Daniel O'Neil

Liberia's Paths to Prosperity

I first came to Liberia four years ago—just as the Ebola epidemic was starting to spread. The classic image of Liberia’s roads was that of a four-wheel drive vehicle stuck in a sea of mud. Today, the situation has dramatically improved. I spent the last week driving around Bong, Nimba, Lofa, and Grand Bassa Counties inspecting the roads that we have improved through the USAID-funded Feeder Roads Alternative and Maintenance Program (FRAMP). I drove on nearly 400 km of these small roads and probably twice as much on the primary and second network to reach them and 90% of the time I was on good roads! The main roads from Monrovia through Bong County and up to Nimba County and over to Grand Bassa are all paved. The road from Bong County up through Lofa County was nicely rehabilitated (we helped with that). Even the feeder roads that were fixed several years ago under a different program remain in good condition.

That last point surprised me. When we talk about the work that we do, we talk about how we “rehabilitate” rural roads and how maintenance is critical especially since Liberia can get over three meters of rain a year. Of course if you don’t maintain these gravel roads, they will just wash away again. But I’ve learned a new narrative. These roads that we are improving were just tracks. They never had a proper driving surface or side drains. If there were any cross-drains, they were built out of rough timber and prone to collapse. When we work on the road, we install culverts and bridges so that water does not need to pass over the road. We build a proper road surface with side drains so water stays off the roadway. We compact the road surface so that the gravel (really a mixture of clay and small pebbles) does not wash away with the rain. Although the road condition will deteriorate over time—especially if the improved road ends up with significant traffic. However, it will never again be as poor a road as it was before we started.

The biggest challenge that we face in maintaining the road is the sudden growth in traffic. Although we designed these roads to be feeder roads—to feed traffic from small villages to the secondary and primary roads—some road segments have become popular shortcuts and now have significant car and truck traffic. Several of our road segments ought now to be upgraded to be secondary roads—given wider carriageways and more gentle curves to allow for faster driving speeds. This is another nice success of our project—helping Liberia to grow.

The four counties that I visited have about half of the feeder roads in the entire country. I understand that there is still much to be done in the rest of the country and especially in the southern counties. I am proud that we were able to play our part in helping Liberia on its path to prosperity.

Eight years of Hope

Shortly before Obama took office, I wrote a post with the title What will the world look like after this economic crisis? I saw the big economic crisis of the time as an inevitable correction. The US had been living too big for too long. I saw that Africans were taking over international jobs once reserved for expatriates. The rest of the world was catching up to America in terms of the ability to get tings done. I said that American would come out of this recession poorer than it went in--the glory days were gone.

After Obama's inauguration, I changed my mind. He convinced me that I had been thinking too small. I remember almost titling that post Slapped down by Obama. 

Trump won because I was right. For much of America, we did not recover from that economic crisis. Last summer, we drove through Indiana and I saw the communities that never recovered. I think Obama did a great job. He brought hope and change to many. However the world has changed. Whereas in the 1950s, a blue color american could support a middle class family, that will never be true again.

There are great jobs for well educated people. There are plenty of opportunities for those with the right skills and in the right place. This is a golden age for entrepreneurship. But what do you do for those who are unwilling or unable to to take advantage of those opportunities? 

So what do you want to do with your life?

Chris Guillebeau is back with a new book on managing your career. After he wrote about how to live the life that we want (The Art of Non-Conformity), how to start the business of our dreams (The $100 Startup), and how to create and chase our dreams (The Happiness of Pursuit); he is now tackling how to create the career of your dreams.

If you are set on starting your own business, stick with The $100 Startup. If you are working for someone else or unsure of which path to take, this is a great overall guide. Chris starts off by helping you figure out how to align your work dreams with your life goals--revising your script so that your actions actually lead you to be happier not just higher up the ladder. He covers the pros and cons of working for yourself, working for someone else, or figuring out how to do both.

 

This is an ideal book for someone either early in their career or feeling stuck. Chris does a beautiful job of showing the incredible range of opportunities that are out there and provides solid advice no matter which way you might want to jump.

Note that Chris was kind enough to send me a copy of the book in exchange for this unbiased review. However, since I am a fanboy of Chris', he knew that I would love it! 

 

Yes, Muslims should try to root out extremists in their midsts

... and so too should anti-abortion activists, environmentalists, political activists, Christians, and all other groups. The United States is founded on the belief that all men [women and children] are created equal and have the inalienable  right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have to work together to protect these rights, protect our neighbors, and build the country that we want to live in. Can you imagine the shame of knowing that a neighbor had imprisoned women in his house for years and you did nothing to help? That your talk encouraged someone to open fire on a health center that offered abortions? Or that you had a friend who became such an extremists that he shot innocent people in the name of your religion? Are we not our brother's keeper?

What would I do if I was in charge of the American Red Cross?

After I published my post last week on the American Red Cross (ARC), a few people have asked me what I would do if put in charge of it. Given all of the bad publicity that they have generated with their response to each major disaster, they certainly need to change their approach and to rebuild trust. The ARC plays a critical role in disaster response. They have an incredible ability to raise funds and are part of a broad international organization that has branches in nearly every country. They are perfectly placed to provide leadership on disasters all over the world.

So how do they pull themselves out of their deep hole and reestablish their leadership? I would suggest focusing on the following three areas:

1. Figure out what they are best in the world at doing and focus on it: The ARC seems to try to be all things to all people. They provide emergency kits, build shelters, feed people, finance grants, rebuild communities, and on and on. Sometimes they work through the local Red Cross, sometimes they set up their own organization and work around the local partner. Instead, I would have the ARC keep only a small number of high level experts who would implement only through the local Red Crosses and other partner organizations. The role of the ARC team members would be similar to the role of the OFDA staff. They would provide technical assistance to their partners and review grant requests. By being in the field and focused on implementation, they could help their partners be flexible in their approach. Given that the ARC is an NGO, they ought to be the most flexible of the funding organizations. By having highly trained people in the field, these experts could be trusted to guide the funding decisions.
   
   
2. Embrace Radical Transparency: Since the ARC will be subcontracting out most of the work, it will be easier for them to be very transparent. Their management costs should be around 10-20% of the donations that they receive. This would cover all of their home office costs and the costs for their field teams. The rest would be given out in grants. They can require that all funded proposals are published and have an open database that tracks the results. Financial data should only be published at the line item level (showing for example how much goes into all salaries but not showing how much an individual is paid). In this way, it will be clear not only what the ARC is doing but how their money is spread around. After all, the money being spent isn’t really the ARC’s money—it is money donated through the ARC to help the disaster victims. By having the funded proposals published, other organizations can see what is being done and better understand both how to coordinate with the implementer and how to learn from the funded approaches. This would encourage learning by doing and improve the quality of proposals over time.
   
   
3. Publish Evaluations Consistently: Because the ARC is focused on being the best in the world at what they do and on being radically transparent, it only makes sense that they conduct thorough evaluations and publish the results. Yes, these will highlight mistakes and shortcomings and will sometimes be embarrassing both for the ARC and for their partners. Implementing projects in a disaster or post-disaster environment is tough. You have to move fast which means making mistakes. But we shouldn’t be repeating the same mistakes. If the ARC committed to conducting thorough evaluations and publishing the results, the ARC could help share best practices and prevent repeated mistakes. Besides, as most politicians have learned, the best way to avoid a public scandal is to own up to your shortcomings.

The ARC ought to be a very powerful force for good and a key actor in every major disaster. Instead, their brand seems to be continually weakening. Each scandal hurts not only the ARC but every NGO who ends up painted with the same brush. 

If only the American Red Cross was as efficient as the US Government...

Inspectors assessing the earthquake damage in a house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

"I still have a lot more questions for the Red Cross," said Sen. Charles Grassley in a statement. "I have other questions about the spending numbers and how they add up and the overhead costs for both the Red Cross and the grantee organizations. Also, I'd like to see more details of the results achieved from each of the partner organizations."

Propublica and NPR have done an admirable job of trying to figure out what the American Red Cross (ARC) has done with the nearly half a billion dollars that they raised for the Haiti earthquake. However, I fear that Senator Charles Grassley will lead this in the wrong direction. The ARC should be encouraged to give out the money that it raises rather than trying to do it all themselves.

As we’ve seen with nearly every disaster, the ARC does a great job of raising money and a lousy job of using it. Even in domestic disasters like Katrina or Sandy, the ARC seems poor at delivering results. Imagine how much harder it is to set up a large organization in a foreign country in the middle of a disaster response. It is just a recipe for failure.

Instead, the ARC should follow the example of the US Government’s disaster response agency: the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). As soon as a disaster hits, OFDA sends a small team of experts to help assess the situation and to review funding requests. They focus on working with organizations that are already on the ground with a solid track record of success. Because they are on the ground, they understand the situation and can work with their grantees to ensure that proposals make sense. The field team is senior enough that they can frequently review proposals on the spot.

This model allows OFDA to quickly get funds injected into where they are needed the most. They keep their overhead low by focusing on channeling money to those who can use it effectively. Their field teams are able to work with their partners to keep projects moving. By channeling money through other organizations, they build local capacity and make it easy to wrap up their work as quickly as possible.

The ARC’s problem is that it establishes a large bureaucracy that is unable to implement projects directly and very slow to issue subgrants. I did succeed in getting a large grant funded through the ARC, but it took nearly 10 months to get it worked out. Once awarded, we were micromanaged from beginning to end. I have worked with funding from a wide range of donors and found the ARC to be the most difficult. We did succeed in repairing 4,000 houses for the ARC and the work was of higher quality than what he had done for OFDA and others, but it was a soul-sucking process that left all of us exhausted.

I would love to be able to support the American Red Cross. With their incredible name recognition, they have enormous potential to help. Instead, their repeated and very public failures make it that much harder for everybody else to raise money and help out.

 

Why is the Ebola Response considered a success and the Haiti Earthquake Response considered a failure?

The International Response to the Ebola Outbreak was a huge success. Back in September, it seemed as if the Ebola outbreak was spinning out of control. When the death toll didn't seem high enough, the stories became that the toll was under reported and stories that the outbreak could plunge Liberia back into civil war.Remember the September 23 New York Times headline: Ebola Cases Could Reach 1.4 Million in Four Months, CDC Estimates?

 

Instead, the number of new cases began to decline in late November. By late December, they had slowed to a trickle. Liberia has only had 12 cases in the last 21 days. Guinea and Sierra Leone are down to less than 200 new cases a week. The total case load will likely not exceed 25,000. This dramatic turnaround was a direct result of the strong international response.

Three activities were key to stopping the spread of the Ebola:

1. Community Awareness: Ebola was spread through contact with the bodies of those that it had killed or were dying. Funeral rites had to change. People had to be convinced to give their loved ones over to foreign doctors draped in protective gear. Physical contact had to be limited. Changing attitudes is hard, but this was key to slowing the spread of Ebola. Some organizations took this on as a primary mission through radio messages and posters that still blanked Liberia. Others added this component to their work such as distributing Ebola awareness information to the farmers with whom they work.
2. Safe Burials: An Ebola victim is hardly contagious until he is so sick that he can hardly move. His body remains highly contagious long after he has died. Touching the body of an Ebola victim is one of the easiest ways to contract Ebola. Traditionally, mourners would hug the corpse of their loved one to say goodbye. Stopping that practice was a key component of the community awareness. But bodies still had to be disposed of. In Liberia, the US government funded a large program to provide safe burials for all Ebola victims. This was very dangerous work and done very effectively by Global Communities. It is probably the reason that Ebola disappeared first in Liberia even though it had been hit the hardest.
3. Constructing the Ebola Treatment Units: As the Ebola outbreak was growing, there was not enough room to treat the victims. The few treatment units were overwhelmed and the centers were forced to turn away people who were clearly very sick. Building more treatment units became an international priority. Once there were enough treatment units to house those who needed care, it was possible to isolate those sick with Ebola and prevent them from contaminating others. It also became easier to trace their contacts and seek out others that might become sick.

I believe that a decade from now, we will talk about the Ebola response as one of the great victories of foreign assistance. The international response was critical in turning the tide on the epidemic. Those people who went to Liberia to help and those who stayed in country are the heroes that saved West Africa and the rest of the world from a terrible disease.

The response to the Haiti Earthquake was also a great success and yet is frequently portrayed as a failure. Five years after the earthquake, Haiti’s economy is stronger than it has been in decades. There is more electricity, government services function better, and there are even twice as many international-standard hotel rooms. Does the International Community not get any credit for helping to rebuild Haiti?

In both cases, there was great chaos in the response. In Haiti, one of the biggest wastes of money was building camps and temporary shelters that ended up housing people who had never lost their home in the first place and became very difficult to close. In Liberia, one of the biggest wastes was the construction of the Ebola Treatment Units—although desperately needed in the beginning, construction of new ones continued long after the need for the units had disappeared. There were still units being built in January when there were only a handful of cases of Ebola. In both cases, once a need is identified and projects are funded, it is very hard to redirect that funding.

I loved that Time magazine named the Ebola Fighters as Person of the Year for 2014. I think that those who responded to the Haiti earthquake and those who donated to support it deserved the same honor in 2010.

Proudly Passionate at 50

Carolle’s present for my 50th birthday was to take me to see Queen perform. Freddy Mercury is gone and instead they have a young replacement, Adam Lambert. It was great fun to hear the song that I’ve known since high school and to be with a crowd of thousands cheering and singing along. What made the concert special was that Adam Lambert seemed to be genuinely happy to be performing and honored to be singing with Queen. The guitarist, Brian May, has been playing and singing the same songs for 30 years and still seemed happy to be on stage. Having completed my first 50 year,, that is the attitude that I hope to keep—proudly passionate for the life I lead and the work that I do.

Getting Lucky in Bangladesh

Here in Bangladesh you have been very lucky. It has been two hundred years since your last major earthquake. But for how long will your luck last? With its proximity to an active fault, very weak soils, dense population, and poor controls on construction, the next earthquake will be a terrible disaster.

I repeated these lines over and over while working our booth at a safety conference for factory owners in Bangladesh. Dhaka is a scary place for earthquakes. Very little of the construction is designed to resist even a small earthquake. The government’s own reports highlight the risk—with a 6.0 earthquake (10 times weaker than the 2010 Haiti earthquake), 70% of the buildings will be badly damaged including the hospitals and other emergency facilities. Roads and rail lines would be damaged. The airport would be closed. Hundreds of thousands of people could die.

This was my first visit to Dhaka. I spent five days talking with people at the expo, visiting factories, and driving around the city. I came away with very mixed feelings and a deep fascination for the country.

Having spent so much of my time in Haiti, I naturally found myself comparing Dhaka and Port-au-Prince. Both are poor cities with weak infrastructure and both are struggling to grow and modernize. Dhaka is a dramatically bigger city with bigger assets and much bigger problems. Traffic has been Dhaka’s bane for many years. From early in the morning until late at night, traffic crawls through the city. It can take three hours to get from one part of the city to another. Pollution is another bad problem—a heavy haze that hangs over the city.

At the same time, the city is growing well. A handful of overpasses are being built. There are beautiful new buildings. I felt a strong sense of optimism and hope—that Bangladesh was moving forward. The quality of the buildings is also improving. Many of the new buildings appeared to be well built. Perhaps if Bangladesh can remain lucky for another 50 years, then perhaps be ready for the next earthquake.

Lying wasn't Greg Mortenson's biggest sin

On Tuesday, Greg Mortenson reappeared after the scandal surrounding his books and charity to apologize for lying. “I stand by the stories. The stories happened, but … not in the sequence or the timing,” Mortenson told Brokaw. If his only fault was rearranging the facts, then I would never have cared. After all, All Marketers are Liars Tell Stories.I don't mind that he changed the truth around a bit to make a good story.

What really upset me was finding out that he didn't run a charity focused on building schools in Afghanistan. Instead he ran a self-promotion company. Jon Krakauer's book, Three Cups of Deceit, was more damning of how poorly run the Central Asia Institute was than of the poor story telling. He showed how the Central Asia Institute seemed to exist more to promote and purchase Greg's book than to build schools. Rather than Greg's book being a source of income for the Institute, a large portion of the Institute's budget went to funding Greg's book tour and purchasing, at full market price, Greg's books. Many of the schools that were built weren't even being used.

As Seth tells in All Marketers are Liars, everyone tells stories that have shades of untruth to them. Rearranging the facts to make a better story is fine as long as the central story is true. The real lie that Greg Mortenson told was claiming that he was trying to improve education in Afghanistan. Instead, he was just trying to get rich. This is why the Central Asia Institute has lost nearly all of its funding.

By contrast, Kiva managed to survive largely unscathed when its great untruth was exposed.  Kiva claims to allow people to lend directly to small businesses in poor countries. Their website is full of stories of micro-entrepreneurs who need a little cash to grow their business. You can pick someone with a compelling story, lend them money, and when the loan is repaid so are you. It seems like a fun, easy way to help out. Except it doesn't work that way. Back in 2009, David Roodman showed that most entrepreneurs are funded well before their page even appears on the Kiva website. If the entrepreneur defaults on a loan, the intermediary organization that facilitates the loan repays it. There really isn't any link between the donor and the entrepreneur.

Big scandal, right? No. Kiva quickly admitted that this was indeed the case and that it was a matter of logistics. The entrepreneur needed the cash quickly. It didn't make sense to make them wait for funding to come (or not come). Yes, the intermediary organziations would repay loans but that was to prevent occasional defaults from disqualifying them from managing future loans. Kiva was in the business of funding micro entrepreneurs, just not quite how they had originally described it. So Kiva is going strong while the Central Asia Institute is nearly closed.

We all tell stories and no story is ever completely true. If the Central Asia Institute was doing great work in Afghanistan as Kiva is doing with microfinance, I would have easily forgiven Greg for playing with his facts. Instead, I feel as if his whole story was just a con.