Learning to Love Africa | Monique Maddy | Talks at Google

Hi, everybody.

Can you hear me?

Good.

So I'm Michelle Stribling. I work in internal communications here at Google, and it's my pleasure to introduce Monique Madi today. Monique Maddy, as many of you know, is actually a Googler. She joined google.org in October of 2005. She's also an author, and she's here to talk about her book, which is called Learning to Love My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back. Monique is originally from Liberia, and she's now a US citizen. And in true Google fashion, she has an elite, elite education. She has a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, a master's degree from Johns Hopkins, and an MBA from Harvard. So we can certainly vouch to her incredible credentials. Excuse me, I have a cold. She has worked for the United Nations Development Program on development issues in New York City, in Angola, in the Central African Republic, and in Indonesia. In 1993, she founded the African Communications Group, which was later renamed Adisimi. Monique has also brought a special guest, and I trust that many of you are feasting on his treats today. Her guest is Jean Barbeau, who figures in her book and also happens to be an amazing pastry chef. He's brought samples of his famous croissants, pain au chocolat and Pain aux armandes. Monsieur Babo.

So.

So without further delay, I'm very pleased to introduce Monique. Please give her a warm welco.

Thank you very much. I appreciate your coming here today. I'm sure many of you, most of you, haven't read the book yet. So what I'm going to do today is just draw out some of the highlights of the book. There are about four themes in it, and I'll go take you through each one of them, and hopefully after reading it, you'll be inspired to go and read it from COVID to cover. The first one, let me just say how I came to write the book. It originally started out as a Harvard Business School article that I had written after I had run my company, Adisimi, the African Communications Group, which was a telecommunications company that was designed to build wireless infrastructure in emerging market countries, particularly in Africa. And it was at the end of. We had liquidated the company and. And I was writing about the experience after seven years at the helm of the company for the Harvard Business Review. And I was approached by Harper Collins to write a book on the subject. And once we started doing, or I started doing the work, they thought the whole story was quite interesting because the article was primarily about entrepreneurship in developing countries. And they found that there Were several themes in my life that I had been an entrepreneur. I had worked for the undp. I had grown up in an entrepreneurial family. So it was very much, what could we learn from all of those various experiences and apply it to an area that I care a lot about, which is poverty alleviation. So the book, again, it goes back and forth, but it's in. There are four central themes. African entrepreneurship, international development aid. And by that, I mean the united nations, world bank, and all the efforts that have been made to alleviate poverty. And then what I feel which is most pertinent to all of us here today, I think, is the role of business in poverty alleviation. And since google is quite new to the game, I think it has a unique opportunity to really make an impact. And then throughout the book, again, I also talk about the african people themselves. And I think the best way for me to illustrate that. And the reason he's here today Is really through babu, who you just met. So, again, the book is somewhat historical, Because I talk now I'm going to go to the first theme, which is entrepreneurship in africa. And the book goes through several centuries of african history, through the eyes of a certain group of west africans, A group that I come from, or at least a part of my family comes from, which is the madingo people, who had networks of trade that really extended from west africa all the way to the middle east and europe, where they traded gold in exchange for cloth and other materials throughout, basically from the 5th century, where there were really big kingdoms in west africa, and all the way to the middle ages. And. And what you'll find is that until around the middle ages, Africa and europe Were very much along the same path in terms of economic development, which is something that I only really discovered As I was doing the research for my book and trying to sort of do the parallel, the chronology of both continents at once. And then once the slave trade was introduced, that's when things really began to form. And then, of course, you had the wealth that was created in the new world, which led to the industrialization and so forth in africa, Rather than continuing to build the infrastructure, Many of the chiefs preferred to actually export people, which ended up being the slave trade, to the new world. So that's where the big disparity is. But as I said before, that there was lots of kingdoms and also lots of infrastructure, Universities, and all kinds of developments that were going on on the continent. So I think it's important that when. Even though. And then we had colonialism, which lasted for 150 years in Africa. And there also, the entrepreneurship was basically killed. And it was mostly governments, the European governments, principally Britain and France, and to some extent Portugal, that were running these countries and really exporting the raw materials to further the industrial efforts elsewhere in the world. So I think it's important that when we look at Africa today, we have to understand that the countries, most of them, got their independence in the 1960s and after. So in terms of going of how we measure the continent and how badly it's performing, I think it's important to note that we do have these economic roots that go way back in history. But somehow the new governments that replace the colonialism haven't really stepped up to the plate in terms of letting their entrepreneurs thrive and creating an environment. And added to that is my next topic that I'll go to, which is the international aid business. Until the 1960s, or actually in 1940s, when the UN was created, the countries were basically running on their own. Then you had the creation of these development aid agencies, which, up to about last year, about $2.3 trillion has been spent in an attempt to alleviate poverty. So when I was growing up, I always thought I wanted to work for the United nations, and I thought that was a way to alleviate poverty. Even though my family was entrepreneurial, my father had a restaurant and did many other things, I thought that the best way would be through the un and that was because that was its mandate, at least for UN United Nations Development Program. And so, as Michelle mentioned in the introduction, I had assignments in Indonesia, Angola, the Central African Republic, and eventually Central Indonesia, New York, Angola and Central African Republic, where I eventually met Babu. And what I found was that we were giving money principally to the governments, and the governments really weren't doing. I mean, we had very little contact with the people, and we weren't even making a dentist in terms of poverty alleviation. And first I thought, okay, well, maybe it's just because it's this country, my next assignment, things might change. And unfortunately it didn't. And then as I looked around the world and this has proved true now, the countries where we see the most economic growth and poverty alleviation, so in countries where it's really the private sector, not governments, that are driving growth. And even though it might, it's not politically correct to say this, I think in many cases, economic aid has worsened the situation of many of these poor countries, particularly Africa, because, as I said, it enables. It doesn't give the governments, for the most part, the incentive to reform and to allow entrepreneurs and businesses to play the role they can in poverty alleviation as the they've done in other parts of the world. So my next theme is the role of business and how and why. I believe that business, where many people believe it's, you know, many multinationals at least believe that businesses are exploitative of people and resources and that they don't contribute to economic growth, rather that they exacerbate it. My experience has been quite the contrary. And I'd like to illustrate with a company that you're all familiar with and then go into my own experience and why it's possible for me to even be here today. If you take, Henry, if you look at it from just. If you take it from the perspective of a development agency, they don't really have an incentive to alleviate poverty because if you alleviate poverty, you have a whole machine that has to be dismantled. And that if you're familiar with bureaucracies, that doesn't happen very easily. On the contrary, if you take a private company, they have every incentive for all the people that are at the bottom of the pyramid. We talk about 4 billion people to emerge from poverty because that means more markets, new ideas, and just greater prosperity globally. So it makes sense that business would want to advocate for poverty alleviation. The question is no. Business seems to have found a way, or at least they haven't made it their core mission. It's sort of been a byproduct because they create jobs and so forth and they invest in infrastructure. But if you think about Henry Ford, he's the one who had the wage incentive. And he said, you know, he didn't want to make. To have people who could just make cars. He wanted people to buy cars. So there's no equivalent in the development aid agency. And so I think that's why you can see that $2.3 trillion can be spent. And I don't think any private company would be a going concern if they had spent that much without any results. So that was what led me to. So again, so just to bring it to my personal experience, when I was. I'm from Liberia, originally from the very northern part of the country, which was very. Just a bit of history on Liberia, which was founded by American slaves that had gone back to Africa, just a few of them, but they became the elite of the country and really treated the native population as if they were, you know, savages or whatever. And so there was a big disparity there. And up in the northern part of the country, they discovered Iron ore. And in this area they would. I mean, there were just a few villagers living there. They had no, I mean, no education or no roads, nothing. I mean, it was just basically bush. But a Swedish industrialist, I'm sure you've heard of the name Wallenberg because it's a big industrial family in Sweden. One of the major family members discovered he put together the consortium of companies, American and Swedish companies, to go and explore the iron ore mines there and extract the iron ore. But in order to do this, because everyone was, I mean, there were just a few people to begin with, and because everyone was illiterate, they had to build an entire infrastructure. In other words, they had to build railroads, they had to build houses, they had to build schools. And it was company self interest, but it was also somehow enlightened by the shareholders of lamco, which was the name of the company, that they had to treat the employees much better than they would have been treated if it was the government that was ruling them or whatever. So an entire infrastructure was built. And that was the infrastructure into which my family moved. In fact, my father was one of the first employees of the company. And because of that infrastructure, you had people now that were getting educated, they were getting jobs. And when they got jobs, they had disposable income. So when they had disposable income, that created new markets. So some of the people, my father included, left the company to start his own business and sent me and my brothers away to school. So this is the kind of cycle that business can create because when they invest, there's a huge multiplier effect as opposed to a dollar of development aid, which pretty much remains a dollar or sometimes can even be negative. So it was in thinking back over my childhood growing up and opportunities that this private company had given me that I decided after five years with the United nations that I should, you know, that this wasn't the way to alleviate poverty. And it's funny because at that time I was in the Central African Republic, where, as I said, I had met Babo, who. He doesn't speak English, so he's not. But that's where. And when I told him, he thought he was really not just him, but many others in the UN thought I was crazy to, you know, here's a secure job, you know, why are you leaving? You know, you have it made. And I just thought we weren't helping people, why should I, you know? And we were making quite good money not helping people. So. So I decided to go to apply to Harvard Business School and figure out another approach, maybe launching my own company, but knowing that it would be a private sector solution. And I think it's important for me to say too, that Babo thought, because I had all of these things at the time, I had a car, a house, and everything else. He thought, you should be happy, everything should be great. And. And I always used to tell him that he seemed much happier than I was because he had almost nothing. But he just, you know, he had this calm and sense of balance or whatever. So I did leave, and that's when I started this telecommunications company with a classmate of mine from Harvard Business School. We raised up about when it all was said and done. Throughout the seven years, we'd raised about $25 million. We had built infrastructure, we put the team together, we created a number of jobs in three different countries, and we were about to acquire some additional companies when essentially we had a major difference between what we call the do good investors and the do well investors. The do well investors being venture capitalists who had invested in our company and some of the more UN type investors. And the venture capitalists being business people, really wanted to see the company grow and eventually go public and get into multiple countries. Whereas the do good investors, again, going back to the UN model, they wanted to see only modest growth because, I mean, they want to help poor people, they don't want to help people do too well. And that's sort of the cycle that, you know, it's always the poor as victims as opposed to potential entrepreneurs. Now, again, that's changing a lot, and there's been a lot of movement in the industry. But even the UN now tries to see, well, how can we support entrepreneurs and businesses and so forth. But they, I mean, they're bureaucrats, they don't have business experience. So it's very hard for them to teach entrepreneurship, even though they acknowledge that entrepreneurship is. And job creation is the key to poverty alleviation, because essentially you're giving people the tools to get themselves out of poverty. So again, why do I tell Bubbles? So these are the central themes in the book, and I go into each one and in quite detail. And I mean, there's some really insightful stories about how life in the UN is also just as an entrepreneur, when I started my company, I had seen it with my father when he started his company. But as an entrepreneur in Africa, it's very. Or in any developing country for that matter, it's just so much harder. I mean, you're fighting. I mean, at least in the U.S. you have just the business to contend with there you have the infrastructure, the government, the policy, the. So there's so many forces working against you that you can't really gain much traction. And you only. I mean, large businesses like Coca Cola or some of the other major companies around the world, they can withstand the ups and downs of the turbulence of these markets, but entrepreneurs cannot. So that's why you don't find too many businesses that are scaled and you find many small, isolated cases of success. So the real key is to try to find ways in which you can get that kind of growth from the small company to the medium size to high growth companies. So you have the microcredit, the SMEs and the high growth. So again, so that's when I decided, when we encountered all these problems running the company, the telecoms company, I decided that the only real solution to poverty alleviation would come from the business sector. Going back again to what I said about the Henry Ford analogy. But I also thought, looking back at how much had been spent trying to alleviate poverty in the world, I also felt that it wasn't money that was needed, it was new ideas, bold initiatives that could really turn the development thinking on its head, not more money. Because many people feel just give us more money, double the amount of aid. I mean, if you think about it, it's all really arbitrary. 1% of GDP or 2% of GDP will alleviate poverty. That's not the case at all. And so coming to Google, I think what drew me the most to Google was the fact that for the first time a company was actually going to make poverty alleviation a core part of its DNA. In other words, it wasn't just a corporate philanthropy and that it was going to put its best minds, which is what is really needed. New ideas, new concepts, innovation to tackling these problems. Which is why I think that everyone here has something to contribute. Because if you look at bubble, I mean there are 4 billion people who won't have the opportunity that we have and that we take for granted. So I think that we really owe ourselves and the world, even if it's enlightened self interest, to find new solutions because we don't have the tradition that other companies or foundations for that matter, might be saddled with. And so those are the themes that run through my book. But at the same time, I would like to, to end before I take questions with a cautionary note, which I talk about in my book, which is I think Babo had, I mean, I think it's best if I illustrate it with just reading a section from the book. And to put it in context, it was after Pablo had come over to. This is his second trip here, and he had come over and we were running the company. He'd come over to spend a few months, about six months with us. And, you know, he was, you know, fascinated when he came. And now. Yeah, so he'd been here about six months. So as I talk about our taking businesses to Africa and doing, you know, helping them emerge from poverty, I think it's important to say. To say the following. One day, when his early fascination with a big building, giant supermarkets and shopping malls and all the other symbols of modernity had begun to wane, Babu looked at me sadly. He said, mama, the people in the street, they don't say hello. He had seen for himself what I had tried to explain to him, probably unsuccessfully in Bangui, that the cars, the houses, the clothes, the money did not make one happy. After almost six months in America, he was aching to return home to his village, where, as he explained to me, when the people see you, they smile and they say hello. They take good care of each other. He explained, just as he had done so unwittingly for us during his brief stay. I could see the pain in his eyes, and I knew that it was time for Babo to go home. Progress, I have learned from people like Bubble, is an extremely delicate balance and usually comes accompanied by a very hefty price tag. For all its horrors, miseries, and calamities, maybe in partial compensation for it, and perhaps to help its people deal with them. Thanks. Africa remains the one place on this planet where one can still find Eden, as the author Graham Greene so aptly put it, love stripped of all its trappings. So that was the cautionary tale. So, if you have any questions. Oh, sorry. Hi.

Thank you for coming and for sharing your story with all of us and for having the sort of the courage to talk about it so proudly. I have two questions for you under the theme of what is Google going to do in Africa? And I think the first part of the question is more as a company, I mean, we offer a set of services and products which are very relevant. I'm curious how you think that would fit in Africa. And I'm also curious as to some of the more cultural challenges that we may face, considering that, for example, when we tried to go into Asia, we figured that we realized it's not quite as easy in different countries as it is here in our homeland. So that's one question. And then on the other side more for google.org, you've talked a lot about the role of the business sector. What sort of private sector ideas do you think are you guys thinking about for Africa through the google.org umbrella?

Okay, great. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge two of my google.org colleagues that are here, Rachel Payne and Katie Wirtz somewhere. And we've been struggling with this very much over the past. I just joined four months ago and this is something that we've been working on. So. Yeah, so I think as I said, the way how google.org was created and the founders created google.org was really not to just use Google and Google's products as the entry into these markets, Africa included, but also to look at poverty just as poverty, regardless of what Google does. I mean, again, I think it's more the brain power that we bring to the issues rather than so much the products, even though there will be overlap. Obviously technology is a key component of economic development and economic growth. But we'll be looking at some other issues, including basic needs and, and other aspects of economic development. I think what Google can bring is, as I said before, new solutions, new ways of thinking about these problems and also ways that are more sustainable so that 10 years from now we're not looking back and say, well, we spent this much and what did we get for it? We didn't get much. So I think, as you know, we have a new executive director who's going to be starting in a little while and these are many of the issues that we're going to be looking at. And hopefully I think poverty is very complex. We have in these countries, we have both institutional poverty and individual poverty. It's not going to be one solution. I don't think there's a silver bullet. But one thing I can say, and even though we haven't decided yet, is one thing we know throughout history, is that the private sector has been the key driver of poverty alleviation. That's been consistent around the world. Some people have come to that later, the former Soviet Union, China. But you're seeing that all of these countries are reforming and letting the private sector play a much more prominent role. And what Google will bring, hopefully, is a new way of looking at this, especially as a corporation, looking at it in a more business way and valuing the people and what they can bring, rather than just looking at them as victims in these markets and the cultural challenges. I think in my book I talk a lot about that and the importance of having really strong local Partners and local participation in everything that we do. Because it is true, it's very localized. The solutions. If you take the most successful multinational companies, it's really because they found ways to really localize and involve the people at all, at all stages of both the product introduction, expansion and so forth. So I think I'm hoping that that's what we'll be able to do. And hopefully also google.org and Google Inc. Working together closely, I think we'll be able to find some really creative and innovative solutions that other companies don't have. I mean where the founders go and start their own company. Philanthropic army. This one, we have it all together, which makes it really exciting. So there was. What's another. Oh, Bill.

So you had some pretty, what I would almost describe as damning words for the UN and the governments. Do you think they have a useful role to play or are they mostly going to be obstacles in, in anything we try to do?

Well, it's multifaceted. But I think the UN poverty is complex. And if you have people in Sudan, for instance, right now who are dying, they need urgent help. I mean that's not where Google has its strength. They need short term emergency aid. And so that need is there and it's going to be there even if you're in a rich country. I mean we saw Katrina, right? I mean it happens everywhere. So that's a very different type of poverty. And that's again, what I'm talking about here is long term poverty alleviation where it's not just for a day or two, you're providing food. I think what these people want is security and security is best given in the form of jobs or something that's sustainable so that at least you can plan beyond tomorrow or the day after. And, and that's where they are now. And so governments, again, I think it's going to take a lot of discipline on the part of agencies such as the World bank and the UN to really make the governments responsible to their people. Because if they aren't, there really is no incentive to change. And many people say we should get rid of the debt to the African government. And if you talk to many African people themselves, the people in the street, the bubbles of the world, they say don't erase the debt because then they won't reform. We need. Because they never benefited from the debt in the first place. So there's this disconnect between there are many people who want to do good and they think they're doing good often. But the reality on the Ground is very different. So yeah, so I think the role of the UN and other agencies should be more what they're good at. And government should be encouraged to really invest in their people, whether it's education, health, but not go into the business realm which is better left to business.

Hi Jenny, thank you again for coming to speak and the wonderful chocolate croissants. So my question is, so you've had a firsthand experience of building a company and had problems with the divergent wants of the do well and do good investors. And if you were going to do it again starting today, do you think you could do things differently to succeed and have it move forward and what would that be like, your kind of learning take home message to move forward for other people that are thinking about starting businesses there?

Yeah, thanks for asking that because that's something I wanted to address actually. If we as Google can find a way to support these entrepreneurs, these potential businesses that have the ability to scale, to grow, then that's what I'm in favor of. Because what we lacked again was the staying power, the access to governments, the access to connections that only a big company has. And if you can find a way to incubate these entrepreneurs so that they can focus on the business and we can to a certain extent give them the benefits that we have as a big business, whether it's capital, as I said, expertise, then I think they have a chance to move and with them take a lot of other people too. Because as I said in the private sector you have a lot of the multiply effect where one job creates another. You have a market that's created. And I think that if Google can even just do that to create, help, show and not Google alone. Because Google, even though it's big, it's also the demonstration effect. If Google can do it and do it right in a few cases and show to other corporations or foundations that look giving people jobs or creating sustainable business in these markets leads to permanent change, then Google would have accomplished a lot because it would have invented a whole new model. And I think it's uniquely positioned to do that because it has the best minds to think about it. I mean, there's not a day that I don't go to lunch or something or have an incidental meeting with someone who has a very different way of, of framing a problem that just adds a whole new light to it. I think it's one of these breakthroughs that we're going to be able to put out there that others will emulate just as we've innovated in the software in the search and Internet industry.

Hi, thanks for coming. I was really inspired by you today and I was just wondering is what I can do as an individual to help Google reach that goal of becoming a model for other companies to make a difference in social causes. Like what can I do today to get to that point?

Well, I think one of the good things is that we have through google.org, we have this 20% time that the Google employees will be dedicating their hopefully some of their time too and brain power and you know, we've already, I mean since it was just beginning, we haven't put the mechanisms in place for that. But some people are already helping us and I mean it makes a tremendous difference when you sit around the table someone whether it's from, you know, biz ops or biz dev or co op dev or whatever, you know, we all sit at look at the question the situation holistically and we ask the probing questions. We try to figure out okay, what works, what doesn't work. What do we have to what kind of information do we have to see to see why it works or why it doesn't work or why it didn't work. So I think you're going to find that your services are going to be in very high demand very soon as we get this thing going. Katie, did you.

I was just going to add right now if you go to moma, there's a google.org link from the corporate link section. Click on that. There's a section on our internal pages that says a few ways to get involved. Right now a couple things we're looking for an executive admin or administrative assistant. So if you know anyone within Google who might be good for that, let us know. And there's the contact info on that Sparrow page that you can link from our internal pages as well as a couple other projects that you can help with for our current grantees like technoserve acumen and that kind of thing. And they're listed there with contact info.

Of who to contact during the.

Hi, I remembered a couple weeks ago in the TGIF we talked about Google should sponsor what kind of the programs or project if it's too controversial two sides probably we will don't choose any sites to sponsor as a core company. And then I remember my experience in UN training when when I represent China and we first have a big discuss with the Africa trainees about birth control because to Chinese birth control is the country policy and really drive the country Sustainable, developed, but to rest of the world. A lot of people really feel like birth control is a evil and so. But a lot of programs for local localized level they do need some sponsors and the program itself, it is controversial. I don't know what's your experience to.

Address this particular in birth control?

No. In several different developing countries a lot of the local program, it's really work for local people. It really can help that country. But to the rest of the world maybe have controversial. It's a controversial topic.

Right. And so your question is, would Google, would we.

Yeah, yeah. And whether you know how we can really approach to the greater good.

Right. Well, I think hopefully we'll be in area. We'll try to stick to areas that are non controversial or have as little controversy as possible because one of the things that we will be trying to identify our solutions that are scalable if it works in Africa, if it works in India, you know that you can take too many because that's one of the tests of success I think how scalable it is and how replicable it is. So we might, I mean I can't speak for the executive director when he gets all the founders, but I mean I think there are lots of things that we can do to help alleviate poverty that are non controversial. And I think the areas where you're talking about tend to be more UN type work so they can talk to the governments and actually sort of try to work them out. But my guess is that Google will try to do things that are at least and that's part of the discussion that we constantly have to ask all of these questions that I think the common goal that we all have is to get people out of poverty. And yeah.

I was wondering if you've thought about collaborating with other large foundations as a way to leverage your brain power and money. You know, Bono and Microsoft or the Gates foundation is doing a lot of work in the world. And secondly with the civil war strifes in Africa, how do you deal with a situation where you just can't go in and help the people because they're fighting against one another or their government is repressing them?

Right. Well, on the first point, yes, I think we will need to leverage other institutions and work with them. And I think what's important here is what do we bring to the table? Hopefully, as I said, we'll bring new models and new ways of thinking and people will be willing to work with us to experiment with these new models. Because again, it's all a matter of convincing others because we can't do it alone. Even Bill Gates has been quoted his 20 billion doesn't even make a dent. And he can do all the vaccination campaigns and save the children, but they save them for a life of what. So we have to look at what are we saving them for. And I think if we can look at it more holistically, that will definitely help. The second question was just about the.

Fact that in Africa there's a lot of civil wars or repression by governments, and that seems to be a big obstacle in alleviating the goals.

Yeah, yeah, and that's very true. I mean, every day, even when we were running my company and there was a day there was a fundraising, we were about close, like $5 million or something. And then I think that was when the. The bombs went off in Tanzania where we had our main operation. So, yeah, so there's all this instability that's there. But again, part of it is because the governments don't have. I mean, the international community continues to give them economic aid. I think there has to be a strong emphasis on policy advocacy for these governments to change. I mean, there have been some initiatives, like Bush has developed the Millennium Challenge Account, which only lends money to governments that reform and invest in their people, in their health, their education, because it's the truth, the money won't go anywhere and they won't invest it in the people. And at the end of the day, they won't be any better off, but will have just kept on writing checks. So I think to the extent that once we start talking to other foundations and other and other companies, that we should talk about some of these things in terms of our responsibility to make sure that because many of the private companies are also major sources of revenue for the government in terms of taxes, so they do have the ability to talk about those things.

Thank you.

Hi, Monique. Thank you so much for coming today. I've been looking forward to this, which is a long time, and it was really wonderful. And if I can make a quick plug to the book, I actually had the opportunity to read it, and it was absolutely fantastic and it really impacted me. And I really urge you guys to pick it up and spend some time reading it. My question is thinking about really how many undiscovered Monique Matis are out there in the world and thinking of how LAMCO really gave you the leverage to become what you are today. How do we create more lamcos? When you're thinking the natural resources were their core business, and maybe a lot of those natural resources are depleted or there's already such a saturated market, are there other lamcos that are going to be able to come into the 21st century and really make an impact and give people the opportunity to take full advantage of what they have?

Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, Africa still hasn't. I mean, it doesn't even have to be only a natural resource company. I think it's a matter of. And it doesn't even have to be a company that has a product that's relevant to. If you think about Coca Cola, for instance, Coca Cola is Africa's largest private sector employer. It employs 60,000 people. And for every one person they employ, they create 10 indirect jobs. So 600,000 people are employed because of Coca Cola. And that's because they have everything down the value chain. They have the butlers, the kiosks at every single corner. So in every village you can find a bottle of Coke. Now, that creates tremendous value all across from the syrup to the person who's serving you in the restaurant. But many companies, when they start their corporate philanthropic arm, they think, okay, well, let's give some books or let's give some food or supplies. That's not going to get people out of poverty. That's just going to make their poverty a little more tolerable. But if you really want to use your philanthropic dollars, I think it's more important to use it wisely and in a way that's sustainable. That really creates change. And that's where I talk about valuing the people themselves and their ability to help themselves. Babo was just telling me, I didn't even know this, but the Chinese have been investing a lot in Africa, and I think they've taken a very different approach. They're looking at it as markets. And so they're going in there. They're not just doing giving supplies and so forth. They're actually creating businesses and entrepreneurs. I was looking at a project just we were looking at some pilots in Brazil, and one of them involved aquaculture to develop fish for the markets and so forth with the tilapia fish. And it was something I didn't know anything about. We came back and we presented it to Larry and Sergey. And, you know, and Larry's like, oh, I think Sergey said, you know, what's aquaculture? Or something? And we're talking about it. And I went home and I don't know how it came up. And Babu started telling me about his fish tank and tilapia and the fish he was cultivating in his, you know, back in his village, and he was wondering how his fish was doing. And he started telling me all about tilapia and aquaculture. And I said, well, what are you? I didn't even know this. So the Chinese, they had invested in him. He had taken some money that he had. I left him with a good retirement fund or whatever. And he'd gone to the Chinese people who were in Central Africa. They're all looking for business opportunities. And he showed a picture of me and his trip to America and everything else. And they thought he was a good. And they said, remember, Babu can't read or write. And so they basically set him up with his fish tank, and he's practicing aquaculture right now. So it's really. You don't have to be a big company to find ways to empower the people. That's my point. Hello, Monique. So thanks to Babu's wisdom, you've already seen the flip side of prosperity. So my question to you is, in your dreams, in the ideal world, your ideal world, what does the world look like? It's really funny because that's why I read that last part in terms of what wealth does and the kind of where he thought that because I had all of these things, I should be happy and so forth. Ideally, I try to spend at least three months in Africa a year. I mean, just because you just. It's just so simple and basic. I mean, and, you know, can we find a way to. I mean, I think that people say, well, you know, you don't. Many people say, well, you know, you don't want to destroy their innocence. I mean, I think there's a long way between destroying the innocence and Britney Spears or whatever other analogy you want to, you know, to drum up. Right? I mean, so I think. I think it's always important because over there, it's true, people do take care of each other. They are. I mean, I think he's very here. I mean, everything is mechanized. I mean, you know, everything's very isolated. And I think it's something that's very. Even my mother, who's lived here now for many years because she had to escape the civil war, you know, she was here visiting recently, and she was talking about how, you know, here, over there, people can just drop by people's house unannounced, and it really is a whole community, whereas here it's really individuals, and it's a very different, I guess, alienating way. So I don't know. But I think we owe them the opportunity to decide for themselves how much they want to absorb of our way, I guess. Yeah. So think that's any other question. Okay. Thank you.