Agora Partnerships: The Blog

The Face of What We Do

July 27, 2010

By Sergio Figueroa Sanz

As my interview for the Associate position over the summer at Agora Partnerships ended, I couldn’t help but be enthusiastic. It was late Spring in New York and I was finishing my second semester of graduate studies, navigating the all too new to me world of the summer internship search. Of the employers I had held conversations with, Agora seemed the most interesting and engaging. It promised a summer of hard work in a small organization, focused on model development and implementation strategy of its most ambitious project to date: an initiative for all Central America -and then Latin America as a whole, to foster entrepreneurship thorough strategy and management consulting, and facilitating access to capital and investor networks. The initiative, called the Agora Accelerator, will be the first impact investment community of its kind in Central America. If it’s successful, it will revolutionize the way people understand economic development and investment and it will help redefine the role of the private sector. You can learn more about the initiative -and criticize my collaboration with Agora, here. In addition, Agora’s summer collaboration included a one week visit to Nicaragua with the purpose of meeting some of the entrepreneurs Agora has worked with in the past and conduct joint work sessions with their offices in Managua (did I mention the Managua Lake’s isletas and the Nicaraguan coastline are breathtaking?). Being a travel addict myself, I have to admit I was sold the minute they mentioned this. In stark contrast, most graduate students end up realizing that an undergad degree, a couple of years worth of work experience, and half of a masters degree can’t guarantee escaping from “administrative” tasks (the glorified way to label duties such as archiving, contact card organizing and quietly sitting in conference calls no feedback is requested on). Agora offered a unique opportunity indeed.

During six weeks I worked from Agora’s offices in Washington, DC doing what I love: learning about a new and exciting industry, researching on its performance and impact, theorizing about its potential and implications, framing it all in the context of poverty abatement and development, diving into datasets, reports, interviews with stakeholders, the whole thing. Agora is a truly motivating work environment where my input and opinion were used for actual decision-making. My recommendations –along with my colleagues’, materialized in what is now the Accelerator’s beta phase. Nonetheless, it was all abstract until my trip to Nicaragua…sitting in an Ikea desk with A/C, changing the world one regression at a time.

I’m writing this on my flight back from Managua to Houston, where a brief layover will take me back to DC, and all I can think of is the radical change in mindset that going down provoked in me. All the numbers, charts and tables generated prior to the visit had a face now, but oddly enough, it wasn’t that of the entrepreneurs I visited with Agora. Certainly, being able to talk to Agora’s entrepreneurs helped me better understand the market segment and their needs but most of all, it helped me better understand the entrepreneurs backgrounds. These are low to mid income individuals with a clear understanding of their role in society as business leaders and the relevance of the impact they have on their social and natural environments. They are clever, educated professionals, engaged with local civil society organizations and with active political lives. They are not the most marginalized members of the Nicaraguan society but they give economic opportunities to lower socioeconomic strata families and contribute generously to regional development by generating income and retaining it locally. Be as it may, holding these meetings made me realize that we, as an industry, still have a long way to go.

The true bottom of the pyramid (BoP) is still to be tapped and it’s our job to find it, just as we found the entrepreneurs whose face you see now in Agora’s website. It’s almost paradoxical that while it’s our job to go out there and find BoP entrepreneurs, I may just have met, out of coincidence, one BoP entrepreneur for Agora to work with in the not too distant future. His name is Jorge, he’s in elementary school and he sells seashells when he’s not in school in a beach I visited on my last day in Nicaragua. He lives in an impoverished town in the Pacific coastline south of Managua in a tin roofed shed with his five brothers and sisters, his parents and an uncle. He told me about how much he loves playing soccer in the sand and how he resents a five star hotel that took over the beachfront and prevents him and his friends to play there. I said I was sorry to hear that but while I was articulating my ideas he said (in Spanish) “but you know what? I don’t mind because I have the solution to this problem”. “Oh yeah?”, I responded. He proceeded to explain. He wants to own a beach soccer school for kids where he’ll allow everyone to get in and play as long as they keep the beach clean and he will only charge for coaching and his school’s uniforms. He said he plans to make it the best in Nicaragua. Clever young man! After hearing his idea and making him guess my nationality, we played with his friends using a semi-flat soccer ball until the rain kept us from it… We won 4 to 0.

I return to DC more motivated than ever to continue to be part of this fascinating industry and to help people like Jorge get the tools they need to make a positive impact in their societies and, ultimately, exercise freedom. Agora’s approach shares this vision and acknowledges that, as Amartya Sen –Economics Nobel Prize in 1998, puts it: development is freedom. I must say that if I come back a few years from now and Jorge is able to make this dream a reality, we can say our industry has succeeded. It’s Jorge’s face I’m keeping in my mind when I think of how to connect the abstract work in Washington DC with the reality in Managua. I encourage my colleagues in the field to find their Jorge and keep him in the back of their heads to pull out when in need of a reality check.

Entry Filed under: Agora-wide Updates, DC Updates. Tags: nicargua, reflection.