On infrastructure challenges in Kenya

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“Infrastructure challenges” are often cited as a barrier to doing business in emerging economies. I thought it might be interesting for people to see very concretely how infrastructure challenges do and don’t affect our work at Kapu (1).

Roughly in order from least challenging to most challenging:

  • Water access issues don’t affect us. We have fine running water at our offices/warehouse. Water access is a bigger challenge in the countryside

  • Power outages: doesn’t affect our office or warehouse directly. But sometimes when power goes out for a night in a poorer neighbourhood, our agents can’t place orders the next day because their phones are all dead

    • power outages are a significant issue for businesses like manufacturing though

  • Cell network / internet issues: We have significant but not huge problems here

    • Cell and internet connection can be patchy. Lots of “can you hear me?” “sorry, there’s lots of lag”

    • Internet periodically just goes down - hurts our customer service response time most of all

    • Sometimes Safaricom - the biggest cell and payments network - goes down for a few hours, leading to failed payments, OTPs that don’t send properly, and lots of hassle

  • Low level corruption: Cops sometimes stop or impound our trucks and want bribes. They let us go after we show the proper paperwork for the 7th time, but it can make our deliveries late

  • No comprehensive street address system: You describe where something is by saying “it is next to House of God Church” or “it’s in the Mumbi area” (2). We rely on GPS pins (which are not always correct) rather than addresses to make deliveries. This slows down deliveries

  • The roads aren’t great: In Nairobi some roads are concrete, and some are dirt. When it rains hard, some of the dirt roads become impassable. This happens every couple weeks or so and then we are unable to make deliveries in a few neighbourhoods for that day

Collecting payment from customers and agents who - because of lack of trust and lack of liquidity - don’t want to pay in advance for a product that will arrive until tomorrow is also a huge challenge that you don’t face so much in the US. I wouldn’t consider this strictly an “infrastructure challenge” - but it is another type of challenge that also tends to go away as a country’s economy develops.

Overall these issues aren’t huge for us. I think these types of problems matter much more in industries like manufacturing, or in countries where infrastructure is worse.

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  1. ofc this is all my own views, not any kind of official view from Kapu

  2. My friend was once asked to draw a map of where he lived for an official document

What I learned from two mosques in Mombasa

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Indian ocean trade routes, with Mombasa marked with a red star

The Kenyan city of Mombasa has been an important port city for over 2000 years, connecting Africa to the Middle East, India, and China.

I visited for a couple days in February, and on a whim bought a book on Swahili architecture. I was struck by how much I could learn about the city just from learning about two mosques (1).


Mnara Mosque (also called Basheikh/Tangana). In a back alley, not clearly labeled, and you would miss it if you weren’t specifically looking for it

Mandhry Mosque - still powerlines but on a main thoroughfare. Has a gift shop attached, not visible here.

More modern Konzi Mosque in Mombasa, It’s not as much in the Swahili style and does not have the rounded Swahili-style tower

1. Swahili architecture is distinctly African - not just imported Arab culture. British colonialists claimed that Swahili architecture was simply Arab (the implication being that Africans did not have such advanced culture). It is certainly Arab-influenced, but it has core features that come from building history on the African continent. This is illustrated by the minarets (towers) on these two mosques - they are simple, rounded, white, and very solid. There are four mosques with minarets like this in the world - all of them on the Swahili coast: 2 in Mombasa, 1 in Lamu (Kenya), and one in Stone Town (Zanzibar, part of Tanzania) (1).


For example, see the picture of a non-Swahili mosque in Mombasa for reference. The tower looks quite different.

2. British colonizers wanted to give prominence to the “Arab” factions rather than the “African” factions in Mombasa. The mosques were given attention and prominence accordingly: The Mnara mosque was more associated with Swahili people, while the Mandhry was more associated with Arabs. I’m sure there are other factors as well, but this seems like it has trickled down to today where the Mandhry mosque is labeled as a great tourist site, with a gift shop, while the Mnara mosque is not well-labeled and is hard to find (1).

3. Islam was super culturally important in Indian ocean trade. Indian Ocean trade was dominated by Muslim merchants, and mosques in a port city would serve as a beacon to arriving travelers. The Mandhry mosque was one of the most prominent buildings on the Mombasa coast, and was available to Muslim visitors as a place to rest, and even sleep.

I had never really appreciated architecture as a lens for learning about history and culture, but I’m sold now (2). I think that this lens might be especially valuable in African cultures. I’ve found fewer analytical, interesting, well-researched writing on Kenyan culture/history/art compared to other foreign countries I’ve tried to learn about (China, Japan, India, Persia). My guess is that this is partly because there hasn't been written culture in east Africa as long, so there aren’t written records to dive into. But buildings have existed for a long time, which gives architectural study a comparative advantage.

That’s my hypothesis anyways. I’m now paying much more attention to the architecture of the places I visit to try to understand the place and people in a different way (3).

—

1. Unfortunately I couldn’t see the thing I most wanted to see in Mombasa, which is the alley that Cob gets stuck in in Inception. As I learned 2 days before departing, that chase sequence was actually shot in Tangier Morocco

2. Anecdotally, it seems factionalism is still a significant factor in Mombasa - as my guide was taking me around he specifically pointed out how “this mosque is Shi’ite”, “this mosque is Sunni”, and when prompted that another mosque was for Indian muslims.

3. I was convinced by this one experience to buy a couple volumes of the Sub-Saharan Africa Architectural Guide (h/t Tyler Cowen).

How to be cool and impress your girl in Nairobi: Ride a matatu

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Daniel (while reversing up the ~50M driveway of my apartment complex): “I love driving in reverse more than anything.”

Luke: “Really? Why?”

Daniel: “I used to drive matatus in CBD (1), and that driving is so crazy. Driving in reverse is so easy.”

Matatus make up the bus system in Nairobi. Ranging from nondescript white minivans to school-bus-sized machines painted with marijuana leaves and blasting reggae, matatus are the probably most common means of commuting for Nairobians.

Standard-issue Biggie ganya

I’ve always been fascinated by how the matatu system works - people often talk vaguely about them being connected to organized crime - so I had to pick Daniels’ brain for the 20-minute duration of our Uber ride together.

Some ganyas are more saintly, like this hardcore St. Michael the Archangel

The most fun matatus are the “posh” matatus as Daniel called them - the ones with paintings of rappers or movies or saints or Squid Game characters. 

  • These Matatus are called ganya, and Daniel assured me I would instantly be cool if I told my girl we were taking a ganya around town (3)

  • The hottest ganya that Daniel drove was the Vybz Kartel matatu (video example here), which blasts reggae music and required him to continuously hit the airhorn button on his sound effect switchboard 

  • A government regulatory agency has to approve the paintings on ganya, and - as an example Daniel gave me - they likely wouldn’t approve one with naked ladies because “school children might be riding this” 

It was alarming and a little upsetting to see this bus protesting police violence with a picture of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck

The basics of the business work like this: A matatu owner pays for the right to drive on a particular route (4). Every day the owner hires a driver, and the driver’s job is to return the matatu at the end of the day with a full tank of gas and with ~10,000 Kenyan shillings (around $90). 

The driver collects fees all day from passengers (5), and pays for his (6) day-to-day costs himself (fuel, paying a guy who hangs out the door on the side of the matatu and stirs up business, and bribes for cops (7)).

Economically, the business set up of matatus has a few interesting results:

  • Drivers are incentivized to get as many customers as possible - your pay as a driver is directly proportional to the number of customers

  • The driver has no guaranteed minimum income. If he only makes 10K in a day, he doesn’t make any money. If he doesn’t make enough to pay the owner, he has to convince the owner that there were riots that day, or crazy traffic or some other excuse. “Matatu drivers are very clever” says Daniel

    • Daniel said the reason he drove Uber now was because Uber guaranteed a minimum income - predictability is often more important than high average pay

  • Matatu drivers are “in the same company as the police” so can break traffic laws. Because of standing arrangements with cops, matatu drivers pay way less in bribes than a typical traffic driver who breaks traffic laws, and they drive with relative impunity

    • Cops look out for the matatu drivers. As Daniel kept saying, the cops and the matatu drivers are “all the same company.” Sometimes, to cajole the policemen, matatu drivers even wear blue uniforms, similar colors to the cops, and say “look, we wear the same uniform we’re the same.” 

    • If you can make the cops laugh, they let you off easier (8) 

There’s a lot more to learn about the matatu world - most specifically how exactly organized crime, politicians, and SACCOs fit together, but I’m happy to at least have learned a day in the life of a matatu driver.

As my friend from Maryland said “Kenyans have good taste”

—

  1. Central Business District - downtown Nairobi

  2. From my understanding, the matatu cartels (3) keep competition off their routes. I’m not sure if this is through legal or illegal means, but in any case it’s corrupt.

  3. Note that I have not yet actually ridden a matatu, so I am not cool and have not impressed my girl

  4. These cartels are connected somehow to SACCOs. Generally a SACCO is Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisation, a sort of community bank but they seem serve a variety of different purposes in different industries. Matatu SACCOs are openly known to be corrupt and connected to organised crime, though exactly how the crime part of things works it works is still unclear to me.

  5. It seems like matatu fares are set by the owner or the SACCO

  6. I have never seen a female matatu driver

  7. Bribes for cops are an unavoidable cost of doing business, and break down into two main categories:

    1. In the mornings, cops will stand near the roundabouts and stop matatus who each pay them around 100 shillings (~$0.90)

    2. Later in the day if you get stopped for driving around traffic you pay around 100-200 shillings (~$0.90-$1.80)

  8. Daniel claimed that even now that he was an Uber driver, if he got pulled over he would be able to talk his way out of a fine because the cops would tell he used to be a matatu driver

—

Source: Daniel The Matatu Guy

Thanks to J for convincing me that readers probably weren’t as interested in the financial side of things as I was

Sometimes companies want to stay blind

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In Seeing Like a State, James C Scott says that for a government administrator there are virtually no other facts than those that are in standardized documents and data sets. The accumulation of data allows a state to “see” better and effect more sweeping changes in society.

This ability to “see” through data can be used for good or for ill. When the Nazis occupied Amsterdam, they were able to identify, round up, and deport 65,000 Jews because the Netherlands kept registries of all their citizens. This kind of record-keeping

“merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions. A capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.”

It struck me that the fact that data can enable either good or evil leads to opposite responses in the US vs. Kenya with regards to issues of racial/tribal equity.

In 2020 in the US, something I heard often from businesspeople interested in addressing racial equity was something like “if you aren’t disaggregating your hiring, promotion, and retention statistics by race, you’re never going to know if you have problems.” The assumption being that a lot of companies want to have better representation of e.g., black and Latino employees, so tracking will help them achieve that goal.

In Kenya, as far as I know, most companies do not officially track the tribe of their employees (1). There is a high degree of economic and social inequality between different tribal groups within Kenya, so you might think that Kenyan companies interested in addressing this inequalities would want to track the relevant data, as is done in the US. But by my understanding, officially tracking your employees’ tribe in Kenya is just totally out of the question. Everyone would assume you wanted to show favoritism to one of the most powerful tribes and discriminate against the rest (2).

Standardized data sets allow companies to see better and make more informed decisions, for good or ill. And if you are in an environment where people assume you will use your data for ill, it’s better to stay blind and just not collect that data at all.

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1. Disclaimer that even in writing this sentence I’m entering a world of Kenyan tribal representation and politics where I’m way over my head

2. This type of favoritism is common in politics. Kenyan presidents have blatantly given administrative jobs to those of their own tribes: in the two last terms of President Moi (of the Kalenjin tribe), “two of Kenya’s largest ethnic groups (the Kikuyu and the Luo) were virtually absent from his administration” (page 28). The title of Michela Wrong’s book It’s Our Turn to Eat about corruption in President Kibaki’s administration comes from a phrase used by members of Kibaki’s tribe in anticipation extracting benefits for themselves from the presidential administration

"These Indians are dying like flies"

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Before moving to Kenya part of me, a subconscious part of me that I’m not proud of, thought that sympathy for people in other countries was the luxury of the privileged. “Of course in the US we feel bad for poor people in poor countries who are dying of starvation and disease. We are so much better off than them and sympathize.” I sort of assumed without ever explicitly considering it that a lot of less privileged people are too worried about their own problems to think much of people suffering in other countries.

In February or March of 2021, a month or two after I moved to Nairobi, the delta variant was ravaging India. I was living in an apartment that was just 1km from my office (1), and often on my way home would stop at a fruit/vegetable stall.

The fruit/vegetable stand. 9 cent bananas, 45 cent large avocados. (Google Street View link)

One day I stopped to pick up some produce and had a short conversation with a guy, Josh, who ran a nearby street food kibanda (2). We had a short exchange while I was buying my mangoes and carrots.

Josh: “Have you seen about this delta?”

Me: “Yeah it’s bad.”

Josh: “Have you seen these Indians? They’re dying like flies. It’s terrible.”

It shouldn’t have been, but it was surprising to me that the Indian delta spike and resultant suffering would be top of mind for Josh. It certainly wasn’t taking up enough of my headspace that I would bring it up in a 30-second fruit-stall interaction.

Of course, anyone anywhere in the world feels bad for people dying of starvation and disease. We sympathize because we’re human.

—

1. Even closer as the crow flies, but you know those Nairobi streets can be wily and winding

2. He was just kind of hanging out at the fruit/vegetable stand on break I guess

Reflection on a Year Living in Kenya

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I had a few goals moving to Kenya, and I achieved all of them!

  • Gain experience and credibility working and living in a low-middle income country: Definitely done. It’s been clear when talking to people at different companies/NGOs/”development” actors how much more valuable I would be as an employee from having worked in Nairobi for a year

  • Decide if I would be comfortable living abroad for longer than a year and if I like and do well at the type of work aimed at eliminating extreme poverty: Definitely. I love it here, and see myself living here for at least 1-2 years more, maybe longer. At this point my thinking is that for me to move away from Kenya I would need to have some specific job in another country that seemed more impactful than whatever I’m working on in Kenya (though very possible that my thinking will change in a few years!)

  • If I like it, find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution (1): In the near term, the startup space is for me. In the long term that could change, but I don’t see myself at any point wanting to work at a government organization or large NGO. I have worked with these types of organizations in consulting, and don’t think they are very effective at helping people (2). I also don’t enjoy that type of work (or consulting work) very much. I’m very excited by the idea of helping to build a company, and I think I have the strongest chance to have impact in on people living in extreme poverty by sustainably creating jobs, decreasing prices, and driving economic growth. I also am more open to working at an Effective-Altruism-aligned charity in the medium-to-long term

  • Learn about the different ideas and actors in global development / global health: Done. I’ve been lucky to work on three projects in the development space while at BCG. Plus you can’t go to one party or ultimate frisbee game without meeting people who work at embassies, impact startups, UNESCO, local charities, etc. (3) which has lead to tons of great conversations about global development and global health

  • Refine my views on what the world - and in particular Americans - should do differently from what we’re doing now in order to improve life for everyone on the planet: With regards to extreme poverty, I wrote up my thoughts in a previous post. I’ve also updated my thinking that lots of people should be working harder to improve the long-term future of humanity, but that’s a bit outside the remit of this post as it’s not anything I learned from being in Africa in particular (4).

So what does all this mean in terms of my next steps? I am leaving BCG but staying in Nairobi, to work at a startup in Nairobi! (I will not be founding a startup myself, though maybe in few years I will decide to). Things are not 100% settled yet, but I will share an update when they are.

I’m so grateful for having had the opportunity to move to and work in Nairobi, and am excited for the adventure to continue. And I’m so grateful for everyone who reads this either out of pity for me or because it’s genuinely interesting to you - either way I appreciate it! If you haven’t been reading along and are interested in more about what I’ve learned and done in Kenya, my favorite posts are Reflections from my first two weeks, Iowa vs. Kenyan corn, and on helping people in extreme poverty (5)).

If anyone, from anywhere on the internet is reading this, is thinking about helping to end extreme poverty, and is interested in talking, let me know! Email me at ljeure@gmail.com

—

1. I’ve moved away from saying “I want to work in development” and towards “I want to help end extreme poverty”, though sometimes I am cowardly and still say the former

2. For a lot (but not all!) of these organizations, you shouldn’t even think of their purpose to be helping people as much as possible. Their main purposes (in terms of what these organizations are actually set up to do) are to expand the soft power of their host countries (in the case of government orgs) or meet impact metrics, prove value to funders, and expand their scope of activities (a cynical view of many NGOs)

3. A perspective shift from meeting all these people has been “wow there are tons of people in situations similar to mine trying to do work similar to what I’m doing”. It’s been humbling - I’m not as special as I thought I was. On the other hand, none of these people seem to have exactly the same approach as I do, which is probably good - lots of different but overlapping perspectives trying to solve problems

4. Basically I was persuaded that I had been underweighting Effective Altruism arguments around the neglectedness of humanity’s future. I now think it’s quite a bit more likely that in the medium or long term I work at an Effective Altruism organization on topics related to existential risk And in the short term I’m helping to start an Effective Altruism group in Nairobi

5. My donation matching offer is still valid for the last one:

Understanding why Kenyan Uber is different from US Uber

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As a follow up to my post from a few weeks ago, I want to examine in detail what factors make taking an Uber in Kenya more frustrating than it is in the US.

I’m devoting two posts to this not because this affects my life very much, but because I find it an interesting case study in how behavior that seems driven by incompetence is actually driven by poorly designed systems and incentives that are hard to see at first.

More bluntly, understanding how this all works helps move me from bad stereotypes like “Agh! These Kenyan Uber drivers are so bad at their job!” to “Uber doesn’t work the way it does in the US because drivers face different pressures than US drivers like capital constraints and less reliable maps.

And of course, sometimes people are just bad at their jobs.

Pain points

1. Driver calls the customer to ask where their pickup and drop-off locations are

Drivers call about where you are, which can be annoying because you want to yell “I’m at the PIN - that’s the whole reason Uber has a map.” As far as I can tell there are three main reasons for this 1) Sometimes the drivers aren’t good at reason the map. As one Uber driver who was kind enough to let me interrogate him about this told me “some of these old guys aren’t used to reading these maps.” 2) sometimes the Uber map display is actually wrong (1) so the drivers don’t trust it.

Calling to ask the drop-off location is more understandable. Towards the end of a shift, a driver wants a ride that will take them close to home, so will cancel if you’re heading the opposite direction. This is especially prominent when there is a curfew that the driver needs to beat to get home.

2. Driver asks customer to cancel the ride rather than doing it themselves

If a driver cancels over 15% of their rides, they are in danger of being kicked of Uber. There is no penalty for a rider to cancel a ride though, so the driver asks the rider to cancel.

This issue is totally Uber’s fault. The company doesn’t seem to realize that having the 15% limit doesn’t mean that drivers pick up customers more often - it just means that drivers ask riders to cancel instead which is more frustrating.

3. On Uber’s map, sometimes it appears that car is idling rather than coming closer

It could be that the driver has actually stopped - either for gas or to get food or for other reasons that I don’t understand. I think part of this is also due to Kenya having a “flexible-time” culture, where - according to Erin Meyer in The Culture Map: “Many things are dealt with at once and interruptions accepted”, as opposed to the US where interruptions like a driver stopping before picking you up without explanation would be seen as less acceptable.

Sometimes it’s also because the Uber map is malfunctioning, or because the driver has turned off data on their phone to save their limited data bundle.

4. Driver does not follow the map route and either asks customer, or takes another route which sometimes adds time

Sometimes the maps are wrong, sometimes the suggested route actually takes you through a bunch of traffic. So the drivers, rightfully, are less likely to trust the map than drivers do in the US. And just like people everywhere, sometimes the driver thinks he knows a shortcut that actually takes you through 3 back alleys, 2 dead ends, and a 5-minute total standstill on Waiyaki Way (2).

5. Driver sometimes stops for gas during the trip

Drivers don’t typically have the working capital to fill up their car to the max at the start of the day, so have to fill up in small increments throughout the day as they make money. If they’re doing trips back to back to back, they don’t really have an option other than to fill up while a rider is in the car.

It’s also likely driven by the “flexible-time” culture of Kenya, as explained in 3 above.


6. Drivers give lower ratings than drivers in the US

Uber riders from the US generally get lower ratings from their drivers in Kenya than they do in the US. Part of this is driven by payment type: If you pay by card rather than cash, you may get a lower rating as a rider. Drivers prefer getting paid by cash because they don’t have much working capital, and payments by card are only disbursed to them at the end of the week (3).

It also seems like Uber drivers in Kenya just give lower ratings in general in the US: In the US 5 stars means “good” and anything lower means “bad”. Kenyan drivers seem to think that 4 stars isn’t quite so bad. This is Uber’s fault for not having clear ratings standards worldwide (4).


Takeaways

  • It’s easy to assume people are incompetent when in fact they face pressures that you don’t realize

  • It’s your responsibility as a company (like Uber) to design your system in a way that takes into account the difficulties faced by your contractors (drivers) and customers (riders) so that you don’t put undue pressure on your contractors and have a bad experience for your customers

  • People sometimes complain about technology and the modern American world making all of our interactions transactional rather than personal. I’ve realized that often I want interactions to be transactional and technology-mediated. Calling an Uber in Nairobi involved more personal interaction than in the US, but this is not good, life-affirming personal interaction. I would much rather the act of reserving a car and giving directions be done by technology

Conclusion

All that said, I went to Rwanda recently which doesn’t have Uber and where my friends and I had to find taxis, negotiate prices, navigate a language barrier, and try to give directions using Google maps.

Comparatively, getting around Nairobi is a piece of cake.



Endnotes

  1. For example, when I drop a pin for my favorite kibanda, the location shows as “Safaricom office” which is 400 meters away across the highway. Roads are also often labelled incorrectly

  2. In my 10 months in Nairobi, taking probably on average ~8 ubers a week, I have had <5 women drivers

  3. I think it’s weekly - could be monthly. In any case, it’s not immediate. As one driver, Harrison, told me: “sometimes you don’t have any food in the house in the morning, so you do a few rides, and then send money home so they can get breakfast.” You can’t do that if your first few riders only paid by card

  4. Anecdotally, this is a problem when you go back to the US (probably other countries too) because drivers see you have a low score by American standards and then don’t want to give you rides

Learning from frustrating Uber trips in Nairobi

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In this post I’ll talk about how Ubering in Nairobi taught me to get off my high horse and be a little more understanding of stereotyping and complaining.

I tend to be very suspicious when anyone makes general statements about groups of people, especially negative statements like “people from Iowa don’t believe in COVID”.

I also tend to dislike when people complain about first world problems like “ugh, it’s such a hassle to ship Amazon to Nairobi”.

So it has been very humbling on both of those fronts to move to Nairobi and be very frustrated by interacting with drivers on Uber.

Here’s an example of a typical interaction with an Uber driver on a Friday night in Nairobi (during the period of time when we had a 10pm curfew):

  • 9:20pm: Summon an Uber at 9:20, get matched with a car

  • 9:25pm: Get a call from the Uber driver

    • You: “Hi, how are you?”

    • Uber driver: “I’m good. Where are you?”

    • You: “I’m at Jambo Mzungu restaurant in Westlands.”

    • Uber driver: “Westlands ok. Where are you going?”

    • You: “Junction Mall.”

    • Uber driver: “Ah that’s too far, I’m going in the other direction. Can you cancel?”

    • You: “Can you please come? I need to get home?”

    • Uber driver: “I can’t come, can you cancel please?”

    • You: “Fine. Why don’t you cancel since you can’t come?”

    • Uber driver: “I can’t cancel and I can’t come. Can you please cancel?”

  • 9:27: Depending on how stubborn you are, a back and forth ensues regarding who should cancel the ride. You never end up winning the argument, so eventually you cancel and summon an Uber again.

  • 9:29: Get a call from the second Uber driver

    • You: “Hi, I’m at  Jambo Mzungu restaurant in Westlands, can you come?

    • Uber driver: “Where are you?”

    • You: “It’s in Westlands, on Muthithi street. Can you follow the pin on the map?”

    • Uber driver: “Where?”

    • You: “It’s near Shell on Muthithi street.”

    • Uber driver: “What are you nearby?”

    • You: “It’s near Westpark towers. It’s right at the pin on the map.”

    • Uber driver: “Ok. Where are you going?”

    • You: “An apartment near Junction Mall.”

    • Uber driver: “Ok I’m coming.”

  • 9:34: The car on the map has not moved at all in the last 5 minutes. You call the Uber driver again but get no answer.

  • 9:35: You cancel that ride and call another. You call the third Uber driver directly, worried that you won’t make it home before curfew

    • Uber driver: “Hi how are you?”

    • You: “I’m good how are you?”

    • Uber driver: “I’m fine. Where are you?”

    • You (having learned your lesson about what the most relevant landmark near you is): “I’m at Jambo Mzungu restaurant in Westlands, near Westpark towers. I’m going to Junction Mall. Can you please come?”

    • Uber driver: “Ah I am very far away.”

    • You: “I think your the closest car or else Uber wouldn’t have matched us. Can you come?”

    • Uber driver: “I’m 2 kilometeres away.”

    • You: “That’s okay I can wait. Can you come?”

    • Uber driver: “That’s fine, I’m coming.”

  • 9:40: Uber driver arrives. You get in the car.

    • You: “Hi, thanks for coming. How are you?”

    • Uber driver: “I’m fine. Where are you going?”

    • You (looking at the map and seeing that the pin for your destination shows up): “I’m going to Ziana Springs Apartment on Riara Road near Junction Mall. It’s the pin on the map.”

    • Uber driver: “Ok thank you.”

    • (You arrive at an intersection)

    • Uber driver: “Which route should I take?”

    • You (depending on your level of trust in the driver): “Just follow the map please.” or “Whichever way you think is fastest.”

  • Depending on the night, the driver may stop for gas during your trip home, but eventually make it home just before or a bit after curfew

Throughout this process, I try to keep in mind that I’m incredibly lucky to be in the position to call Ubers, that it’s a miracle that the technology enabling Uber exists, etc. etc.

But the fact remains that it’s all frustrating. I think it’s particularly frustrating because I know how seamless Uber is to use in the US, where you almost never have talk to your driver before they arrive, can just expect the driver will show up and follows the map, and don’t have to worry about the driver stopping for gas during the ride.

Having frustrating experiences like this has made me appreciate two things:

  1. I understand how it would be easy to form potentially harmful stereotypes about Kenyans if you regularly had annoying experiences like this without interrogating their systemic causes. Without considering factors that make life different for Kenyan Uber drivers vs US Uber drivers (e.g., drivers don’t always have mobile data, they are super cash constrained), it’s easy to think “Wow, Kenyans are just really bad at using Uber”. Or maybe the even more harmful and racist “Kenyans don’t seem that smart”

  2. If you’re used to a particular level of service (e.g., Uber in the US), it’s very frustrating to expect that same level of service and not get it. The Uber app looks the same in Kenya as in the US, so I expect the process to be as seamless. Those expectations aren’t met, which leads to frustration.

I should say that I’ve been able to adjust my expectations for Uber now, and don’t often get very frustrated anymore. I’ll probably do a follow up post where I look more deeply at the pain points in a Nairobi Uber trip.

What I learned biking from the equator to Ethiopia

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Last week, I went on a group bike ride from Nanyuki Kenya to Moyale Ethiopia. The route was ~590 km over 5 days, on highway A2 the entire way. Here are the biggest things I learned!

The group was mostly Kenyan, and I was only slightly more a tourist than some of they were in the north of Kenya and at the Ethiopian border. Most had never been to the area,

Relatedly, the group seemed just as affected by the extreme poverty of the areas we were in as I was. And at one point, one of the Kenyans mentioned that people in rural areas often drink unsensitized river water, but they never get sick from it (in reality people get cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, etc. from unsanitary water all the time). Living in a poor country does not mean you understand the effects of poverty, but I still have an instinctive expectation that the average middle-class Kenyan is familiar with and understands extreme poverty way better than me. I don’t think this is true.

I want to be able to flit between languages the way they did someday. It’s mesmerizing to hear people switch back and forth between English and Swahili, sometimes speaking English but throwing in a Swahili word for emphasis or comedic effect (or vice versa) (1). Everyone was very charitable to my constant asking “what does that word mean”. But I was not the only one learning, because they were constantly teaching each other words in their respective tribal languages. Some of my favorite things I heard / learned:

  • “I wasn’t finya-ing” = “I wasn’t trying too hard” (“finya” means “press” in Swahili)

  • “Subhanallah” = literally “Praise be to God” in Arabic, said in the presence of great wonder and beauty. We all learned this one together from an Arabic-speaker, and overused it

  • “Riswa” is what you say to a dust storm to banish the devil within it, in the Luhya tribal language

  • “Supu hii ni nani?” literally means “this soup is who?” which was described to me as a “very broken swahili” way of asking “what kind of soup is this?”

In the north of Kenya their milk is mostly from camels. They cook it by smoking (I think to disinfect it), and the smokey flavor makes it impossible for me to tell if camel milk itself tastes different from cow milk.

For anyone doubting, I can confirm that riding in a peloton is indeed, way more efficient.

There was a really cool cosmopolitanism among the group, that’s unlike anything I’ve seen in the US. The knowledge of many languages is part of it, but there was also a level of knowledge about world affairs, regional politics, many cultures, and a curiosity to learn more. And all of this without any sense of pretension.

Large avocados were described as “they looked as if they’d been to private school”

Anecdotally heard from a fellow biker: Kenya is known throughout the world as the home of many great marathon runners. Nowadays most of these runners come from the Kalenjin tribe. But this was not always so! It used to be that the Kikuyu tribe produced better runners. But the Kalenjin established a system where champion Kalenjin runners would return home to train the next batch of runners. And now the Kalenjins dominate the Kenyan marathon scene (2016 and 2020 men’s Olympic marathon champion, Eliud Kipchoge, is Kalenjin). Which illustrates that genetic predisposition and hard work are not enough: Building a culture of excellence is needed to achieve world-class results consistently on an institutional level.

This power line followed us for 100km, looming on the horizon and stretching out to infinity:

1. This is different from “sheng” (the Nairobi street slang) in my understanding. Sheng is more than just mixing English and Swahili

Which occupations should we hold in higher prestige?

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As I’ve been thinking about what job I might want to do next, I’ve been thinking about the different levels of prestige that society (1) gives to different occupations. What will my friends / enemies / society think of me if I take this job? Will I seem like I am achieving below my potential? Or will they think “wow he must be important if he has that job!”?

Maybe if we were ideal people we wouldn’t care about prestige. But as it is, prestige can be useful. It’s one of the ways that society conveys to us what societal roles are important. But sometimes a given role (public school teacher) doesn’t have the appropriate prestige given how important we think the role is in society (very).

This matters because jobs that have high prestige are more likely to attract more highly-motivated and highly-skilled people - all other things equal. Why do lots of people want to become professors at elite schools? It’s not the pay, or the work-life balance. Prestige plays a large part in it.

So as a society (2) we should constantly evaluate how much prestige we give to certain jobs. If we see that talented and hardworking  people are going into jobs in numbers that are too high relative to how important that job is for society, that’s an indication that the job likely has too much prestige, and we should lower it (3).

So! Here are my off-the-cuff thoughts on which positions in society have too much, too little, or the right amount of prestige (4). Of course prestige is different among different groups of people, but I’m trying to generalize across “American society.” I’m shooting from the hip here, so if you think differently on any of these, let me know and I apologize for any stray bullets

Positions where the level of prestige should be lowered:

  • Consultants

  • Investment bankers

  • Lawyers (excluding public defenders)

  • Most jobs at most large NGOs

  • Working at a startup in Africa founded by ex-Consultants

  • Startup founder (in Silicon Valley)

  • Anyone who has any of the following words in their job title: “quantum”, “partner”

Positions where the level of prestige should be raised:

  • Public school teacher: Despite lots of people saying teachers should be valued more, most people don’t actually value them highly enough. Including the people who say they should be valued more. Probably including me

  • Startup founder (outside Silicon Valley)

  • Non-academic basic research position (e.g., at national labs)

  • Inventors

  • Stay-at-home parents

  • Anyone who has any of the following words in their job title: “nuclear”, “social”, “child”

Positions with roughly the right amount of prestige

  • Medical professionals

  • University professors

  • PhD students in STEM

  • Parents (in general)

  • Engineers

  • Magicians of course. They live their act

—
Addendums from 9 August 2021: Based on input from others, I’ve added a clarifier to “lawyers”, added “inventors”, and removed “journalists” from “Positions where the level of prestige should be raised”. Thanks for everyone’s thoughtful input!

Journalism I think is an interesting one: While I do think it’s the case that better quality journalism would be valuable, raising the prestige of journalists is probably not the best way to do that. Too many people don’t think critically about the news they consume, so raising the prestige of journalists would likely lead people to out more blind faith in the news, which would be bad

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1. “Society” being a word which here means “the people broadly in my circles or whom I want to impress,  including but is not limited to my high school friends from Iowa, my college friends from MIT, that one Uber driver I had last year, my family, the professors I’ve had that I admire, the median person in Chicago, and that one guy who never seemed to like me so much.”

2. “Society” in this case being a word that means “the people broadly of the United States of America”

3. There are other factors here too of course, the biggest one being pay. But “society” (a word which here means See Footnote 2) doesn’t have as much say over pay - so let’s focus for now on what we can control

4. To be clear, I’m not saying that the jobs where prestige should be lowered are worthless (or that the jobs where prestige should be raised are the most important jobs). Just that society should hold these occupations in in lower (or higher) esteem than we currently do

Iowan corn and Kenyan corn

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I was back home in Iowa a few weeks ago and was struck by how thickly and greenly the corn grew:

It’s hard to go for a bike ride in West Des Moines without running into at least a little corn

It’s hard to go for a bike ride in West Des Moines without running into at least a little corn

Compare this to Kenyan corn (we call it “maize” here):

Left: Small patch of maize parked between two buildings. Centre: Close up of maize field. Right: Part of field is devoted to other crops like soybeans

My pictures aren’t great, but I still think this visually illustrates lessons about the US vs. the Kenyan economy:

  • Crop variety and risk exposure: Iowan corn is monocropped (i.e., only one crop is grown on large tracts of land), while Kenyan farmers always grow many different crops. A major factor in these decisions is ability to mitigate risk: Iowan farmers can buy insurance and sign advance sales contracts to protect themselves in the case of bad yields or price fluctuations. Kenyan farmers don’t have access to those financial instruments, and so rely to a much greater extent on hedging by planting multiple crops. If maize isn’t selling well, then maybe avocados are.

  • Scale / farm size: Kenyan farms (average size: <6 acres, with most farmers having ~1 acre) are much smaller than Iowan farms (average size: 355 acres). This means Iowan farmers have more market power, are more easily able to find buyers, and pay less in unit prices for transportation, seeds, fertilizer, etc.

  • Access to inputs driving yield: See how big, closely planted, and green that Iowa corn is (1)? It is GMO corn, nourished with lots of environmentally-harmful fertilizer, to be used mostly in animal feed, ethanol, and manufacturing. Kenyan corn is non-GMO (almost all GMO crops are illegal), and farmers don’t have access to as much fertilizer. US annual corn yields are ~4,000 kg/acre, while Kenyan yields are 5x lower at 800 kg / acre (2).

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1. Okay it is a little hard to tell scale in these pictures, and it is later in the season for Kenya than Iowa, but in real life the Iowa corn plants look much larger and healthier to the untrained eye (and I think to the trained eye as well)

2. Kenya bans the importation and growing GMO crops other than cotton. The policy is pretty popular among Kenyan people.

The ban leads to some frustrating situations. Kenyan manufacturers of animal feed are not able to import the cheaper, GMO-grown maize and beans that they process into feed. However, Kenyan farmers are able to import feed from other countries that was made from GMO ingredients. So it is difficult for Kenyan feed manufacturers to compete with imported feed.

Another interesting bit of collateral damage: The lack of access to GMO ingredients makes it difficult for Kenyan feed manufacturers to use futures to hedge their exposure to fluctuations in the prices of their inputs. Feed manufacturers are exposed to risk in non-GMO crop prices, while international futures markets are traded based on GMO crop prices. The GMO and non-GMO prices are not well correlated.

This is not to say that Kenya should allow for GMO crop inputs, just that the ban has unexpected ramifications.

Your Money can’t End Extreme Poverty, but Can Help People in Extreme Poverty

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For the past couple weeks I went back to Iowa USA for a friend’s wedding (congrats guys! They should know who they are). While I was back, a few people asked me variations on the following question:

Is there anything the typical American can do to help address extreme poverty?

This post is my answer to that question since I feel that I didn’t give great answers on the spot. (The short answer is “Yes - you can donate money.”)

You can break down “addressing extreme poverty” into two parts:

  • #1 - Small-picture improvements: Improve the lives of some people who are living in extreme poverty

  • #2 - Big picture improvements: Contribute to creating social and economic systems that lead to the sustained elimination of extreme poverty 

It’s easy for an individual to contribute to #1. Just give money to help people in extreme poverty. The median American makes $31K per year. There are 600M people who live on under $1.90 per day (~$700 per year). Your money is worth way more to those people than it is to you (1).

I encourage you to donate more to help those in extreme poverty! I think this is really important, so in case it’s an incentive: I will match donations to effective charities helping those in extreme poverty for any reader of this blog who is on the fence about donating (2)!

It’s much harder for a typical American to contribute to #2. Enabling the social and economic systems that will eliminate extreme poverty involves a set of really complex problems. There just isn’t much most people can do here unless your career touches people in extreme poverty (e.g., working in international health, managing supply chains from poor countries).

In this regard, the big-picture problem of extreme poverty is like the problem of national cybersecurity. Poverty and national cybersecurity are both extremely important, and extremely complex. In your spare time you can’t contribute to national cybersecurity. If you’re exceptionally well-informed you could take political action (e.g., maybe writing to their legislator), but that’s about it.

It’s the same for extreme poverty (3). Poverty might seem more addressable by the everyday American than national cybersecurity, but the fact that it hasn’t been solved over the past 70 years shows that it’s not. Plus, the people most able to solve problems related to extreme poverty are those in the poorest countries, not Americans.

In conclusion, my view is that the best way for the typical American to help people in extreme poverty is to donate money to an effective charity. Donating can measurably improve someone’s life though it doesn’t create systems that will consistently lift people from poverty. 

But don’t let the inability to drain the ocean of poverty stop you from helping where you can! What is the ocean but a multitude of drops?

——

1. Other than donating, I really don’t think there’s much a typical American can do here. Doing a mission trip might be good for you spiritually, but probably doesn’t help the people in the country you’re visiting unless you have very specialized skills (e.g., you can do heart surgery).

There’s also a case for adopting someone who would otherwise grow up in extreme poverty - but this is a very complicated issue that I don’t have a strong view on

2. Eligible charities:

  • Malaria Consortium: Cheap malaria-preventing medicine to people in Africa and Southeast Asia

  • GiveDirectly: Give cash directly to poor people in Kenya

  • GiveWell: Charity evaluator that does rigorous evaluations of charities and give you the option to allocate a donate to several highly effective charities (includes the above two charities)

  • Does not directly help those in extreme poverty, but I’ll also match in case you want to directly give money in a way that might be personally more meaningful: The president of my ultimate frisbee club in Nairobi, Emmanual Kameri, is raising money to help cover his tuition at Oklahoma Christian University where he would play ultimate. You can support him here. Note I don’t know details of Kameri’s financial situation and do NOT mean to imply that he lives in extreme poverty, only that he can’t afford tuition on his own (despite his ultimate frisbee scholarship! He’s very good)

Some ground rules:

  • For every dollar you donate to one of the charities/fundraisers listed above, I will donate a dollar

  • You can’t already have been planning to donate to any of these, or another GiveWell recommended charity (on your honor)

  • The donation I make to “match” yours will be above the amount I was already planning to donate this year (on my honor)

  • Message me any way you like (email (ljeure@gmail.com), comment on blog, Facebook messenger, Venmo) if you have questions or want me to match. If there’s another charity you think is close in cost-effectiveness to the charities above, let me know

  • As an edge case constraint: I will match up to a max of $100 per person on donations to Kameri’s tuition fund. I won’t have any such limit per person on the other three charities. This is because I think the other three charities are more effective at truly helping the worst off in the world (if anyone is willing to donate more than $100 to Kameri, I will consider this post wildly successful)

  • Another edge case constraint: I will cap my overall donation matching at some point if this post becomes wildly successful

3. If you want to write to your legislator to help end extreme poverty, ask them to reduce subsidies to US producers that harm producers in poor countries. I may do a whole blog post on this at some point, but for now see this stat from Wikipedia:

“Oxfam estimates that the removal of U.S. cotton subsidies alone would increase prices 6-14% and thus increase the average household income in West Africa 2-9%- enough to support food expenditure for 1 million people” (source).

There have been other studies that have found similar (negative) effects of US trade policy on the livelihoods of people in poor countries. In 2003 when Mississippi catfish farmers successfully placed tariffs against Vietnamese catfish farmers, per capita income for the Vietnamese catfish farmers dropped by 40% (1). As Nathan Nunn says: “If we [found]  an intervention that increased real per capita incomes by 40% it would be the closest thing we have to a panacea for economic development. However, we effectively have a policy intervention that does this, which is to not impose these policies which significantly harm developing countries” (page 11 here).

Updated thinking on what type of work I should pursue

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In moving to Nairobi that one of my goals has been to find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution to improving others’ lives. I still don’t know what exactly I do want to do, but I’ve ruled some things out: Working at a government organization or large NGO (e.g., USAID, UN humanitarian agencies, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is not the best way for me to help those in extreme poverty. 

Being in the orbit of (and even consulting for some of) these organizations here has shown me that most of the common critiques of these orgs are basically right: They are bureaucratic, lots of money goes to writing reports rather than actually helping people, they don’t get enough input from or give enough agency to the people who they are ostensibly helping, there is little-to-no accountability for results, etc (1). Historically, these orgs have not been good at improving peoples’ lives given the amount of money they consume (2).

This was all good to learn, but not surprising. But there have been two things I’ve learned about these organizations that have been surprising and interesting to me:

Firstly: Everyone who I’ve talked to who works at these orgs basically agrees with all these critiques.

Secondly: Relative to other jobs (e.g., working at a startup, a local company, or at a small nonprofit) these positions are very comfortable from an economic and social status point of view, in ways that have nothing to do with how much these jobs actually help people:

  • They pay well (relative to higher-impact jobs you might take)

  • They are stable (relative to higher-impact jobs you might take)

  • They are prestigious (ditto)

  • In many roles, you work steady 40-hour weeks

  • It’s easy to explain what you do to others and they can immediately see that you’re trying to do good in the world

  • They allow travel around to many different parts of the world (3) (4)

All of these are compelling reasons to either convince yourself that working at this org is in fact very effective at helping other people, or to decide to make a tradeoff in favor of your own comfort at the expense of potentially helping others more. 

To be clear: everyone I’ve met who works at one of these orgs has very good intentions, and probably does help people - just not as much as they probably could in other positions (in my view - I could be wrong though nobody has pushed back on this point to me when I’ve raised it). And it’s not as if the problems of promoting human flourishing are easy. But I find it very troublesome that the global development jobs that people in the space complain about most are also those that are the most comfortable.

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1. For me, The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly summarized the problems the best. Noam Chomsky also has great critiques from a very different angle

2. In fact, it’s a mistake to even think of the purpose of “humanitarian” government orgs as helping people. As USAID Administrator Samantha Power said on Colbert this week, USAID “is the soft power arsenal” of the United States Government. Though most people who work for these orgs really do want to help people (and the orgs do end up doing some good), the purpose is ultimately to serve political goals for powerful countries

3. In fact, UNICEF requires its people in certain management roles to move countries every few years. “If you understand infant health in India then you also understand it pretty well in Ghana” seems to be the implicit philosophy 

4. Of course all of this is also true of management consulting

A Trip to the Market with Stan the Mboga Man

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Outdoor food stalls are one of my favorite things about Nairobi. They are my favorite places to eat and to buy groceries. There are two main types that I love:

  • Kibandas: Street food restaurants, typically set up under tarps, where people cook food all day (1)

  • Vegetable / fruit stands: Similarly set up under tarps, where you can buy very cheap fruit and vegetables, most commonly bananas, carrots, sukuma wiki (a kale-like leaf), mangoes (2)

I’ve gotten very curious about how these shops work from a business perspective because they are everywhere, the fresh food seems impossibly cheap (I spend probably $10 a week at the kiosks and it makes up over half of the food I eat), and because agriculture and outdoor markets are so important to Kenyan economic life (agriculture is ~25% of Kenyan GDP and employs ~40% of people).

So yesterday I asked the guy who runs my favorite vegetable stand if I could go with him to the wholesale market where he buys his food. He (let’s call him Stan) was happy to take me along, partly because he’s friendly and partly because he wants me to buy him a pickup truck and hoped that seeing how the market worked might make me more likely to do so.

I met him at 8am today (a Sunday morning) and we drove to Marikiti Market (also called Wakulima Market), a huge outdoor food market near Nairobi’s Central Business District. Here’s what I saw and learned (3):

Marikiti / Wakulimu market

Marikiti / Wakulimu market

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The reason Stan wants me to buy him a pickup truck is because it’s illegal for him to transport large amounts of produce in his car (a small Toyota passenger vehicle). I learned this when he told me to roll up my window on the way back from the market, so that the cops wouldn’t see the 400 pounds of vegetables in the backseat and trunk. I guess there’s some kind of rule against using a passenger vehicle for commercial purposes, but it seems like tons of shop-owners do this anyways.

--

The market was full of carriers - guys who would swing enormous bags of polypropylene sacks on their backs and hustle them through the market. Stan hired a carrier who followed him around all morning, making trips back and forth to the car as Stan bought stuff. I saw this carrier - probably 5’6” and not super built - hoist 90kg (200 lbs) of watermelons onto his back and march away.

--

When brokers pick up produce from farms in Kenya, or arrange for crops to be shipped in from other countries like Uganda, Tanzania, or South Africa, their first stop in Nairobi is Marikiti. So even though there are several large outdoor food markets in Nairobi (e.g., Ngara market), sellers at those markets are buying from Marikiti.

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The market was so big that there was an ecosystem of people selling just to the wholesalers: People were walking around hawking tea, snacks, bags, and sanitary wipes.

--

A lot of people were pretty amused to see a white person there. I kept hearing shouts of “muzungu!” (means white person, or more generally a non-black foreign person), one guy asked me why the US has white supremacists and asked if I had seen the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery videos, and another couple guys taught me to say “A muzungu has a white stomach” in Massai, which I have unfortunately forgotten.

--

A little bit on the finances of a vegetable stand

Stan’s typical markup seems to be ~20-30% on what he pays for his produce wholesale, and his daily revenue has dropped by ~60% due to COVID. He said that before the pandemic, on a typical day he would sell ~$180 of produce, for which he paid ~$150. But he’s located in a business area, so has seen way less business due to people working from home, and now he only makes ~$80 in net revenue a day.

Stan also pays ~$50 a year to the government for a license to run his shop.

Footnote 5 has additional finance and food quantity information for the curious (5).

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Overall this was super interesting, and I’m going to start asking people if I can tag along as they go about their work more often. I got to see and understand a part of Nairobi and the Kenyan economy I never would have gotten to see otherwise.


Feat. the intransigent avocado seller

Feat. the intransigent avocado seller

1. You can buy chapatis (an Indian flatbread), ugali (a maize-meal dish found all over Africa but called different things in each place), mandazi (basically fried dough), nyama choma (grilled meat), stir-fried beans and vegetables, etc (1). A meal usually costs around $1.50, but I did get food poisoning once from the stir-fried sukuma-wiki, so you have to be careful!

Apparently other Africans make fun of Kenyan cuisine for being pretty bland and unoriginal: Their three biggest foods are, respectively, from India (chapati), not unique to Kenya (ugali), and just cooked chicken or lamb (nyama choma)

2. Women who run these stands are called “Mama Mbogas” (mboga = vegetable)

There are other types of outdoor food options too that aren’t quite as fun but are still cool:

  • Food carts: Mostly selling sausages

  • Kiosks: Huts that have doors and counters, often sponsored by wireless networks (Safaricom or Airtel) where you can buy bottled water, processed snacks, and extra cellular data

  • Other small tables on the roadside selling packaged peanuts, crackers, and small toys

3. The source for most of these facts is Stan, and neither his English nor my Swahili is perfect (4) so some things may have been lost in translation

4. My Swahili is practically nonexistent

5. Here’s what Stan bought, including quantity, wholesale price he paid at Marikiti, and what the price he plans to re-sell at (where I was able to get the info). All the prices were in Kenyan shillings, but I translated to USD (it’s about 1 shilling to US $0.01)

  • Peas: Bought 1 grocery bag full

  • Beets: Bought ~10, for $0.40 each, will sell for $0.50 

  • Avocados: Bought 60 large for $0.50 each, will sell for $0.60

    • normally he buys for $0.40 and sells for $0.50 but the wholesaler was stubborn and the avocados were big so Stan thinks he can get away with selling them for $0.60 this week

  • Watermelons: Bought 91kg

  • Passionfruit: Bought one grocery bag full for $1.40 per kg

  • Limes: Bought one grocery bag full for $1.20 per kg

  • Pineapples: Bought ~20 large for $1.50 each, will sell for $1.80-$2.00 each

  • Papaya (this is where things get wild):

    • Bought 10 Ugandan papayas for ~$1.50 each

    • Bought ~8 Kenyan papayas for ~$2-3 each

    • Apparently Kenyan papayas are sweeter and better than Ugandan papayas

    • He doesn’t directly sell papayas - instead he slices them up and sells them along with watermelon, avocado, pineapple, passionfruit, bananas, and beets in plastic mixed-fruit containers that are really good and $1 each

  • He also bought potatoes, mangoes, ginger, and some coconut

  • He didn’t buy any oranges but apparently those are flown in by airplane from South Africa

Some of the most striking things to me from my first 3.58 months in Nairobi

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I was lucky enough to attend the koito for a friend. A koito is a traditional engagement ceremony for the Kalenjin people in Kenya, hosted by the bride’s family. Here are a few details I found very interesting:

  • The groom has to pick the bride out of a group of veiled figures. If he picks incorrectly he’s supposed to marry the girl he picks instead of the girl he actually wants to marry. But this is usually avoided by the bride and groom agreeing on a particular signal beforehand (e.g., I’ll wear these shoes), so the groom doesn’t have much of a chance to mess things up

  • The ceremony involves a standoff between the bride and groom’s families to symbolize the groom’s family whisking the bride away as she leaves her birth family and joins her husband’s family

  • The negotiation for a bride price is also involved - traditionally paid in goats and cows, but now cash or M-PESA is acceptable (1) 

  • The ceremony does not involve the groom in a major way after the veiled-bride-picking (my term, not an official term) and agreement on bride price. Compared to American weddings, the ceremony was far more about the families coming together rather than the two individuals marrying each other

  • The middle-aged Kenyan men in the ceremony seemed extremely reserved

  • The bride and groom have not been officially married in the eyes of the state or the church yet. But as far as the older members of their families are concerned, the koito is more important than the actual wedding

  • It seems that most tribes in Kenya have a similar ceremony to the Kalenjin koito, though the detail vary

Another less-fun wedding-related fact: Apparently it can be extremely difficult to get married in Kenya. I anecdotally heard of a friend of a friend having to wait over a year for the government to approve their marriage application (marriage involved a Kenyan and a non-Kenyan, though I’m not sure if that’s relevant to the delay). Quick Googling indicates that maybe this kind of delay was because of COVID. But even so I found that shocking.

My church in Nairobi sports one of the more fair-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed depictions of Our Lord I’ve seen. This seems like a pattern based on the other churches I’ve been to in the city, though it’s possible I’m just noticing it more than I do elsewhere since the images are so incongruous here.

Jesus Consolata.jpg

Church is basically the same as in the US because Catholic Mass is the same everywhere (and because I go to the English-language service). The only significant differences are:

  • Offertory occurs at the end of Mass rather than in the middle

  • The music involves lots more clapping and swaying, and sometimes Swahili words

  • The Communion line is a self-assembling chaotic system rather than an orderly, row-by-row process. It’s not particularly chaotic, or messy, but there’s no pattern that I can tell. You just get up and add yourself to the line when you feel like it, regardless of whether you’re in the front of the church or the back, and regardless if everyone else in your row has gone already or if none of them have

The key to good haggling for non-essential items (especially knick-knacks for tourists) is to remember that they are non-essential. You don’t need them, and the seller wants to sell far more than you want to buy. So if they don’t want to sell at your best offer (meaning the amount you actually value the product at), just leave. There’s a decent chance that they will follow you and agree to sell at your best offer (2).

Also don’t buy from the first shop in the market until you’ve compared prices with the shops in the back — that first shopowner really doesn’t want you to compare prices between shops (3).



1. One of my favorite facts in economics is that women tend to be higher-educated in cultures with bride prices because (simplifying drastically here) parents have clear economic motivation to education their daughters: My daughter  will fetch a higher bride price if she’s more highly educated

2. On my coffee table sit a set of animal coasters that I didn’t want, paid $20 for, and never use. They remind me of this lesson

3. If I bring you back a gift from Kenya, you can be comforted by the fact that I learned some great lessons in buying it, and likely didn’t pay very much for it (unless it’s an animal coaster)

On American Identity

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I’ve found that leaving the US has made me think a lot about what it means to be American (1).

  • The sense I have in reading the news and talking to people in the US is that America is in decline. This made me unprepared for the volume and influence of American culture I would find in Kenya. I feel just a bit proud every time I see someone in a Spiderman shirt, watch an American movie with my friends, or hear Michael Jackson on the radio.

  • I appreciate the melting-pot nature of the US much more now after realizing that I could live for 20 years in Kenya and never really be Kenyan. I don’t think the same thing is true in the US. From my perspective, as a native-born American, immigrants to the US strike a balance between assimilation into American culture and maintenance of the culture of their motherland. This allows the people in the US to have an identity as “American” while maintaining part of where they came from. I think on balance this is a very good thing for American culture, creativity, and innovation, though there are also downsides (e.g., immigrants feeling that they are forced to assimilate to some degree, and native-born Americans feeling that their country is being taken away from them).

  • The fact that there’s such a constant and robust debate within the US about what it means to be American is itself, I think, very American.

  • The fact that most people here know so much about my county’s politics, history, and culture makes me feel bad because I know so little about their countries. But also better because the fact that they know so much about my country must mean that my country is actually really important, right?

  • I feel at ease talking to other young Americans here because I don’t have to mentally translate to the metric system, wonder “should I say math or maths?”, or question “do we both love ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’?” These three things make conversations much more natural (though sometimes less interesting)

Finally, living outside the country has made me more proud to be American. I love America more than any country in the world because it’s mine — something I appreciate much more with distance.



1. These traits might not be unique to the US, but they are characteristic.

The entrepreneurship culture in Nairobi

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I’ve been astounded by the amount of entrepreneurship in the Kenya. It feels like every Kenyan I meet has their own company, at least as a side-hustle (and checking the stats it looks like ~60% of Kenyans are self-employed). I admire how much people trust in their ability to get out there and build something new.

Some examples from people I’ve met are: Making lotions and skin creams by hand, electric car rental service for hotels, online fashion curation store, self-employed realtor, family company giving technical assistance on setting up corporate software, making and selling toys online (1).

A high level of self employment is typical in low- and middle-income countries. It’s a necessity, because types of well-defined, predictable jobs that Americans tend to wander into (whether a white-collar job at a big corporation, or a cashiering job at Wal-Mart) simply aren’t available in the same volume in poorer countries. There aren’t that many large companies (2).

I imagine some of it also comes from a cultural, though I don’t know enough about Kenyan culture to say where exactly it comes from.

In the US many more people have the option to take a job that doesn’t require them to innovate and create. These jobs have a lot going for them from the individual perspective – stability, health insurance, often higher pay. But at a societal level, the existence of these jobs lowers the number of people who are engaged in trying to create new and valuable things, which is probably a dampening effect on growth.

It’s been inspiring to see how widespread the belief is here – especially among people in their 20s – that they can just get out there and get things done.

 

1.     Lots of them are retail sales and feel like a digital evolution of the self-employed people running outdoor food stalls.

2.     As an illustration: The largest company in Kenya (by market cap) is Safaricom which makes up over half of the value on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. It has a market capitalization $11B (total NSE value is $19B) and ~5k full-time employees (though Safaricom has many part-time workers – see footnote 2). This is very small by US standards where the 50th largest company (Honeywell) has a market cap of $140M and ~113k employees.

For reference, Kenya has ~1/7 the population of the US (50M vs. 330M).

Some of the most striking things to me from my first two weeks in Nairobi

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The security guard at my apartment expressed a more nuanced understanding of American politics than 95% of people I’ve talked to in the US:

  • He asked what I thought of Donald Trump, and seemed surprised when I said I didn’t like him, because  “Trump speaks to young men like you.” 

  • Then he said that the most important thing is to unite people, and that Trump doesn’t unite people.

  • Later he was talking about how corrupt the Kenyan government was, and said he understands why Trump doesn’t want to send money to foreign countries anymore, because it doesn’t end up helping the people.

Relatedly, I know next to nothing about non-American politics, nor am I expected to. A Kenyan was impressed that I even knew the name of Kenya’s first president.

The relative lack of rules is so freeing! There are no sidewalks so you just walk wherever you want! The management of my apartment doesn’t forbid bringing bikes through the lobby, swimming at night, or drinking on the roofdeck!

There is a sense of activity about the city that I don’t feel in Chicago or Boston. Part of it is the construction that is going on all over the city, driven by the twin needs to reduce traffic and to clean dirty money (1). Part of it is the visibility of cooks outside food stalls and salespeople inside Safaricom huts (2) on the side of the road — you can’t help but see people at work when you walk down the street. Part of it is my impression (possibly only existing in my head) that the median person here has larger and more meaningful goals they’re dreaming about and working towards than the median person in the US.

There are wild monkeys in my neighborhood (vervets as near as I can tell).

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There’s not a clear distinction “inside” and “outside” because the temperature is perfect and bugs are not a problem. Windows are always and doors are often left open.

What seem like crazy low prices to me have forced me to understand how low the cost of labor is here. A full lunch today cost me ~$1.10 (3). A 20-minute Uber ride is ~$2. Because the cook and the Uber driver don’t have some other job option they could take for $7.25 an hour, their time is very cheap in economic terms.

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1. Nairobi is full of in-progress and newly-constructed high-rises which are themselves full of vacancies. These high-rises are kept deliberately empty. The “rents” that the owners collect from these empty units serve as a legitimate-looking source of cash. If my co-worker is to be believed, this money laundering is used to cover four types of illicit activity: mining from Sudan, drug trade from South America, corrupt government activity in Kenya, and oil production from the DRC.

2. Safaricom is a phone network and the largest company in Kenya (worth ~$11B and making up ~60% of the Nairobi Stock Exchange (to be fair, a pretty small stock exchange as far as stock exchanges go)). Safaricom runs M-PESA, the widely-used Kenyan digital payment system, and on what feels like every street you can find a green food shack that has a Safaricom sign. These are the equivalence of convenience stores, selling snacks, water, juice, and the ability to upload money to M-PESA via cash or credit card. Safaricom doesn’t own these stores, the store-workers are simply Safaricom agents in addition to being store-owners.

There are ~160k M-PESA agents in Kenya, many at stores like these. There are around 50M people in Kenya, so that’s 3 in every 1000 people, similar to Walmart’s employing ~5 out of every 1000 people in the US (though Safaricom agents are not full-time employees).

3. “today” being a word which here means “the day of writing, not the day of posting”

I've Moved to Nairobi!

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This week I moved to Nairobi, Kenya, where I will live for a year while working at BCG’s office here. I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest people have had in my decision to make this move, so I thought it would be worth it to write up my thought process at the outset of this trip. I’ll also be writing blog posts throughout the next year documenting what I see, learn, and do, and how I use this experience to decide what the next step in my life will be (1).

So why am I moving to Kenya? Basically to see if working in global development / global development is the best way for me to improve others’ lives, which is what I see as my life’s purpose.

My main purpose in life is to improve the lives of others as much as I can, and not necessarily to be happy. I think the call to help others is a strong moral obligation, and while it’s possible that I would be happier or more satisfied pursuing some other purpose, I would not be living the best life I could (2). But I generally do feel happy and satisfied by helping people anyways, so it works out great!

My thinking about my life’s purpose has been influenced strongly by the ideas of the philosophical movement Effective Altruism, and has lead me to two core driving ideas:

  • I ought to push myself to help people as much as I can rather than settling into a career that does a moderate amount of good and remaining satisfied with that.

  • I ought to look for opportunities where I will be doing work that would otherwise not be done. For example, I wouldn’t want to work at a nonprofit, even a super effective one, if I was just filling a job that would otherwise be filled by someone just as capable as me. Because if I do that, I’d simply be displacing good that someone else would be doing rather than making sure that more good gets done in the world. Instead I want to find a job that nobody else would do if I wasn’t doing it, or that I would do far better than the next person (3).

So what’s the work that will help me help others as much as possible in a manner that would not be done without me? As best as I can tell, for me that work is in global development / global health. And working in that space often requires living in or at least having had experience living in a low-middle-income country. So since we do a lot of that kind of work in BCG’s Nairobi office, living and working here seemed like the best way for me to find out if this is the type of work that I want to do longer-term (in addition to being a lot of fun)!

So my goals in moving to Nairobi are to:

  • Gain experience and credibility working and living in a low-middle income country

  • Decide if I would be comfortable living abroad for longer than a year

    • maybe I’ll want to live abroad for 3 years? 5 years? I’m not sure

  • Discover if I actually like and do well at global development / global health type work

  • If I like it, find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution

    • There are a lot of types of work I could see myself in (working as a development economist in academia, working as a consultant, working in a for-profit or non-profit startup, working for a government agency, etc.) and I want to narrow that list down

  • Learn about the different ideas and actors in global development / global health

  • Refine my views on what the world - and in particular Americans - should do differently from what we’re doing now in order to improve life for everyone on the planet

I’ll be blogging throughout the year as my thoughts evolve and move towards some kind of resolution on these topics. On 31 January 2022 I’ll write up my conclusions, which I hope might be useful for other people thinking about similar kinds of questions.

I’ll also hopefully be blogging about other fun and interesting things that happen while I’m here. So if any of this interests you, stay tuned!

1. Given the level of interest people have shown in my thought process about moving to Kenya, it seems like in this case people want to hear my thoughts about myself. So in my blog posts for the coming year I’m going to allow myself a higher-than-normal level of introspection in the hopes that my analysis of my own personal circumstances might give you some kind of insight into yours. If it’s boring, you’ve been warned!

2. I don’t feel this obligation from the fact that I was lucky to be born in a wealthy country, get a great education, have people help me in my life, etc. (though all that’s true). I think that just being a person means being called to help others.

3. As a concrete example, at BCG a lot of the people at my tenure want to be put on social impact cases, and there aren’t enough social impact cases to go around. And people at my tenure at BCG are pretty interchangeable from a work capability perspective. So that means if I was being put on a social impact project, I’m simply replacing an equally capable other consultant. 

This is a problem to me. If my goal is to feel good about helping other people, then being put on a social impact case would be great for me. But if my goal is to actually improve other people’s lives through social impact, being put on a social impact project doesn’t help at all, because I’m just taking the place of someone else who probably have basically the same amount of impact and learning as me. So if my goal is to improve other’s lives, why should I try to be put on a social impact project?

I raised this question to several people at BCG, but the only person who gave me an answer that seemed reasonable to me was the person who said “I actually don’t care about improving the world through social impact. I just like the feeling of working on those projects.”