Embedded inside a post-conflict Ministry of Health, two years after the war.

Monrovia outskirts, 2007 · The reconciliation work was visible everywhere — billboards, ministries, conversations.

By 2007, the Ministry had been largely dismantled during the war — staff dispersed, records lost, systems broken. What I found when I got there was a system with no shortage of external funders, international NGOs, or technical advisors. What it was short on was people willing to treat the reconstruction as an operating problem — supply chains, facilities, payroll systems, data infrastructure — rather than a policy problem.

I spent my first months listening. Visiting county health offices. Walking clinics. Talking to community health workers who'd kept basic care alive during the war without formal employment, training, or pay.

Beyond the grant itself, the broader financing story mattered more than the numbers suggest. The $9M was the first post-war donor funding the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare managed directly, rather than through international NGOs. That single shift — institutional trust, not cash flow — is what made subsequent donor commitments possible.

Expensive short-term expat consultants were cycling through the Ministry with limited lasting impact. Mid-level Liberian staff felt undertrained. The Minister was drowning in administrative work because there was no capable support layer underneath him. The structural problem wasn't a funding gap. It was a human capital gap.

I designed a competitive, performance-based training program for Ministry staff — Saturday classes taught by senior Liberians, not expats; a curriculum co-designed with MOH leadership; and a parallel rule for expat contracts: "work yourself out of a job in 9 months." The Liberians who came through the program became the support layer the Ministry had been missing.

The program was later formalized and scaled by the Liberian government into the President's Young Professionals Program (PYPP), which has since employed 100+ civil servants across 15 ministries and 10+ government agencies — a permanent pipeline of operating capacity for the government of Liberia. This was the outcome I'm most proud of from this period: something that outlasted my time in-country.

What stayed with me from those years was something nobody was working on: clinics had no electricity. Liberia's national electrification rate was under 1%. Planning meetings about vaccine cold chains, maternal health, and community health worker deployments all had the same unspoken dependency on power that most of the country didn't have.

Upcountry Liberia, rainy season · This is why diesel didn't work. Trucking fuel to clinics over roads like this — when they were passable at all — was prohibitively expensive and unreliable.

I secured $3M for solar and ICT deployment at off-grid health facilities and spent time in the supply chain. What I observed was that the economics were about to change. LEDs, photovoltaic panels, and lithium-ion batteries were all moving down cost curves faster than most practitioners realized. A $100 system would soon be able to do what a several-thousand-dollar system did today. That was the founding insight for One Degree Solar — though I took a detour through USAID first.

Before founding a company, I helped USAID document what I'd seen.

From January 2009 through June 2012, I served as an Energy Sector Reform Specialist with USAID across Liberia and Ghana, advancing the Powering Health Initiative — a knowledge portal for bringing reliable energy to off-grid health clinics. I was the lead author and editor on "Energy Management in Your Health Facility," a guidance toolkit for off-grid facility managers that's still in circulation.

I also worked directly with Liberia's Ministry of Energy and the Rural & Renewable Energy Agency on rural electrification planning. This period bridged two worlds: the policy side of the problem I'd watched at the Ministry of Health, and the entrepreneurial response I was about to build.

Health clinic installation, rural Liberia · The technology was straightforward. Getting it to work after the installers left was the harder problem — and the one that pointed me toward what came next.

By mid-2012, the cost curves I'd been tracking had arrived. I left USAID to found One Degree Solar.

Institutions are made of people. The $9M grant didn't happen because Liberia made a better pitch than other countries. It happened because the World Bank trusted the operating team to execute. The PYPP works for the same reason — it's scaffolding around the right Liberians, not around a curriculum.

The best problems find you. I didn't go to Liberia to start a solar company. The observation emerged from the work, not from a business plan. Some of the best moves I've made have started that way.