In Rwanda, Building a “University in a Box”

We were trying to sell internally to what is known as "bottom of the pyramid" markets - the large proportion of the population that makes about $100/month. These live 5-10 to a room, and something like a fridge is a massive improvement in quality of life as being able to store food means one less day a week trekking to the market and one more day to do some work (oddly enough, they still buy a TV first).

Turns out being local is not much help. White goods? The Koreans have more efficient factories and more innovative design. Next time you're in the countryside, check out how much of the store they occupy. FMCG (including your soap)? Hello P&G and l'Oreal. Lest you think they don't understand their markets, I spoke to the salwar kameez-wearing CEO of a large FMCG foreign group for India, and he told me he spent his weekends driving his Royal Enfield in the countryside, to better understand his customers. Some groups like Reliance or TCS seemed to be doing alright, it seemed to be both about having the right connections, and arbitraging the salary differences by selling to the West and paying locally.

I came in thinking I was so smart with my degree and fancy internships in world class businesses, but the Indians knew the business well, in fact my boss for the project knew the MIT and Harvard profs who were at the time leading operations research on a first name basis and had regular phone calls after a few Boston trips. I gave up after a few months and returned to countries where I had some kind of market value.

The MNC had enjoyed a near half century of tranquillity. Until the end of the License Raj (in 1991), it was practically illegal to become a large company (and you'd spend 2-3x your capital just in administrative work if you were a startup) so they had a monopoly on a few markets. Opening to global markets meant that the foreign companies, which already had experience operating at scale and in emerging markets, had a field day.

Really, the only scenario where you might have an edge is if you are a connected national and you get some kind of trade restrictions set up. But you generally don't want to be operating in such a country anyway.

YMMV, the plural of anecdotes isn't data etc.

Have you been to Rwanda? It is a land-locked country surrounded by countries with terrible road infrastructure and corrupt border crossings. It costs more to get a container from Dar to Kigali than it does to get a container from China to Dar.

Rwanda is unlikely to ever become a place where physical goods are manufactured at scale: it costs too much to import raw materials and too much to export finished products even if you can get all the raw materials locally. You can sell into the local market, but it is a very small one.

It is an interesting place to be if you want to work on some kind of knowledge product, ie, software or services, micro-work etc, but even then it comes with its own set of challenges, it is no slam dunk.

Source: I lived there for over four years and cofounded a small software company there (http://nyaruka.com), which eventually built TextIt. (https://textit.in)