On Sunday, I leave Nairobi for Thailand, where I will spend a month visiting various beaches and diving various reefs. Of the many transitions I have documented on this blog, this one is most significant, as it is the most final. After Southeast Asia, I return to the United States for the foreseeable future, embarking on the next phase of my career as an MBA student at MIT. Right now, from the Flamingo Cafeteria in the Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, waiting for the second leg of my flight to Nairobi from Zanzibar, where I spent the last four days SCUBA diving and lounging on the beach with a new group of multicultural friends, I will begin the long process of trying to make sense of my three years working abroad in international development. By way of background for those who do not know the history of Develop Economies, I left my job as a strategy consultant in Boston three years ago to work with Kiva, a microfinance funder, in the Philippines. After the better part of a year, I moved to Ghana to work with Technoserve, a non-profit focused on market-driven economic development. Six...
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Around the world, money talks. In some places, it speaks in a whisper; in others, it is like your humble correspondent at a party after one too many dark and stoney’s – loud and obnoxious. And in Kenya, many, if not all, businesses, will at some point find themselves deciding whether or makes financial sense to pay a bribe. Corruption is not a third world vice. There are enough Swiss bank accounts and shell companies in the Cayman Islands to provide evidence for first-world malfeasance. This corruption, while destructive, is difficult to identify, because it is built into the infrastructure of the system. It is a tax code that makes no sense except to people who understand how to take advantage of it. But in some places – Kenya being one of them – corruption is in-your-face. At every turn, you might be asked for a bribe. Police set up roadblocks simply to collect “something small” from drivers. Ministers exact rent from anyone seeking to do business in their districts. From the lowest traffic cop to the highest levels of government, corruption is rife. For companies, dealing with corruption is a very real part of doing business. The system...
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After one year living in Kenya, my time here is fast approaching its end. In a few weeks, I finish work with Bridge International Academies. I am heading to Southeast Asia for a few weeks of rest and relaxation before moving to San Francisco to help my brother launch a start-up for the summer. After that, I am returning to school to pursue an MBA. And so ends my two and a half years on the road. This weekend, as I visited one of our schools, I was reminded about what a rewarding experience this has been. I have lived in three countries – the Philippines, Ghana, and Kenya – and traveled to many, many more. I have learned an incredible amount and experienced things I never imagined I would experience. Much of it is documented on this blog. But the most rewarding parts have been the work and the people. Being a part of organizations whose missions have been to make things better for others less fortunate has been a privilege. Working with the folks who commit themselves and their time to realize the vision has been rich and rewarding. This weekend, I had a chance to go...
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For months – no, years – Develop Economies has been shouting it from the rooftops. From a foreign policy perspective, the strategic value of Burma is undeniable. It is the only country in the world (besides Pakistan, which is strategic for different reasons) that shares a border with three of the four BRIC countries (Russia, India, and China). But now, in light of several major non-symbolic gestures by the ruling military junta in Burma, the U.S is finally dropping its ideological opposition to an incomplete democracy and, as of a few days ago, has decided to ease sanctions on the country. A foreign policy piece from the New York Times explains the decision: As Myanmar loosens the grip of decades of military dictatorship and improves ties with the United States, China fears a threat to a strategic partnership that offers access to the Indian Ocean and a long-sought shortcut for oil deliveries from the Middle East. With the United States reasserting itself in Asia, and an emboldened China projecting military and economic power as never before, each side is doing whatever it can to gain the favor of economically struggling, strategically placed Myanmar. The Obama administration would like a...
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As faithful readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of the Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions and decisions. Specifically, I like his deference to nuanced conditions and his emphasis on achieving the objective over claiming credit. In my neck of the woods – specifically, Libya, Somalia, and Uganda – he understands and appreciates the nuances that made previous incursions into the region unsuccessful. I think he understands that multilateralism and mutual respect can achieve more than the cavalier dependence on American exceptionalism. That is why when I read that he endorsed Jim Kim, co-founder of Partners in Health with Paul Farmer and a giant in the field of public health, for the World Bank presidency, I tipped my hat. Since its establishment, the executive positions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been held by an American and a European, respectively. Former French finance minister Christine LaGarde recently replaced Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn after – in one of the great ironies in the history of the institution – he was arrested for allegedly assaulting a Guinean woman. So when Robert Zoellick announced he would not re-run for the top spot at the World...
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The other day I talked about the need to really draw your reader in with a short anecdote about something that could never happen in their lives right now, but could if they did what you are doing. Another key to enhancing the reader experience is to include language that makes your movements seem just a little bit crazy. Look at what Levin does in this paragraph: So I hitched a van ride from Puerta Princesa to El Nido, a tiny, dense warren of dive shops that clings to Bacuit Bay in Palawan. What I found, after six hours swerving around goats along a dirt road, was a bangka launching pad to the region’s spectacular islands. This is genius. Hitching a van ride could be one of several things. It could be sitting in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of Filipino cockfighters on the way to a bloody death match, or it could be the driver from the hotel holding a sign outside the airport that says “DEVELOP ECONOMIES.” The fact is that it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the van was hitched and the road was filled with goats apparently unphased by...
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As a generalization, people who travel are interesting. Not interesting in the sense that they are unique or intriguing (sometimes that is the case), but that they often tell good stories because they have fresh experiences to draw from. And within the broader fraternity of travelers, the people who detach themselves from the grid and opt for the most self-indulgent of all pursuits – living on a boat, for example – are really the ones who are out there doing it. Lately, some fortunate journalists from the New York Times have managed to convince their editors to allow them to do just that, and still get paid for their troubles. And, in the spirit of the meritocratic nature of the Internet, I am going to give a lesson on travel writing. These two articles – “Out at Sea, Relaxing in the Philippines” and “Cambodia’s Sweet Spot” – are basically cubicle fantasies, subtly acknowledging that the whole purpose of the piece is to make you wish that you were there and not where you happen to be at the moment. In the first, the author takes a five-day sailing trip from El Nido to Coron. Faithful readers of this blog will remember...
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On Thursday, I shadowed a colleague of mine as he conducted a survey of one of the slum communities where we have several schools. For the last few months, I have been analyzing data about the communities where we build schools and understand where demand is highest. Having spent months looking at scatter plots, I hoped the trip would provide better context and illuminate some of the nuances hidden within the data. As it turned out, the trip did more than that – it exposed me to the worst poverty I have ever seen. I met Dickens, a research associate with the company, near the Hilton Hotel in downtown Nairobi. After a quick breakfast, we walked a half hour through markets, past the bus station where a group of al-Shabaab sympathizers recently threw four grenades into a crowd of people, killing four and wounding dozens more. We picked up a matatu heading to Lunga Lunga, the densely-populated slum in the industrial area near the airport, arriving at around 9 in the morning. This is the same slum where a leaking gas line exploded, killing 75 people. Once you step away from the main road and down into the slums, you...
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Perhaps the most novel and amusing aspect of living abroad is getting around. In the United States, I spent two years walking through the Copley Square mall to avoid the dismal cold of Boston winters. When I moved back with my parents to save money for my Kiva Fellowship, I parked my car at Norwood Central and took the commuter rail into Back Bay Station each morning, and back again in the evening. I actually enjoyed riding the rails for those three months, since it was my first and, to-date, my only taste of suburban work-a-day living. Every morning, armed with a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a day-old Wall Street Journal discarded by my father, I boarded the train and appreciated the fact that I was a commuter. And, unlike my fellow riders, I didn’t have to worry about mortgage payments and other of adulthood’s reality checks. I brought this same zeal with me to the countries I’ve lived and traveled. And, when it comes to getting around, Africa and Asia do it right. I am not quite sure where transportation innovation comes from, but the evolutionary pathway took a radical turn at some point, leaving Asia with the...
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Today, I work for a company that is trying to establish a floor of education for every child in the world, regardless of income status. Children should have access to a basic education, regardless of socioeconomic status. And what motivates people at this company is the very real prospect of achieving just that. We have 60 schools today. In a year, we will have countless more. If this experiment works, every child, no matter how poor, will have access to a decent education for cheap. That is what drives people. So when I heard about a homeless woman who was arrested for “stealing education” in Bridgeport, it upset me. The ironically-named Stamford Advocate has the story: NORWALK — A homeless woman from Bridgeport who enrolled her 6-year-old son at a Norwalk elementary school has become the first in the city to be charged with stealing more than $15,000 for the cost of her child’s education. Tonya McDowell, 33, whose last known address was 66 Priscilla St., Bridgeport, was charged Thursday with first-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny for allegedly stealing $15,686 from Norwalk schools. She was released after posting a $25,000 bond. McDowell’s babysitter, Ana Rebecca Marques,...
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