Author Archives: Ben

Thoughts on IDEO.org Clean Kumasi

Last week I visited Kumasi on my way back up to Tamale to see what my colleague Mark Boots is up to with his venture Voto and to get a bit of a tour of the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of … Continue reading

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A Final Return?

2012 was all things considered the most stable year I’ve had in a long time. I had the same job description, lived in the same house and grew my connection to a community that I feel at home in. It … Continue reading

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No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

This is another post in the #lean4dev series I started up a couple of weeks back. One of my colleagues was attending an event a few weeks, and was pleasantly surprised when they decided to hand out feedback forms. To … Continue reading

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Market Facilitation in Five Words or Less

We currently have seven wonderful University students gearing up to join our team in May as Junior Fellows (JFs), and a couple of weeks ago I tasked them with learning about, and writing a blog post describing the concept of … Continue reading

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The Development Sector is Achieving Failure

I first started getting excited about the possibility of applying lessons learned in silicon valley to the world of international development projects when I stumbled upon the blogs of Steve Blank (http://steveblank.com) and Eric Ries (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com) and the idea of … Continue reading

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Malaria

Erin and I were biking to a restaurant nearby our house for a “date” – trying to take some time for ourselves in our busy schedules when I felt the first telltale signs. About an hour earlier I was feeling … Continue reading

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Two Down, One to Go

Friday was my two year anniversary of landing in Ghana! Hard to believe how time flies. The occasion has had me reflecting on Ghanaian realities. We haven’t had a day in the past two weeks without the power cutting out … Continue reading

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Impact Model Canvas – The Left Side

If the right side of the canvas was about external customers, creativity and value, the left side is all about internal operations and efficiency. As a quick overview, here’s where we left off from last time after filling in the … Continue reading

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Impact Model Canvas – The Right Side

After a long hiatus I am committing to finishing up these blog posts prior to running a session on the Impact Model Canvas in January at EWB’s National Conference in Ottawa. As another side note, I have since moved on … Continue reading

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Nasara’s Smile

This is Nasara. She is two and lives next door to Erin and I. She spends most of her day running around outside trying to get the attention of her father, our landlord by repeatedly saying “Da! Da!” until he … Continue reading

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