Two weeks ago, when we were in Mombasa, Susan, a friend from DC who was visiting, was walking along the beach and a young man stopped her.
“Where are you from?”
“America”
“How’s our brother doing?”
“Um, who’s that?”
“Obama!”

Susan was shocked. How did a Kenyan beach wanderer know about a contender for the Democratic nomination in the U.S.? I’m sure many of you know this, but Barak Obama’s father was born in Kenya and Barak visited Nairobi and his family’s village last summer.

My Kenyan friends and colleagues have frequently told me about their excitement about the prospect of Obama becoming president. They’re optimistic about the assistance Kenya might receive should the U.S. elect “a Kenyan” and tell me how they hope they would be able to get visas for the U.S. if Barak were president.

In the shuttle on the way to work last week, I was reading a New Yorker article about Obama. The first page of the print-out included a small, grainy, black and white photo of Barak. My colleague Rhodah recognized his face and said, “You’re reading about Obama? I hope you will vote for him!”

Kenyan elections will be held in November and people talk constantly about politics. They are amazingly well-informed about local politics, as well as international politics (or at least what is happening in the U.S.). While I should no longer find it surprising, I still think it’s significant that Kenyans follow the Democratic primaries in the U.S. while most Americans don’t know the name of the Kenyan president, or any African president for that matter.

New Yorker article about Obama

Last weekend I went to Mombasa to celebrate Elana’s birthday. Susan, a friend from DC, was visiting and we were joined by Stella, another friend. The weekend was a relaxing one at the beach with activities including swimming, sunbathing, snorkeling, and enjoying the Mombasa nightlife. The beach in Mombasa is beautiful and the resorts that line the coast north of the city are spectacular. Because it is so accessible (via a discount airline, train, and busses), Mombasa is a popular weekend destination for people from Nairobi. Photos from our weekend in Mombasa in my web gallery.

One of the striking things about Mombasa is the diversity of its people. For centuries, immigrants from the Middle East and India have come to Mombasa and have set-up shop as traders and business owners. Many families have now been in Mombasa (and throughout Kenya) for four or five generations and are thoroughly established as Kenyans.

I don’t have much experience with Middle Eastern immigrants in Kenya, but have been struck by the strength of the Indian community. Certain neighborhoods in Nairobi are predominantly Indian and Indians (referred to as Asians) have a reputation for being insolated. Perhaps most striking is that even four of five generations later, Kenyan “Asians” speak with Indian accents.

Indians in Kenya have built large businesses, made significant contributions to the local economy, and employed many many people. Perhaps because of their success, they face discrimination and it is not uncommon to hear disparaging remarks. On her way from the Mombasa airport, Stella’s taxi driver casually remarked, “Asians are buying up all the houses on the beach. They now own everything around here.”

I think about how Indian Kenyans are able to be so entrepreneurial and successful in starting businesses in a place where so much bureaucracy and bribery is required to get anything done. How can their example serve as a motivating one, rather than cause resentment? Many Kenyans are also very entrepreneurial but lack resources to grow their businesses beyond the roadside fruit stand. What needs to happen so they can succeed in starting and building enterprises which can also make large contributions to the economic growth of this country?

This video interview is with Winifred, my colleague Rachel's nanny and housekeeper. Winifred lives with Rachel's family, takes care of her children when Rachel and her husband are at work, and cooks and cleans for the family.

Winifred has her own baby who lives with Winifred's mother, allowing Winifred to work and provide for her family. In Kenya, it's common for middle and upper class families to employ full-time nannies and housekeepers. Many times, these women leave their husbands and children "up country" and go home on a monthly basis to see them.

While this is certainly not an ideal situation, employment options are limited for poorly-educated single mothers like Winifred and working as a nanny will allow her to provide basic provisions for her daughter.

Meet Winifred in this video.

Last week I had the opportunity to spend two days in a Maasai village in Tanzania. I had gone to Arusha with Eric and Marc from Acumen Fund to spend the weekend with Keely and take some time to meet Tanzanian farmers that ABE works with to grow artemisia. I had mentioned to my colleagues in Arusha that Eric and I would love an opportunity to spend the night with the farmers, but hadn’t heard back so I thought it wasn’t going to happen. Fortunately, they had read the email and had been thinking about how to satisfy this strange request. After assuring my colleagues that we understood that we would not have a real bed to sleep on and that we knew the village would lack modern conveniences, my colleagues agreed to make arrangement for us to stay with a Maasa family about an hour outside Arusha.

We spent the day interviewing and video-taping a group of 15 farmers who work together to grow artemisia. Each of them told stories about how their income has increased as a result of the new crop and how they can now afford to sell their children to school and put metal roofs on their houses. They can now even afford to buy the malaria medication that the plant they are growing is used to make.

At one point, we stopped to take a soda break and noticed that the farmers we all talking about us and laughing. I asked my colleagues to translate and found out that they were excitedly spreading the news that Eric and I would be spending the night with them.

That evening, the family ceremoniously slaughtered a goat in our honor as we sat around a fire sitting on short three-legged stools chatting with my colleagues from ABE and the farmers. One of the farmers asked why we were visiting them in Tanzania and Eric and I did our best to explain our work and our relation to them. We explained that we were all connected – Eric (Acumen Fund) has the money which it gives to Jocelyn (ABE in Nairobi) who in turn gives the money to Peter (ABE in Arusha) who gives it to the Maasai farmers in exchange for their artemisia. The smiles on the faces of our hosts when they realized that we are working together and that the supply chain of which they are an integral piece stretches around the world, was unforgettable.

As I mentioned in my last blog post about ABE, it still blows my mind that ABE’s scale and reach in East Africa is so large. That this company is able to work with thousands of small-scale Tanzanian farmers (including this group of Maasai) is incredible, as they have had to overcome so many logistical and infrastructural challenges to make this happen. Through our interviews and by getting to know these farmers, Eric and I were certainly able to see the social impact on the lives of these people and truly feel inspired by our work with ABE. Stay tuned for the video that we are making for the company.

Until then, check out this short video I developed about what I’m doing at ABE and these photos from my trip to Tanzania.

Read Eric's account of our visit

My friend, Maryanne, recommended her hairdresser, Daniel, and I made an appointment. I expected the salon at the Holiday Inn to be swanky, but I did not expect my hairdresser to be Swiss. When I met him, I figured he had come here with someone or had grown up in Kenya. However, I was surprised to learn that he applied to a classified add in Zurich recruiting European hairdressers for a Nairobi salon.

My first instinct was to think that the expat and mzungu influence was so strong in Kenya that not only do development agencies import talent from abroad, but this mentality has extended to hairdressers. I brought this up with another friend, Elana, who had another perspective. Elana goes to an Ethiopian hairdresser in Nairobi because the woman’s hair is like hers. We want confidence that the person who cuts our hair knows how to handle it. We’re all vain in some ways and hair is an important piece of the way we look. Elana thought it was natural to seek a stylist who has experience with people whose hair is like ours. While I still can’t imagine seeing an Italian hairdresser in Bolivia or India, perhaps seeing Daniel in Kenya is not as disturbing as I initially thought.

Last week I traveled to Nakuru, 3 hours north of Nairobi, to interview farmers ABE is working with and film them for a video project Eric and I are doing. While I knew that ABE was working with 7,500 farmers throughout East Africa, the scale of our operations was much more impressive than I expected. In my work with Scojo and SHEF, I learned how difficult it is to achieve scale and develop a network of agents (producers, distributors, entrepreneurs, etc.). It takes many social enterprises years to build a network of 200 or even 1,000 agents. As I passed farm after farm growing artemisia and ran into farmers working with our company, I wondered how ABE was able to achieve this scale in only two years.

What can other social enterprises learn from ABE’s example? My sense is that a primary advantage ABE had was an enormous influx of capital (in the form of a loan) from Novartis who pushed the company to expand rapidly. With millions of dollars up-front, ABE could open country offices, hire extension workers, purchase vehicles, and procure the inputs necessary to enable the farmers to begin growing artemisia.

Second, the company’s founders and directors knew they had to reach scale to succeed. A small producer of artemisinin was not going to sell its products to the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and a measured approach to growth would not work. Therefore, they scaled quickly because that was the only option.

Third, artemisia offers returns to farmers that are far greater to what they previously saw growing maize, wheat, beans, or other crops. Without having to work much harder, farmers could double or quadruple their incomes. This was an easy conversion to convince farmers to try and farmers were encouraged to continue using some of their land to continue growing the staple crops.

Finally, ABE has seen that once the early adopters in a region do well, the followers are eager to jump onboard. Other models, like Scojo and SHEF, can only take on one entrepreneur in an area, limiting the bandwagon phenomenon that ABE could take advantage of.

Some of these factors are particular to ABE’s case, but I do believe it can be viewed as a good example of rapid growth in the social enterprise space. I would love to hear comments from others about what we can learn from this example and how it could be adapted to other organizations.

More photos from my trip to Nakuru

I had an opportunity to interview the children of my colleagues, Lisa and Rachel. I started with one-on-one interviews with the kids which were a bit awkward beacuse they were camera-shy at first. By the time I got the three of them together for this interview, they were much more gregarious.

By five, Kenyan kids speak at least three languages fluently (English, Swahili, and their family's tribal language). These kids spoke English with each other and at school so, as you can see, their English is perfect.

Meet Adam, Melissa, and Leon.

More photos of the kids at the end of this album.

We were in Amboseli enjoying our safari when Jacqueline called Eric to tell him to rush back to Nairobi the next day to meet Tom and Ann Friedman at the airport. Apparently, after several years of trying to get Tom interested in writing about Acumen Fund, Jacqueline was finally able to track him down on vacation in Tanzania and pique his interest in a piece about social investing and Advanced Bio-Extracts (the Acumen Fund investee where I am working).

Of course as soon as we heard that Tom Friedman was coming, we all shrieked with excitement as we tried to figure out what the schedule would look like and who would attend the meeting. Fortunately, I was able to negotiate a seat at the table as an ABE team member.

I drove to the ABE artemisinin processing facility in Athi River with the CEO, Patrick and a shareholder, Rob. In the car we discussed what Patrick’s main talking points would be and I shared as much as I knew about Tom Friedman. About fifteen minutes after our arrival, Eric, Nthenya, Tom, and Ann pulled up and we began our one hour meeting.

Tom was charming during the meeting and started off with, “I believe the pessimists are usually right, but I know that all positive change in this world has come from the optimists. So, I’ve decided to throw my cards in with them and am in the good news business.” He was interested in learning about ABE’s project, seeing the factory, and hearing about how we have been able to secure social financing from organizations like Acumen Fund.

I haven’t had many run-ins with famous people, so having an opportunity to meet and then correspond with Tom (to provide additional information about the company and review drafts of the piece) was a real thrill. But, most exciting was the see the piece in the New York Times early this morning and think maybe this piece will encourage more people to get into the game in Africa and think about building or investing in companies here.

I have pasted the piece here. Read More...

On Saturday, I spent the day at the house of my colleague, Rachel Okeyo. Rachel and her sister, Pam, cooked a magnificent feast of Swahili, Luo, and Chinese dishes and their hospitality was heartwarming.

Rachel and her family live in a quaint three bedroom house on the outskirts of Nairobi. The house is filled with all the furniture and electronics that any upper middle class family in the U.S. or Europe has, and is tastefully decorated with beautiful masks from all over Africa.

One thing that is different about Rachel's house (compared with upper middle class homes in the U.S.) is that there is no running water inside. Once a week, water dribbles out of the tap behind the house and Rachel stays up all night filling buckets of water so her family will have enough to drink, bathe, clean, and flush the toilet for the week. It's shocking to me that today in Nairobi, an upper-middle class family living in a nice house in a safe neighborhood would not have access to running water. This is a family ready and able to pay for access to water and there is no one to supply it. The government is clearly unable to meet the demand and no private sector player has come in to fill the gap.

Meet Rachel Okeyo in this video interview

This photo shows the water tap behind the house with the small buckets which are used to fill three large buckets to hold the week's supply of water. More photos at the end of the album.

Inspired by Global X's short video interviews at the Skoll World Forum, I decided to embark on a video interview project of my own and get to know some of the people I interact with on a daily basis a bit better.

On Friday, I interviewed three young women who work in the "canteen" - tiny restaurant - at my office. ABE and about five other companies rent space in a large house converted into an office in Muthaiga, on the outskirts of Nairobi. These women bring us tea every morning, serve our lunch, and clean up our dishes in the evening.

In the interview, I asked them to introduce themselves and describe how they think Kenya will be different in five years.

Meet Beldine, Dorine, and Victoria

For the first few months I was in Kenya, I thought that people were not optimistic about the future of their country. I compared this pessimism about the government, corruption, and lack of economic opportunity with what I had seen in India – a rapidly-growing middle class, world-class universities, and a general sense that things were improving for most people. More recently, I’ve seen the optimism in Kenya shine through and have been pleased to observe how many people do have great hope for their country. In 2006, real GDP growth was between 5 and 6% and these high growth rates are expected to continue.

Last Monday, Deepti and I visited Kencall, a call center started in 2004 by Acumen Fund friend, Nik Nisbitt. We showed up around 9 p.m. and saw about 100 of Kencall’s 300 employees talking with customers in the U.S. Nik came up with the idea for the business in 2000 when he was still in the U.S. and decided to try returning to Kenya and see if outsourcing could work in Kenya as it has in India.

Fortunately, Nik was right and Kencall has been able to bring in clients like Infoseek, Dun and Bradstreet, and the U.S. Postal Service. In 2006, revenues were $2 million and Nik expects an increase to $4 million in 2007.

Nik is truly optimistic about the future of Kenya and believes that Kencall will serve as an example to others that it is possible to create profit-generating businesses in Kenya and that East Africa can be competitive with the rest of the world. Listening to the enthusiasm in Nik’s voice and the seeing the excitement of the employees we met on the floor, I walked out feeling truly hopeful about the future of Kenya.



Thomas Friedman was in Kenya last week and wrote this Op-Ed about Kencall. Read More...

Easter is a big holiday in Kenya, and hence, everyone is given a four-day weekend. The timing was perfect as Peter and Shekinah, friends from Thunderbird, and Deepti, a friend from Acumen Fund were all visiting Nairobi. So our friends could see the country a bit, we took a three-day safari to Amboseli. Amboseli is a national park in Kenya on the border of Tanzania and is known for its spectacular views of Kilimanjaro and the numerous elephant families who traipse across the savannah each morning and evening.

An optional activity while on safari in this area is to visit a Masai village. The Masai were traditionally cattle herders and are nomadic people. They have held on strongly to tradition and the men and women wear beautiful brightly-colored cloths and blankets and many still have gaping holes in the ears from which they hang beaded earrings.

While we were intrigued in seeing a Masai village, before going, Deepti and I had a long debate about whether paying $20 each to take a tour of the village and watch a traditional Masai dance was respectful and supportive or if it was cultural exploitation. On the one hand, the Masai seem to have held on to their traditions much more than other East African tribes. This may be because they typically live outside of urban areas and have kept a fairly closed culture by roaming throughout Kenya and Tanzania. But, I also think they must have realized early on that they could increase their income by bringing in tourists if they maintain the look of their villages and traditional clothing. If, then, at the end of the day, the children know the songs and dances of their elders and if they are now able to afford to send their children to school and invest in bore holes for clean drinking water, is it wrong to pay to visit? Should we think of this as visiting a living museum? Should we encourage people to continue using traditional medicines when Western medicine might prevent children dying of malaria or typhoid?

Even after the conversation and a lovely visit to the Masai village (whose people truly did seem happy to host us), I still don’t feel like I know the answers to these questions. If cultural tourism is a way to improve livelihoods while maintaining culture, I’m all for supporting it when it’s organized by the community and done in a way in which the Masai people can most benefit from it.

Photos of Amboseli
Video of Masai dancers
Video of elephants in Amboseli

One of the closing speeches at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship, held at Oxford University, was Larry Brilliant, CEO of Google.org. Larry’s speech was perhaps the best of the conference, possibly because it has been delivered many times since Davos, or perhaps because he had interesting stories to tell and was aided by a top-notch Powerpoint.

After beginning his talk with the case for pessimism: global warming, HIV/AIDS, malaria, increases in income disparity, Larry continued with his speech with the case for optimism and why he will always be an optimist. Larry spoke passionately about his work eradicating small pox and argued that if the world could come together to end such a horrifying disease, we were capable of anything.

Listening to the speakers at the Skoll Forum, learning about the projects of the Skoll awardees, and meeting a diverse group of practitioners, donors, academics, and students certainly reassured me that there is a case for optimism. As Bill Drayton of Ashoka mentioned, we are now seeing “unlikely bedfellows working together” to address the world’s biggest challenges. At the conference, we saw involvement from a range of players, from GE Capital to Barefoot College and from Nike to IDEI. Plenary speakers were as diverse as the attendees and showed the growing interest in the field of social enterprise. We heard Mohammed Yunus, Queen Rania of Jordan, Peter Gabriel, and Jeff Skoll talk about the new capitalism, the need for the three sectors (public, private, and citizen) to collaborate and for their hopes that social enterprise will become as far-reaching and well-known as microfinance is today.

Blog posts about the Skoll World Forum on Social Edge
Video highlights of the conferece (scroll towards bottom of page)
Article on the forum from onPhilanthropy
Article on the forum from The Chronicle of Philanthropy
My photos from the trip

Last week, Acumen Fund convened the seven fellows in Oxford for a three-day mid-year meeting prior to the Skoll Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. We had an opportunity to tell stories about our work with the investees, discuss our career plans, plan our work for the next three months, and generally reflect on our experiences to date.

On the first day, Nadaa shared that the fellowship had changed her life. I’m sure that we would all agree. Her comment made me remember the taxi driver who said to me as I was leaving New York in November that I would “come back changed.” I’m still not sure exactly what that will look like, but I know it is true.

The fellowship has encouraged self-reflection. Acumen Fund’s culture is self-critical and I think we have all spent a lot of time soliciting feedback, thinking about how others relate to us, and working towards improvement.

In “The Inheritance of Loss”, Sai describes well this process of introspection and the importance of looking at oneself in many ways. “But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.”

More photos from Oxford and London

As a continuation of our weekly book groups during the fall orientation, we were asked to read “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai in preparation for the mid-year gathering at Oxford. As the title would suggest, “The Inheritance of Loss” is a novel about loss, but it is also a novel about love. At the beginning of the novel, the teenage girl, Sai, thinks about love, “Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”

Spending prolonged periods of time away from my family and friends over the past three years, I can identify with Sai’s assessment. Later in the book, Biju, the cook’s son reflects about his father, “If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they’d missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forget, or they became accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the façade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.” While I don’t expect Biju’s prediction to come true for me, I do wonder what it will be like to resettle in the U.S. after spending so much time away.

Desai is a spectacular writer. Her descriptions of the natural and political landscapes of India are vivid as are her delves into the emotional lives of the characters. I highly recommend the book, both for the story as well as Desai’s narrative skill.