* Shortly after World War II, Union Carbide perfected the alkaline battery (sold under its Eveready name), which lasts five to eight times as a long as a carbon zinc battery.
* The rapid growth of for-profit microfinance banks has sparked controversy, with critics citing the potential for exploitation of the poor. In 2011, Yunus himself was forced to resign as managing director of Grameen Bank, in what may have been a politically motivated sacking.
* Rawlings is half-white, the son of an immigrant Scottish pharmacist and his Ghanaian mistress.
* Ghana’s tribal languages, perhaps eight thousand years old, are members of the Niger-Congo linguistic family, which predominates from Senegal to Tanzania and includes virtually all of the African equatorial belt.
* In fairness, Bono himself has said as much. In an April 2010 op-ed piece in the New York Times, he reported on a recent pan-African visit to observe entrepreneurship in action. “Smart aid can be a reforming tool,” he wrote, “demanding accountability and transparency, rewarding measurable results, reinforcing the rule of law, but never imagining for a second that it’s a substitute for trade, investment or self-determination.” He recounted a meeting in Ghana with the Sudanese-born cell phone mogul Mo Ibrahim, who told him, “Ghana needs support in the coming years, but in the not-too-distant future it can be giving aid, not receiving it; and you, Mr. Bono, can just go there on your holidays.”
* Whit later laughed at my naiveté; Africa is the Wild West of counterfeit products. “I don’t care what they say on the soles,” he said. “I guarantee you those boots are made in China. They are, however, probably better than the ones made in Italy.”
* Lithium ion batteries like those used in laptops and cell phones are lightweight, powerful, and have no memory issues. But they are expensive and fragile, requiring complex circuitry. Moreover, they are not compatible with the huge installed base of devices owned by Burro customers.
† An electricity primer: Amps are a measure of current, often compared to the amount of water that flows through a hose; the larger the hose, the more water flows. Volts are a measure of force, equivalent to the pressure of water in a hose. Amps times volts equals watts, which is the measure of power.
* Although the national currency had been revalued to account for inflation more than a year ago (the new cedi was equivalent to ten thousand old cedis), many Ghanaians still expressed monetary amounts in the old system. The old currency had the advantage of not requiring knowledge of decimal points, since a cedi was the smallest denomination. Under the new system, a cedi was divided into one hundred pesewa.
* The burn rate included salaries for the three Ghanaian employees plus operating expenses. It did not include Whit and Jan’s travel expenses, or Jan’s salary, all of which were paid from the U.S. holding company.
* Roughly 90 percent of agents were asking Burro to hold their commission for a month or more. In that sense the company was functioning as a rudimentary bank for agents with no other savings account. Stashing money with Burro prevented theft and eliminated the cultural pressure to share earnings with extended family—everyone from siblings to cousins. Burro did not pay interest but did not charge any fees—unlike the informal local savings banks known as susus, which charged customers for the service of saving their money. In the developing world, this is called earning negative interest.
* Chop is the Ghanaian slang for food.
* Quinine, an alkaloid derived from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, has been used for centuries as a somewhat effective treatment for malaria.
* Whit finally did get malaria, resulting in feverlike symptoms for several days. Treatment was a drug made from wormwood that has been proven to cure the disease.
* In January, Harper, Whit, and I visited the Gramophone Records Museum and Research Centre in Cape Coast—basically an archive of some fifty thousand Ghanaian highlife recordings, mostly on old 78-rpm discs. The museum’s director, Kwame Sarpong, showed us a record from the sixties that celebrated Nkrumah; scratched across its surface in yellow paint were the letters NTBB—Not To Be Broadcast.
* Maya Angelou worked there as an administrator in the renowned School of Music and Drama from 1963 to 1966. She also performed in school plays.
* The Fante people speak an Akan tongue similar to Twi and getting more so in today’s mobile society. At this point the two languages share many words.
* Nkrumah’s daughter Samia was elected a member of parliament for the CPP in 2008.
* Whit and Jan initially saw texting as a great way to communicate with agents, since virtually all of them had cell phones. But it turned out that the messages were relatively expensive (the price added up when you had a hundred or so recipients). And many agents, especially those living in villages with poor or no cell coverage, kept their phones turned off until they needed to make a call from a better signal area. Also, while Burro agents had to be functionally literate, few had ever used text messaging and most didn’t even know how to access messages on their phones.
* This did not happen, and the sleeves had to be trimmed by hand in Burro’s office.
* An American-run, Hong Kong–based company that helps Western companies source and manage manufacturing partners in China. Burro’s start-up operation was an insignificantly small—if not actually bothersome—client for Three-Sixty, but Whit had a strong relationship with the company from his game manufacturing days, so they were basically doing him a favor while placing a long-odds bet this crazy Cranium guy might really crack the nut on expanding developing-country markets for a range of manufactured items.
* Computers were nonexistent; most government offices, at least in the provinces, conducted business on paper.
* Whit has reflected that Ghana’s primitive retail environment and nightmarish infrastructure has expanded the definition of an impulse purchase. In other words—yes, you do buy that nightstand or that puppy on the side of the road because it’s so much easier than even contemplating “shopping” for one in some later all-day episode.
* Abacost: from the French à bas le costume or “down with the suit,” referring to Western-style business suits that were rejected during the African independence movement as patronizingly colonial, especially by venal dictators like Zaire’s Mobutu. Oddly enough, the abacost is in fact a suit, but a distinctly African version with short sleeves and large external pockets. Ghana’s President Mills wears them almost exclusively.
* As virtually all buildings in Ghana are made of reinforced concrete—wood is used only for doors and window trim—unfinished structures can sit exposed to the weather for years with little or no harm.
* Some of them held up quite well, others seemed to fail prematurely.
* Agents were now being called resellers because it more accurately reflected their independent status as required by Ghanaian tax and labor law.
* Ghanaians keep their cars surgically clean, a Sisyphean obsession considering the country’s sloppy roads. I view it as an extension of the Big Man conceit; very few people own cars or even drive company cars, and those who do take great pride in their good fortune.
* Subsequent fieldwork by Rose suggested that Stays Strong was as potentially ambiguous as More Power. She convinced Whit that a better slogan was Brighter/ Louder, which also helped justify the battery’s shorter duration.
* “IC” in this context means integrated circuit. Whit had no idea what she meant by “professional IC.”
* Alec and Nii eventually obtained national census data from the Ghana Statistical Service that listed the year 2000 population of every village in the country. Along with the phone book–sized volumes (organized, less than optimally, in a single alphabetic listing for the whole nation) came a rough disc version that Whit was able to import into Microsoft Access and integrate into Fodder. While the data contained no geographic coordinates, Burro could now narrow down potential sales areas within districts and sort by population—a “game changer,” as Whit called it.
* Jargon decoder: LFP, for lithium iron (ferrous) phosphate, is an emerging-technology chargeable battery that is much more stable (i.e., noncombustible) than standard lithium-ion batteries, with a longer life cycle. Whit was talking about designing a device that could eventually use such a battery as they became more cost-effective, while also working with his current NiMH double-A’s.
† Power LEDs, also known as high-power LEDs or HPLEDs, are driven by high currents and are extremely bright. They are also expensive, in part because they require special heat-dissipation elements.
* Ghanaian cell phone shops also repair phones on site, usually the same day and for a few dollars. I try to imagine the tattooed Gen Y’ers who staff cell phone stores in the U.S identifying and replacing a faulty microchip on a printed circuit board, but I give up.
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