One of the things I enjoy the most about working on international development is the missions. This week in Kigali is a reminder that all of the effort we put into our academic work is just an intermediate input. While I very much appreciate doing academic work, where the rubber meets is here: in the ministries of growth oriented countries like Rwanda. It is here where your ideas about international development better be useful. Theory gives us clarity, but missions like this give us context. It’s one thing to model growth on paper, and another to work with a country to try to make it happen.

Join us tomorrow in DC or online for this event. We’ll have great presentations from people working at the intersection of complexity and development.

Let me tell you an inspiring story about a different type of entrepreneurship. A venture where social and financial returns are not well aligned. This is the story of Nigist Goytom (@nigigebi), an Ethiopian entrepreneur I met in Zurich a couple of years ago. Nigist is an architect and a mother of three young children. Like many of us during the pandemic, she was worried about her children’s education. So, she went looking for apps to help them learn basic literacy and math skills. But while Ed Tech was booming, most apps targeted the English speaking world. She wanted her children to learn the Ahmaric alphabet she had grown up with. Unfortunately, this was a niche market lacking the financial incentives needed to make it an attractive space for Ed Tech ventures. So Nigist decided to create what she could not find in the marketplace. She combined her skills as an architect with her entrepreneurial spirit to create an app she called HaHu (@HahuScripts), as these are two sounds made by some phonemes used frequently in Ahmaric languages. Nigist story is an example of a misalignment between social and financial returns. A basic rule of entrepreneur is to follow the money. The first question investors often ask an entrepreneur is the size of their potential market. Markets in which many people can pay a lot are, of course more attractive, but financial returns and social returns are sometimes misaligned. Consider developing one more early childhood literacy app in English. It may be a better business than doing one in Ahmaric, but it is unlikely to generate the same social returns. One more English app provides a redundant capacity in a saturated market. It can still be more profitable than an Amharic app, but the Ahmaric app helps promote the preservation of a language and culture. In fact, Nigist and HaHu are now focused on gamifying the learning Ge’ez, an ancient language with few remaining speakers on which much of the history and culture of Ethiopia are recorded on. Nigist story is interesting because it illustrates a different type of entrepreneurship. What some people call social entrepreneurship. Her motivation is not to become rich, but to have an impact. Her goals are to support the preservation and diffusion of the Ethiopian culture she is right to be proud of. Her entrepreneurial bug bit her at home, during the pandemic, but today, her work continues to be important, as many children in the northern parts of Ethiopia stopped attending school during the Tigray war. So if you believe in this type of entrepreneurship, please support Nigist’s entrepreneurial journey. She is running a small kickstarter campaign to help keep HaHu alive. You can support her and the HaHu team by liking, sharing, or if you have the means, investing in her project. There are only 4 days left in the campaign. All of these actions help support the preservation of an entrepreneurial effort designed not to make someone rich, but to help have a positive impact on their works. Kickstarter: kickstarter.com/projects/202…