“I stayed there a few months and told my manager this position should not be a full time office job - you need to stay with them.”
-Joseph Kajerero, Cofounder of Sanitation Africa
When Joseph Kajerero was moving into the sanitation sector, his experience was in data and investment. His manager believed that he could get to know the sanitation sector from an office. He knew from experience that this was going to require him to, as he put it, “go native.”
##Living With Concrete Producers and Cow Farmers
“If you are to mentor and develop entrepreneurs you must live with them.”
-Joseph Kajerero, Cofounder of Sanitation Africa
By spending time getting to know the relevant players in sanitation and by living in their communities, Joseph made connections that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. He was able to convince concrete companies to help him create toilets for his sanitation product.
“I went there and I worked with them and you know when you’re passing on critical information you don’t appear instructive you pass on casually even when people are taking lunch.”
But going native was even more critical when Joseph was trying to sell artificial insemination to cattle farmers in Uganda. They were reluctant to try this new technique. Joseph couldn’t convince them by telling them how it was better.
“It takes time, I realized that over time even farmers were shying away from their people, they hear and started associating with me more because I could go native.”
But after living with them, eating their products, even holding their children, Joseph was able to build relationships and understand his customers. As a result, he successfully convinced farmers to change to using artificial insemination for their cattle.
For Philip Walton and his company BRCK, going native meant traveling hundreds of kilometers by motorbike and living in villages.
##Sandstorms and Village Schools
The team at BRCK started by making wireless internet routers for use in rural villages. What they needed to understand was how these routers performed in real conditions and how actual people in these villages would use them.
For example, they realized the main button they had designed couldn’t survive a sandstorm near the Kenya Ethiopia border.
“We were at a desolate campsite and trying to turn the brick on, sand had gotten between the button and the BRCK so we couldn’t turn it on.”
-Philip Walton, Cofounder of BRCK
Doing this also helped them realize that the antennae which worked great in the city weren’t enough for use in rural areas.
The BRCK team goes on yearly road trips. They love motorcycles, and take their products across Africa as a motorcycle crew. They even depend on their early prototypes. On their first trip, they depended only on their BRCK router for internet access. Every time they crossed a border, they realised it was difficult to configure a new SIM card on some mobile networks. This exposed a critical improvement.
Years later, they did the same when designing their new tablet for rural classrooms. Watching how students used the tablets in a classroom taught them that they needed to make the left and right headphones different colors so the teacher could instruct the students on how to put them on.
“A lot of the learning has been a continual process of getting surprised like oh I wouldn’t have thought of it from that perspective and putting ourselves in the shoes of our users.”
-Philip Walton, Cofounder of BRCK
In the end, this kind of testing turned BRCK from a product which would have been frustrating to use for many schools and failed in difficult conditions into a reliable product which is simple to use. Going native made the difference.