The Infrastructure of Ambition

I needed to get somewhere in Accra I had never been to. No car, so I was going to do what most people in this city do every working day, figure out which combination of trotros gets me there.

I opened Google Maps first, because I am not against using a map. It gave me driving directions. Turn by turn, confident, and almost completely useless to someone without a car. There was no option for the actual way most people in this city move, a sequence of shared minibuses with no published schedule, station names that shift depending on who you ask, fares that move with traffic and time of day, the whole system held together by knowledge that lives in people's heads rather than in any database.

I do not think Google will ever solve that particular problem, and not because anyone in Mountain View is indifferent to it. It is that the engineers building that product have never stood at a trotro station at seven in the morning trying to work out which car goes toward Madina before changing for Adenta. The knowledge required to even understand what needs solving lives here, in the city, in the people who navigate it daily. Nobody who has not lived inside that problem can fully see its shape.

I started out meaning to write about transit, and I think the actual subject is something larger. Ambition needs somewhere to travel, literally and otherwise. A good idea that has no road to move along, no system that carries it from one person to the next, does not compound. It just sits where it started.

Some of that infrastructure is the obvious kind. Most African nations still experience power outages that run twelve hours or more on a bad day. Road networks reach only about a third of rural areas.¹ Those are not abstractions. They are the literal surface an ambitious plan has to travel across, and when the surface is broken, even a genuinely good idea moves slowly, or not at all.

But some of the infrastructure that is missing is harder to photograph. It is the maintenance plan, not the ribbon cutting. I wrote elsewhere about an Ethiopian water program where boreholes built and owned by the community stayed functional at a rate of ninety four percent, against a national average closer to forty five, because someone had built the institutional infrastructure of upkeep, not just the physical pump. The pump was never the hard part. The system that kept someone responsible for it three years later was.

I think this is the actual infrastructure gap behind most of the ambition I see wasted around me. Plenty of people here have the idea. What is missing more often is the connective tissue, the system that lets an idea travel from a person's head into something other people can actually use, reliably, without the entire thing depending on one founder's continued attention forever.

I do not have a finished theory of how to build that connective tissue at scale. I notice it mostly by its absence, the way you notice a road only once you are standing at the edge of one that stops.