Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  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 gli
mpse 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.

  4. Strict Standards

  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.”