Work Work Work!

Apologies for the radio silence lately, I’ve been working, a LOT. Three nights last week I came home, went to the hotel, and worked until 10 or 11pm. Time’s flying and there’s a lot of work to do, but it’s coming along quite well.

The website I’m getting up and running hit a rather welcomed snag: the non-profit who offered to build it for us for free is really strained and they couldn’t promise us they’d get it done by September when we need it. I was pretty concerned about the final product considering they were doing it for free and were very busy, so I was relieved to pursue paid options for development. So I’ve been scrambling for two weeks to find someone, figure out the criteria for making a decision, and find a way to get about $10k of work done for $3500. Fortunately we finally moved forward with someone yesterday that I’m really excited about.

I’ve also reached my preliminary conclusions on the leapfrogging technology question and I’m pretty pleased with how that work has come along. I really drew on my knowledge of the technology space from Google, but applied the concepts I learned at Harvard to put the pieces together. Based on the maturity of the market, the current infrastructure, and the activities of others in the space, I concluded that there is a real and pressing need not for aid to build infrastructure, but for policy to coordinate investments and determine what roles the private sector, government, and outside support (i.e. foundations we work with) should play. Once a policy is in place, our foundation partners could support the areas designated for public funding. But without an overall plan, anything we could pursue would almost certainly be inefficient at best and harmful to the market in the long run at worst.

This policy is well out of the scope of the project I’ve been assigned, but it could potentially become my thesis next year. That would require both me deciding it’s what I want to do my thesis on and support in the government for not just the policy but also for me to work on it. I’m navigating some pretty political waters with this one, so the road might end here.

I’m very grateful to have worked on this technology piece. The other projects I’m working at are important and often interesting, but I could have done them well years ago. It doesn’t take years of tech experience and $40k in Harvard’s pocket to get a website up and running, but I do feel uniquely qualified to assess the technology question and I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to apply myself to it.

Molasses

Back in the day a colleague of mine at Google told me he felt like a racehorse tied to a plow.  He meant that the job he'd been tasked to do didn't need someone with his still set or experience.  It's actually quite a common sentiment around Google.  Too much demand to work there, so they hired overqualified people for many roles.

I didn't post much last week because I was hesitant on what to say on my blog.  I'm hesitant to call myself a racehorse, but to continue with the analogy, I feel like a racehorse running through molasses.  But again I'm not here to win any races, I'm here to understand what it feels like to operate in the molasses.

And so the productivity hit a wall, big time.  Meeting requests require formal written letters (which I think is less an issue of the Liberian government and more likely standard in governments in general.  I'm just used to Google and doing everything via email and rather informally).  Naturally getting things done requires a great sensitivity to politics, which is particularly difficult to manage when there isn't often transparency into the political environment you're navigating in.  If someone doesn't want to you to be doing what you're doing, they might just ignore you completely to stall your work.  And those who offer to help governments pro-bono don't exactly have much pressure to make deadlines for themselves (let alone meet them).

But I am getting a few things done, at least for the time being.  Molasses it might be, but quicksand it is not.

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.

Serendipity in Minister Saytumah's Office

The Minister I am working for this summer, Hon Natty Davis, is very supportive of us learning about Liberia broadly, not just the work we will do for him during our internship. In last week’s staff meeting he expressed his willingness to arrange meetings for Jacob and me (Jacob is a classmate from Harvard who’s also interning here) with various ministers to learn more about what they are working on.

An hour after arriving yesterday morning, Minister Davis’s assistant Ussman (I can’t resist the urge to call him “Oos”) came into our office.

“In accordance with Minister Davis’ request for your meetings with other ministries, you will meet with the Minister of State for Finance, Economic, and Legal Affairs.”

“Great,” we responded. “When?”

“Now.”

Glancing at each other and laughing inside, Jacob and I walked down the hall to meeting with Honorable Morris Saytumah. Sitting down at the conference table in his office, we talked briefly about our backgrounds and our projects for the summer. Then we started discussing what the minister is working on. Inevitably the conversation drifted towards things that were relevant for our projects.

Literally sitting in front of me on the table was a copy of Liberia’s Telecommunications Act of 2007, which established the legal and regulatory framework for the telecom sector. Needless to say this is exactly the document I need to read. Since it was thick and I knew I had no hopes of printing a copy myself, I asked Minister Saytumah if I could borrow his copy.

“On one condition,” he said. “You have to come back to me after you read it with your comments.”

“I’ll probably have more questions than comments.” I said.

“Deal,” Minister Saytumah replied.

So, not only do I have a paper copy (I am a printer so I'm really excited about this!) of the regulation I need to understand, but I have a meeting with the President’s adviser on Legal Affairs to discuss my questions. If that’s not a lucky way to start the week, I don’t know what is.

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 well 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, including no data center for hosting information. So when I’m thinking about where to focus investments, it’s at this core. You can’t build a wireless Internet platform that works well 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 4kbps (or something like that).

So my 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.