On Twitter recently a Nigerian business man shared some of his frustrations which I found insightful

I gotta be honest, this post reads like "just driving by I knew how to fix all these peolles' problems but they seem too lazy to care". Is it possible there's something you don't know about each of these scenarios? It's easy to construct some self congratulatory narrative when you're visiting a poor country, but it's also a trap. In the past, these narratives tended to be biological. Now they're "cultural" but the effect is often similar. Take the pipe example. Maybe the police don't let people just "crowd fund" repairs to public infrastructure and perform them themselves. Maybe what you saw on the video isn't representative of the whole problem, or your assessment of the repair difficulty isn't accurate. Perhaps your brilliant idea about pricing and selling ecotourism booklets isn't such a great idea after all. Maybe they already tried it and tried different price points and were too po…

That reminds me of a story of western businessmen offering 50% more to local workers to get them to work more. This totally works in the US, where overtime pay can easily get workers to show up for extra shifts. The result here was they worked 50% less and were happy to take home the same amount. Workers seem misguided in both cases, but it is clear that they had a totally different view and relationship to money.

I have heard similar stories, from people I kmow who have spent a lot of time working all around Africa. And countries where people are more proactive—Rwanda, Ivory Coast—are more functional overall. Climate seems to be a factor