Meanwhile, Whit needed to find Ghanaian college graduates with an enterprising spirit. He had learned when publishing a help wanted ad that he could eliminate most of the idle opportunists by stating that the office had no air-conditioning. The résumés that flooded his inbox showed alarming job mobility: people tended to change jobs every six months. “I think a few years ago Barclays must have offered some sales position to anyone in Ghana who could speak English and wear a tie—or a short skirt,” said Whit. “It’s like they hired everyone, and paid them literally no salary; it must have been all commission. So of course they all quit, and now every résumé in the country says former sales rep at Barclays.”
Interviews could be surreal. “I went over to Polytech and asked a professor about hiring some electrical engineering grads,” Whit told me. “I said I’m not looking for rocket scientists, just someone with some technical aptitude who can help keep the batteries charged and recognize bad ones. You wouldn’t believe some of the people he sent over. The first guy was this big dude; he comes in and we explain the battery offer. To make sure he understands it, I ask him to pretend he’s pitching the batteries to Rose. So the first thing he asks her is, ‘Where are you from?’ You know, people here can be sensitive about their ethnic background in different contexts, so she was a little taken aback. She says, ‘I live in Koforidua.’ He says, ‘But where are you from?’ She says, ‘Well, I grew up in Accra.’ He keeps pressing: ‘But what language do you speak?’
“She finally says, ‘I’m Fante. Why does it matter?’ He says he wants to know what language to do it in. She says, ‘Just use Twi.’
“So he starts out and devolves into this harangue about the program, how it will never work because people can’t afford the batteries, on and on. So I say, ‘You know, you raise some good points, and these are things we are all discussing on an ongoing basis as a team, but right now, when you’re trying to sell Rose the batteries, this is not the place for that.’
“Then I ask him if he knows how a multimeter works. He says yes, so I hand him the meter and a radio and I say, ‘How would you measure the power this radio consumes?’ He takes the device, and Max, it was like voodoo. He’s just passing his hands over it, and playing with the knobs and crossing the wires; he obviously doesn’t know the first thing about it and doesn’t seem to realize that I do. He thinks he’s fooling me with magic or something. It was fucking laughable. I mean, why didn’t he just say, ‘I don’t know how to use one but I’m a fast learner and I’m sure you can teach me quickly.’”
Even when Whit found job candidates who were honest and enthusiastic about the company and its mission, training required huge reserves of patience, with daily lessons that emphasized the basics. For example, the notion that emails benefit from subject lines describing their content came as a revelation to much of his staff. And all three of his employees needed to learn how to drive. After taking formal classes (paid for by Whit) and getting learner’s permits, Kevin, Rose, and Adam required hours of practice behind the wheel; it fell to Whit and Jan to fill in the skills.
One day, on a harrowing trip to Accra, Rose (in three separate incidents) hit a Barclays Bank, ran a red light, and brushed back a traffic police-lady. “Well, she was in my way!” said Rose in self-defense about the last infraction.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Whit calmly. “You still can’t hit her.”
Rose might have hit another pedestrian had Whit not reached for the emergency brake. “Rose, when I say stop, stop,” he said. “Stop means stop. Right away.”
“Am I doing that bad?” Rose asked.
“You’re doing fine,” said Whit. “You only hit one person and one building in two hours; that’s one incident per hour, so I’ll try to keep your missions under an hour.”
“Oh, you are so bad!” she said.
“Just watch your clutch. It stays all the way in or all the way out, not in between.”
2. Thinking for Yourself
“So when are you going to interview me?”
Small of frame and often quiet, Rose could easily be mistaken for a shy person; in fact she was confident and poised. She spoke with an inflective tone that turned every sentence into a challenge, which could seem jauntily flirtatious, in a romantic-comedy kind of way, or playfully mischievous—a fickle streak that was also reflected in her personal appearance. While she usually wore her hair braided into fine cornrows, sometimes she coiffed it into a straight perm, so one never knew what to expect. And contrary to the conservatively dressed women we encountered in the villages, Rose mostly wore blue jeans so improbably tight that I wondered if machinery were required to don them. She was smart, and not unpleasant company on a drive, so long as she was in the passenger seat. It was fall and we were traveling, the two of us, to set up a gong-gong in a Krobo village an hour northeast of Koforidua.
“What do you want me to ask you?” I replied.
“You should ask me about school.”
“Okay, shoot. Tell me about school.” I already knew that Rose was a 2009 graduate of Accra’s Ashesi University College, a private four-year business and computer science school, with a strong liberal arts core, that emphasized entrepreneurship and ethics. Ashesi was founded in 2002 by Patrick Awuah, a Ghanaian graduate of Swarthmore and Berkeley’s Hass School of Business (and like Whit, a former Microsoft manager, although the two did not know each other then). Ashesi means “beginning” in Twi, and Awuah’s goal was to begin by training students as good citizens and critical thinkers, reasoning that success in business would naturally follow. And if his school could also train the next generation of political leaders, so much the better.
“The whole idea of liberal arts, thinking for yourself, analyzing, not cheating on exams—it’s very un-Ghanaian,” said Rose. She went on to describe a depressingly cynical system of higher education, in which credit is contingent on bribing or sleeping your way into favor with key professors. Perhaps she was exaggerating; perhaps academic corruption is more the exception than the rule in Ghana, I don’t know. But based on Whit and Jan’s experience sorting through stunningly inept job applications from Ghanaian college graduates, I was giving Rose the benefit of the doubt. Then, in 2010, a sex-for-grades scandal erupted at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the country’s second-largest college. Apparently Rose was not exaggerating.
“How did you end up at Ashesi?” I asked her.
“I didn’t want to go to a big school like Legon,” she said, using the shorthand location name of the University of Ghana, one of seven public universities in the country. Legon was founded in 1948 as an affiliate of the University of London and now has forty-two thousand students.* “And I didn’t like the national system where your major is determined by your test scores, regardless of your interests.”
Ashesi, which currently has about four hundred students, appealed for its promise of individual attention. “Unfortunately it is very expensive,” Rose said. Tuition ran more than three thousand dollars a year, a fortune by Ghanaian standards. Rose’s family is not poor but hardly affluent—the Ghanaian version of middle class, such as it exists, which is to say lower middle class. Her father, Francis, works for an NGO that supports youth groups; he travels often to London and to southern and eastern Africa. Her mother, Becky, is a caterer, preparing Ghanaian specialties for weddings, funerals, and other social events. The family (Rose has a younger sister, Gracelove, who is studying accounting and fashion design) lives in Osu, the central business and shopping district of Accra, where Rose grew up in a modest two-room home behind a block wall on a narrow one-way street. A childhood in Osu is the equivalent of an American kid’s growing up in midtown Manhattan. In much the same way as New York kids seem to know everything (or at least think they do), Ghanaians from the streets of Osu carry themselves with assurance.
Rose was actually born in Winneba, the large fishing town on the central coast and the easternmost stronghold of the Fante ethnic group. In colonial times the Fante ma
intained close relationships, in every sense of the word, with the Brits. Fante tend to be lighter-skinned than other Ghanaians, and they often have British surnames (as in Rose Dodd). President Mills is Fante.*
Rose managed to get about three quarters of her first-year tuition covered by financial aid, but she still needed to come up with eight hundred dollars, which she earned by working in a real estate office owned by a family friend. “The second year was the hardest,” said Rose. “I did not have the tuition by the start of the semester, and the rule was if you did not have your tuition you could not get textbooks. So I had to study all year in the library. I still got all A’s, and I told the school, ‘I deserve a scholarship because I got A’s even with no textbooks.’” The school agreed, and in 2007 Rose became the first recipient of an annual twelve-hundred-and-fifty-dollar scholarship in honor of a beloved professor named Princess Awoonor-Williams, a development economist and head of the business department who had received her own doctorate from Howard University.
“Turn here,” said Rose. We bounced up a dirt track that climbed steeply, and when it turned into a path, we left the Tata and walked the last few hundred yards to the high village of Djamam. Along the path, delicate Chinese lantern flowers, drying in the sun, hung from rangy bushes over our heads—Ghana’s version of fall foliage. Wild begonias, pink and blue, crowded along the shoulders of the path like seedling racks at a nursery. Behind us, the land dropped off and the sky opened to a cyclorama of Lake Volta, its water stretching to the horizon and pulsing like a mirage in the heat. For a minute I imagined a distant human ancestor standing in this spot and enjoying the same view, although he would have seen a wide, branching river and not the man-made lake. Thanks to a unique geology that created rich fossil beds, eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley has become ground zero in the study of human evolution, but man may have also taken his first steps here in western Africa.
“So what are your plans for the future?” I asked Rose as we tramped along.
She laughed. “I have so many ideas. My problem is I get bored. I want to clean up the beaches of Accra, but not as a charity. You see these groups come in and do a big cleanup, but a year later it’s covered in filth again. I want to do it in a way that keeps them clean forever. So people have to see clean beaches as a benefit.”
“You mean tourism?”
“Yes, that could be part of it.”
Indeed, with its miles of sandy coastline, formidable slave castles, animal reserves, friendly citizens, and English language, Ghana has the natural and cultural resources to support a first-class tourist industry. The potential is there, but the problem always boils down to infrastructure. The country needs better roads, safer transport, Western-style hotels and restaurants, cultural attractions that are well maintained, and yes—beaches that aren’t vast public toilets. Rose talked about starting a targeted tour bus service that takes visitors directly from the airport in Accra to the slave castles and the national game park up north; currently there is no easy way to link those sites, and existing public transport, while dirt cheap, is unreliable, unsafe, and downright shocking to Western sensibilities. She also envisions organizing cultural homestays in small villages, and renovating the few tired old beach resorts that do exist.
“Do you think you’ll get bored with Burro?” I ask.
“Not now, because it’s a challenge; every day is different. If it really becomes successful, then I might want to try something else.”
“Spoken like a true entrepreneur.”
She laughed again. “I like working for Whit.”
Left unspoken was the alternative, which for a young woman in Ghana often means working for lecherous creeps. Ask just about any Ghanaian working woman and you will hear stories of bosses who simply assume sex is part of the job description. Indeed, help wanted ads in Ghana often call out young ages and female gender as a requirement; some go so far as to call for “attractive” candidates. Like some cheesy porn movie, engaging in sex can even be part of the “interview” process, but it doesn’t stop there. In late 2010, a story broke about a junior banking rep who came out with some colleagues (all anonymously) to state that the bank set impossible sales targets and that they were expected to sleep with potential major clients to secure their deposits.
The harassment often starts with flirtatious talk and moves on to work dinners, out-of-town travel to conferences (Ghanaian enterprises seem to spend much of their time conferencing, which if nothing else keeps the hotel business humming), late-night work in the room, and so on, with dreary predictability.
A related issue is the secret world of some Western aid workers and businessmen who, under the pretense of being in Africa to help poor people, are more pointedly interested in helping themselves to African women. While not as awful as the criminal pedophiles like the American “businessman” whose arrest I described in the previous chapter, these more garden-variety creeps still rate pretty high up on the icky scale. Whit and I would occasionally run into these malingerers—middle-aged white men living semipermanently in lower-class hotels around Accra, where they run businesses of questionable efficacy and spend their evenings around large dinner tables conducting their own version of social entrepreneurship with much younger locals. I’m thinking this subject doesn’t come up at international conferences on developing-world business opportunities, but based on our observations, the phenomenon is quite real.
The chief of Djamam had traveled, so we greeted an elder who was shaving rattan fronds into strips with a sharp knife, preparing to weave baskets. Rose explained the plan for the gong-gong, speaking in Twi and some Krobo she had been learning, then concluded in English: “So you understand it? There is a one-cedi deposit with each battery. Do you think people will still buy them?”
“I am telling you, they will come,” said the elder. “Do not fear.”
We walked back to the truck, past huts plastered with faded campaign posters emblazoned with a rooster—the symbol of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), founded by Nkrumah himself in 1949 but now a perennial third-place finisher in national elections.* “These people all vote,” said Rose wearily. I think she was tired from all the walking in the hot sun. “If I were them, I would not vote.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it doesn’t matter. Nothing ever changes for them.”
3. An Akan Proverb
On Wednesday mornings we had a staff meeting, which lasted about an hour and was run by Jan, following a printed agenda put together by Rose. Jan passed out sheets of colored graphs and bar charts, culled from the Fodder database, that illustrated battery rentals and business growth. “We’re at one thousand sixty-four batteries with a hundred and fifty-seven clients on the new program,” Jan reported one day in August. “Twenty percent are on grid.” Gaining new customers on the electrical grid was significant because it suggested the business could work in cities as well as remote villages.
“That’s great, Jan,” said Whit. “I’m wondering, what’s the best way to get at revenue per battery? It feels like something we should report. Any idea how that’s running right now?”
“It ain’t pretty,” replied Jan. “July revenue was thirty-one pesewa per battery.”
“Ouch,” said Whit. “It’s hard to see how that sustains our business, long-term.” At one point he had come up with a figure of fifty pesewa per battery per month as a bottom line. Calculating that the Koforidua branch could support at least three hundred agents if the routes were designed well, and figuring an average of one hundred batteries per agent, a fifty pesewa average would yield revenue of fifteen thousand cedis per month—a real business, in other words.
“Well, remember, we’re giving away lots of free coupon books to chiefs, queen mothers, and youth leaders in the new villages,” Jan countered. “So we’re doing a lot of promotions right now, and that’s skewing the number.”
“Can we just run a trailing thirty-day so we don’t have to wait until the end of every month for an
update?” asked Whit. “That will give us a meaningful number we can constantly track.”
“What does that mean?” asked Kevin.
Whit and Jan together explained the concept of a trailing thirty-day average, and I could see a flash of insight in Kevin’s eyes; he got it right away, but apparently no one in his previous business career had ever bothered to explain it.
“Speaking of promotions, we need to send another all-agent text message,” said Jan.* “We’re running a four-coupon bonus promotion till the end of September and giving agents an extra cedi for every client they convert from the old program.”
“I can do that,” said Whit. “Is the agent contact info in Fodder up-to-date?”
“As far as we know,” said Jan. “Okay, let’s move on to our monthly goals. We have twelve days remaining toward our goal of twenty new agents in August. So far we’ve added eleven. How’s that going?”
Kevin and Rose detailed their plans for adding several new agents by Friday.
“How many of the first agents have converted their clients to the new program?” asked Whit.
“There are still many more to go,” said Kevin. “Only two of twenty-six have been converted so far. Jonas and Yirenchi.”
“What’s our goal for total conversion—end of September?” said Whit.
“Right,” said Rose.
“So we need to stay focused on that while also training new agents.”
“And we need to make sure the new agents are signing new clients,” said Jan. “I think client growth should be our main goal in October, and we’ll need to come up with some new promotion. Now I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the coupon inventory. Those coupon books are like money, and they need to be under lock and key. I created a database for managing the inventory, but Adam, you’ll need to oversee it.”
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