Six years at Dalberg, and what comes next

On Monday March 6th 2017, 6 years ago yesterday, I started working at the Nordic Development Corporation office with Jesper Lindhardt, Hans Uldall-Poulsen, Henrik Skovby and a bunch of other great folks out of the Dalberg-ish office in Copenhagen. I’m a data guy, so I did a bit of counting. During the six years in between, I have been based in four great offices, visited 13 of Dalberg’s 30-ish offices globally, and worked in 16 countries (including virtually “in” and on Guinea, Madagascar and the Comoros for six months during the deep lockdown phase of the pandemic with Dalberg Data Insights). I have completed a total of 22 projects (with two ongoing) and 9 winning proposals. I have worked with most of the key actors in the development space: governments and public sector agencies, bilateral and multilateral donors and development finance institutions, charitable foundations, investment funds, start-ups, and civil society organizations. I spent this Dalberg-versary in Dakar, about five years after I first started working on Senegal’s national and regional development. In 2018, I and my teammates traveled all around Senegal for 8 months building out detailed value chain studies of its horticulture, tourism, and energy sectors and working with the Ministry of Finance as the Government of Senegal was planning the second phase of its Plan Sénégal Emergent (PSE). Senegal successfully raised $~20 billion dollars from international donors for the 2019-2024 period and Phase II of the PSE! In 2023, as we are refreshing prior work on the top constraints to private sector growth in Senegal to inform a large donor’s programming, I get to see the fruit of so much of Senegal’s efforts in the past few years (as well as some of the deep Covid set-backs): The breakthrough of mobile money (finally!) and growth of “digital lions” in Senegal, big advances on industrialization and supplanting imports of construction materials, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs, major infrastructure advances supporting Senegal’s regional importance and interconnections with its neighbors, Senegal’s rising role as a cultural force on the African continent and across Francophone Africa in particular, new promising exports, better access to finance for SMEs, etc. etc. etc. I love this country 🇸🇳 Looking ahead, I still believe extreme poverty in low- and middle-income countries is a solvable problem that we can eradicate in my lifetime if we decide to do so. One of the ways I want to contribute is to explore the new world of global remote work and how it can provide first-class incomes for first-rate work in low- and middle-income countries. I also want to do more work on digital financial services for low-income people on the African continent. I want to spend more time thinking about the big picture and what really matters, and on strategy (and less time on small-scale short-term execution).