Andrew UmansMVP in Senegal and Mali
It’s tempting to start this as “how I spent my summer vacation.” This summer, through the generosity of the Social Enterprise Fellowships, I traveled to Senegal and Mali while working with the Millennium Village Project’s (MVP) Business Development group. The MVP is working to demonstrate the impact a relatively small amount of development aid can have on poor countries working to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. It aims to do so through a multi-sector development plan currently being implemented in more than 100 “Millennium Villages” in 15 “clusters” throughout sub-Saharan Africa. I knew when I started making plans for the summer that I wanted to do a development internship, building on my studies in the dual–degree program at CBS and SIPA. The MVP presented the opportunity to work in development up close and gain the experience of building a business on the ground.
My role was to create business plans for medium-sized enterprises, usually requiring $500K or so of startup capital per business. My boss in New York will then pitch these business plans to investors. The businesses will all use local resources and be managed by local professionals. The ultimate goal in funding these businesses will be to allow the poor – including some of the most marginalized and underserved, such as women, youth, and the landless – to diversify their incomes, create new sources of economic growth and generate additional employment (including self-employment).
Both Senegal and Mali are former French colonies, part of the former French Sudan. The cluster in Senegal has fertile land to the west, where it runs up against the Atlantic Ocean. To the east, the land gets much more arid as it approaches the Sahara. Mali, Senegal’s neighbor to the east, is a landlocked nation, of which a good bit runs into the Sahara in the north. The cluster there is blessed to be along the Niger, providing fertile agricultural land. Mali is consistently ranked as one of the poorest nations in the world. In both countries, over 90 percent of the population is Muslim.
Senegal is a much more developed country than Mali, and their capitals reflect the gap in economic activity. While Dakar, Senegal’s capital, has the hustle and bustle typical of many developing countries working their way up the economic ladder, Bamako, Mali’s capital, was rather sleepy, composed of buildings more on the scale of a village in the MVP cluster than in a big city. International aid is one of the biggest industries in Mali, and much of the money floating around Bamako – be it in the form of SUVs, office space, or luxury villas – has the aid industry as its source.
I have a strong interest in North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) and hope to work in consulting in the region after graduation. There are a lot of ties – historical, cultural, and economic – between the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa. The Fellowship gave me knowledge of key issues – agriculture, infrastructure, and business culture – that can help me work in areas that build bridges between the two regions for their mutual benefit.
Journal 2:
As the summer progressed, I was exposed to more and more of the local culture and its direct effect on business. The MVP staffs in the regional offices are all nationals, with economy, tech, agriculture and veterinary backgrounds, among others. This is a talented pool, most of whom hold advanced degrees from universities in Europe and the US.
One component of my work has been to track down data to plug into my models, which provided a lot of exposure to the cultural mores. Simply gathering information involved the niceties of getting to know people and a formality of questions about kith and kin. People aren’t very responsive to email and most felt the need to meet face-to-face. Documents and data were usually transmitted in hard copy form, trading paper rather than phone or electronic communications. The expectations are that there will be direct interaction and dialogue.
Another critical issue has been connecting the headquarters in New York with the local offices in Senegal and Mali. All of the national teams are development professionals who signed onto the project two years ago to work on a development project, not to build a business. One of the key hurdles for the success of the businesses will be obtaining buy-in from these experts, whose on-the-ground experience and general knowledge inside the clusters is invaluable.
Journal 3:
I had to use a lot of the skills I learned at Columbia, and some of the tools I gained in the classroom are visible in the final deliverables I produced this summer.
Working on a plan for a dairy business in Mali, I looked back to models we used in our Operations class. I had to test the feasibility of getting milk from rural farmers to a central pasteurization facility within three hours, in order to prevent milk from spoiling. I created a queuing model inspired by Operations to determine how many employees the company would have to hire at each central collection point to make this chain possible.
In Senegal, I saw the sizeable impact a tiny investment in basic equipment could make in the income potential of women who work drying and salting fish along the coast. Fish curing could easily be a year-round venture, as it is not prohibited by the seasonality of agriculture. A back-of-the-envelope market analysis revealed the huge potential of dried fish even in the local village markets, not to mention in Dakar and other big cities in West Africa. Similarly, a rough estimate of the investment costs and profitability revealed the enormous potential returns. This is one of my favorite business plans from the summer, because it captures the potential of small- and medium-sized businesses in the region, and how access to startup capital for basic inputs is the chief bottleneck to achieving this potential
In both places, women quite possibly were one of the largest untapped resources. Traditionally, they have largely agrarian roles, and could, if moved into other verticals, provide more income and opportunity for themselves and their families. I am excited about the prospect of helping the MVP in its effort to establish local savings and loans institutions that can provide a safe place for women to keep their cash and establish a capital base for the communities to expand local business opportunities. When I come back to campus in the fall, I hope to support this initiative through Microlumbia – the business school’s student-run microfinance fund – by leading an investment that will provide additional capital for one of these fledgling institutions.
For more on the work fellows did for the Millennium Village Project, visit Sandy Eapen's journal.
