In a 2007 op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times titled “What Bono Doesn’t Say About Africa,” William Easterly chided rock stars and their corporate sponsors for perpetuating an image of Africans as downtrodden victims. “Africans are and will be escaping poverty the same way everybody else did,” he wrote, “through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home, not through PR extravaganzas of ill-informed outsiders.”*
When it comes to Africa, charity bashing appears to be catching on. In 2009 the young, Harvard-educated Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo wrote a best-selling book with the eye-poking title Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Asked by the New York Times Magazine what she believes has held back Africans, she replied: “I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption—historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty—and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship.”
It sounds ridiculous to say that entrepreneurship is risky. Of course it is, even when carefully conceived. Investing time and money in any venture that doesn’t generate a paycheck within a month is risky. But as time went by, what struck me was the prolonged nature of Whit’s risk; it was like betting on a horse the day it was born, then waiting three years for the Kentucky Derby. Even so, it became clear that Whit and Jan needed to figure out a faster way to deal with agent reconciliation, or get better agents, or both.
“Seasonal income is a big issue,” said Whit one January night, back from our coastal trip, as we sprawled across the rattan sofa on his second-floor veranda. “When we started in the fall, people were harvesting their maize and they had lots of money, disposable income,” he went on. “But because they can barely meet their needs, they spend it when they have it, without a whole lot of thought to what happens next. So now it’s the dry season—no crops, no money. I had assumed people would still buy batteries in hard times, but we’re finding that many people really do live without them in the lean months.”
Whit had only been in business for a few months, but already he was seeing kinks in the plan. He had assumed customers would recognize the obvious advantage of the Burro offering and keep renting every month, exchanging their old batteries for new—establishing the sort of recurring annuity stream that gets venture capitalists salivating. But a number of factors led to renewal rates lower than the high client satisfaction reports had predicted, not least of which was the issue of income volatility.
“What if you got people to pay an annual fee when they have the money?” I asked.
“That’s a lot of money for these people, even in the good season. Maybe with microfinancing. Maybe we get into a model where agents get microfinancing so they can stock up on batteries from us.”
Whit poured a sweaty bottle of local Star lager into a pint glass and took a long swallow. “Initially we were focusing on signing up new customers,” he continued, “and I think that also hurt our renewals. We hadn’t prepared the first class of agents for the challenges of renewals. Some agents feared that collecting batteries from people slow to pay would terminate the relationship for all time, and even jeopardize their standing with friends and neighbors. Some even went so far as to continue providing fresh batteries to clients who kept promising to pay ‘tomorrow.’ We had to put a stop to that, but saving face is very important here. So Jan and I came up with revised terminology. Instead of canceled, nonrenewing clients were said to be on break, and we trained agents to remove any stigma from the collection of batteries. You know—‘It’s fine to go on break, many clients go on break, and Burro will welcome you back when you are able to pay.’
“The third problem is that a lot of customers seemed to be testing our resolve. So many charities and NGOs have provided so many services at little or no cost to these villages that expecting something for free from white people has become perfectly rational behavior. Once we made it clear that Burro was not only refusing to offer credit but was also being hard core about collecting batteries on unpaid accounts, renewals began to improve.”
Down on the street, a minivan for Fred’s Medicated Soap crawled past, its roof-mounted speakers blaring ad slogans in Twi. On the side of the truck, next to a crude painting of a topless woman with one breast cartoonishly larger than the other, was inscribed in English:
Indication: Treatment of Breast Cancer, Boils, Conjunctivitis of Eyes, Treatment for Broken Bones, Waist Pains, Rheumatism, Menstrual Pains, Severe Headaches, Stomach Aches, Rickets Fibroid, Whitlow Piles, Stroke & Babies Facing Hard in Walking.
“Jesus,” I said. “We’re doing business in a country where people buy soap to cure breast cancer.”
“Ghanaians are obsessed with cleanliness,” said Whit. “Which is amazing considering they have no running water and live on packed dirt. They take bucket showers twice a day, and you’ve no doubt noticed the beauty salons on every block. Frankly, they find white people rather slovenly.”
“Well they’re used to Brits,” I noted. “Which reminds me, what’s up with all the ironing? These people are constantly ironing clothes, and with no electricity. Have you seen those irons that hold a chunk of red-hot charcoal? Amazing. I’ve never seen such a crisply creased bunch of people. I feel like such a slob by comparison.”
“Well, you are a slob, but the ironing is a health issue,” said Whit, draining his beer. “Mango flies, also known as putsi. They lay their eggs in drying laundry, hanging on the line. When you put the clothes on they hatch and the maggots burrow under your skin, leaving nasty boils. The only cure is to squeeze them out by hand. You put Vaseline on the boil, and the little fucker sticks his nose out to breathe. Then you pop him out like a zit—but the trick is, they have barbed spines and they hold on, and if you break them off they get infected. Before you know it you’re a walking pus-bomb. Sepsis is a big issue here. It’s so hot and humid that even minor insect bites get infected; you can imagine what a rotting half maggot under your skin looks like after a week. Anyway, ironing kills the mango fly eggs.”
“Holy shit. As if these people didn’t have enough to worry about. No wonder they buy medicated soap.”
“It’s a dangerous place. Americans have no idea. By the way, did you know your son bought a bottle of Scotch yesterday?”
“What?”
“Scotch.”
“Where’d he do that?”
“At the liquor store, duh.”
“Were you with him?”
“Yeah.”
“And you let him?”
“I’m not his dad. But I figured you’d want to know.”
“I figure his mother will not want to know. Hey, Harper!” No answer from inside the apartment.
“He went down to the market,” said Whit.
“Great. What’s the drinking age here?”
“Eighteen.”
“He’s seventeen.”
Whit laughed. “This is Africa. Like they check IDs.”
I took away the Scotch.
Seasonal income was one challenge facing Whit. Another, more vexing problem for Burro was the complexity of agent reconciliation. Twice a week, Whit, Jan, Kevin, Harper, and I spent the day driving to villages around Koforidua, meeting with Burro’s dozen or so field agents to exchange dead batteries for fresh ones and collect the rent money. It was an absurdly complicated process with reams of paperwork to keep track of who had paid, who hadn’t, who was going on break and who was renewing, to say nothing of how many batteries each customer was using and the frequency of their replacement. We all knew there had to be a better way, and Jan and Whit were developing more efficient accounting systems, but Burro hadn’t gotten there yet. One idea was to give more autonomy to agents; Burro would rent batteries to them and not worry about the end users—sort of like Avon ladies. But for the pilot program, Whit felt it was important to understand how villagers were using the batteries, and how often they needed to “refresh.” So the tedious reconciliation days continued. We’d sit for hours in our camp chairs, eating peanuts and grilled plantains under the midday sun as Kevin and the agents pored over numbers, flicking biting red ants off their paperwork.
One day we sat under a tree in the village of Adawso, a pleasant junction town with a busy market, near a group of teenage boys playing a menacingly physical game of Ping-Pong at an outdoor table. It reminded me of the cutthroat Ping-Pong Whit and I used to play in the basement rec room of our split-level suburban house. One of the boys was wearing a T-shirt that said IT’S MY BROTHER’S FAULT. Whit and I went over and posed with him for a goofy picture. Agnes, an agent for the nearby village of Gbolokofi , arrived and spread out her paperwork. Her wide, soft face was framed by a knitted headband around her smartly coiffed and straightened hair. She ran down the list of her clients: Kwaku Afo, Kwei Norley John, Ogbey Samuel, Kwame Oparre, Regina Awuku … twenty-eight in all. This week she added a new client, but some of her existing clients who owed money appeared to be missing in action. “What about Neil Armstrong?” Kevin asked her.
“He went away,” replied Agnes. I think we all said “To the moon?” in unison, and Agnes laughed. (When signing on for his Burro batteries, Neil told Agnes his first name was spelled “like the moon astronaut,” which is what she wrote down.)
Another man “has a program with the radio and he has traveled,” she reported. “I can’t find him. But he’s not done yet”—meaning he has not formally canceled.
“Did anyone go on break this week?” Kevin asked.
“Dabi dabi!” No, no.
The boys at Ping-Pong reached an impasse over a play and were now arguing loudly, slamming fists on the table and threatening each other with the paddles. High in a papaya tree in the courtyard of a pale colonial government building, African pied crows—black with distinctive white breasts and shoulders—cawed aggressively as if mocking the Ping-Pong brawl below. Agnes finished her paperwork. She unknotted the waist wrap of her skirt and carefully pulled out her money, paying Kevin one cedi and fifty pesewa—about $1.20.
It would all make more sense if the agents were moving more product, but after four months it appeared that very few were able (or willing) to rent more than a hundred or so batteries per month. Agents made a fifteen-pesewa commission on each battery rental, and in theory it could be a relatively lucrative full-time job for an aggressive salesperson. But virtually all of the agents worked at other jobs. Some were schoolteachers; others were farmers, bar owners, tailors, even local politicians. Moreover, there did not seem to be a lot of aspiration to wealth in rural Ghana; people tended to work until they earned what they needed, then stop. They were not trying to “get ahead,” a Western notion of individualism that seems alien to the Ghanaian mind-set, at least outside of the capital. Africans are adept at making from scratch things that Westerners simply buy—homemade rat traps from inch-and-a-half-thick chunks of mahogany, bamboo flashlights, sandals from old tires that are sewn together at lightning speed by cottage tailors on almost every city block, to say nothing of the huts in which they live and the charcoal fires by which they cook. But for all their sense of invention, they seem to have no thought of reinventing themselves. This medieval acceptance of the status quo is the antithesis of the modern West. We need experts to build our homes, fix our cars, and grow our food, but we try on careers, religions, and identities as if they were new clothes. The Ghanaian sense of contentment is admirable, but also maddening in a modern business context.
Harper and I went home at the end of January. Whit and I stayed in touch over the phone, by email, and on Twitter; Jan’s blog posts also kept me informed.
Movement came soon. Whit called to say that on February 23 he added seven new agents in one day. Best of all, their work would be coordinated by two new “team leaders”—which meant more sales and less reconciliation for Burro. The Avon model seemed to be panning out. “These guys are great,” said Whit, referring to the team leaders. “One is a man named Jonas who won Farmer of the Year for his district. The other, George, is a shopkeeper in a pretty big junction town.”
“How did you find them?”
“Both were recommended by a district assemblyman. We met the assemblyman at a meeting we had in the village of Korkorom; he was in the audience. He signed up for batteries and told us he could help us find agents in the other villages. The guy was amazing—he took a workday off and introduced us to chiefs and elders.”
“What’s in it for him?”
“He gets perceived as bringing services to the villages he represents. It’s a way for him to get visibility. So it’s politicking, plain and simple. The question is, can it be modeled? Gideon is also an assemblyman, but he’s taking a different approach; he wants to be an agent himself. Either way, we’re now seeing evidence that we can build some sort of dynamic relationship with civic-minded local assemblymen.”
“What’s the district assembly?”
“We don’t know exactly yet. It seems to be vaguely Napoleonic—an outreach of the executive branch, not legislative. Each region has fifteen to twenty districts, and each district has an assembly. Each assembly has fifteen or twenty-five smaller assembly areas, and an assemblyman represents that area, which is like eight to fifteen major villages or towns. They get paid a small stipend, basically expenses for when they go to meetings. We don’t have an electoral map, at least not one that’s up to date, but we’re trying to get one.”
“How long do they serve?”
“They stand for election every four years, and they are apparently nonpartisan. The district is managed by the district chief executive or DCE, who is appointed by the president. So individual assemblymen are nonpartisan and elected, but the DCE is appointed, although he must be approved by majority vote of the elected assembly. Meanwhile, each DCE reports to the regional minister—again, very Napoleonic.”
“If it’s not legislative, what can they do? Can they raise taxes?”
“Not really. Impose fees, perhaps, but apart from that one-shot chance to vote up or down the president’s choice of DCE, they seem to have virtually no substantive power. It seems mainly to be a bottom-up steam valve to vent local disputes and resolve grievances. For example, each village has a unit committee, which meets with the assemblyman. I went to one of these meetings with Hayford Tetteh, who translated.”
“I thought English was the language of government.”
“Not at this level. It’s in Twi. Anyway, the assemblyman was reading from this very official-looking document that obviously came from higher up the chain. These were his top-down notes for points he was supposed to be making. In this case there was a dispute between two youth sports leagues, two groups in two different villages including this one. Every time these kids got together they ended up in a brawl, so the DCE decided that sporting events were ‘rescinded’ between the two villages until the dispute was resolved. This is what the assemblyman was reading. One of the opinion leaders got up to speak. ‘The elders of both villages have met, and the issue has been resolved,’ he said. ‘There will be no more trouble.’ The assemblyman said, ‘Good, but I need the elders to draft a letter to show the DCE so that he will lift the ban.’ Case closed.”
“Man, I’d be careful getting involved in local politics.”
“We are definitely staying out of the politics, but this looks like a good way into the villages. And it gives us a fallback if an agent screws up; we can call the assemblyman. Anyway, business is growing by about a hundred and fifty batteries a day. There are plenty of scary details still, including the fact that we’ve got six thousand new batteries held up in customs in Durban, South Africa, which is bullshit because the batteries aren’t even landing in Durban; they’re en route from fucking China.”
On February 23, I emailed Whit: “What are the chances that this all goes belly-up?”
The next day, he called: “Best case? Our new model works. We solicit the support and cooperation of locally elected assemblymen. They go around with us in a single day to every one of their major off-grid villages and introduce us to the most trustworthy, hardworking agent candidates, with blessings and endorsements from elders, opinion leaders, and chiefs. We work out the kinks in our ‘group leader’ model so that we can aggregate all of these folks into one or two ‘super agents’ to reduce our reconciliation burden. This enables us to add the former equivalent of four to six agents a week to the model, with a management burden little more than one of our former agents. Each of these has the potential to grow within one month to a five-hundred-to thousand-battery business. This puts us on track to getting to full branch capacity in something like nine months. We build out a serious local corporate capability that allows us to staff, train, and manage branches autonomously. Koforidua turns profitable by August or September or October. We launch a second branch in July or August or September. We are able to raise prices while sustaining subscriptions. We add wildly well-received items for sale including improved lighting devices, better, cheaper phone chargers, low-power battery-operated televisions, etcetera. We evaluate self-funding versus seeking outside capital. We opt for ever more rapid growth and so create a compelling financing story and receive five million dollars in VC money. We accelerate local branch rollouts and by March 2010 have begun to establish two branches per month in Ghana with five already well established. We kick off operations in a neighboring francophone country, probably Burkina or Togo. I’m invited to speak at Davos.
“But there is potential downside here. We may be unable to resolve operational challenges related to efficient branch operation.”
“Speak English.”
“Management issues. It could be hard to recruit enough motivated agents to drive the business forward autonomously. There are technical concerns. Our batteries may all of a sudden collapse in month nine versus month thirty-six. Politics: sustained civil strife may break out across the country. I may chicken out before plowing in the three hundred to four hundred K to make the best-case happen. Lots of unknowns. It’s risky. It’s Africa. The reality will probably fall somewhere between best and worst case—much closer to best case because I am paying attention to things.”
On March 11, Jan left for Seattle. She had not been home in six months, and she was more than ready for a break. Whit called after taking her to the airport: “I am utterly terrified of leaving this business alone when I go home in May.”
“When’s Jan coming back?”
“Mid-June. I’m putting all my energy into recruiting some more bench depth here before I leave. There’s a great candidate I met at a job fair in Accra, a young woman who just graduated from Ashesi University College, a private college run by this Ghanaian former Microsoft manager named Patrick Awuah. She totally gets it and seems to want to work on a start-up, but it’s hard to know. Maybe she’s just looking for an air-conditioned office job in Accra like everybody else and we’re like her third or fourth choice. We’ll see.
“I’m also trying to design a computerized field management system that we can use with cheap netbooks. That should let us build a client-level database, and then we can create an output for agents—you know, ‘Kwame is overdue, he’s your number-one effort, dude. He doesn’t own a cell phone? Have you asked him lately? Maybe you should ask him right now.’
“Ultimately this will give us a direct-marketing database with half a million cell phone numbers. But in the near-term it’s all about helping agents do their job. They can’t track it all on paper.”
On April 16, Whit called with good news: “I hired Rose Dodd, the Ashesi grad.” She drove a hard bargain, demanding six hundred cedis a month—about four hundred dollars—a handsome salary for an entry-level worker in Ghana.
“My new accounting guy started last week,” Whit added, “and Kevin passed his written exam today and takes the driving test tomorrow. He’s still a little scary behind the wheel; he’s not a natural driver, and he’s pretty rough on the clutch. But man, I think I pulled it off; this place is actually going to be running itself when I’m gone.”
Other personnel issues appeared less sanguine. “Gideon is turning into a major flake,” Whit said. “It’s partly our fault; we let him get overextended. It doesn’t work for one guy to cover fifteen square kilometers. He had a bunch of personal issues. He crashed on his bicycle and injured himself. He had malaria or something for a while, and then things got really busy in the district assembly—like they had to do actual work. So he got completely distracted by all that. He just basically went missing on us. He lost his phone, he had to travel to Tema to visit his family, on and on. His business is a fraction of the size it was. I lent him a cell phone, but he never turned it on, so I still couldn’t reach him. Finally I said, ‘Dude, bring back my phone.’ He’s definitely not the superstar we thought at first. But he is very good at selling when he’s in front of somebody.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I like that guy.”
“We’ll see; maybe he can unwind it all. Our new superstar is Jonas, the Farmer of the Year. Get this: His wife is almost full-term and had a complicated labor last night. They lost the baby. So the guy’s up all night with his wife near death, loses his full-term baby, and he’s still fucking showing up at ten A.M. today to swap batteries with Burro. Can you imagine in America? He’d be out of pocket for a month.”
“And rightly so. That’s awful.”
“And that’s not all. Remember Agnes from Adawso?”
“Of course, the biting red ants and the Ping-Pong table.”
“Yeah, well, she gave her business to Hayford. It just wasn’t working for any of us, and we sort of agreed she would be better off doing something else. It was sad because she was our first agent. Anyway, her husband died last night.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. So we had two weird deaths in the Burro family last night. Oh, and here’s another charming development. A little while ago they put a new billboard up that you can see from our balcony: BREAK THE CYCLE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, REPORT PERPETRATORS TO POLICE. So a woman in the courtyard got beat up by her husband pretty bad two days ago. I mentioned the new sign and she just laughed. ‘The police won’t do anything,’ she said. I checked with Charlie and he agreed. ‘Some white people came in and gave the locals some money for a program,’ he said. ‘The sign makes them feel like they’ve done something useful.’”
“Your tax dollars at work,” I said, assuming the sign was paid for by some Western aid program.
“Actually just yours,” said Whit. “To pay taxes you need to make money, which I’m not doing yet. Which reminds me—the batteries got loaded on a ship in Durban today; they sail Friday or Saturday. Not sure how long it takes, but pretty soon we’ll have six thousand more batteries. Did I mention inflation here is running at twenty-two percent right now? We just raised prices on the rentals yesterday, and so far we’re not hearing any massive revolts.”
“Speaking of revolts, what’s going on in the government? Is Rawlings gonna stage another coup?”
“Charlie feels it’s a bunch of bluster and hot air. Some say Rawlings has no substantive support or effective power within the military at this point. And he is aware enough of his legacy that he won’t do anything to endanger that. I mean, he did run for election and relinquish power voluntarily. There’s a good chance history will treat him favorably as the George Washington of Ghana, albeit a George Washington tainted by the murder of four Supreme Court justices. When are you coming back?”
“June 13. I got on the same flight as Jan. When are you headed home?”
“May 15. Can’t wait to get a haircut.”
“You haven’t cut your hair since January?”
“There is no one in Koforidua who has ever cut a white person’s hair. Do I want to be the first?”
“Man, you can’t let your hair get long over there; you’ll get lice. Why don’t you just shave your head?”
“Shelly will leave me.”
“It will grow back.”
“She’s not that patient.”
“Hey, leave a light on for us, in honor of Dad.”
“I need your baggage allowance. I’ve got five hundred cell-phone chargers to bring over.”
I was becoming the Burro mule.
Today is National Noise Awareness day. Someone forgot to tell the roosters. And the dick with the 5:30 AM radio blaring.
—Whit on Twitter, 5:54 A.M., April 16
On May 12 I called Whit. “Didn’t sleep too well last night,” he said. “You haven’t met this guy Dave, a former two-term Peace Corps worker who’s been living here four years, about two miles down the road. He runs the bike shop around the corner. A couple of nights ago he was the victim of a home invasion and an armed robbery. They beat him twenty times with a board; his eyeball socket is all but broken. He woke up to the sound of these guys busting his front door down, and next thing he knew he was getting hit over the head with a board. They were screaming in pidgin English, ‘Where be the laptop? Where be the money? Where be the phone?’ He thinks they were Nigerian from their accents. He’s all bandaged and bruised. Told me in four years he’s never had any trouble here. The worst of it was that the neighbors didn’t do anything to help.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “And I was sleeping behind nothing but a screen door off that balcony.”
“Yeah, I know. I mean, I feel a little better that we’re on the second floor, and I don’t think they would come in through the front balcony. The street merchants are out there most of the night, and the bank across the street has night guards. If they came in here it would be through the back, up the stairs. But we definitely need to be more careful. I want to get a bar for the door. It’s going to be an exciting summer.”