New friends

New friends
Originally uploaded by kippster.

Ellen (our host here) invited us, her team, and some of the folk from the Energy Forum over for a dinner party last night. Her team has been working 24x7 to get everything ready for what turned out to be an extremely well attended conference on Energy in Liberia. We'll see what comes out, but this certainly should kick up the activity -- but it still looks like it is up to the government to clean up it's legal and regulatory framework and figure out what they really want to do before the investors are going to be willing to step in.

There are some similarities between the energy and telecom industry regarding the legal, regulatory, and investment environment. Transparency and clarity are needed in order to move things forward.

Anyway, we spent Friday in meetings with USAID, Comium (mobile provider that was incredibly unhelpful), Search For a Common Ground (regarding community radio) and some folk from the Carter Center. We were able to gather a good bit of information on the industry and some of the policy issues. As I mentioned above, Comium was completely closed and would not discuss anything.

Saturday was some work around the office here, with Edem trying to get his crew ready to do the personal survey work. I spent some time playing around with Google Earth and showing some of the folk at Genesis a few geographic details (like where the heck is Nebraska!).

We closed the work day with an excellent meeting with Boutheina from the World Bank. Great stuff, and I think they are doing some incredible work here and elsewhere -- she was off to Freetown today to mark the first engagement with the Telecom sector in Sierra Leone. Good luck on that one!

I was jonesing for some college football yesterday -- caught a few early scores online while hanging out at the Mamba Point Hotel, but just not quite the same. At least the Huskers won (sorry about the Tigers Greg).

Today is a day to catch up on my notes and get the week nailed down. Should be pretty quite, and it looks like the rain may have moved on for the day or at least the moment.

Kipp