Before I landed here, I posted a bit about what I’d heard about Liberia: how incredibly poor it is, how people live, how little economic activity there is. Now that I’ve been on the ground for three weeks now (time flies!) I can say that much of that was just plain misleading.

The fact of the matter is people living in poverty, people living off a dollar or two a day, people without running water, without proper waste treatment facilities, without electricity, in homes that could blow over in a bad storm – I’ve seen it before. It hit me first when I went to Mumbai with Google back in 2006.  A drive by its enormous slums, the sight of millions of people (literally) sleeping on the streets, the children begging at every turn, and you’ve looked dire poverty in the eye firsthand. That same poverty is in abundance here, but in India it’s literally orders of magnitude larger in terms of absolute numbers.

And there is economic activity everywhere you turn.  Markets are bursting with activity (even by candlelight at night!). 

What makes Liberia different isn’t the poor, and it isn't the limited market activity.  It’s the lack of much of a middle and upper class, and the skills and capacity that come with them.  In so many other developing countries there’s enough wealth and expertise to establish small and medium sized businesses, to pay taxes to fund public services and investments, to justify the existence of nice hotels, restaurants and imported goods.

Here there’s a very thin veil of it.  Almost every Liberian with the money or means or skills to leave did, and few of them have yet come back. Those who remained weren’t building businesses and acquiring skills; they were surviving. They weren’t sitting in school or university; they were fleeing their homes. As a result there is a serious lack of capacity required to move this country forward, let alone support a tax base for redistribution and government programs or create demand for expensive imported goods.

It’s this lack of capacity Liberia’s struggle forward so challenging. The problems we are targeting in most other developing economies are premature here in Liberia. It’s not that we need capital for entrepreneurs to flourish, it’s that we need to provide training to create the entrepreneurial skills in the first place. It’s not that we need to figure out how to fix the incentive problem in health and education, it’s that we have to train doctors and teachers in the first place. The list goes on and on.

Building capacity from next to nothing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not something that happens in one incredibly capable President’s term either. Building this fundamental capacity in Liberia will probably take an entire generation. But hopefully, if this country can avoid slipping back into conflict, it will happen.

The process, as slow as it is, is definitely on.