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.

The Ministry I walked into in 2007 was a shell. Most of the senior staff had left during the war. Records were gone. There was no shortage of donors, NGOs, or technical advisors lined up to help. What was missing was anyone treating the rebuild as an operating problem, the kind that needs supply chains, payroll systems, facility management, data infrastructure, and trained people who actually stay in the job.

So I spent my first months not doing much. I visited county health offices. I walked clinics. I sat with community health workers who had kept basic care going through the war without formal training, employment, or pay. The work I eventually did came out of those conversations, not out of a strategy document.

Beyond the grant itself, what made it consequential was who managed the money. The $9M was the first post-war donor funding the Ministry handled directly instead of running through international NGOs. That mattered for everything that came after. Donors don't write the second check until they see the first one delivered.

A pattern I kept seeing: expensive expat consultants would fly in, write a report, fly out. Mid-level Liberian staff felt undertrained. The Minister was buried in administrative work because nobody around him could absorb it. The fix wasn't more money or more consultants. It was a layer of capable Liberian staff that the Ministry didn't have yet.

I built a competitive, performance-based training program for Ministry staff. Saturday classes taught by senior Liberians, not expats. Curriculum co-designed with MOH leadership. And a rule for any expat contract: work yourself out of a job in nine months. The Liberians who came through the program became the layer the Ministry had been missing.

The Liberian government later formalized it as the President's Young Professionals Program (PYPP). It's since put more than 100 civil servants into 15 ministries and 10+ government agencies. That's the outcome I'm proudest of from those years. It outlasted me by a long way, which was the whole point.

The thing that stuck with me from those years was something almost nobody was working on. Clinics had no electricity. National electrification was under 1%. Every conversation about cold chains, maternal health, or community health workers depended on power that most of the country didn't have. People kept planning around the assumption that it would show up later. It wasn't going to.

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 helped secure $3M for solar and ICT at off-grid health facilities and spent enough time in the supply chain to see something most people in the field hadn't noticed yet. LEDs, photovoltaic panels, and lithium-ion batteries were all moving down cost curves fast. A $100 system would soon do what a several-thousand-dollar system did. That was the seed of One Degree Solar. I just took a detour through USAID first.

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

From early 2009 through mid-2012, I worked as an Energy Sector Reform Specialist with USAID across Liberia and Ghana on the Powering Health Initiative, a knowledge portal for getting reliable electricity into off-grid health clinics. I was the lead author and editor of "Energy Management in Your Health Facility," a guidance toolkit for off-grid facility managers that's still in circulation. I also worked with Liberia's Ministry of Energy and the Rural & Renewable Energy Agency on rural electrification planning.

It was useful because it let me see the same problem from a different angle, the policy and program side of energy for health, rather than the Ministry-of-Health side I'd been on for two years. By 2012 the cost curves I'd been tracking had arrived. I left USAID to found One Degree Solar.

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

The $9M grant didn't come through because Liberia made a better pitch than other countries. It came through because the World Bank trusted the team to actually execute. The PYPP works for the same reason. A program is just scaffolding around the right people. If the people aren't right, the curriculum doesn't matter.

The other thing I took from those years: I didn't go to Liberia planning to start a solar company. The observation came from being there long enough to see the problem nobody was working on. I've kept that habit since. The best moves I've made have started by paying attention to something that was sitting in plain sight.