments, it’s at this core. You can’t build a wireless platform unless you have a backbone to connect to, you can’t implement networking programs, improve capacity, or build a technology industry when the average speed of the Internet is 0.4kbps.

Ny thoughts have gravitated towards building a domestic backbone and getting it connected to submarine cables. Even if demand is years out, especially in rural areas, Liberia is building roads now and could possibly simultaneously lay fiber. This, coupled with training for maintaining infrastructure, scholarships for computer science at Liberian Universities, and grants / loans for tech entrepreneurs could potentially create an enabling environment for myriad applications to spawn.

So that’s where my intuition landed before I landed in Monrovia. And then I met Ben Wolo.

Busy Summer Ahead

Most internships are not about getting much accomplished. Many of my fellow interns her are complaining about how little they’ve done so far, and many of my classmates abroad are two weeks into the job, still waiting for their projects to materialize. In all honesty it was never my goal to have a big impact over a nine-week period. I just wanted the perspective that working in a capacity constrained government in Africa would afford. Turns out I’ve got my work cut out for me, and I’m loving it.

I have three projects. The first is to oversee the development of the Philanthropy Secretariat website. I’m designing the site’s overall structure and functionality as well as creating the content to give to the technical team. The second is a report on progress against three Clinton Global Initiative Commitments made regarding Liberia last year. The third, and this is the big one, is coming up with a plan for foundation support for ICT investments in Liberia. This could easily materialize into my thesis next year. And on top of all this, I’m working to support the Secretariat Program Manager across the board to make sure that the organization is meeting its goals for 2009. I have to admit, I’d love to have his job.

I’m just three days in but the perspective I was looking for is certainly coming along as well. The inefficiencies are mind-boggling. The biggest issue so far is actually the Internet. It’s down as often as it is up. As the President’s Energy Advisor said to me today you “click and pray” – i.e. pray that your email goes out or that your attachment downloads. If you need to download or upload a document, often you just start it running in the background and check back in a few hours. We share documents with jump drives instead of via email. You always copy your emails before hitting send so they don’t get lost. I’m also unable to print in any significant quantity so have the pleasure of reading a 120-page document on PDF. There is no ink for the printers in many buildings. These are just the technical obstacles. I haven’t encountered the bureaucratic and capacity ones yet.

First Night in Liberia

It’s almost a joke. I haven’t even seen Monrovia yet, but I’ve just returned from the opening party of Liberia’s first luxury resort, which also happens to be spitting distance from the intern house I’m staying in.

Also in attendance was the President, Governor of the Central Bank, Chief Justice, Ambassadors from the United States and China, various Ministers, Ambassadors, and heads of pretty much every major company in the country.

This was my introduction to Liberia. At first I thought it was a little ridiculous to be attending such a lavish event on my first night in Monrovia. But what’s even more ridiculous is that there I was, mingling with these people. After just a year of grad school, I’m actually completely comfortable engaging on development issues with anyone. I chatted with the Chinese Ambassador. I joked with the President and General Manager of Buchanan Renewables and Buchanan Energy, two arms of one of the most exciting private companies in the country. And I met the managing director of Liberia Telecommunications Company. Turns out we think very similarly about technology investments in Liberia. It’s good to know I’m on the right track.

But there was something else striking about last night. Children from the high school performed traditional Liberian dances for the President. Mid way through, they stopped dancing and started talking -- one at a time. And this is what they said.

“My name is Michael, I’m ten years old, I’m in third grade, and I want to be a teacher when I grow up.”

“My name is Ellen. I’m fifteen years old, in third grade, and I want to be a nurse when I grow up.”

“My name is George. I’m nineteen years old, in fifth grade, and I want to be a businessman when I grow up.”

The disconnect between age and grade was striking, a stark reminder of what this country has been through. And where it’s going.

Touchdown Liberia

Taking off and landing in Ghana and Liberia today, I peered out the window looking for roads. In Ghana there were many, though few were paved. In Liberia, nearly all I saw was dense jungle. Maybe a few foot paths. One road. As we touched down at the airport the US transportation security deemed unfit for Delta to fly to, I noticed a dead plane sitting near the runway, collecting rust. I hurriedly pulled out my camera to capture the image, but as I stepped off the plane the lens immediately fogged up from the humidity.

Liberia’s main airport is tiny. There’s one belt for baggage claim. The carts to carry your bags are so old and rusted that I had to try out several before I got one that didn’t’ screech horribly loudly. But shockingly, my bags made it (there was a bit of a debacle in Accra). And now I’ve arrived.
There are eight of us in the intern house, which has four bedrooms. There is no hot water, but I’m pretty used to it after the past week in Dakar and the water warms up quite a bit because of the heat outside. We only have electricity for half the day. And we’re about thirty minutes from downtown Monrovia. I’m yet to report to work, but I really can’t wait hit the ground and start running. I’m going to need all the time I can get; they are really loading the work on me this summer.

Constance

As I sat down to wait for my delayed flight to Monrovia, a woman asked what the confusion was all about.  I spent the next couple hours talking to Constance, a Liberian woman who lives in Ghana and was coming home for her mother’s funeral.  As I continued to ask her about herself, her experience in the Liberian civil war unfolded.

She escaped on foot to Sierra Leone.  Walked from Monrovia.  She had left the suburb her family lives in to visit friends for the day when the rebels took over.  First they overtook the area where here parents lived, then where she was visiting. She wasn’t raped, but her friend who was three months pregnant was.  The rebels forced everyone to leave their homes and took them to refugee camps.  She stayed there for a few days, without food, in rooms so cramped that you wouldn’t dare leave your spot on the floor lest you would have to stand from there on out.

Then she escaped and walked to Sierra Leone.  There wasn’t really food or water.  They ate rats.  They crossed rapid filled rivers in canoes so laden with people she feared they would drown.  The final stretch was a treacherous bridge crossing at the border (she says it was about as big as a rope), only to find it was closed.  And then they were told the rebels would come to kill them.

Fortunately they didn’t, they managed to cross the border, and Constance now lives in Ghana with her husband and two children.  She was the sweetest woman. 

But what impressed me most was her resilience.  

A Note on Air Travel in Africa

I continue to be shocked at how difficult and expensive it is to travel around Africa.  Upon reflection it’s not that surprising – clearly only a tiny sliver of the population even dreams of flying, which doesn’t amount to enough demand to bring prices down to what we are used to seeing elsewhere around the world.

Still, my jaw drops every time I inquire about a flight.  It’s actually more expensive to travel around Africa than it is to travel to Africa.  We originally though to go to Tanzania after our internship, then opted to stay local after seeing the $2000+ price tag to get from West Africa to Dar es Salaam and back.

Yesterday I found out that the inaugural Delta flight into Monrovia – the bargain $650 one-way 2-hour flight I scored- has been canceled.  TSA in the US hasn’t yet given security clearance.  I looked into booking what was option B, a one-way ticket on Virgin Nigeria via Lagos for $1000.  The price had risen to $3500.  Delta offered to get me to Monrovia – via Amsterdam.  There are several local carriers I’m looking into.  I’ve been told their planes are sketchy, to say the least.  You can’t book tickets online, and so far I haven’t been able to get an answer when I call.   I’ve been at it for two days now, still to no avail.  If this were in the US, or even India, it would have been resolved in under an hour.  I’ve got a feeling this is my first taste of doing business in Africa.

Preparing for Liberia

As the start of my internship draws near, I’ve been reading more and more about Liberia. I’m pretty sure that it will impact me more than any other place I’ve ever been, and probably any other place I’ll ever go. A few Harvard professors from the Kennedy School visited last winter, and even they said they’d never seen anything like it. These are people who have spent a career studying development.

Liberia is, literally, one of the poorest countries on the planet - next to Malawi, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Burundi (according to Wolfram Alpha). It’s GDP jumped from $150 per capita in 2007 to $300 per capita in 2008 to almost $500 today. 85% of the population is unemployed. There are no markets, our professors reported; the only thing people buy is matches, salt, and kerosene. They quite literally live off the land.

There are the difficult to fathom infrastructure facts. No electricity. Next to no running water. Only 500 miles of paved road in the country. But it’s not just the lack of economic development that makes Liberia different from anywhere else I’ve ever known. This is a country with some serious scars.

I remember being in Cambodia several years ago and thinking to myself “everyone I see over 30 years old most likely has a horrible story to tell.” In Liberia, it will be every adult, every teenager. During the fifteen-year civil war, an estimated three out of every four women were raped. One of every three Liberians forced to flee their homes. One of every 17, killed. Perhaps saddest of all, tens of thousands of former child soldiers, some having been as young as seven or eight, who were given guns and drugged up, who raped and pillaged their way across the country, wielding guns as tall as they were.

It is upon this economic and psychological destruction that Liberia rebuilds. As much as I’d like to believe I’ll have some small positive impact on Liberia this summer, I have no doubt it will leave a much more profound mark on me.

Global Philanthropy Forum

I went down to Washington DC yesterday for the third and final day of the Global Philanthropy Forum. It's an annual gathering of philanthropists to share ideas and foster coordination. Minister Davis was on a panel on policy, philanthropy, and investment in post-conflict countries. So this was a very fortuitous opportunity to meet him as well as the foundations in Liberia.

The day started with a breakfast on Liberia led by Humanity United, one of the primary foundations in the country. They discussed Liberia's opportunity, long list or pressing needs, the role that foundations have been playing to date, and the novel model of coordination that foundations are employing. In attendance were the heads of Daphne Foundation, NoVo Foundation, TrustAfrica, and Humanity United - four of the five foundation in Coming Together for Liberia's Future, a group who pledged $15M to help Liberia's reconstruction and development efforts at the Clinton Global Initiative last fall. The fifth, the McCall McBain Foundation, ironically is led by Max's (my boyfriend) former boss. Small world! Also in attendance were representatives from the Center for Global Development, BRAC, Google.org, the Hilton Foundation, and other smaller family foundations.

Later in the day was Minister Davis's panel, which was very informative. The panel had representatives from government (Minister Davis), philanthropy, NGOs, and multilateral institutions (the IFC). Frankly what impressed me most were the calls for humility from international organizations -- recognizing that they really needed to get on the ground to understand what was happening and provide proper support.

Tarek, my friend from Humanity United, has taken me under his wing and really went out of his way to introduce me to everyone I needed to know. They were all incredibly receptive to me, excited about me supporting the Philanthropy Secretariat this summer, and particularly excited to have me working on this technology strategy. It was an amazing day of networking, a refreshing change from the monotony of the classroom and the problem sets, and most of all, generated even more excitement in me for the coming summer.

But in the meantime, I've got a few finals to take.

But what exactly will you be doing?

I received a draft Terms of Reference for my internship the other day. In addition to broadly supporting the Philanthropy Secretariat's Program Manager, I'll likely be tasked with a specific project that I'm incredibly excited about: defining Liberia's leapfrogging technology strategy and determining how to partner with foundations and private companies to make it a reality.

This idea was one of several "visionary" initiatives defined at a meeting between Liberia and the foundations they are working with last September. At this point, it is very nebulous with a few ideas thrown on the table but no comprehensive thought in terms of what the opportunities are, what will have the biggest impact, and what's feasible.

Needless to say, it's a big task. And to be frank, it's hard not to initially react with "Really guys? This is a country without electricity and you're talking about technology leapfrogging?" But I'm definitely the right person for the task given the Google background and connections, and it's an incredible opportunity to put more thought into what technology and development means and whether this is something I want to turn into my area of focus down the line. And I can see it become a killer second year policy analysis paper next year.

So there you have it. I'll be spending my summer in the middle of Liberia's foundation coordination, with a focus on technology opportunities. I couldn't have imagined a more perfect internship if I tried.

The Philanthropy Secretariat

As my first posting outlines, my primary goal for this summer has been to gain a perspective I felt I would be severely lacking as a development practitioner without: really understanding what it's like to get things done in an African government.

At first I thought I'd intern with the Finance Minister, in order to understand, you know, how Finance Ministries work. I am primarily studying economics after all. Though I did receive an offer to work with the Ministry of Finance, by then I had realized there was another opportunity more closely aligned with my development interests.

Minister Natty Davis is part of the President's Office and works on initiatives that are strategic in nature, require cross ministry coordination, or do not fit neatly into any single ministry's day to day activities. I know, I know, it's true. Completely analogous to the Strategy and Business Operations team I was in at Google.

To date his primarly role was leading the Liberia Reconstruction and Development Committee (LRDC), which is moving into the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs. As such, there was some significant ambiguity in my internship when I first accepted. I'd heard however, that though traditional aid coordination was shifting with the LRDC, working with Liberia's growing private foundation partners would stay with Minister Davis.

Upon accepting my offer, I made it clear that I was very interested in working in this space if there was need. I am sure that foundations make many mistakes in their engagement with developing countries, and I didn't want to be perpetuating them based on my ignorance. Working from the government side on foundation coordination would allow me to better understand best practices and develop my own perspective on how foundations should best engage on development issues.

I received the other day Liberia's plan for a newly formed Philanthropy Secretariat. Apparently, this is the first office of it's kind, designed to coordinate foundations and engage directly with a government. It's actually funded by four of the five foundations that are very active in Liberia right now. It's a two person team (one manager and one assistant) responsible for coordination with foundations, including:

• Facilitating information sharing between foundations
  
• Determining which Liberian government priorities should be supported by foundations
• Expanding existing foundation relationships
  
• Establishing new foundation relationships
• Helping connect foundations to NGOs
• Facilitating foundation trips to Liberia
• Monitoring existing activities suported by foundations and carried out by NGOs.

This is essentially one person's job for the next year (the assistant will play a very administrative role). Needless to say, I think he could use my help.

Interlude: Linking the internship to my post-graduate career direction

It's not entirely clear to me, by the way, what I ultimately want to do with this degree. There are things that are obvious: technology and development, stupid, you worked at Google for four years and consulted tech companies for two. There are things that are intuitive: industrial policy and private sector development, naturally, after all I've met with economic development agencies around the world on behalf of Google.

But there is so much more I came in knowing so little about: public service delivery, macroeconomic policy, international trade, sustainable development, microfinance, the list goes on... Which is to say, I've spend the majority of my first year open to whatever bubbles up, thinking I'd hone in come second year when we actually get to choose our classes.

What's bubbled up? Philanthropy. Private foundation work attracts me for a number of reasons. 1) it's high level and strategic -- remember me the girl who's done strategy for six years? 2) it's a mechanism to help developing countries outside of the politics and bureaucracy of bilateral and multilateral institutions and 3) there are a lot of really smart really wealthy people who want to do good in this world.

Bridging technology and development of course still remains high on my radar. Let's face it, the Google background gives me enormous credibility and opens doors in this arena.

So in this context I chose the particular internship I did in Liberia this summer.

Why Liberia?

This is the first question people always ask me. Coming into the MPAID program last fall, I knew I wanted to do my internship in Africa, and I knew I wanted to work within a government. The Liberia part I narrowed down once I got here.

Though I have traveled to over forty countries and worked extensively in Asia and Latin America, I have never been to Sub Saharan Africa: the focal point of global poverty. I didn't feel I'd be worth my salt as a development practitioner without spending some time on the ground of the poorest continent on earth. That was abundantly obvious.

Secondly, my experience to date had been limited to the private sector: consulting at Accenture and then strategy at Google. I knew that getting things done in a government environment meant something very different, even more so in the severely capacity constrained realities of most developing countries. I don't believe this is something I can understand without experiencing it firsthand, so this part was a real no brainer for me as well.

But why Liberia? Because it's one of the most exciting places to work in development today.

Liberia, with its annual per capita GDP of only $500 (according to the CIA World Factbook, other estimates are as low as $300), is one of the poorest places on earth. Fourteen years of civil war caused devastating destruction to infrastructure, industry, and human capital. GDP per capita fell an astonishing 90% in one of the largest economic collapses in history.

The civil war ended in 2003. In 2005, Liberia elected the African continent's first female head of state: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard graduate and seasoned Liberian politician. This presented a unique opportunity to build a country from scratch under the inspiring leadership of the President. The support has since poured in from the international development community.

And so it is an exciting time to be in Liberia. What gets me particularly excited is the opportunity to observe the myriad international players in Liberia today: from the World Bank to bilateral donors like Sweden, China, and France to a growing number of private foundations to the NGOs to private companies. It's a fascinating case study of best practices in aid and collaboration with the government.

I will walk away with an valuable perspective not just on Africa and working in a government constrained by financial and human capital; but also the international community's engagement in one of development's most exciting countries today.