From Silicon Valley to Swaziland, Rick & Wendy Walleigh [i love reading books .txt] 📗

Nairobi was totally different. Nairobi was analogous to New York City. There were many nice restaurants, multiple shopping centers, movie theaters, and nightclubs; and Nairobi had an edge. Like New York, it heightened one’s senses. It made my adrenaline flow. Both for self-preservation and for enjoyment, I was more alert. There was more to take in and more to worry about. There were more cars and more people, which moved faster, except in rush hour when traffic came to a standstill for miles. Although people didn’t walk as aggressively as in New York, there was a very different feel from Mbabane. Hawkers were also much more pervasive, not too aggressive, but selling everything. I was familiar with hawkers walking through rush-hour traffic selling flowers and crafts, but I was surprised to see them in Nairobi selling puppies, television antennas, coat racks, pillows, and pruning shears.

Traffic and driving were also very different from Mbabane. Nairobi driving habits were not as bad as Kathmandu or Bangalore, but they were worse than any place in the United States. The matatus (mah-tah-toos) were especially aggressive. Matatus are the small independent vans that substitute for buses and in other countries are called combis or micros. The drivers of these vans seemed to be frustrated race car drivers who felt that a moment’s delay would seriously decrease their income. They were really independent cowboys, and everyone complained about their driving style. While driving in Swaziland wasn’t too unpleasant (after learning to drive on the left), I decided to avoid driving in Nairobi. I knew I could manage Nairobi driving, but I didn’t want to. The combination of the very heavy traffic and aggressive driving would have made it quite stressful and the office and shopping were only short rides or walks from our apartment.

Another factor that influenced my decision was that riding in a taxi with a local driver seemed more secure than driving our own car. Part of Nairobi’s edginess was the backdrop of crime. Most expats didn’t personally experience this on a regular basis, but crime was always in the background. Carjackings happened. Shortly after I arrived, two women were shot dead by carjackers because they didn’t vacate their United Nations SUV quickly enough. I felt safer being in the backseat of a beat-up taxi with a local driver than being a big white guy driving a nice, new rental SUV.

The next week, the news reported another carjacking just outside Nairobi in which the occupants were murdered because apparently they resisted. I also heard that two other UN vehicles had been carjacked recently, but they didn’t make the news because no one was killed. It made me nervous about our decision to come to Nairobi, and I did consider whether I should tell Wendy not to get on the plane. However, after carefully processing my concerns, I was mostly able to put them into the background. Except, they definitely reinforced my plan not to drive in Kenya.

Helping me to process the violence were Kenyan friends who told me that these fatal carjackings were very unusual, and they suspected Somali refugees. Kenya had definitely been experiencing a recent upsurge in violence, which many people attributed to the fighting in Somalia. Many Somali refugees were fleeing to Kenya, and sometimes they brought along their military weapons. Because I had registered on the U.S. embassy website and included Wendy’s information, we both received e-mails with the embassy’s travel warning referring to the violence. I had read earlier embassy warnings and this new one wasn’t much different, so I was disturbed, but not too much. Since Wendy hadn’t seen these warnings before, she was seriously taken aback and initially very nervous. However, I was able to reassure her. I thought with a few precautions, it would be easy to minimize, but not totally eliminate, our exposure to violence. Everyone knew to take taxis wherever they went, especially at night. The area where we were living and working was quite safe to walk around during the day but, once again, not at night. Based on empirical evidence, I had already developed what I believed to be important safety rules: Rule # 1: Don’t drive around anywhere in a large new SUV. Rule # 2: Don’t drive alone in isolated areas in any kind of car. Rule # 3: If held up or carjacked, don’t resist or scream; do whatever the criminals request.

While getting accustomed to my new living conditions in Kenya, I was also developing an understanding of the Kenya TechnoServe operations. Before arriving, I had begun to form a conflicted view of the state of TechnoServe’s Kenya office from the bits and pieces of information that I had received and my earlier visit. In one sense, Kenya was a star because it had secured large amounts of funding in the past few years and had tripled in size. It also had very successful projects producing clearly demonstrable benefits for many smallholder farmers. On the other hand, I was getting the impression that the rapid growth was not necessarily under control.

After the first week, I had seen things that supported both points of view, but I didn’t have enough information to form a complete and detailed picture. However, I did think that there was an opportunity to improve the overall management of the Kenya office and to establish good management practices in Uganda. And that’s basically what I was there to do. Because of the huge growth and the new country directors, TechnoServe’s regional VP thought that the Kenya (and Uganda) office could use some support from someone like me with years of business management experience, especially in consulting, providing advice to senior executives in high-growth companies. It seemed like a perfect fit and an opportunity for me to make a significant contribution. My role was going to be very different from the direct client work I had done in Swaziland, but I was looking forward to it. I had put together my objectives, based on my job description from the regional VP, but I needed to sit down with Fred and Erastus to make sure that my ideas aligned with theirs.

After two weeks of work, I had a better understanding of TechnoServe’s operations in Kenya. I’d even started to contribute. The TechnoServe programs in Kenya were mostly doing the right things and helping people the way they were supposed to but without a consistent approach for assuring they were under control. Success relied heavily on the experience and skills of each individual program manager. Like a lot of rapidly growing companies that I’d worked with in Silicon Valley, TechnoServe had grown beyond the informal management systems and processes that worked when the staff was smaller and the projects less complex. Fred, as the new country director, readily admitted the need for more management rigor and had already taken steps to improve the situation. He knew that getting things more thoroughly under control would only enhance his ability to manage and expand the Kenya program. It was good to know he supported this direction and welcomed my help because not all personalities would have. For example, as Fred and I were reviewing the annual budget with our controller, I asked a number of specific questions, which brought up a number of issues regarding our financial situation and management practices. Fred insisted on the spot that we have an offsite session with all of our professional staff to talk about operational management including a big component on financial management, which I would develop and present.

We held the offsite meeting within a week. Fred reviewed our overall budget for Kenya and the funding pattern of our programs. He highlighted the ones that would run out during the year and the need to replenish donor funding to allow the affected teams to continue their work. I gave a presentation on program management with a heavy financial component and explained that Fred and I would be initiating more formal program management procedures with detailed monthly reviews. No one complained because everyone seemed to believe that more of this discipline and structure were needed. Donors, particularly those with a background in the private sector, were becoming increasingly attracted to the TechnoServe approach for development that emphasizes private sector business. However, these donors also demanded very rigorous management of projects and monitoring of results. As these donors contributed more and demanded more, we needed to demonstrate that we could reliably and consistently deliver the results they wanted.

As I learned more about the details of our projects in Kenya, I learned that they were typical of the type of work that TechnoServe was doing in many developing countries. TechnoServe’s tagline is “Business Solutions to Poverty,” and it is essentially a training and consulting organization. Since 80 percent of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers, TechnoServe primarily worked to improve agricultural value chains consisting of smallholder farmers, their suppliers and the buyers of their produce to raise incomes for all of them. This was accomplished by better connecting the various stages of the value chain and improving performance within each stage to produce a self-sustaining market system. In many ways, TechnoServe’s work was analogous to the consulting I had done for many high-technology companies, except we were talking about bananas, milk, cashews, pigs, and coffee instead of computers, semiconductors, and software.

For example, most smallholder farmers are not well connected to markets where their crops can ultimately be sold to consumers. Poor infrastructure, lack of transportation, and wide dispersion often prevent smallholder farmers from selling produce in any market. If a smallholder farmer can sell his produce, beyond what he needs for subsistence, the process typically involves inefficient middlemen (often multiple layers) between the farmer and the consumer. Each of these middlemen wants to make a profit, and so the farmer ends up with a very low price for his produce. Individually, smallholder farmers do not have the resources to do anything about this situation. From the other end of the value chain, it is much too difficult for supermarkets to interact directly with individual small farmers whose output is tiny, often unreliable, and possibly of low quality. In electrical engineering systems, this is known as an impedance mismatch. The solution to the problem in both electronics and economics is to design and implement an interface that doesn’t result in large losses, like those created by the middlemen.

TechnoServe has a comprehensive approach for dealing with this very common situation. First, smallholder farmers are organized into producer groups. These groups have different names and different legal structures, but all have a number of attributes in common. They all allow small farmers to mass their produce and have more direct purchasing arrangements with large buyers, such as food processors or supermarkets. This allows the farmer to have a consistent market and receive a better price for his produce since numerous middlemen margins are eliminated. The farmer group also facilitates interaction with providers of goods and services that will enhance the individual farmer’s productivity. In a simple example, TechnoServe encourages these groups to procure fertilizer and high-yielding seeds in bulk to make them more affordable to each farmer. Also, these groups can contract in quantity for services such as veterinary visits and artificial insemination for dairy cows. Beyond organizing farmers and agricultural value chains, TechnoServe frequently provides training in basic business concepts, agronomy, and the management of cooperatives.

While simple in concept, the changes promoted by TechnoServe are always challenging to implement. People all over the world, in every environment and at every intelligence and economic level resist change. However, if these types of changes are implemented, they can often double a farmer’s income. This can mean moving a farmer from the category of seriously poor (earning $1 per day or less) to working poor (earning $2 per day or more). It can mean that a