An Inspiring Visit

Photos of Kenya—Part Two

Managing Budgets and Donors

Finals of the Business Plan Competition

Coming Home

Your Turn

Epilogue

What’s Happened Since We Left in Africa?

Postscript

Is There Any Hope for Africa? Yes!

Swaziland

San Francisco to Mbabane

As the twin-engine turboprop climbed out of Oliver Tambo airport, we could see the densely packed slums surrounding Johannesburg, but the urban landscape quickly disappeared. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, and the flat terrain below was dry and brown. The land was chopped up into tiny plots for farming, most of them fallow. They looked rather sad, as farmland does when nothing is growing. The flight from Johannesburg to Matsapha Airport near Manzini, Swaziland, takes less than an hour, but this was our fourth flight since leaving San Francisco. We had been traveling for thirty-six hours, including two overnight legs.

The journey from San Francisco to Manzini, Swaziland, is just about the longest possible trip on earth. In addition to contending with the long flights, we had to manage our carry-on luggage through the multiple airport transits. Since we were staying for nearly six months, we brought a lot of luggage. The airlines allow you to check two bags per person, so we had four large suitcases weighing the maximum of fifty pounds each. In packing, we had allocated them fairly—that is, three for Wendy and one for me. She wasn’t going to Africa without a sufficient wardrobe and a six-month supply of her favorite beauty aids and toiletries.

However, throughout the trip, Wendy was a real trouper. Since two hundred pounds of luggage was not a sufficient allowance for all of our stuff, we also maximized our carry-ons. For carry-ons, the airline allowances are by size, not weight. Consequently, we each carried a thirty-five-pound duffel and a fifteen-pound computer bag. These were heavy for me, and my shoulders ached, but as we slogged through our last transit, I wasn’t sure Wendy was going to make it. Going through the terminal at Oliver Tambo, she looked as if she was about ready to drop. I helped some, and she pulled through bravely. Later, we saw the rough, red welts she had from the shoulder straps, but they cleared up in a few days.

As our flight approached Swaziland, the topography changed again. We began to see a few small mountains. They looked like the foothills in California, but craggier. In California, it rains in the winter, and the foothills are covered with green grass. In late spring, the rains stop and the land turns light brown as the vegetation dies. In California PR terms, the hills turn “golden.” They’re really dead brown, like straw, but can still be beautiful in a rugged natural way. In Swaziland, it rains in the summer and the winters are dry. The approaching hills looked comfortably familiar, like California with the dry, straw-brown grass contrasting with the black rock and the red dirt.

As we approached Matsapha International Airport, I wasn’t nervous or even excited. I was mostly curious and definitely fatigued. On landing and deplaning, the airport felt welcoming and comfortable in a cute and informal way. Since Matsapha has the only paved runway in Swaziland, it is an international airport by default. It had the smallest commercial airline terminal I had ever seen, particularly at an international airport. The terminal had one door for arrivals and one door for departures. Separating the two doors was a pleasant little garden, about ten feet square, of local flora surrounded by carefully positioned rocks. Someone had taken time and effort to make it attractive, and it worked. We entered the arrivals door and passed through immigration and customs in a space the size of our living room at home.

Outside the terminal, Kiki, the driver from TechnoServe, was waiting for us with a warm, smiling face, and we were very glad to see him. With very few people awaiting the arrival of our flight, it wasn’t hard for us to pick out Kiki. And as we were the only non-Africans on the flight, it wasn’t hard for him to identify us.

We loaded up our luggage and set off for Mbabane (pronounced by humming the m and then saying “buh-bahn”), the capital of Swaziland and our home for the next six months, about a half hour away. Our first destination was the TechnoServe office where we would be working. The office was on the second floor of a small, modern shopping mall in the center of Mbabane (population 90,000). The TechnoServe office had been open only since February, but was already becoming crowded. We met fourteen people, but there were nearly twenty names on a whiteboard that showed everyone’s location throughout the day. Among our future colleagues, only Leslie, our country director and boss, plus three other volunteers had come from the United States. Leslie had worked for TechnoServe in Mozambique for several years prior to Swaziland. Everyone else was from Swaziland. Some were full-time employees and some were interns, but everyone was young, most of them younger than our two children. After we met our coworkers, we got local cell phones and then bought a few groceries so we could exist until Monday.

Having spent two overnights on airplanes and having endured a nine-hour time change, we got tired very quickly, so we were driven to our lodgings about four miles outside of Mbabane. We were delighted to see the quaint little cottage where we would be living. Our cottage and several others were located on the grounds of a Christian retreat center along with a small conference facility and a chapel. The cottages were widely spaced and surrounded by large eucalyptus trees. Our front door exited to a patio overlooking a deep valley with mostly forest on the opposite side. Once again, we could imagine we were in the foothills of California, except for the thatched roofs on the cottages.

Later, as we ate dinner, we discussed our first impressions. From what we had seen, Swaziland was definitely a developing country. However, it seemed cleaner, neater, and sometimes more modern than many others we had visited. Especially in the center of Mbabane, where there was a shopping plaza dating from the early nineties and two small malls that were newer, we felt the ambiance of a small working-class city in the United States or Canada. It wasn’t an exotic environment from an African novel or a movie. The city streets were better maintained than in some U.S. cities, and the road from the airport to Mbabane was a four-lane divided highway. While the cars were not extravagant, they were not all old and run-down as they are in many developing countries; and they seemed to be plentiful. However, contrasting with the pleasant, if not inspired, architecture of the shopping area was a huge concrete skeleton of an abandoned multistory building that dominated the hill above the city. I was sure that there was a story of speculation and probably corruption behind the giant edifice because it looked as if it had been abandoned, partially constructed, many years earlier. I wasn’t judging, and I hadn’t drawn any immediate comprehensive conclusions; I was just trying to take in the comparisons and contrasts to begin the mental processing.

My other immediate impression as we walked around Mbabane was of a disproportionately youthful population. Since we were walking around a shopping plaza at 4:00 p.m., the youthful crowd could have been just what would be expected at a shopping mall at 4:00 p.m. anywhere in the world. However, I couldn’t help but think about the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging Swaziland, worse than any other country in the world, and producing an average life expectancy of only thirty-two years. Maybe it was what a society looks like when AIDS kills a huge proportion of the adults and produces a generation of orphans.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s hard to know when the idea started for me. Maybe it had been percolating since I read a biography of Dr. Albert Schweitzer when I was a child. Or maybe it only started a few years ago as I became one of the frontline baby boomers contemplating what I wanted to do in “retirement,” whatever that means anymore. I had always admired Albert Schweitzer, who gave up a great life in Europe to be a doctor in a remote region of Africa. However, I hadn’t been so moved that I wanted to be a hero and give up all the worldly pleasures of a good life. I wanted a good career and the rewards that went with it.

Now was different. We had been fortunate in our lives and careers. We weren’t rich, but we had enough saved that we didn’t need to focus on maximizing our income. Also, our children seemed on their way to careers of their own. One was in medical school and the other nearly finished with law school. So when I left my last high-tech job, I evaluated our finances and decided that I’d finished my primary career, but I wasn’t ready to stop working. For a number of years, Wendy and I had periodically discussed what we would do next as we contemplated wrapping up our primary careers. Neither of us wanted to be heroic, but we both wanted to “give something back.” We both wanted to be working on something of obvious benefit to society.

Wendy had taken the first step in this direction. Four years earlier, she was feeling frustrated and unsatisfied selling just one more new technology product. So she left her career as a director of marketing in the high-tech industry where she had spent her career. She took time off to contemplate and explore what she wanted to do next. As she thought about her interests and how she might contribute to society, she narrowed her focus to three major themes: youth (especially young women), education, and entrepreneurship. Her next step was to network and explore for potential opportunities that could satisfy these interests. After a lot of lunches and coffee sessions, a friend suggested that she might want to join the board of directors of Junior Achievement (JA) in Silicon Valley as a part-time activity while she continued to explore. The focus of Junior Achievement is teaching young people the life and business skills they will need to thrive in our free market economy. So it aligned precisely with Wendy’s interests, but it wasn’t a fulltime activity.

Wendy joined the Junior Achievement board and immediately assessed that JA needed help with marketing. There was no marketing plan, so Wendy set out to create one. She did extensive interviews with the executive director, the staff, donors, and other stakeholders and developed a marketing plan that would allow JA to increase their revenue and the number of students that they could serve. The executive director loved the plan and convinced the executive committee of the board that she needed someone to implement it. She wanted to hire Wendy as a full-time employee. The executive director got her approval and approached Wendy, who was excited, but a little surprised and definitely hesitant. The position sounded great, but Wendy had been expecting to take more time off. In the end, the opportunity was too good a fit to pass up, and Wendy agreed to start in a part-time role that quickly evolved to fulltime.

Wendy became JA’s vice president of marketing, and several months later, when the vice president of development left, Wendy became vice president of marketing and development. She was paid half of her former salary, and she still worked long hours, but she felt she was doing it for a better reason. In addition to teaching kids about the free enterprise system and how to be successful in business, Junior Achievement encourages young people to stay in school, study hard, and to see themselves as future entrepreneurs or businesspeople. It was a great fit with Wendy’s interests and allowed her to use her skills and experience to benefit society.

While Wendy was at Junior Achievement, I was still pursuing my career in the high-tech industry, but I knew it wouldn’t be for many years. It had been a very enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding career. I had been a partner in a large consulting firm, a senior vice president at a start-up and a general manager in a software company, but I was ready for a major change. I thought a lot about what might come next. As with the millions of baby boomers who will soon reach the traditional retirement age in good health, I knew that I could easily live another thirty years, and I knew that I would have a lot of time to fill. I didn’t play golf, which can fill more time than any other human activity I know, so I had to think of something.

I knew I wanted to contribute something back to society, and I knew I wanted something that would excite me, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. My first thought was to become a paramedic and support relief efforts after global disasters. It sounded exciting and heroic, but it would have meant a year of training and then being away from Wendy for extended periods of time. I realized that I needed a more disciplined approach to my search. I bought What Color Is Your Parachute? and followed the instructions and exercises for a “life-changing job hunt.” In one exercise, I decided the person that I would most like to be was Kofi Annan because he worked to achieve world peace. I decided I wanted to work on world peace, and I knew I could use my skills and experience to do it.

It may not seem obvious as to how experience in management consulting and managing high-tech companies can directly contribute to world peace. However, a few years earlier, I had read Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and in my opinion, he had defined the path to world peace. Paraphrasing, with apologies, his idea was to get everyone doing business with each other to generate economic benefits for all parties. Once people got significant benefits from doing business with each other and developed strong stakes in preserving society, they wouldn’t go to war against each other because they would understand how devastating it would be to their lives. In other words, the idea is to create enough economic incentives not to go to war that they offset the many other causes that push people to war. It all seemed very logical to me—create economic development to decrease the possibility of war and, along the way, reduce poverty.

I wasn’t so naive to think that this was an easy path to solving all the world’s problems, but I do believe that one person can make a difference. My philosophy is to light one candle rather than curse the darkness. When confronting difficult or undesirable situations, I hate feeling hopeless. I always look for a solution, and the solutions to difficult problems are often complex and difficult themselves. If I was going to pursue this path, I didn’t want to be simple-minded or foolish. I really wanted to know what the experts said about how to foster economic development. If I was going to put a lot of effort into something, I wanted to be contributing in the most productive way.

So my next step was to study. I read over twenty books related to international economic development. Some were academic; some were inspirational. Some were very hopeful, others just the opposite as they recounted all the mistakes that continue to be made in the name of trying to help poor people and developing countries. As I read the books, I continued to focus my direction, but I didn’t find anything that made me change my course.

The first thing that I learned from all my reading is that the experts don’t have a clear, consistent recipe for successful economic development. However, as I read, I became convinced that building private enterprise was the best way to achieve sustainable success. There are too many stories of grand government schemes costing hundreds of millions of dollars that have failed to make a difference or just failed outright. Also, with large government projects, there are too many people who can benefit whether the project is successful or not. Naturally, this includes the graft that is endemic throughout the world, but it also includes all of the people who get an income from contracting to do the work whether the work generates real benefits or not. But for independent businesses, there will ultimately be a success or a failure, and it is not hard to measure the successes and keep score. You can keep doing the things that work and stop investing in the things that don’t. Independent business development also promotes freer societies as we’ve seen in many developing countries, such as South Korea and even China. Once again, don’t get me wrong. I know that there has been a lot of exploitation of people and resources by business. However, on balance, free-market economic development is good, and independent businesses with some government regulation are the ways to make it happen.

Fortunately for me, and probably not coincidentally, I had a lot of experience in private business. I knew how to help businesses solve problems, and I knew how to help businesses grow. So my skills aligned with where I saw the best opportunity to contribute. I had theoretical convergence, but I had no idea as to where to apply my theoretical solution. I didn’t know if any real-life organization doing international development needed my skills. I also had no experience in international development or the whole nonprofit arena, and I didn’t even know most of the major players in the field.

I needed to do more research, so I went to the web, and I started networking in person. On the web, I started researching the larger organizations that I had heard of such as CARE and Heifer. I also read about the Peace Corps, USAID (United States Agency for International Development), and various agencies within the United Nations. I asked all of my friends who they knew who might be in the field, and I went through the alumni directories of MIT and Harvard Business School to find fellow alums who worked in international development. As I talked to all of these people, I asked them for additional contacts. I eventually talked to over eighty different people about what I wanted to do. Some were in government, some in academia, some in large nonprofits or NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), and many were in smaller NGOs. They all gave me ideas about organizations that might be of interest to me. Then I researched those organizations on the web and made contact to find out more. Thank goodness for the Internet.

After making contact, I visited a number of organizations where I thought I had relevant skills and experience and interviewed for potential job openings. Although people were impressed with my background and experience in business, I kept hearing the same refrain, “But you have no experience in international development or even the nonprofit arena.” There was a terrible mismatch. Without the international development background, no organization was going to hire me into a senior-level position despite all of my business experience and accomplishments. On the other hand, it made no sense for the organizations, or to me, to hire me into an entry-level position. It was a frustrating dilemma.

As I spoke to knowledgeable people in the international development field and explained to them specifically what I wanted to do, a number of them recommended that I talk to an organization called TechnoServe. TechnoServe’s tagline was “Business Solutions to Poverty,” and their mission was to grow businesses that could provide livelihoods for the poor. It sounded like a good match, and so I contacted them.

TechnoServe was located in Washington DC, and I was going back to the DC area for Thanksgiving, so I arranged to meet with Bruce, TechnoServe’s CEO for an informational interview. With TechnoServe’s approach to international development, my business background was highly relevant. However, I knew that my lack of international development experience would still be an issue, so I explained to Bruce the challenge that I had been having with other organizations. Bruce had a solution immediately. He agreed with the position taken by other organizations, but he also saw that I had important qualifications and experience. He said that with my background in business, it would only take a year or two of international development experience for me to develop the credibility I would need for a senior-level position in an NGO. And he had a solution for where to get the experience.

TechnoServe had a volunteer consultant program wherein people with business skills volunteered on TechnoServe projects to provide business insight. TechnoServe provided housing and twenty-five dollars per day for food and incidentals. Participants in the program were called “volcons” (volunteer consultants), and most were young people in their twenties or early thirties who had worked for prominent consulting organizations. Many of the volcons worked at TechnoServe for three to six months right before or right after getting their MBAs. Obviously, Wendy and I were older, but that also meant we had a lot more business experience. We could also devote a longer period of time to an assignment. I told Bruce that the opportunity sounded interesting and that I would discuss it with Wendy.

While I was doing all of my research, Wendy was still working for Junior Achievement. She wasn’t quite ready to leave her job, but she knew the time would be soon. Since we would eventually be undertaking our international venture together, I had continued to discuss my thoughts with her, and she was supportive. She had always wanted to try living in another country but had mostly been thinking about locales like London, Paris, or Hong Kong. Living in a developing country hadn’t really crossed her mind, but she was brave and willing to try a new adventure. Since she was still working, she was happy to have me do all the research and planning. One time, as we were discussing my latest findings and thoughts while I was preparing dinner in our kitchen (she was working full-time and I wasn’t), she told me to choose where we would go and she would go along.

She said, “I have just four requirements for any place where we will live: First, there can be no flying bullets. Second, the name of the country must not end in ‘stan.’ Also, there must be flush toilets, and there must be hot showers.”

I had no problem with these minimal restrictions since I knew by focusing on business, that we wouldn’t be living in a mud hut in a rural village. As I continued my discussions with Wendy, I told TechnoServe that we would be interested in the volcon program, but just not yet. Seven months later, Wendy was finally ready to leave Junior Achievement, and I called TechnoServe to tell them that we were ready to take on overseas volunteer roles. They told us they would send out our résumés to their local country directors to see if there were any opportunities that would fit our backgrounds. Within two days, we heard back from Leslie, TechnoServe’s country director in Swaziland. She had started up TechnoServe’s new program in Swaziland just a few months earlier and was still recruiting staff. She was very excited about our skills and background and explained that she had openings that would be a perfect fit for each of us. She also thought we could help her immensely.

The primary focus of the Swaziland operation was to help small businesses to be successful and create jobs and economic growth. For this focus, my management consulting experience was very attractive because most of Leslie’s staff would be consulting to small businesses. My background was particularly attractive because I had been a consultant for many years and most of her staff members were very young. Although they were smart, they had limited experience, and Leslie thought that I could be a mentor to them. Another objective of the Swazi operation was to set up a program of youth training in business skills and entrepreneurship. With her recent work in Junior Achievement, Wendy was a perfect fit for this initiative. Leslie wanted us to fly to Swaziland immediately. We weren’t ready to take off immediately, but in less than a month, we were on a plane. After all the research and waiting for Wendy to be ready, everything seemed to happen very quickly. We just packed our bags and moved to Africa without a very clear idea of where we were going or exactly what we would be doing. We did limit our initial commitment to less than six months, just in case, but our friends were still amazed. For us, it wasn’t that difficult to commit. We were confident that we could survive for six months. More importantly, we knew that we would be working for a social benefit, and that the whole experience would be an adventure.

Settling in

Familiar Work in an Unfamiliar Environment

On our first morning in Swaziland, we both suffered from serious jet lag caused by the nine-hour time difference from California. We had essentially switched night and day. I got up in the middle of the night to read for two hours before returning to bed, and we both slept in until 10:30 a.m. After breakfast, we weren’t sure what to do. While we were in a beautiful setting, we were basically trapped because there was nowhere to easily walk, and we didn’t have a car. We had been told that the conference center had a workout facility, so we asked for the key. We walked to what turned out to be a one-room cottage with a few dumbbells and an all-purpose exercise machine with missing parts. We hadn’t expected much, and so we weren’t disappointed, but we never went back. We exercised briefly with a set of elastic tubes that I had brought from home, and both of us tired really quickly.

We didn’t have Internet access at our cottage, but we had heard that we could get on and check our e-mail at the Mountain Inn, a very pleasant sixty-two-room hotel at the top of the Malagwane grade overlooking the valley below. Many years earlier, the family who owned the Emafini Christian Center where we were staying had purchased the Mountain Inn when it was a famous brothel and converted it. Liz, our landlady and the matriarch of the family, volunteered to drive us up the two miles to the inn.

As we arrived at the Mountain Inn, we breathed a sigh of relief after the quick trip up the Malagwane grade, a very steep and winding section of the highway to Mbabane. The Malagwane grade would never exist on a four-lane highway in the United States. It was too steep and had excessively sharp curves. The speed limit was ostensibly 60 kph (36 mph), but as we learned from experience, no one drove that speed. Drivers in the powerful Mercedes and BMWs that could climb the grade without downshifting would roar up the hill at 120 kph (over 70 mph). (These people, often members of parliament or government officials, were known locally as members of the MBenzi tribe, even if they drove BMWs.) But in addition to the MBenzis, the grade was always sprinkled with massive, overloaded trucks going 20 kph (12 mph). I later had many chances to drive up the grade and personally experience the excitement and danger! The dual challenges were to not slam into the slow trucks as I came up rapidly from behind and to not get hit in the rear by a fast car as I passed the slow trucks, all the while maneuvering around the sharp curves. Every trip up or down the grade was an adventure, and soon it became our daily commute.

On our second morning, Sunday, we got up late again, still struggling with oppressive jet lag. We had breakfast at 11:30 a.m., so we decided that it was our lunch as well. While I was lounging in the living room with a book, I got another indication of the local similarity with California. As I looked out of the glass French doors, I noticed a large plume of smoke from the forest across the valley. I didn’t panic immediately, but I knew the brush was dry and the thought of California forest fires came to mind. I had observed that we were surrounded by tall eucalyptus trees, and I remembered that they burn easily and very hot. I began thinking about what I would pack if we had to evacuate in a hurry. I went outside to survey the situation. At the base of the huge smoke plume, I could see some low flames in the brush. There was no fire higher up in the trees themselves, so I decided not to get too excited. I would just watch calmly and patiently. I figured that if there was an emergency, someone would warn us.