For those of you who don't know, I've been given an amazing opportunity to participate in a 3 (ish) month internship with a pilot program called "Frontier Market Scouts" ("FM Scouts"). The idea behind the whole thing is to "engage in enterprise development and investment for social and economic impact"... essentially to help small business owners and entrepreneurs improve (or create) their business so that they can make more money and improve their lives. Of course, this isn't "make more money" in the Goldman Sachs/ Wall Street sense.... Its probably closer to the idea of "make more than $1 a day" (although that's a slight exaggeration).
FM Scouts as a program actually includes 4 groups of students traveling to and working in 4 different countries (Nigeria, Tanzania, India, and Vietnam). Each group is partnered with various in-country organizations (in the case of the Nigeria group: the School of Business at the University of Lagos) and will receive the help of "virtual support staff" (a.k.a grad students) who have chosen to stay in the US but assist with research via wonderful inventions such as skype, email, and google docs.
Training for FM Scouts will be held in Monterey, CA on the grad school campus of the Monterey Institute of International Studies (my old stomping grounds) and will last about 3 weeks. ... Needless to say, I'm more than a little excited to be moving back to the (other) Bay Area even if it is only temporary. Of course, even MORE exciting than moving back to Monterey is the opportunity to move back to Africa (if only for a short time) so clearly my life is full of excitement these days.
While I'm in Nigeria, I'll be in the city of Lagos (bottom south-west corner of the country... right on the Atlantic Ocean and very close to the Benin border) and, more specifically, I'll be living on (or near) the University of Lagos campus. For those of you following the news, the recent ethnic/ religious violence in Nigeria is in Jos, a city/ region north of Abuja (the capital city) and, as you can see from this map, far far away from where I'm going to be.
Some fun facts about Nigeria:
$1.00 USD = 150 Naira (Nigeria's official currency)
Nigeria is slightly more than twice the size of California.
Nigeria is the 8th most populous country on earth (US is #3)
It is the #1 most populous country in Africa....
And has over 250 different ethnic groups.
Lucky for me, Hausa is the "most common" one (at a mighty 29%).
Anyway, I'll keep posting as my travel and work plans develop further. This is only the beginning... and it hasn't even really begun yet!
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