Standing beneath the canopy of the largest rain forest in western Africa, a young woman named Rose recalled a recent trip along the dirt path that runs through Zeagbay, the remote Liberian village where she lives. Her daughter, Blessing, had developed a fever, so Rose slung the five-month-old onto her back and began the hike to the nearest health clinic–22 hours away. Five hours in, Blessing died.
While she described her lost baby as a hole in her heart, Rose maintained a detached calm as she recounted the nightmare in her native Krahn, a language spoken by only 139,000 people worldwide. Death is no stranger in Zeagbay: In a town of fewer than 250, 10 children under 5 have died over the past two years. Life expectancy here is 29, the same as in medieval Europe during the plague.
According to the IMF, Liberia is the eighth-poorest country in the world and one that only a decade ago was engulfed in a 14-year-long civil war that featured the full set of sub-Saharan Africa’s gruesome horrors: child soldiers, endless rapes, beheadings via machete. About 250,000 of Liberia’s 4 million citizens perished in the conflict, and the war devastated the country’s economy and infrastructure. Against this backdrop Rose’s tragedy seems sadly predictable, even inevitable.
But Liberia is also unique. A peace movement of women ended the civil war, and the country boasts Africa’s first female democratically elected head of state, Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who has embraced entrepreneurship as a long-term fix to her nation’s many woes. The country’s leaders, from government to private-sector to nonprofit, recognize that sustainable self-reliance ultimately requires market-based solutions. “We are not poor,” says Axel Addy, Liberia’s commerce minister. “We just haven’t tapped our potential to get beyond begging.” And for Americans, helping Liberia carries the same kind of moral responsibility as one might feel caring for a troubled family member.
The country was founded by freed American slaves, part of an ill-conceived plan in the 1820s to solve the slavery issue by sending blacks (most of whom had been born in the U.S.) back to Africa. The capital, Monrovia, bears the name of then president James Monroe. Their red-white-and-blue flag sports the star and stripes, their currency is called the dollar, and their map is speckled with names like Virginia, Maryland and Bunker Hill.
Armed with these justifications for both the heart and the head, for the past six months FORBES has engaged in an experiment: Can focusing some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurial and philanthropic minds on the problems of one specific country make a tangible difference? With that in mind, we made Liberia the centerpiece of the second annual Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, attended in June by more than 150 billionaires and near-billionaires. President Sirleaf and several of the country’s top social entrepreneurs addressed the participants, who then broke into groups to see how they could help them. In October FORBES followed up, leading a delegation of a dozen top philanthropists and private sector altruists to Liberia on a three-day mission to see their how their ideas worked in action.
IF THERE IS HOPE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION of Roses–and their kids–it comes from people like 32-year-old Raj Panjabi. A Liberian native, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and protégé of Paul Farmer of Mountains Beyond Mountains fame, Panjabi has returned to his homeland knowing that the solution to health care in places like Zeagbay is neither aid, which buys time but does nothing systemic to change the reality of a 22-hour walk for help, nor medical breakthroughs, since the tools to treat Blessing, who likely died of malaria, have existed for decades and cost a few dollars.
It’s jobs. Medical care is scarce even in urban Liberia–when the civil war ended, just 51 doctors remained in the entire country. So Panjabi’s nonprofit, Last Mile Health, recruits, trains and hires bright local villagers to serve as “frontline health workers,” who provide basic immunizations, diagnoses and medicines for 30,000 patients in the Liberian rainforest. In a region with 85% unemployment, Last Mile pays workers $60 a month and then incentivizes them based on completing immunizations, pre-natal treatments and the like. In the 41 current Last Mile villages, the child mortality rate has decreased by over 33% while the number of women receiving prenatal care soared from 15% to 97%. Says a smiling Markson Tarley, a 34-year-old frontline worker teeing up the Last Mile program in Zeagbay: “People call me ‘doctor.’ ”
The villagers, meanwhile, well understand that Panjabi’s jobs initiative can mean the difference between life and death for their children. The FORBES delegation, there to support Panjabi’s plans to expand into Zeagbay’s region, received a hero’s welcome, complete with the highest honor: the village elder presenting his peer–whom he quickly identified as 59-year-old former Morgan Stanley Smith Barney president Charlie Johnston–with a live chicken.
The helicopter flight back to Monrovia displayed the abundant resources available for Liberia. As we flew closer to the ocean, massive iron ore excavations, led by ArcelorMittal, filled up the landscape. The coastline, meanwhile, conjures what Florida’s Gold Coast must have looked like to a seagull 200 years ago–unspoiled green paradise brushed against thick white beaches, which roll on, untouched, for dozens of miles until the approach of Monrovia.
For all its beachfront charm, though, Liberia’s capital proves a textbook case study in the issues confounding urban Africa. Specifically, West Point, Monrovia’s largest slum, where 75,000 people cram up against the South Atlantic in an endless maze of wooden shacks that lack electricity and running water, much less sanitation.
Commerce here plays out at a subsistence level, from those selling a key source of protein–bony dried fish, possibly plucked from the same water that the sewage runs into–for a few pennies to the $1 prostitutes, some as young as 10. But at the elbow of one alley (West Point’s pathways are nameless), something more ambitious is going on. A pilot “trash-to-cash” program, seeded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (and 10% cofunded by the Liberian government, ensuring buy-in), generates $128,000 in revenue–and 300 jobs, which in turn provide for over 2,000 dependents–by collecting and repurposing West Point’s waste, which is otherwise destined to litter their neighborhood or clog the water supply.
A wooden door swings open to reveal the program’s most innovative aspect: 15 single mothers, the first of two shifts, crammed into a space no bigger than a backyard shed, vintage sewing machines in front of them all. Since June they have been taking plastic containers and turning them into stylish hats, backpacks and coats that, if tagged with a designer name, would surely run hundreds of dollars in New York boutiques–a huge opportunity, since the cost to produce each item is minuscule.
That’s part of what makes Liberia so intriguing. The ROI in terms of helping people, or in potential financial returns, is exponential. “Frontier markets like Liberia appear to be uncorrelated to both developed and emerging markets,” says Robert Hain, the chairman of City Financial, who joined the FORBES Liberia delegation. “This can provide investors with important diversity and performance–because frontier markets are underdeveloped, the potential for growth is high.”
That’s also why the FORBES delegation ended its trip with a larger-scale attempt to reach Liberia’s startups. Almost 400 people showed up at Monrovia’s city hall for what was billed as Liberia’s first entrepreneurial exchange. For all its issues–corruption remains a particular concern–the World Bank now ranks Liberia among the five easiest countries in Africa to start a company. “Liberia is ready–and ready now–for business,” Addy, the commerce minister, told attendees. “We, as the government, are banking on you, the entrepreneur.”
The exchange–some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, talking with civil war survivors trying to forge a new kind of living–was telling. Sometimes, the groups were speaking different languages–solid advice in the U.S. about setting up advisory boards or avoiding dilution were met with blank stares from a woman who in buying a single, used copy machine is trying to fashion herself as Liberia’s Xerox. When Jennifer King, whose family recently pledged $150 million to Stanford to nurture entrepreneurs in Africa, asked how many people in the audience had more than $150,000 in revenues (the current threshold, she told them, for the Stanford program), less than a half-dozen raise their hands.
But ultimately the language of entrepreneurship proves even more universal than English. After panels on raising capital and growing a business, an informal meet-and-greet turned into a networking frenzy, with dozens of business cards pressed into every open hand. Rather than chat, one local designer quickly charged Francine LeFrak, whose family has made more than $5 billion in New York real estate, $30 for two colorful hats, each proudly stamped “Made in Liberia.” A nascent e-entrepreneur, stymied by the fact that PayPal operates in 191 countries but not Liberia, wrangled an introduction to the U.S. ambassador, who in turn said she’d see if she could solve the bottleneck.
For the final session, Building Markets, a nonprofit that helps the most promising Liberian entrepreneurs get access to capital and contracts, hand-selected nine for a West African version of Shark Tank. Competitors included a group that makes flour from plantains, a concern that wants to consolidate local rice growers so that they have enough scale to sell countrywide and two different electricity companies–no small idea in a country that doesn’t have power outside its capital. City Financial’s Hain was particularly smitten by a proposal for Liberia’s first fleet of container trucks to service those burgeoning iron ore discoveries: “That’s a highly investable idea.”
Hain hopes to get the chance to put these ideas into practice soon. In partnership with Building Markets, he’s in the midst of putting together a frontier market fund of between $50 million and $75 million, which will invest heavily in Liberia. LeFrak and King each committed to fund a village for Last Mile Health, and King also promised to expand her family’s $150 million Stanford program here. Perhaps most dramatically, Raj Panjabi closed in on a major commitment that could, in one stroke, bring health care to 1 million Liberians.
In a country with a GDP of just $1.75 billion, this is progress, which we’ll be keeping tabs on. As Mother Mary Brownell, who started the Liberia Women ?Initiative in 1994 and proved instrumental in stopping the civil war, put it: “When I was on mission, we used to sing a song: ‘We don’t know where we’re going. But we’re going. …’ ”
forbes.com
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