An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan
When Whit Alexander, the American co-founder of the Cranium board game, decides, at age 47, to start a new business selling affordable goods and services to low-income villagers in Ghana, West Africa, his journalist brother Max comes along to tell the story. The idea is to create a for-profit enterprise that empowers the world’s poor as modern consumers.
Whit’s first product is a high-quality rechargeable AA battery that off-grid villagers can use in their flashlights and radios, as well as to charge their cell phones.Starting any business is risky enough, but Ghana presents extraordinary challenges, including deadly insects, insane driving conditions, unspeakable food, voodoo priests, corrupt officials, counterfeiters and ethnic rivalries.
Signing up customers whose disposable income ranges from a few dollars a month to nothing, training employees with no Western-style work experience, dealing with Chinese manufacturers used to offering Africans junk - it all requires single-minded focus and a lot of patience.
Cut loose from their wives and children, Whit and Max relive their own childhood, bickering across the African bush, learning a great deal about Africans as well as themselves. Along the way, Ghanaians stop seeing themselves as charity cases, and the brothers introduce soft-spoken locals to new dimensions of profanity.
Irreverent, hilarious, and ultimately inspiring, BRIGHT LIGHTS, NO CITY challenges accepted notions of charity and suggests that there is hope and opportunity in Africa.
