Off-Roading It

Off-Roading It

“Co-op is what you make of it.” I heard these words over and over as I began my studies at Drexel.

I certainly made the most of mine, including riding a motorbike through miles of African bush roads to visit farmers and negotiate agreements with them.

As an international business and economics student, I knew I wanted more than the typical co-op experience— something other than sitting at a cubicle, pecking away at Excel or entering information into an online database. So I decided to go to West Africa to find out what I could learn about business there.

After long trips via plane, train, bus, boat, car and motorbike last spring, I finally arrived in Kono District, Sierra Leone. This region was the epicenter of the country’s civil war and the setting of the movie Blood Diamond. Though the country is now at peace, remnants of the war can still be seen today, 10 years later. Kono is one of the most diamond-rich places on Earth, and these diamonds were sold to fuel the brutal war. However, diamond mining now required huge foreign investment and terrible working conditions since most of the easy-to-reach diamonds were taken and are now pieces of jewelry.

After the war, hundreds of nonprofits flocked to the devastated region and began to put together the pieces where they could. Though most of them do great work, handouts from non-government organizations (NGOs) only last until the money runs out and the aid workers go home.

But, figuratively speaking, what if you could give the people a fishing pole and teach them how to fish?

Unlike most projects that NGOs set up here, the project I worked on, Palm 2 Palm, helps the people of Kono break their dependence on diamonds and shift to more sustainable business plans. Rather than handing out money and then walking away, a grant was used to set up a factory that buys palm fruit from local farmers and processes it into palm oil to sell in the marketplace of Koidu town. All the money stays in the district, distributed fairly between the farmers and the factory workers. Palm 2 Palm will create economic growth for years to come.

I had several roles there that ranged from helping to set up the accounting system (a few carefully kept notebooks, a calculator and a lot of patience) to managing the 15-person factory. Palm 2 Palm is in the early stages, but I am confident that it will ultimately make life a bit easier for a large group of people in Kono.

I definitely got the kind of co-op experience that I was hoping for, and much more. The three months I spent in Kono were truly life-altering; I learned many valuable lessons about business and life.

Pre-junior Daniel Pinto finished his first co-op in a more traditional desk position with Wellbody Alliance (a health clinic in Kono created in conjunction with Palm 2 Palm). He is currently studying abroad at Aston Business School in London and hopes to complete his second co-op in China.