Philosophy: Invisible Lines

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine that you're in America (or the UK, Europe, somewhere in the Global North). You're driving a car and come to a section of the road that has no line painted on it. No cars are oncoming. What do you do?

Most people would say “stay on your side of the road”. You draw an invisible line down the center of the road and stay on your side of it.

One of the patterns that I've consistently seen through many long taxi rides in East Africa – drivers here don't do that. Instead, people drive on whichever side of the road makes the most sense – the one with fewer potholes, less pedestrian traffic, etc.

It's a subtle realization but when you start looking for this mentality, you see it all around you. A lifetime in the West trains you to see invisible lines everywhere – down the center of the road, around other people's houses, between your problems and your neighbor's problems. The lines are drawn differently in rural East Africa (and indeed in any culture other than the one you grew up in). I still don't fully understand it, but in general people in the villages seem to have a very different worldview than my own – one that has much less abstraction and much more concrete reality. A reality where driving on the wrong side of the road or walking through a neighbor's backyard are much more socially acceptable, but interpreting an abstraction like a map doesn't always translate culturally. Of course those are broad generalizations and don't apply to everyone, but they apply to enough people that you need to account for your own invisible lines when operating in rural areas.

This mentality is coded into One Acre Fund's systems in hundreds of subtle ways. There is a single moment that pretty well captures Roster and the OAF business model. It's not the only quirk of our systems, but I find it the most interesting.

During truck deliveries, One Acre Fund sends out excess bags of fertilizer in the likely event of breakage. The interesting question - what should you do if there's an excess bag left at the end of a delivery?

1. Send it back to the warehouse. This is the Western model of business - no client has placed an order, it's easiest to predict inventory and manage sales if the bag is returned.
2. Sell it to a client who wants to buy it. This is the East African model of business - there's a client right there who wants to buy your product, why would you stop them?

In my opinion, One Acre Fund grew because it is built around the second option (not every country does this, we refer to it as "Just In Time" for those that do). Allowing total client flexibility on the day of item delivery is not a standard Western model of business, but we're not in America here. It's not like a post office can just "deliver it tomorrow" or accept item returns after the fact. Trying to force "what works in America" to work here is doomed to failure, no matter how well-funded or internationally applauded.

Generations of foreigners have come to Africa and tried to "Make Sense" of the continent. As far as I can tell, the only foreigners who are capable of "making sense of Africa" are the foreigners who are changed by Africa; those who start to question their own invisible lines rather than projecting them onto others who can't see them.