There is a place in the world for the corkscrew that breaks after one use, the faucet that leaks out of the box, the gas oven that blows out when you shut the door, the refrigerator that won’t stay closed, the garlic press that bends into a pretzel, and the tongs that lacerate your hand like scissors. That place is the African kitchen. I illustrate my point with these common household appliances because of my intimate familiarity with them, but you could as easily find examples in office supplies or mechanic’s tools or consumer electronics. Any product that is too shoddy or unsafe for the West ends up getting sold in Africa, alongside the cast-off Goodwill clothing and the refurbished four-track cassette decks.
The main engine today is China, scouring Africa for natural resources with which to power its manufacturing colossus, and repatriating the continent’s raw materials in the form of shiny junk for which there is no warranty, no return, and no exchange. Against this tsunami of stamped tin and thin plastic paddled my brother, trying to bring well-made but affordable products to rural Ghanaians. “They deserve better,” he would say, and he meant it—but by the summer of 2010 it had become clear that his business was unlikely to thrive on batteries alone.
Indeed, with battery quality issues seemingly under control, a nagging question remained: why were so many people in Burro’s villages still using Tiger Heads? It seemed that even the best Burro resellers had a hard time keeping customers coming back for more exchanges. Since the first battery use was essentially free—you could return the dead battery and get your deposit back, having paid nothing—ongoing exchanges were crucial to the business; otherwise it was just a free-trial giveaway. But instead of exchanging old for new every week or so, many customers were giving up, returning their dead batteries, and collecting their deposit.
Presumably those customers were going back to buying Tiger Heads, as the only other option was living in darkness after six o’clock every night. Whit knew his batteries were better than Tiger Heads and cost less money; the Burro team was working to ensure that every battery sent out had been properly charged and tested for strength. What was not to like? It took months of work on the ground for Whit to fully understand that the problem lay in the nature of the local battery-powered devices, and in the peculiarly subjective nature of human vision.
Whit knew from all his testing that Burro’s NiMH batteries provided bright light for about thirty more hours than the cheap carbon-zinc Tiger Heads. The problem was that the Tiger Heads continued to provide at least some light for several more days, whereas the Burro battery quickly died at the end of its useful life. In the modern world of smart, high-tech devices and ready power supplies, the Burro power curve would be preferable; you’d get a lot of steady power, followed by a steep drop-off that signaled it was time to recharge. But rural Ghana was not the modern world. Whit’s customers didn’t have smart devices, much less electricity to recharge their batteries. Instead, virtually all of Burro’s clients used “dumb” flashlights sold (also by Tiger Head) for two or three cedis—lights that by their very simplicity were ideally suited for the long, slow voltage trickle of Tiger Head batteries. “They’re killing us with these cheap LED flashlights,” said Whit. “They have no serious circuitry, so instead of keeping power constant as the battery voltage falls, they actually draw less current—a lot less. It would be like if you were climbing a mountain and the more tired you got, the more weights people along the trail would remove from your pack. You could keep going forever. So as Tiger Heads die, their voltage just tracks lower and lower in a straight line. And those cheap flashlights respond to the lower voltage by demanding less and less power.”
“So what’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Well, the light gets dimmer and dimmer. Think of brightness as being the weights in that backpack. The more you take out the easier it is to climb, but the less light you have. Laws of physics apply here.”
Indeed, Whit’s tests demonstrated that the light provided by a dying Tiger Head was barely visible, perhaps on the level of a dim night-light. But here was the problem: the human eye does not readily perceive differences in light intensity; it simply adjusts and gets on with things. Only when compared head-to-head with a more powerful light do we say, “Aha! Big difference!” As far as the average Ghanaian villager who owns only one flashlight was concerned, that faint glow was still light. Explaining to her, “Well yes, but, you see, it’s not really very much light, and Burro gives you much better light for a lot longer, at least at first,” presented a qualitative marketing challenge, to say the least.
In short, Whit was trying to sell “brighter” to people who really wanted “long-lasting.” And while he couldn’t change the physics of the NiMH battery curve, he felt there had to be some way to work around their disadvantage in cheap devices. After all, the batteries were inherently better.
Then one night in the battery room, it hit him.
“Hey Max, check this out,” he said. “I’m thinking you could run one of these flashlights on just one Burro battery.” He had fashioned a sort of faux battery with a roofing nail and a ball of tinfoil, which he was jamming into a flashlight canister.
“One battery in a two-battery flashlight?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be incredibly dim?”
“Well yeah, it would be running at 1.2 volts instead of 2.4. But it would still be brighter than people are used to on their rundown Tiger Heads. In fact, I’m thinking the power required to operate at that lower voltage would be so low that …” He paused.
“That what?”
“I’m almost afraid to say this. But I’m thinking the flashlight might actually run longer on one battery than on two.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Maybe so, but I think I’m right. It would be incredibly cheap, much cheaper than two Tiger Heads. It would make Burro the cheapest way to get fresh light today, and as we’ve seen, with most of our customers it’s all about current expenditure.”
We stared at each other and smiled. It was like the moment in The Producers when accountant Leo Bloom realizes they can make more money creating a Broadway flop than a hit. But while Bialystock and Bloom never imagined their flop would become a hit, Whit realized from the beginning that his battery saver would be a crowd pleaser.
“This is huge,” said Whit. “Shit, though. It means bringing in a device that diminishes the need for my product; that’s a little scary, but we’re losing these people anyway.”
“And couldn’t people just use the eliminator with a Tiger Head?” I asked. “Then you’re back in the same hole.”
“Well, you could design it with an insert on the top that wouldn’t work with Tiger Heads,” he said, “although people could probably game it with a piece of tinfoil. But a single Tiger Head in one of these flashlights would get really dim really fast, and it’d be especially prone to leaking. I’m pretty confident that most users would pick Burro in a head-to-head running this way.”
Whit shoved a single battery into the flashlight with the makeshift tinfoil “battery eliminator” as he quickly dubbed it (later christened the battery saver) and turned it on. “I need to test this.”
The other way around the cheap flashlight issue was to sell better lights and other smart devices optimized for Burro’s NiMH batteries. One example was the jerry-rigged battery-powered phone charger that Whit was already selling for three cedis, but he wanted a Burro-branded phone charger, ideally with a built-in flashlight, that wouldn’t force customers to cut and splice wires from their wall charger.
Through Three-Sixty, his China-based sourcing partner from his Cranium days, Whit had located a low-cost consumer electronics manufacturer in Guangzhou that was ready to work with him. During a visit to their plant in the summer of 2009, Whit was shown a standard catalog of flashlights, most of which were too expensive or included useless frills like flashing disco lights. He told them he wanted a simple but elegant four-battery phone charger that incorporated an LED light, including a red light for preserving night vision while hunting. He was also interested in selling a Burro-branded headlamp, but it would have to cost a lot less than the forty-dollar versions Americans buy from L.L. Bean, and even less than the twenty-dollar versions sold at Walmart. Whit laid down a few thousand dollars to commission hand samples—prototypes that must be approved before actual production begins—for the combination phone charger and flashlight and the headlamp. It went downhill from there.
Whit had specified that the phone charger include circuitry to shut itself off when the power from the batteries dropped below 3.6 volts. That was crucial to prevent damaging Burro’s expensive NiMH batteries, which lose capacity if they are run down too low. Bernice, the manufacturer’s English-speaking sales rep, confirmed by email that the company could make the unit as described for a wholesale price of $1.32 “FOB China,” which means free-on-board China—the cost before shipping and customs. After factoring in those additional expenses, each unit would probably cost Whit about two dollars, or three Ghana cedis. He figured he could sell it for five cedis, which represented a modest but acceptable gross profit margin. (Net profit would of course be much less after factoring in the cost of his operations.)
Everything was falling into place. But when the hand samples for the charger and the headlamp arrived in Ghana in October 2009, it was clear that a lot had been lost in translation. Whit detailed the problems in a follow-up email to Bernice:
PHONE CHARGER:
The battery compartment requires a screwdriver to open. This is not acceptable. Our clients do not have access to screwdrivers. The compartment must snap closed securely and cannot require a screw for closure.
The battery contacts do not work well yet. I had to use a piece of tinfoil to get the negative contacts on the lid to contact the battery terminals. Please be certain you are testing with high-capacity, NiMH AA cells that are custom labeled as these tend to have slightly different dimensions, smaller electrode contacts, and larger diameters. Such batteries fit a bit too snugly into the unit currently and do not make electrical contact. This is a major concern.
The lights should stay on when the button is pressed and turn off when the button is pressed a second time. Our clients will be using the lights for extended periods. It is not acceptable to have to hold down the button to keep the light illuminated.
The green is not our Burro green. Please confirm that you will able to hit PMS 802 C 2X in the final plastic.
HEADLAMP:
The switch on our sample unit is defective. It is nearly impossible to turn the unit off once it is on. It takes many attempts before the mechanism finally clicks in correctly and turns off the unit. This is very troubling since I don’t know how we could count on the quality of production units if the one sample is so flawed.
The clicking angle adjustment seems quite prone to breaking. I’m concerned that the plastic part that provides the ratchet might easily snap after repeated use. I’d like to know more about your testing on this and any return issues or complaints you might have had. At a minimum, we would need to have spare parts of the piece with the ratchet so that we could field service any that might break in the service of Burro clients.
Whit concluded by pointing out that the phone charger did not cut off below 3.6 volts, as specified, and did not seem to work with many phones, including his own.
“We can’t reach this,” Bernice responded in an email, referring to the 3.6-volt cutoff requirement. “It needs professional IC* which is used for rechargeable Lithium battery. The extra charge is USD 1.5-2/PCS.”
That would more than double the cost of the unit, evaporating Whit’s profit.
She went on, “We have sold this item to Europe and USA 5 years ago. Why Africa has more strict standard?”
As for the headlamp, she wrote: “The price deserves the present quality. We can’t match low price products with higher quality products…. I think it’s suitable for African market also.”
In other words, Bernice was proposing to send my brother the same old junk that Africa always gets. Whit was insulted, and furious that she had been wasting his time. He wrote back:
Wow! I’ll be honest with you. Your responses to my email providing feedback on the samples were extraordinarily disturbing. Note that on 24 August I specified precisely the functional requirements to control maximum output voltage, to cut off current flow at 3.6 volts, and to ensure current could not flow back into the batteries. Based on this exchange, I agreed to proceed with the design and arranged to wire transfer the design, tooling, and sample fees early in the following week. Now, weeks into the process and thousands of dollars later, I learn that to achieve what was specified from the beginning and agreed upon will require additional circuitry that would more than double the unit price I had been quoted. Frankly, your comments about Africa add insult to this injury. My business is all about introducing more appropriate products into this market, Bernice. While I welcome your product insights, please do not presume to dismiss critical market requirements we have garnered on the ground here while building a new kind of brand and business. Your suggestion that cheap is the right answer for our market is, frankly, insulting—especially after having agreed to deliver the functionality we need at a price we had agreed upon.
Perhaps most disturbing to me was your comment about the headlamp, “The price deserves the present quality. We can’t match low price products with higher quality products.” Bernice, perhaps I wasn’t clear. The headlamp does not work. The switch is broken.
More generally, let me reply specifically to your comment and question about the charger, “We have sold this item to Europe and USA 5 years ago. Why Africa has more strict standard?” Call me crazy, Bernice, but if I buy a phone charger, I expect it to charge my phone. Your sample does not charge my phone, it fails to charge other phones we tested on the first day, and its present circuit limitations will hasten the destruction of our valuable battery inventory. Why should Africans care more than Americans or Europeans that something they buy actually does what they bought it for? That answer is simple, Bernice. Because they have so much less.
I think we are done here.
Whit was done with trying to extract Burro-worthy product from this particular factory, but he viewed the whole snafu as a delay, not a defeat. As long as he was going back to the drawing board, he decided to keep it simple and make the phone charger a stand-alone product with no light—basically a square plastic battery holder similar to the generic ones I had schlepped over in the spring of 2010, only Burro-branded and with a removable adapter tip to match any kind of phone connection. That would be easy to source through Three-Sixty. As for a lantern, he was brainstorming bigger ideas—and he already had a new design and manufacturing partner in mind: a young American engineer living in China who shared Whit’s passion for bringing quality products to the world’s lowest income families.
I came home from Ghana in June of 2010 and spent my first summer with my family in Maine in two years. As soon as the leaves started falling in October, I was back on a plane to Accra. Whit had arrived the night before, from a two-week Italian vacation with Shelly. My own absences from home were difficult for Sarah, but they paled in comparison to Whit’s: he was spending most of his time in Ghana, with only brief visits home. The long separations were straining his marriage. The original plan was for Shelly to join Whit in Ghana after a year or so, once both kids were away at college; maybe they would rent Charlie’s house in Peduase, about halfway between Accra and Koforidua. But then she got her big job at the Gates Foundation, and that became impossible. Shelly was totally self-sufficient, adept at running their Seattle household and holding down a demanding job that could find her flying to India for two days. But with both their kids out of the nest, Shelly, like Whit, was living in an empty house—one even bigger than Whit’s African bachelor pad. “It’s pretty stressful all around,” said Whit as we drove off from the airport and into the boil of Accra. “I mean, we had a great time in Italy. We still really love each other, enjoy each other’s company, share the same values. We talk on the phone every few days, and I try to stay engaged in her life and with the kids. But it’s hard.”
Whit’s vacation was compromised by a tenacious intestinal disorder that was eventually diagnosed as giardia, a type of flagellate, pervasive in Ghana, spread through fecal-contaminated drinking water. Antibiotics can kill the flagellates themselves but not the reproductive cysts, so it can take several courses to wipe out subsequent generations. As a result, despite a vigorous round of antibiotics before Whit left for Italy, the little bastards were still hanging on when he came back. The situation wasn’t helped by an almost comically grim layover in Libya on Afriqiyah Airways, which was, until the Arab revolutions of early 2011 and the NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Tripoli, Muammar el-Qaddafi’s showcase commercial airline.
Afriqiyah didn’t fly to the Western Hemisphere, but its colorful Airbus jets (one of which crashed in May 2010, killing 103 people) crisscrossed Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The late-model planes were reported to be exceedingly comfortable, with ample legroom and leather seats—green, to match the Libyan flag—even if there was no alcohol served. But Afriqiyah’s real draw was its rock-bottom fares. Perhaps realizing few Westerners would make it a first choice, the airline had managed to lure travelers with fares roughly half that of its competitors. Always anxious to save money that could be better spent on his self-financed business adventure, Whit decided to give Afriqiyah a go, connecting through Tripoli to Rome. It was, to put it mildly, a learning experience.
What he learned is that the hub is the rub. To hear Whit describe it, Tripoli International Airport is a nexus of such uncompromising sadism as to warrant revisions to The 120 Days of Sodom. Upon debarking into Tripoli’s transit “lounge” (dominated by a monumental portrait of Qaddafi ) after an overnight flight across the Sahara, Whit and the other passengers were frog-marched through a reception line of redundant document and baggage checks performed by shouting, mustachioed security operatives resembling those weasely bad guys in spy movies who are always lurking around foreign airports, just before James Bond gets klonked over the head and shoved into a waiting Deux Chevaux. Copious signage, with lots of bold passages and exclamation points, covered the walls, but only in Arabic. Having survived the pat-downs and random confiscations (Libyan authorities took all eight of Whit’s Burro batteries, plus a plastic D adapter, on the grounds of “travel security”), the weary nomads at last encountered an oasis: a pleasant little café bar, around which perhaps a dozen or so urban Bedouins sipped aromatic espressos and enjoyed fresh local pastries. Alas, this “Traveler’s Café & Restaurant” did not accept credit cards or any foreign currency, despite the fact that by definition all travelers in the transit lounge were changing planes to and from other foreign countries and thus were highly unlikely to possess even a single Libyan dinar. There was, needless to say, no currency exchange office in the transit lounge; a decrepit looking ATM was out of order.
Well, coffee and breakfast would have to wait until Rome. But given Whit’s condition, what definitely couldn’t wait was the restroom. Here the term restroom must be stretched even beyond its usual euphemistic sense, although the British moniker water closet turned out to be pointedly apt. In this cruel dungeon, above a floor covered with an inch of gray fluid vaguely resembling clam liquor, the culture gap widened into a chasm. As in many Islamic countries, Libyan toilets are set up to accommodate the religious hygienic rules known as Qadaa al-Haajah. These rules, established by Muhammad himself, require “purification” with water after defecating. In modern Islamic toilets, the ritualistic ablution is accomplished with a flexible rubber or metal hose having a manually controlled spigot and an ergonomic tip. While the rules do not prohibit the additional use of toilet paper (Muhammad recommended using smooth stones), in practice many Muslims just rely on water. Nevertheless, in a public restroom in an airport transit lounge frequented by non-Muslims, one might expect to find a roll of tissue in the stall. But a country that requires all visitors to have an Arabic translation of their passport is not about to compromise on the weighty issue of Islamic ass wiping. There was not a scrap of paper to be found. Everyone, regardless of religion or background, was required to spray down with the hose. (Fellow passengers confirmed to Whit that the ladies’ room was no different.)
Intending to be better prepared for Tripoli Airport on his return flight, Whit secured toilet paper in Italy and scoured the country for Libyan dinars but could find none at any exchange bureau. Miraculously, on his return the sad little Libyan ATM was working, which allowed him to buy coffee and, in the souvenir shop, a new English translation of Qaddafi’s 1975 Green Book, in which the dictator shares his wisdom on the tyranny of representative democracy and Western capitalism. It’s a slim tome. Perhaps it was meant to be used as toilet paper.
Whit’s Koforidua estate was much quieter in the fall. The courtyard was empty, the door to the hut shuttered and locked. “Where’s Akosia?” I asked.
“Gone. Victor threw her out.”
“What?”
Apparently Whit had followed through on his promise to Akosia, telling her husband he could no longer bring other women to the house. Victor retaliated by throwing Akosia into the street—pregnant, along with their young son. She disappeared, presumably to her mother’s place up on the Akwapim Ridge. When Whit found out, he evicted Victor. Now the place lay empty.
Nkansah had also disappeared. Over the summer things came to a head about his use of Burro’s fifteen-hundred-cedi loan, which was supposed to cover an apartment lease but which Nkansah said he had used to buy a motorcycle so he could continue to live with his parents out of town and commute to Koforidua. After Whit and Rose pressed Nkansah repeatedly to come up with the bike, he admitted he had used the money to invest in a taxicab, which another man was driving for him. (A man whom Burro had hired to drive Nkansah until he got his license; Nkansah stole the driver too.) It was just another of his many business ventures. Enraged that Nkansah had essentially gamed Burro’s generosity and then lied about it, Whit put him on leave and ordered him to return the money, even if it meant selling the taxi. But Nkansah simply vanished after sending Whit a string of barely comprehensible text messages lamenting what he perceived to be unfairly harsh treatment—never accepting any responsibility in the matter, calling Rose “Juda,” and assiduously avoiding any discussion of a repayment plan.
The whole experience left everyone dispirited, in part because Nkansah had shown so much promise. On the other hand, as Whit pointed out, his sales skills were not matched by even the remotest flair for management or any capacity for details. It was probably just as well.
At any rate, in Whit’s absence, Jan and Rose had hired an even more promising manager—a twenty-three-year-old Ashesi grad named Nii Tettey. While he lacked the protean carnival-barker sales skills of Nkansah, Nii was considerably more polished. A member of the Ga tribe of Accra, he had grown up in an elite family. His father, who died when Nii was seven, was a Ghanaian diplomat and former undersecretary of the United Nations; his mother was a retired accountant. Nii was born in Italy and attended Achimota, the renowned secondary school in Accra mentioned earlier (as the alma mater of Whit’s partner Charlie) that has groomed African business and political leaders (including Zimbabwe’s despotic Robert Mugabe) since the colonial era.
Perhaps reflecting his privileged background, Nii favored an archaic manner of speaking that seemed professorial even by Ghana’s formal standards of English. Instead of “yes” he would often say “exactly.” Offer him any small favor—a cookie, a sachet of water—and he invariably replied, “That would be nice.” One day in a village we encountered an unusual curly-haired dog of the type more likely to be seen on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and Nii remarked that lately he had been observing a profusion of “randomly exotic dogs in villages.” Rose teased him about his baroque syntax, but he was self-assured and paid no mind. “I should like to write a book,” he told me. “A book about cultural and social changes in Ghana.”
I told him I felt he was in a good position to do so. We had just left the Burro office, Nii and I, driving out of town toward the northwest, scouting off-grid villages for new Burro agents. This was uncharted territory, so to speak—places and people as yet unaware of Burro and its offerings. Nii was a good and experienced driver—the first employee besides James, the route driver, whom Whit and Jan did not have to train in this skill—but like most Ghanaians he grew a lead foot behind the wheel. This compunction for haste had very nearly proven tragic two weeks earlier, when Nii and the newest intern, a nineteen-year-old college sophomore from the Bay Area named Alec Scott, rolled the Kia onto its side after losing control when a wheel broke off the axle. This was the same car in which Whit and I had burned up a wheel bearing more than a year before, but this latest malfunction was considerably more serious.
The accident happened on a weekend; they were headed down the coast to Busua Beach, an idyllic tourist spot popular with adventurous surfers. Somewhere along the way, the car began swaying ominously, but they pressed on—the pair had what pilots call “get-there-itis.” They did not get there. When the wheel fell off, the car pitched, rolled, and landed on the passenger side, skidding along the roadway. Photos taken later by Rose showed the entire right side creased and crumpled from stem to stern, the windshield smashed. Nii was driving; had he not been wearing his seat belt (a Burro rule), he would have landed on top of Alec, who was riding shotgun. Luckily, both ended up only briefly in the hospital, with minor injuries. (It would take several weeks to fix the Kia.) “For the rest of my life I will always wear this seat belt,” Nii said to me as he drove.
When Whit, still in Italy, heard about the accident, he was aghast. Alec’s parents were old friends; they had worked together decades ago in Niger. “Imagine if something had happened to Alec,” said Whit, shaking his head. “I mean, yeah, it wouldn’t have been my fault—both of those guys should have known better and stopped before the fucking wheel fell off—but still. I would feel totally responsible.” The accident caused Whit to rethink letting employees or interns borrow cars for personal trips. Besides the risk of injury, Burro was growing fast and simply couldn’t afford to lose vehicles.
A lot of that growth was in the new territory that Nii was opening up. He and Alec had been using Google Earth satellite imagery and local topographical maps to zero in on population centers, which were not always visible from the road; thousands of people might be living down a narrow trail, out of sight. Although the Google maps were useless in much of Burro’s territory due to out-of-date and low-resolution satellite imagery, it so happened that relatively new and more detailed imagery had been added to Google Earth for this particular test area. The topographical maps were thirty years old and unreliable for population data (some villages had sprawled and grown over three decades, others had withered), but they typically contained a more comprehensive set of place names, sometimes for even the remotest settlements, as well as elevation contours. By cross-referencing Google Earth and the local topo maps, Nii and Alec were able to discern in advance the latitude and longitude of locations with greater potential. Those coordinates could then be entered into a handheld GPS for field location. They had begun to articulate what was becoming an increasingly sophisticated and efficient way for Burro to identify potential sales areas.*
So armed, Nii and I were striking out to find new customers—or more accurately, new agents (make that resellers) who could serve customers in new villages. Building on the fieldwork done by the BYU interns last spring, Burro had refined and codified the process of reseller selection, and I wanted to see how that was working. Now reseller candidates were nominated in an open-forum village meeting (often with special input by village elders), then interviewed and scored by a Burro manager—Nii or Rose, whoever was running the new territory in question. The “winner” was then announced with fanfare, a process that not only helped ensure the best reseller but also reinforced the idea that the job was important.
Nii dodged potholes at high speed along a theoretically paved main road on which I had never traveled, not that the landscape offered any novelty; stretches of plantain groves, teak plots, half-built concrete churches, and roadside vendors with their gallon jugs of crimson palm oil under raffia pergolas could have been just about anywhere in Eastern Region. As usual, three-phase electrical lines ran on high poles along the road—in fact they appeared to be getting upgraded, as large wooden spools of bright chrome wire had been dropped every few miles—but no power went back into the villages.
Nii turned onto a muddy tire track that ran alongside a teak farm and drove about fifty yards until the road turned into a footpath. The map data had suggested there was a substantial village down this path, a place called Nkrankrom Dadasu.
We got out of the truck and looked around. A shirtless man was hacking at the trunk of a teak tree with a machete, work that I imagined to be exceedingly difficult in the midday heat; I have fashioned teak accessories on my boat and respect it as a wood with the approximate density of alabaster. He stopped and greeted us, sweat glinting off his bare chest. Nii and the man spoke in halting Twi, which was not Nii’s first language or, I gathered, the stranger’s. “He says he will take us to the village,” said Nii. Ghana was like that. Everywhere you went, someone in the middle of some important exertion would cheerfully drop everything and help you. Then again, any excuse to stop chopping down a teak tree in ninety-degree heat might be welcome.
It had rained buckets the day before, and at some point the trail actually went underwater. Villagers had fashioned makeshift bridges with logs, but the logs themselves were now floating, so there was no way to cross without getting wet. I had on Crocs, which were fine except for being dangerously slippery, but Nii was wearing leather street shoes and socks. It may have been the last time he sported formal footwear on a recon mission. After about half a mile we reached the village and met the chief, a small man about my own age. Nii introduced us and the chief gathered several of his elders.
We sat under a tangerine tree, the tiny fruit still green, as Nii explained Burro to the assembled dignitaries. It turned out that the villagers were Ewe, from Togo. Nii spoke no Ewe; my French was rudimentary but serviceable, although not as good as Nii’s Twi, which was better than their Twi or English. Between this Babel of languages we managed a crude but effective communication. Our cold call was warming up.
Nii explained the battery program and passed around some samples. “You must always keep using them,” he said. “They are like a footballer who must always stay excited to perform well.”
The elders were duly impressed.
“We are very community centered,” Nii continued. “We like to talk to people, find out what they need, and so we talk to our agents. If they tell us they need this thing in their neighborhood, we look for the best way to bring it at the best price. And we found out that a problem was charging your phones. For a place like this where there is no electricity, you have to take your phone far away to charge it.”
The elders nodded. The chief explained that villagers pay fifty pesewa to send out their phones for charging, plus forty pesewa in taxi fare each way, for a total of 1.30 cedis.
Nii continued: “So we said, ‘What can we do to solve this problem?’ And so let me show you the Burro phone charger.” He pulled the small green device out of a plastic bin.
“This is what it looks like. It uses four of our batteries that I showed you.” He opened the charger to reveal the batteries.
“I’ll show you how it works,” he said, pulling his own phone from a pocket.
“Everybody gets their phone pin,” he said. “Everyone gets one free when you buy it. And so you put it like this”—he inserted a phone pin into the female receptacle on the charger wire—“and then you put it inside your phone, and you have your phone charging.”
He held up his phone so the chief and elders could see the blinking battery symbol on the screen. “Look at it, you can see it charge.”
They gathered around, amazed. “Charging!” confirmed one man.
“Charging!” agreed another. They said the word in English but pronounced it almost like Chinese: CHAH-jing!
“It’s as simple as this,” said Nii. “Now you can always have your phone with you; you don’t need to send it away, wasting time and money to charge it.”
“How much for this?” asked another man.
Nii replied that the four batteries cost a total of eighty pesewa and are good for at least two phone charges but often as many as four, depending on the phone. “So you would be paying twenty to forty pesewa to charge your phone,” he said. “That is on average a cedi less than what you currently pay. You must also pay five cedis for the charger, which is yours to keep. So after just five charges, the money you have saved will pay for the charger itself.”
The men indicated they understood, and they did not seem fazed by the upfront cost of the charger.
“But the main reason we have come is to talk to the chief,” said Nii, “so I can schedule a day that we will come to select a reseller. A reseller, also called an agent, is someone we need to see every week to give them more batteries and give them the things they would like to sell. So that is why we came.”
The men conferred in Ewe, then spoke to us and agreed on a date the following week. “How many people are in this village?” Nii asked.
“Oh, we have many,” said a man.
“How many?”
“Here we have thirty or thirty-five.”
Nii’s face fell. That was not enough to justify an agent. “Okay, so I want to know how many in all the surrounding villages.”
The men consulted again in Ewe. There was much shouting and gesticulation. “Perhaps a thousand,” said the spokesman.
“Excellent,” said Nii. That was about what he had expected based on the map data. We shook hands all around, said good-bye, and trudged off down the slippery trail.
On the appointed day we returned to select a reseller, this time wearing farm boots. But it had not rained in several days, and the trail was dry. We met again under the tangerine tree, now with a larger crowd of villagers that included four men selected by the elders as reseller candidates. Nii ran through the basic Burro spiel, pointing out what he called the three most important points about the batteries: stays strong, no leak, and costs less. Then we broke off for the job interviews, moving to a bench under a cocoa tree, next to an elaborate double still that bubbled under a thatched roof.
The interview process had been codified into a series of questions designed to evaluate a candidate’s competence in seven critical areas:
Literacy and Numeracy
Honesty
Reliability and Motivation
Trainability
Sales Experience
Ability to Commit Time to Burro
Personality and Character
Service-oriented
Each criterion was followed by several sample questions and a “scoring aid” to facilitate analysis of the answers. So a question under Service-oriented was “How would you deal with clients that came to you saying their batteries do not work in their flashlight?” The scoring aid noted, “Saying something like ‘I would tell the client to hold on while I report to the company,’ at this stage is a good enough answer to earn them a high score. Saying something like ‘I will collect it from them and tell them to stop spoiling my business’ or ‘I would tell them that they are lying’ would give a very low score on this.”
Under each criterion, candidates were scored on a seven-point scale, from negative three to positive three. At first I thought the whole thing was a bit artificial, but then I remembered that if the business were to expand across the country, route managers would have widely different backgrounds and education levels, and they all couldn’t be trained personally by Whit or Jan. It was important to have a clear set of guidelines. In this case simplicity was a virtue.
The first candidate sat down and Nii handed him the written portion of the interview. The paper had two questions:
1. If a client buys 2 chargers costing 5 cedis each, and registers 4 batteries, how much does the client pay you?
2. How much is 52,000 old cedis in the new Ghana cedi?
“Please write your name,” said Nii, “and your location and your phone number.” Nii watched as the man struggled to compose his name. “Now please read the two questions aloud and then write your answers.” He read the questions slowly, laboring over each word. His brow creased like origami as he tried to process the math, but it was no use.
“Have you ever worked with money before?” Nii asked.
“Yes.”
“What was the job?”
The man thought for a minute. “In Nigeria.”
“Doing what?”
“I organized a football club on Sundays.”
“How did that involve money?”
He scratched his head. “I don’t know.”
“Can you remember the three most important points about the batteries?”
There was an awkward silence. Finally Nii reminded him: “Stays strong, no leak, costs less.”
“Okay,” the man said, but he seemed unable to repeat them.
“What would you say your village needs?”
The man considered the question carefully for a long minute and said, “Water.” “Okay, thank you,” said Nii. “Can you please tell the next candidate to come?”
The second guy was more assured and obviously better educated, although his English was almost nonexistent. He told us in French that he traveled to Togo every year, which probably disqualified him.
“When does it work for you to meet us?” Nii asked.
“Anytime.”
“But not anytime; you said you had a farm and you also travel to Togo.”
“My wife can also come.”
After the interview he walked over to the still and changed one of the drip containers, which was close to overflowing with the clear, potent brew.
The third candidate, a man named Francis Ataglo, was better yet—well groomed in a polo shirt and poised, with a fluent command of English. He had no trouble doing the math and seemed to understand the concept of Burro. It transpired that he was either a preacher or some sort of lay leader in his church, a sign of respect in the community.
The fourth interview went well enough, but the best candidate was clearly Francis. We reconvened the villagers and Nii announced the new agent, leading everyone in applause. Then Nii spent an hour and a half training Francis and setting him up with an initial inventory of batteries and phone chargers. In a week Nii would return and hold a formal sales gong-gong to help Francis develop his new customer base. I was glad to see that the fourth candidate sat in on the training session, apparently out of simple curiosity; he would make a good alternate agent if things didn’t work out with Francis.
“That went very well,” said Nii as we drove away. “Sometimes it comes down to picking the lesser of two evils, but in this place I think we got a very good agent. He fits the image of a reseller. Plus he is already an evangelist, so the people trust him to send them to heaven.” I detected a note of irony in his voice. Of all Whit’s employees Nii seemed the most likely atheist, not that many Ghanaians would dare identify themselves as such, and I didn’t ask.
It had been a little more than two years since Whit first arrived in Koforidua with a new Tata, looking for a place to live that could double as a business. Now he had three vehicles, five full-time Ghanaian employees (two of them college graduates), with more on the way, nearly a hundred part-time agents and a revolving group of American and Ghanaian interns. He had invented a brand that was trusted and respected by thousands of Ghanaians, mostly by respecting them.
He had not expanded nearly as fast as originally planned; indeed he hadn’t expanded at all beyond the first Koforidua test branch, although the branch itself was growing rapidly and poised to demonstrate replicability. But he had done it all with his own money—more than a quarter million dollars at this juncture, not counting his own opportunity cost—which meant that when the time came to scale rapidly through outside investors he’d be well positioned to retain control of his brand.
Burro had reached a turning point of sorts, at least in my mind. The new protocols for finding villages and hiring agents felt more mature, less seat-of-the-pants, than a year ago when we just drove around looking for crowds. The new phone chargers were spiking revenue; trailing four-week sales had more than quadrupled in the last month and would soon top twenty-five hundred cedis. And that was mostly just income from the chargers themselves; the tail of the battery exchange revenue was beginning to lengthen dramatically once new customers started charging their phones regularly. “It’s obviously not enough,” said Whit, “but it’s going in the right direction.” The company was applying months of hard-learned lessons at a quickening pace and seemed to be within striking distance of real success.
This was all good news, and I was happy for Whit, but I also felt myself pining for the primal chaos of the early start-up days. I missed the adventure of the random hunt for new villages, the improvised and ever-changing battery spiel in God knows how many languages, the palm-wine toasts with one-eyed chiefs, the villagers who gave us duck eggs and mushrooms, the game of wits against the coupon counterfeiters. I had met men who ate cats. I had seen dead cows and live sheep in the trunks of taxicabs. Now what was I doing? Now I was tailing a hotshot African college boy who punched coordinates into a GPS. I missed being an explorer. And yet—just when I was starting to think there was not much more for me to see, we pulled into the village of Owuratwum.
Electric lines stepped down from the main poles that ran past the little brown-and-beige outpost of huts, so we knew at least some citizens of Owuratwum had power. But a teenage boy returning from school told us that only a few homes right along the road were wired; most of the village, he said, confirming our analysis of Google Earth imagery, was back in the bush where the lines didn’t run. “Where does the chief live?” asked Nii.
“I will take you,” said the boy. We parked and got out.
Along the road, huge sisal bags filled with cocoa beans were stacked several feet high, waiting for transportation by taxi or tro-tro to the central depot—on their way to becoming Belgian truffles, oozing exotic liqueurs and sold in boxes with red velvet ribbons on Valentine’s Day. Ghana is second only to neighboring Ivory Coast in global cocoa production, growing about 14 percent of the world’s crop. It was cocoa harvest time, and prices were high this year; the farmers were flush.
We headed down a footpath, which dropped into a low, swampy area thick with cocoa trees. The broad leaves blocked out the sun, and the gnarled trunks looked like spineless space aliens in some 1950s sci-fi movie. Moss dripping water like mucus dangled from branches. It was dark and creepy, and I half expected flying monkeys to hatch from the strange, elongated cocoa pods. Instead, mosquitoes and tiny gnats swarmed. Soon we reached a residential compound—a U-shaped complex of rectangular stucco huts, fronted by wide porches under the shade of metal roofs. In the central clearing were three large, flat bamboo racks, each waist-high and the size of a large Persian rug, covered with dark cocoa beans drying in the sun. The thumb-sized beans had already been fermented under wet banana leaves, and they exuded a strange smell, like chocolate vinegar, that was pungent but not unpleasant.
“Master!”
I turned, and from the corner of my eye caught a fleeting glimpse of a satyr rushing toward us from across the clearing. It was, in fact, a small old man, arms flailing like a pinwheel and bent over from what must have been years of physical labor. His long white beard hung down in front of him like a turkey’s snood.
“Oh master! Oh master!” he cried. I looked behind me to see whom he might be addressing, and before I could spin back around the old man had wrapped his arms around my legs in a bear trap. “Master, you have come!” he said, looking up and smiling. His teeth had rotted in a peculiar way that left his lower incisors stepped like an Aztec pyramid. “Master, you are welcome!”
This was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Having lived and worked for many years in Hollywood, I can report from personal observation that there are men who thrive on such obsequiousness. As for me, all I could do was stand gape-jawed and try to retain my balance as this groveling lickspittle hugged my kneecaps and genuflected in the dirt. Finally he arose and screamed orders in a strange tongue at a younger man, who scurried to find a plastic chair and a tin cup of rainwater for me, the inexplicably honored guest.
Up to this point Nii had been watching the whole affair bug-eyed. Now he spoke up. “I don’t know what this is all about,” he whispered to me. “I can’t understand his language.” The younger man spoke to Nii in Twi. “Okay,” said Nii to me again. “That man is the chief. This is his son. They speak Larteh, a language specific to this area.”
“Great,” I said, “because I was just thinking we didn’t have enough languages around here.”
“He says his father thought you were someone else.”
“Livingstone?”
“No. It seems his daughter works for an obruni in Accra, a man who keeps promising to come and visit. So he thought you were his daughter’s boss.”
“Would that be a typical way to greet your daughter’s obruni boss?” I asked Nii.
“I should think not.”
“I am very sorry,” said the chief sheepishly, in his best English.
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling weakly. He was, after all, the chief. The whole experience reminded me of those Tarzan movies where the natives fawn over the very important bwana, just before tossing him into the cook pot.
The package arrived from DHL with a distant, handwritten return address:
Greenlight Planet Inc.
Bldg 3, Rm 3A, Conrad Garden
Binhe Rd & Caitian Rd, Futian Shenzhen
China 518026
“It’s here,” said Whit, and people in the Burro office dropped their work and gathered around the conference table. We knew exactly what it was: the final engineering prototype (“FEP” in the lingo of product development) of the new Burro lantern, the African village version of the “killer app”—in this case, Whit hoped, the appliance that would lead Burro into profit and sustainability. “This is the final consumer packaging,” said Whit, pretending to admire the makeshift cardboard shipping container, crudely bound in clear tape.
“Just open it already,” I said.
Whit carefully cut into the package. It was Christmas in November.
Shenzhen is a sprawling manufacturing and financial hub narrowly separated from Hong Kong by the slate waters of the Sham Chun and Sha Tau Kok rivers. It’s where you go if you’re looking to buy lighting devices, among thousands of other electronic products. In the summer of 2009 Whit had traveled there on a weeklong tour of manufacturers. After several days politely nodding at pulsating disco flashlights and other useless and poorly made devices, he began to realize that nothing “off the shelf” was going to work in the tough conditions of a Ghanaian village. He’d have to create his own products. But he needed a partner.
Whit couldn’t remember exactly when he first heard about Greenlight Planet, the for-profit company founded in 2008 with the idea to design efficient lighting products for the world’s poor. “I was just searching around, looking for alternatives, and Greenlight Planet popped,” he said. “And then I met Patrick.”
T. Patrick Walsh was the young American engineer living in Shenzhen who cofounded Greenlight Planet right out of college. As a sophomore at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the same school where Jan studied engineering), Patrick had joined the campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a group that connects student engineers in the United States with communities in the developing world. Patrick, trim and dark-haired, with eyebrows like coal smudges, worked on a project designing affordable electrification for a village in northern India, a country that still has four hundred million people living off the grid. “It was really stunning to me as a city kid to go and live in this village for two months,” he said in a speech at his alma mater in late 2008. “On the first night when I got there I walked into a dark room and I went to turn on a light switch”—here he waved his arm, groping for an invisible switch—“and I went ‘Holy cow! I’m not gonna have light—not only tonight, but for the next couple months.’”
The villagers had a diesel-powered generator to pump water and process spices, a chief source of income. But they couldn’t afford the fuel needed to light the whole village. They did, however, have a surrounding forest thick with trees that produced an oil-bearing seed. Patrick and his fellow students designed a system for extracting the oil from the seeds; then they modified the diesel engine to burn the vegetable oil. “It’s a workable system,” Patrick said. “It produces two or three dollars’ worth of fuel for half a day’s work, so it’s doubling or tripling income plus lighting the village. After a year, the people had wired about half the village and put lightbulbs in sixty homes.”
It was an elegant local solution, but much to his disappointment, Patrick came to realize it wasn’t scalable. The project had been funded with a twenty-thousand-dollar charitable donation, but there was no money to duplicate it in the other fifty thousand non electrified villages in the state, much less the whole country. “We’ve got four hundred million people with no light, and they’re not gonna get it through charity alone,” he recalled thinking. “We’ve got to have a way for these villagers to afford light themselves. It can’t be donated, it can’t be pushed down from the top, it’s got to be demanded from the bottom. And what we looked at was how can we develop an individually affordable solution—something that the private sector could have a motivation to sell, and something they could actually scale.”
Thus was born Greenlight Planet and the company’s flagship product, the Sun King solar-powered lantern. The product was a flying saucer– shaped pod of tough polycarbonate plastic encasing an array of LED bulbs and a lithium-ion battery that was charged by a plug-in postcard-sized solar panel. A hand strap allowed the light to be palmed in one hand or tied to the forehead with a bandanna. A heavy-duty steel stand transformed the light into a table lamp or (if hung from a nail or clothesline) an overhead fixture. On its lowest setting the device provided as much light as a kerosene lamp, without the expense and danger of fuel. On its highest setting (which burned through a full solar charge in a few hours) it provided twice the light of kerosene. The unit was virtually indestructible—Patrick liked to demonstrate by dropping it onto a hard floor—and watertight. It won a Mondialogo Engineering Award, a student competition sponsored by UNESCO and Daimler.
Whit loved the Sun King’s rugged construction and clever functionality, but the solar design didn’t fit into his immediate business plan: if your primary business is renting low-cost grid-charged batteries to off-grid villagers, you ought to be able to provide them with compatible battery-powered devices, not a much more expensive solar device. (The Sun King solar lantern retails in India for eight hundred rupees, almost nineteen dollars.) But it was obvious to Whit that Greenlight Planet shared his commitment to selling quality, productivity-enhancing products to the world’s poor.
“I talked to Patrick on the phone at first,” said Whit, “then I went to meet him in China, and I was blown away. He was my kind of product guy, so passionate about developing amazing products. He took me through the whole efficiency chain of lighting devices, from photons emitted from the sun hitting the ground to photons reflecting off a kid’s school book at night, and the whole chain of conversion that has to happen for that to work efficiently.”
Patrick was also intrigued by Whit’s ideas, but he was cautious. “He told me it was kind of interesting but that he was very focused on solar,” said Whit. “He wasn’t saying everything has to be solar, and I got the impression that if something could be useful in his product line, he’d think about it.
“So I started spec-ing this thing a little bit. What I originally wanted to do was something that would be forward-compatible with some kind of proprietary battery format—a form factor that would work with legacy double-A’s but also with an integrated LFP battery.* As I was sending Patrick drawings and ideas, he was playing along at first, but finally he threw up his arms and said, ‘This thing is getting too hard, it’s distracting me from what I should be doing.’ That’s when he backed out. So I was like, fuck, what do I do now? I decided to recalibrate and say okay, we’ll tackle the lithium-iron forward-compatible device later on. I went to Patrick and asked him what we could do now. He said he could modify the existing Sun King to work with our current batteries. I said great.
“What I didn’t realize,” Whit continued, “was that he was talking about more than just changing the Sun King to take batteries. At the same time he had also been thinking about moving away from an array of conventional LEDs to a power LED, and he had found a good source for them.† So the Burro light in a way became a test for what he wanted to be doing with power LEDs.”
The Burro light would also differ in other ways. “Patrick’s original Sun King had three brightness settings,” said Whit. “I wanted four. He was resistant to that, and he knows that stuff so well, but I was pretty adamant. So with strong input from me we came up with four power settings, each with some element critical to our market positioning. We wanted one setting that matched the perceived output of a kerosene hurricane lamp, so people could do the same shit they do with kerosene but at a huge cost savings. Lots of people talk about beating kerosene, but we truly deliver it in this mode—eighty percent cost savings, cleaner, safer, more convenient light. It’s huge for anyone with access to the Burro battery service.
“We wanted a second mode that blew kerosene out of the water—you know, any observer would say that’s brighter than kerosene, but still at a thirty percent lower cost than kerosene.
“Then we were both in agreement that we wanted something really bright. Exactly how bright was the question. I said, ‘How high can this thing go?’ Patrick was like, ‘The human eye isn’t linear, I wouldn’t recommend pushing it all the way; buy yourself a little more battery life and go dimmer, people won’t notice it all that much.’ I said, ‘You know what? Go for it. What’s the maximum current?’ He said, ‘Three hundred and fifty milli-amps.’ He was saying we should go for like three hundred or two eighty. So we did the math on it, and for any of these currents, even assuming typical degradation of our batteries, we’d get maybe only five or six hours of life. I was like, ‘Dude, that’s an evening. Let’s go all the way. Give ’em the brightest fucking light in the village! They’ll get it—they’ll know it’s gonna use more power. Plus they’ll still get another five or so hours in the lower modes after the batteries run low on juice.’ I talked him into it.”
“So that’s three settings,” I said. “You’ve got kerosene equivalent for a fraction of kerosene’s operating cost, better than kerosene for still less money than kerosene, and bright as physically possible for five hours. What’s the fourth setting?”
“Well, I told Patrick how we’re facing this competitive threat from Tiger Head on the insanely long tail they deliver in those stupid flashlights. So I asked him how low we could go and still get some useful light—like an ambient night-light or something like that.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Try it yourself. Buy an LED and just drive it.’ He explained how to dial in the input voltage and use different resistors to play with different ranges of current. I was home in Seattle then, so I went to Radio Shack and bought an LED and some resistors. I’m doing all this and looking at the output, blocking out the windows, turning out the lights, and I email him and say, ‘Okay, I can go as low as six milli-amps and still get useful light.’ He says, ‘Really?’ I say, ‘Yeah, I mean I guess there’s maybe a photon or two there. But I’m looking at these Tiger Head flashlights after a hundred hours of use with Tiger Head batteries, and that’s what they look like! It’s a really low bar. It’s like a candle. You’re not going out hunting with this light, but there is a glow there, and I’ve learned that villagers like a night-light.’
“Patrick said if we went that low we’d have to factor in the circuit, because the circuit itself would draw as much current as the LED at that point. I actually wanted to go lower. I did a lot of tests, and you could argue that a Tiger Head flashlight with a pair of Tiger Head batteries was maybe usable as a night-light for two hundred or two hundred and fifty hours. So I wanted to beat that, to hit three hundred hours. But we couldn’t really go below six milli-amps, which would give us two hundred-plus hours once we factored in the draw of the circuit, so that was it.”
Whit and Patrick settled on an initial order of three thousand lights and worked together to dial down costs as low as possible. As the project advanced and estimates of manufacturing, shipping, tax, and other import costs firmed up, it became clear that Burro could not hit Whit’s ideal retail price of ten cedis (about seven dollars) while maintaining adequate margins. Even using sea freight, which was dramatically cheaper than air, wouldn’t cut it. It would have to sell for fifteen cedis, roughly ten dollars. But Whit felt the market could bear the price, given the huge cost savings over kerosene.
A hand sample of the light was manufactured and sent to Ghana in September. Whit responded with a detailed email to Patrick, who continued the conversation in a series of answers to Whit’s questions:
From: T. Patrick Walsh
Sent: 9/18/2010 10:03:23 AM
To: Whit Alexander
Subject: Re: Fwd: DHL sample
WA: Couple early thoughts/questions, Patrick: We are seeing flicker really only when first entering any given power mode. Is this the extent of the issue, or is it impacting in ways we aren’t yet noticing?
PW: That’s the extent of the issue.
WA: Battery lid does not seem excessively tight in sample. Was it fixed by hand in the sample?
PW: Yes.
WA: Battery lid is able to be closed in four different orientations, three of which prevent switch from functioning. Not a showstopper, and I wouldn’t want to delay initial order to address this, but should we consider “keying” the lid somehow and/or marking correct orientation?
PW: Already being done. If you look on the back side of the cover there is a stopper that is supposed to prevent the cover from being inserted in the wrong direction. This was designed poorly so it doesn’t work, we have already started altering the tooling to fix it.
WA: Is there added schedule risk if we wanted to go slightly cooler on the light color? Not sure we want this yet, and not sure if it’s all or nothing. Some early feedback that the color combined with the frosting is creating an impression that we’re an “old-fashioned” incandescent. It may be the kind of thing where usage preference is different than purchase preference. Is slightly cooler possible, or is a major shift the only option? Would there be any supply or functionality risk from making such a change so late in the game?
PW: Interesting. We could try to go with some middle-ground between what you have and the Sun King—maybe 4500K–5000K. There will always be a range of colors in each batch of LEDs, so these are ballpark figures. Let me know if that’s what you want to do based on feedback there. There is always some supply risk with LED chips, sometimes you just can’t get exactly the bins you want. But even if we can’t get the exact target bin we can always get something close, and the lead times have become very reasonable nowadays.
WA: Will wire stand be identical to Sun King in shape? The new lamp is slightly wider. Old stand seems to function fine with new lamp, but it does change the “bearing” angle a bit. If the stand was changing, I’d consider trying to make the wall-mounting screw/ nail affordance more pronounced.
PW: The regular Sun King and the AA version are actually the same outer dimensions, so we should keep the exact same stand at least for now, as producing this part in low volume is not trivial.
WA: The new lamp is, no surprise, pretty darn heavy when loaded up with three cells. I’d like to reduce the prospects of lamps crashing to the floor if practical. On that topic, how do you think we’ll perform in drop tests when loaded with cells? I managed a small such test by accident already, and nothing bad happened, although the battery lid did pop off.
PW: This is what we have seen: battery cover pops off if the lamp is dropped on the top side. The mechanism is pretty clear—the batteries hit the cover and push it out. I have done a few drop tests with batteries loaded and even spiked it into the ground touchdown-style and ended up with a blown-off cover but no permanent damage outside of a nick or two. We could try to add more of an undercut to the bosses that hold on the battery cover, but that may be a bad idea as if they are too undercut and the batteries really want out, they could break the bosses right off instead of simply pushing the cover off without damaging it and letting the energy dissipate. Let me know what you think.
WA: What’s been your experience with warranty, Patrick? We’d like to offer one year, but we’d want some backing from you guys.
PW: In India we offer a 1-year warranty against manufacturing defects. We also offer the same to international customers even for the original Sun King. The question is how to implement this in practice. If you have defects that lead to returns we will replace the units for sure, we just need to make sure they are actually defective and not abused. Standard warranty against defects in material/ workmanship only, obviously.
WA: What caveats do you have to make and how do you know if someone dropped his lamp into a pond? Should we consider any field servicing? Should we order any spare parts? On branding, the seam between the battery lid and the back is so smooth, we actually might be able to pad print over the two when assembled. This would give us some good real estate upper and lower right for logos. It could also provide that visual hint on correct battery lid orientation.
PW: I don’t see why not!
WA: We’re still playing with our baby all weekend and are likely to have further insights or questions, but this should get us going. We want to order on Monday, so let’s resolve anything we need to do to get you guys unblocked and into manufacturing ASAP.
PW: OK, we should be ready to quote and take your order by Sept. 25th. If we can do so by then we will get this on a plane certainly by the end of October.
WA: Thanks again, Patrick.
PW: My pleasure!
I’m old enough to remember the TV repairman (ours was named, perfectly, Ray) making house calls, a concept even more anachronistic than doctors knocking on your door (I remember that too) since at least doctors still exist. In Ghana, however, TV and radio repair shops are everywhere—wooden shacks with mountains of electronic carcasses overflowing onto the street and where men labor six days a week over circuit boards with tweezers and soldering irons.* Nothing in Africa gets thrown away, because there is no money to buy new, so Africans have learned how to repair just about anything. Ghana’s manufacturing sector may be sadly underdeveloped, but its knowledge base on how stuff works, based on the country’s vibrant repair business, is profound.
The console television that Ray the Repairman serviced in our living room was made in America. It seems reasonable to observe a correlation, and perhaps causality, between a society’s ability to fix things and its ability to make things. Could it be mere coincidence that our throwaway culture parallels the demise of our manufacturing sector? After all, people who don’t know how to make things will soon lose the skill to repair those things. Of course it could be argued that even poor Americans are too affluent to bother with repairs. Whatever the reason, we now have a consumer society almost completely divorced from production. Everybody knows where our widgets come from—China—but almost no one knows, or seems to care, how they get made. We fetishize the latest gadgets and venerate the entrepreneurs who run the companies who make them, but the self-evident miracle of creation itself, the process of designing and engineering and molding and assembling all our gear, takes place off camera. Whatever happens before the UPS truck delivers the new gadget to our door is like the era B.C. (Before Consumerism), a dark time when molten plastic roiled upon the Earth and our merchandise was formless and void. It’s as if the subject itself makes us uncomfortable, reminding us of the loss of our esoteric knowledge of the assembly line. Modern manufacturing is indeed complex, but the basic process can be readily grasped.
It begins, like most modern things, with a computer—in this case a program used by the designer to generate a detailed three-dimensional model of the product. This computer drawing then goes to a tooling engineer, who is charged with designing the best way to make the “tool,” which is factory lingo for the mold—a two-piece apparatus held together in a powerful vise and into which molten plastic is injected. The tooling engineer must figure out where on the mold to inject the plastic and how the mold will come apart after the plastic cools. Some shapes (like a sphere composed of two halves) are simple to tool. But if the product has a complicated surface with lips and returns, the tool could require elaborate moving parts called slides and pulls, which shape the plastic within the mold. That kind of tooling gets expensive; a good tooling engineer will always be looking for the most cost-effective solution, which may involve molding several parts for later assembly. Once the tooling engineer has designed the tool (or tools), a final 3D computer drawing of the part is created. That design is then electronically transferred to a milling machine, where a high-speed cutting wheel similar to a router bit automatically carves a full-sized model of the part out of a piece of solid copper.
This copper model, called an electrode, is then placed under heavy pressure against a block of steel and charged with massive electrical power at high voltage. The surging power and high pressure (tempered by a special cooling liquid) causes the copper electrode to physically cut a “negative” version of the shape into the steel, which becomes the actual mold. The finished steel mold is then fitted to a machine that injects it with heated liquid plastic that has been tinted with dye pellets to a specified color.
Elsewhere in the factory, workers (and robots) put together the product’s internal subassemblies—the circuit boards, LED boards, and other components that will go into the finished piece. Once the molded plastic pieces and the subassemblies are finished, the product goes to final assembly, where workers (in China mostly women) in white gloves and hairnets sit along a line, fishing the various parts out of plastic tubs.
But before thousands of identical widgets start rolling off the assembly line, the factory has to turn out just one very important widget—the final engineering prototype to be approved by the customer.
Whit slowly cut away the packing material on the DHL package from Shenzhen. “Here it is,” he said, “the final engineering prototype of the Burro light. There’s the Burro logo and the Greenlight Planet logo. Do More is, I guess, kind of legible. The color looks nice; they really pumped up the green. The battery lid doesn’t close as well as I’d like already; it’s not flush. Supposedly it’s keyed so it will only fit one way. Aha! It is keyed. I wish it would fit more flush. Let’s get some batteries and try it, shall we?”
Alec, the intern, grabbed three fresh Burro batteries. “Here goes,” said Whit, and he pressed the switch. The white plastic dome glowed with a dim but observable light, even in the daylight of the office. “That’s what we’re calling Super-Saver,” he said. “More than two hundred hours of light for about forty cents operating cost.”
He hit the switch again. “This is Saver—comparable to kerosene at one fifth the cost.”
Again. “Bright—much better than kerosene, still more than twenty-five percent cheaper.”
And again. “Super-Bright—more expensive than kerosene but the brightest light in the village. It’ll really light up your room.” He turned the light toward his eyes and squinted. “Wow, that’s bright!”
So was my brother’s face. I remembered what Beatrice, the Chinese rep from Whit’s first potential partner, had said in defense of her crappy headlamp: “Why Africa has more strict standard?” Finally Whit had a light that met his strict standards for Africa. “I’m thinking we could put kerosene out of business,” he said.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Think about what?” I asked, glaring at my brother. We were at the fetish market in Accra, where voodoo priests buy curatives and offerings like frankincense, dried herbs, monkey heads, and crocodile skins. It was probably my last trip to Ghana and I wanted to check this legendary place off my to-do list. Tucked into the bowels of the timber market outside the vast slum of Agbobloshie (known locally as Sodom and Gomorrah), the fetish market was definitely not on the tourist maps, and I ended up paying a guy a few cedis just to lead us there.
We probably could have followed our noses; the place reeked of rancid flesh and pungent, unidentifiable spices. Sellers glared at us from behind baskets filled with decomposing dog heads, their lips frozen in gnashing snarls. Desiccated, coiled lizards were stacked artfully on tables next to crude wrought-iron daggers. Whole python skins, rolled up like sleeping bags and tied with raffia, shared table space with black, shrunken monkey heads and empty tortoise shells. Hanging from a stall like coats at Macy’s were dozens of whole animal skins—antelopes, crocodiles, and several large wild cats, the latter priced at three hundred cedis each (about two hundred dollars) but negotiable. That’s a lot of money in Ghana, which probably explains the cat knockoffs on the same rack—antelope hides on which feline spots had been obviously painted. The real cat furs were stunning and sad, luxuriously soft and improbably tame. “I said don’t even think about it,” Whit repeated as I brushed a feline pelt.
“What do you take me for, anyway?”
“I take you for someone who if he thought he could get away with it would smuggle a leopard skin home, or at least a leopard-skin hat.”
“Give me a break. These animals are endangered. I’d go to jail. And Sarah would divorce me. Is it legal to bring back a python skin?”
“It’s illegal to bring a python skin into my car.”
“What a wenis. But just as well. Hey, check out these voodoo dolls. This one’s painted white; it looks like you.”
“Seen enough? This place creeps me out.”
Voodoo wasn’t the only bad medicine bothering Whit. His giardia was still hanging on, and the doctor at the clinic in Koforidua had prescribed the nuclear option: a broad-spectrum antibiotic called chloramphenicol. While I was driving to Accra, Whit swallowed his pill and googled chloramphenicol on his smart phone. He read aloud: “‘Due to resistance and safety concerns, chloramphenicol is no longer a first-line agent for any’—repeat, any—‘indication in developed nations. In low-income countries, chloramphenicol is still widely used because it is inexpensive and widely available.’”
“In other words,” I said, “it’s being dumped on the poor, like all the other shitty products over here.”
“Listen to this,” said Whit. “‘The most serious adverse effect is aplastic anemia, a bone marrow toxicity that is generally fatal.’”
“Are you kidding?”
He read on: “‘There is no treatment and there is no way of predicting who may or may not get this side effect. The effect usually occurs weeks or months after chloramphenicol treatment has been stopped, and there may be a genetic predisposition. The highest risk is with oral chloramphenicol, affecting one in twenty-four thousand.’”
“One in twenty-four thousand that you could die? Holy shit, those are pretty bad odds. I mean, it’s better than Russian roulette, but still. I don’t think I’d lay money on a bet that had a one in twenty-four-thousand chance of killing me.”
“No shit.”
“Listen, man, if you die, I’ll be there for you.”
“Fuck off.”
“You know that shop in town that makes the cocoa-pod coffins? I bet we could get them to do a Burro battery coffin. We should probably order it now.”
“Just watch the road.”
As far as I was concerned our primary destination was the fetish market, but Whit kept insisting the trip was actually about picking up a hand sample of his new battery saver, which had just cleared customs. For about fifteen hundred dollars Whit had hired an industrial designer in Madison, Wisconsin, to work up the model, then worked with his partner Three-Sixty in Guangzhou to source a Chinese manufacturer. The design was simple: a hollow plastic shell the shape and size of a D battery with two poles and internal wiring that could replace one of the Burro batteries in a two-battery flashlight. The first sample, which had arrived in the early fall, fit a little too tightly; it was a little too long, and Jan observed that it needed a beveled edge around the “positive” end, which would make it easier to fit in next to the real battery in some devices. So we were down in Accra picking up this second version. But as soon as Whit stuck it in a typical radio (he had brought one with him), he realized the new version had a new problem: the beveled rim made it nearly impossible to grab the thing with a finger and pull it out. It needed some kind of “affordance”—a plastic nib or ridge that the finger could grasp. Before we even got to the fetish market he had emailed his designer in Wisconsin with the new request.
As Saturday trips to Accra go, it was a fairly productive day. Traffic wasn’t bad, Whit got one step closer to a usable battery saver, I crossed what was, in my mind, a major Ghanaian attraction off my travel list, and we shared a charming lunch of wood-fired pizza (the kind of Western food you can only get in Accra) with Rose, her sister Gracelove, and their friend Sarah, all of whom graciously pretended to be amused and entertained by the doddering old graybeards who were picking up the check. After dropping off that trio at the sprawling and crowded Makola market (their own fetish hunt ran to shoes, handbags, and fabric), gassing up, and stopping at the Shop-rite for precious cargo like Parmesan cheese and olive oil, we drove home in the dark with considerably less cash but a trunk full of Italian groceries, a Chinese battery saver, one dried lizard, and a rusty sacrificial dagger.
Revisions to the battery saver were trivial compared to the ongoing discussions with Patrick about the lantern. After Whit conducted a thorough examination of the latest FEP sample, he sent Patrick an email detailing seven areas of concern before granting approval to place the initial order of three thousand units. Patrick responded to each concern, and Whit responded again. The conversation was cordial (the men respected each other as obsessive about quality) but with an undercurrent of urgency; Whit needed these lights soon. He had already been teasing the sample light in gong-gongs, and agents were getting impatient.
1) Final units will run well on alkaline or other primary cells with no damage to unit from higher voltage.
PW: I fixed this theoretically, but we will definitely test it thoroughly before shipping. I am waiting to get a handful of completed units to do more rigorous testing like you mention.
WA: Sounds good. If it doesn’t work, please advise before considering changes. We might be able to accept this limitation in the first run so long as we know about it up front.
2) Final units will withstand a drop to a hard surface from eight feet high and not break, continuing to operate normally.
PW: I will do more drop testing to make sure they don’t break in any permanent way, but depending on the angle it hits the ground the batteries are most likely going to come out. In my opinion this is really barely acceptable, but I don’t have any quick way to fix it. I think if we enlarged those undercuts, we might wind up with broken bosses when the heavy batteries try to find their way out and can’t. My suggestion would be to try enlarging the bosses after this production run, and hope for the best. If not, go back to the way it was or think of a better design. Including planning and testing and such this process will probably take 2 weeks or more, as it’s not a straight-pull mold.
WA: It is okay if the battery lid opens in this initial shipment. It is much more problematic if a drop from the ceiling breaks it permanently. If you are seeing this, let’s talk. Otherwise, let’s ship. I concur that we should find a more robust solution for the next shipment.
3) Final units will withstand monsoon rains in all orientations while operating and continue to operate normally.
PW: I think the units as is are water resistant at best. I don’t think we’re going to get waterproofness without a gasket. We are already on sample mold 2 in attempting to put a gasket in there, but I’m worried it makes the cover too difficult to close. We’re still playing with this and will update you—new samples are due on Monday. My guess is that with the waterproof switch, this thing will survive pretty well even if it gets water inside (for example while somebody has the cover off for battery replacement). We will also test this once we have enough units in hand.
WA: We can’t take a huge slip to dial in the gasket fit. If it works well in the Monday sample and is easy to integrate into production tooling, then great, otherwise, let’s get the cover fitting as nicely as we can over the next day or two and set realistic, tested expectations that we can position as best as possible for our clients in this initial run. I concur that in the next run we want to dial-in water resistance to support operating while exposed to monsoon rains. We do not need submersion capabilities, but it’s sure nice to have if the cost delta is close to nil.
4) Please confirm light will ship individually bagged in a reusable Ziploc bag.
PW: Clear zip lock bags—got it.
WA: Thanks!
5) Please attempt to get back cover fitting more flush with back of lamp. This sample has a perceptible edge where the cover rises above the back. I do not want to delay initial shipment for this, but want to express desire to improve this ASAP.
PW: I also noticed that the cover is sitting farther up than the first samples. I assume this is really hard to fix, but we will look into it. I also know that with the O-ring gasket I tried, it makes the cover sit slightly higher up and creates significant resistance when you try to turn it into the locked position. I’ve had a sample mold made up for a square gasket which should be ready by Monday and we will try this.
WA: Per above, let’s evaluate on Monday if we have a viable and superior solution with an incremental day. If not, the fit is acceptable for the first run assuming it doesn’t cause massive fail following even momentary exposure to moderate rains.
6) Would love to have our Do More pop more clearly. Let’s not slip further for this, but would want to dial it in down the road if it’s not a quick fix now. We should also be TM [trademark] and not circle-r. [U.S. federally registered trademark].
PW: Got it—to save time let’s make these tweaks after this run?
WA: Concur. Ship as is. Fix on next run.
7) Confirm increase in base circuit power consumption that has Super-Saver, lowest power mode drawing 8.5 to 9.0 mA.
PW: So this would be about right for 6 mA through the LEDs plus 2 mA through the MCU/opamp [the circuitry]. The first sample may have been running low—it’s hard to dial in that lowest current mode very accurately. At 8.5 mA / 2000 mAh you’re looking at 235 hours; is this sufficient or do we want to go to 6 mA total (4 mA LED) and 300 hours? I’d rather not tweak the code again but if you’re set on 300 hours I understand.
WA: Ship as is. Please don’t touch the code at this stage. I think it is fine. I just wanted to alert you that it seemed to be running a bit higher than the previous sample. We’ve been specifying runtime against 1800 mAH cell as our realistic level post field degradation. This puts us at slightly below 200 hours, but we’ll be fine. We’ll just change our positioning on it to be more like, “run it all night, every night for less than 5 pesewa a day.” The light is actually quite nice. Comps well to a candle. Can even read by it if in close proximity.
Let’s ship, ship, ship!
PW: Indeed!
WA: Seriously, Patrick. I really need you guys burning on this 24/7 until we ship.
Whit swallowed hard, reconciled himself to the tougher sell of a fifteen-cedi price, and wired Patrick a down payment on the first order. Burro’s first collaboration with Greenlight Planet was officially greenlit.
It was early November; the finished lanterns wouldn’t arrive until at least December and possibly January. Meanwhile, the new phone chargers were flying off the shelf, and as a result battery inventory was dwindling. Six thousand new batteries were on order, scheduled to be flown from Hong Kong to Accra on Air Emirates, via Dubai. That was in late October—just as al-Qaeda bombs were discovered in two packages originating from Yemen, one of them at a parcel facility in Dubai. Whit groaned at the news. He knew it would mean delays getting anything through Dubai, especially thousands of powerful batteries.
But there was little time to worry about bombs in Dubai. We had a gong-gong scheduled in a village called Akorabo, another new place west of town where Nii had trained a new agent. Like the reseller selection and training process, the protocol for an initial sales gong-gong had been refined and formalized. After the new agent had been trained and was ready to sell, Nii or Rose would consult with the chief and elders to schedule a sales gong-gong, at which one of them would present the Burro offering and products to the village and give the new agent a chance to sign up clients. In advance of the gong-gong, the agent was given a stack of promotional flyers bearing the date and time of the event. He distributed the flyers to villagers, who were encouraged to hold on to them by the promise of a raffle at the gong-gong: anyone with a flyer could enter the raffle and win a valuable prize—usually a green Burro T-shirt, which (to even Whit’s surprise) was rapidly becoming a status symbol in the area around Koforidua. The gong-gong was also a chance to preview new products, like the battery saver and the lantern, and get a feel for customer demand.
On the drive out to Akorabo, Whit coached Nii on how to introduce the lantern sample. “Tell them it’s a torchlight, it hangs on a wall, you can hold it on your head—it needs to be really short. The four settings are Super-Saver, Saver, Bright, and Super-Bright. If we actually name those modes, it will help explain what we’re trying to do. So if you’re spending five cedis a month on kerosene now, you’re gonna spend one cedi with this. Keep it really crisp and on-message.”
“Perfect,” said Nii.
We rolled into Akorabo in the Tata, speakers blaring the recorded Burro pitch. The place was already humming with activity. It was market day in some larger nearby town, and residents were rushing to prepare for departure, gathering baskets and packing their wares with the usual African trifecta of yelling, laughter, and commotion. Taxis brimming with sacks of cocoa beans, looking about as mobile as overstuffed sofas, groaned into motion. Dozens of passengers squeezed into crowded tro-tros like rush-hour commuters. In the village square, cocoa beans dried on a giant section of a four-color billboard print—thick rubbery paper that had been spread out on the ground like a carpet. The print had logos for the National Football League and the ESPN television network; giant faces of thick-necked American football players grinned out from under the fermenting beans. I tried to imagine how a section of an American football billboard had found its way to this distant off-grid village in Ghana. Did someone roll it up and stuff it into a Goodwill box outside a shopping mall in St. Louis? Did a church group haul it over in checked luggage, and why? Or was it counted as a charitable tax deduction by some corporation? Maybe it was part of the “5 percent of profits donated to charity” that some companies boast about. Every scenario I could think of begged the question, What were they thinking? Clearly no one in Akorabo had paid good money for it; when Ghanaians take the time and effort to build their own cocoa drying racks, they elevate them off the ground for maximum airflow and to keep goats and chickens away. This makeshift version, lying in the dirt, was far from ideal, but as a handout it would suffice.
We gathered in the shade of a tree. Nearby, a gasoline generator was set up under a corrugated metal-roofed gazebo, next to a sign that said CHARGE YOUR PHONE HERE. This was the competition. Children wandered up, many of them wearing school uniforms embroidered with badges identifying the Akorabo Islamic Primary School and the Akorabo Islamic Kindergarten. A man explained that the town had a zongo, the Ghanaian term for an Islamic section, as well as many Christian residents. The new agent, I forget his name, was Muslim. He had gone off to round up more villagers as Whit, Nii, and I took seats on a wooden bench.
Villagers started to arrive and sit down. Soon there were forty or fifty people, men and women, waiting for the gong-gong to begin. I looked out at the crowd and noticed that lots of people were clutching cedi notes in their hands. “Whit,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “I don’t know much about sales, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say these people are ready to buy.”
“Do you think?”
Finally the gong-gong rang out and the show began. Nii ran through his standard demonstration of the phone charger (“CHAH-jing!” several people said), then pulled out the lantern sample. “Coming soon, this is our new torchlight,” he began. “It has four settings …”
But before he could go any further, a man in the crowd stood up. He was wearing a University of Georgia Bulldogs cap and a golf shirt from the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. “White man!” he said to Whit, gesturing with a handful of crumpled bank notes. “Tell him to stop talking and let us pay! We need to get to market!”
“No more talking!” said another man. “We want to pay.”
Another stood up, then another, and another, as if we had just asked which one was Spartacus. And so began a buying frenzy not seen since the Dutch tulip bubble of 1637. One aspect of British culture that Ghanaians appear to have wholly rejected is the polite queue, so we were not totally surprised at the swarm that quickly engulfed us. And yet, as we stared at the jostling crowd and the outstretched arms holding cell phones to be tested (most but not all phones worked with the Burro phone charger) and money to be collected, we realized that this was something new for Burro. “Nii, you sign up the clients while I test their phones,” said Whit hurriedly.
“I’ll make change,” I said, grabbing the cash box. Within minutes we had fallen into a rhythm like short order cooks:
“He’s got four batteries. Make that four and a charger, with a Motorola plug.”
“Adapters, adapters, I need adapters here.”
“Change for a twenty on this woman, she bought four and a charger.”
“Give this guy a micro-USB. No, that’s a mini, he needs a micro, a micro.”
“Sir, where is your slip? You need to register first.”
“It’s a Nokia, old Nokia. No can do.”
“Try the blue diode.”
“She’s back for more batteries. Nii, change her slip to eight batteries. What’s your name, ma’am?”
“I’m dyin’ here, boys, my kingdom for an adapter.”
This went on for nearly two hours. People would buy chargers and batteries, then leave and come back with more money, more phones to be tested, more orders for chargers and batteries. It didn’t even stop when a customer came running up holding his new phone charger, which was plugged into his phone and spewing black smoke, the wires melting in his hand.
“Unplug the phone!” said Whit, grabbing the charger and pulling out the hot batteries. “I’m very sorry. It must have some kind of short. Let’s get you a new one. But you can see how powerful our batteries are! Don’t worry, if your phone is damaged we will replace it.”
The man smiled. Whit looked relieved. “Note to self,” he added to Nii and me, “add a fuse to the next shipment.”
We finally ran out of chargers and D adapters, and nearly sold out all the batteries we had brought. Nii raffled off two T-shirts amid great applause, and after rounds of thank-yous and good-byes we drove off. Nii had another gong-gong scheduled that afternoon, but first we had to race home and restock.
“Well, that went well,” said Whit in the truck, with purposeful understatement. “Good job, Nii.” The pair started planning for the afternoon gong-gong, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was in the backseat, counting up the cash box. We had taken in two hundred and eighty cedis, a record. I wish Harper could have seen it.
Stop talking and let us pay!
As far as I was concerned, those six words pretty much said it all. Because while you could measure business success with any number of more sophisticated metrics (and Whit eventually would), you could get at the essence of success in that one sentence. You couldn’t get there with a handout. People will always accept handouts, because free is everyone’s favorite price. Ghanaians will dry their cocoa beans on the NFL billboard not because it is ideal, but because it is free. But when they tell you to shut up and throw money at you—that’s a pretty sure sign you’re on the right track.
Stop talking and let us pay!
It had been nearly three years since Bill Gates banged the gong-gong for creative capitalism, spurring a global discussion on helping the poor through profits that was still raging from classrooms to corner offices. In one corner of one country in the crucible of the developing world, it seemed to me that the time for talk was over.