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A Digital Option In Moldova

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An RPCV’s readjustment allowance creates better jobs

The Republic of Moldova is a small nation of beautiful landscapes, vineyards, never-ending fields of wheat and sunflowers and broken roads nestled between Romania and the Ukraine. Going to Moldova is a little bit like going back in time. The countryside of day laborers and subsistence farmers move at it their own pace in villages where horse-drawn carts are still common.

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It is also often called The Poorest Country in Europe. I personally do not like that title because it focuses on the wrong problem. The root of the problem is the lack of job opportunities in the country where I served as a small business advisor in city of Drochia from 2014 to 2016. BY ADAM LAWRENCE

I saw the nation’s economic troubles as a lack of job opportunities and wondered how I could create good jobs here in Moldova.

The local office of the UN Development Progamme estimates that a million Moldovans have emigrated to Europe to find work and send money home. Many others have given up their rural gardens— a staple of Moldovan life—and flocked to the capital city of Chișinău— pronounced Kish-e-now—to look for work, a place where they are

3A web design and development company founded in Chisinau in 2016 is creating new opportunities for some of Moldova’s urban young. The nation is one of Europe’s poorest economies where men in Grigorauca chop wood for a living.

surprised at the high cost of city living and the competition for jobs. I was working on information technology-related projects such as Technovation, a competition for girls to design and develop an app to address a social issue. I attended information technology events, and mentored youth programs and competitions.

I was familiar with the tech community and I wondered how I could target what I considered a social problem by creating a company that could create jobs for Moldovans who could compete in the international market.

For starters, Moldova’s internet runs on fiber-optic lines were installed more than 15 years ago. It remains one of the world’s fastest. It’s also relatively inexpensive by U.S. standards. I also knew young women and men in Moldova who were tech savvy and liked working in technology. People I worked with believed these young creatives should be able to choose to stay and work in Moldova if they had an opportunity.

A few months before my Peace Corps close of service I met with tech leaders in Moldova, local and foreign. I knew that local creatives were some of the most hardworking, intelligent, and dedicated of

3The web development company, Enspire, was launched three years ago by RPCVs and serves a global clientele. These nine Enspire tech staff are Moldovans who work in the company’s headquarters in Chisinau.

Moldovans. But it would be hard to keep the good talent because many would leave for international companies abroad. I met with information technology department heads at several universities. I read through the curriculum to gauge the quality and level of students on graduation. The technology and computer codes or languages they were learning were severely outdated. Many of the graduating students were only about 30 percent ready for the caliber of a modern internet-driven technology job. They would need more training. They also lacked some of the soft skills of time management, how to identify the client’s needs, and how to explain best practices. I discovered important pieces missing from their educational experience.

I was warned that the local government’s problems were high taxes, out-dated laws, and corruption. From its history as a former member of the Soviet Union the government had inherited the bureaucratic idea that everything goes in a box and everything has to be done in the same way. The problem was that when you don’t fit in the box, you are wrong and must fix what is wrong. There was no flexibility for change and new ideas. Fortunately, I have since then learned that the Moldovan bureaucracy is becoming more flexible to change. Improvements have been made since I founded the company three years ago.

I concluded that most of the web-based developers in Moldova were at a junior level, with a limited amount at mid-level, and a solid but small group of senior developers. So I decided that our website development company would focus on WordPress, one of the world’s most popular content management systems because it was a good entry point for local employees. It allowed me to fit the company to the talent and resources in Moldova and address a global need. STARTING ENSPIRE My start-up capital was $2,500 drawn from my readjustment allowance. I started our firm’s corporation structure as a limited liability company in Virginia and opened a fully-owned subsidiary in Moldova. It took me 30 days to find and file the necessary notarized and translated documents in Chișinău.

Two months after my close of service in July, 2016, Enspire was officially registered in Moldova. It took three months to get a foreign investors visa so I could stay in Moldova. But I had already registered the company, moved into a Chișinău office, and hired our first official employee, George, who was a junior web developer. I didn’t receive the visa until a week or so after the expiration of my 90-day visa, so I had to pay a small fine.

I was off to a rocky start but with the help of the Moldova community of fellow entrepreneurs and RPCVs—others like David Smith and Kelsey Walters who chose to stay in Moldova after service and start their own businesses—we moved forward. My experience building Enspire just goes to show that the Peace Corps community is truly a unique and lasting bond that works in ways you can never imagine.

I stayed in Moldova for two more years to hire, train, and work with the initial team. Over the course of three years, we have grown into a full creative agency with a social impact. We have expanded to three offices: Chisinau, Moldova, Washington, D.C. and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. THREE YEARS LATER We created an opportunity on a small but increasing scale to start the process of change in Moldova. Ten of our 15 employees live and work in Moldova. Elena Putina just celebrated her two-year anniversary with Enspire in June. Her story is truly one that makes me smile. She joined the team as a marketing specialist with great English skills. Elena is an avid reader, reading 81 books in 2018, which beat her own reading goal for the year. Elena is now our senior user experience designer and leads many of our design projects. Elena has led many of the design process changes and conducted company-wide changes at Enspire. Our technical director and senior fullstack developer is Sergiu Negară. Since we hired him a year ago, Sergiu has dramatically improved the way we develop websites, our systems, and processes and boosted the team’s talent level.

There are four RPCVs working at Enspire. Three served in Moldova. For all of us, our wages, work flexibility, the office culture and the projects we manage reflect the atmosphere of many of the Silicon Valley startups. But interestingly, our work practices are being noticed by other businesses in Chișinău.

We started out working predominantly with small businesses. A Moldovan honey producer, Dulce Plai, was one of our first clients. The woman who owns the company is a social entrepreneur who hired workers from economically disadvantaged communities. They were giving back to their community and ran a transparent and bribe-free business. Liza, the founder, needed to tell their story and present their products in an easier way. We gave their old-fashioned blog a better look, fleshed out the details of their online products, updated their hosting to load faster, and introduced them to a larger market with multi-language capabilities. The company has grown with sales on the global market.

One of our largest customers is an investment firm in Colorado with more than 75 U.S. branch offices. This U.S. company understood and saw first-hand how we work as a company with our Moldova design team.

As a growing company offering branding, web site design and development and search engine optimization we and our staff in Moldova work on large-scale projects with multi-million dollar companies, some of which are publicly held: a tech news site in Belgium, a West Coast investment firm, and a publishing company on the East Coast.

Our goal is to expand Enspire and start new companies using seed capital from Enspire’s profits. By the end of 2020 our plan is to open another office in a new country to provide opportunities for more employment that changes people’s lives. We want to get connected and support local communities in the world with programs, initiatives, and social projects that serve those communities. 1 Adam Lawrence served in Drochia from 2014 to 2016 before founding Enspire Development, LLC, a full-service web development and marketing firm serving organizations in several countries including the United States. Go to enspiredev.com or Facebook and Instagram for more information. Moldova’s internet of fiber-optic lines was installed more than 15 years ago. It remains one of the world’s fastest and is relatively inexpensive by U.S. standards.

A Corps of Their Own

Iwas sitting in a Marrakech café 26 years ago when I struck up a conversation with a lovely young Moroccan woman named Fatima. She had recently graduated from college and was looking for an entry-level job, unsure of what she wanted to do with her life. Over steaming mint tea and sweet biscuits, I told her I was working on environmental projects in a small Amazigh village in the High Atlas Mountains as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

She asked what the people living in rural areas were like and how I was able to live without electricity or running water. She was intrigued and asked if she could join the Peace Corps so that she, too, could help her country. It was like a lightbulb had gone off in her head and she suddenly realized what she wanted to do: be a Peace Corps Volunteer. Sadly, I had to explain, “It’s only for Americans.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but Fatima’s question and those of so many other young Moroccans dogged me for 20 years and eventually changed my life. In 2011, I started CorpsAfrica. STARTING WITH MOROCCO When young Africans in Morocco, Senegal, Malawi, and Rwanda ask if they can serve like Peace Corps Volunteers, we can now answer, ”Yes.” We started CorpsAfrica in Morocco in 2013 with seven volunteers and we now have almost 200 alumni in four countries and 75 more about to start their service. When we expanded beyond Morocco, we began inviting volunteers that had successfully “COSed” to serve again in other CorpsAfrica countries. We call them “Exchange Volunteers,” serving across borders and building a Pan-African community along the lines of our own RPCV network.

It wasn’t easy getting started. I spent many years raising money for CorpsAfrica in my spare time while working full-time as a fundraiser for the America Civil Liberties Union, and it eventually took its toll. There were times I thought about giving up on the CorpsAfrica dream, but realized that wasn’t an option: This idea had to happen, and no one else was doing it. I had heard about some interesting volunteer programs in Africa but they weren’t capitalizing on Peace Corps’ established successes.

The fact that so many young Africans want to be Peace Corps Volunteers is, I think, the greatest testament to the organization that Sargent Shriver founded so many years ago. It was time for somebody to pass Peace Corps’ baton to our host-country nationals. We’re so fortunate to have received early support from the biggest company in Morocco, OCP Group. Their commitment at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative helped us expand to Senegal and Malawi and then to Rwanda last year. OCP’s endorsement provides a great deal of credibility, especially as we seek support from other donors in Africa.

We started in Morocco, Senegal, Malawi and Rwanda because they are geographically diverse, politically stable, and have a long history with the Peace Corps. That was important as we were just getting started; the context was already in place, and the young people in those countries wanted to be volunteers. CorpsAfrica’s long-term goal is to be in all 54 African countries. Unlike Peace An RPCV brings public service to Africans in Africa BY LIZ FANNING

3Morocco: Nadia in Tizi Ousem painted the walls of a village preschool in 2015.

WINTER 2019 WORLDVIEW NATIONAL PEACE CORPS ASSOCIATION All photographs courtesy of CorpsAfrica

Corps, we can operate in countries with civil unrest because the volunteers are from those countries – they’re not going anywhere and they’re looking for a way to be part of the solution.

A MODEL FOR A CONTINENT What we’re creating with CorpsAfrica is a model of national service and participatory community development across the continent. We’re engaging young people to promote civil society; to build alliances and understanding between diverse communities; and to develop innovative solutions through communication, education, and, most importantly, friendship. We strive to recruit volunteers

from across socioeconomic classes, regions, and ethnicities. During pre-service training, they learn human-centered design and assetbased community development tools that are grounded in the belief that communities are perfectly capable of addressing their own unique challenges.

The CorpsAfrica Volunteers live in remote, high-poverty areas in their own countries for one year without preconceived agendas. Rather, their goal is to form relationships, identify local needs and assets, and work with local counterparts to facilitate projects that have been identified by the local people. They listen to the people, help them identify what they want for their communities, and then connect them to the resources to help make it happen. That’s it – they’re the facilitators. Their projects happen through them, not by them. And what they get in return is the understanding of poverty that can only come from living it, hands-on professional development experience, and the chance to be part of a community unlike their own. This is the transformative experience. To be clear, CorpsAfrica isn’t just about creating the Peace Corps opportunity for Africans. It also stems from my deep cynicism of development efforts that

3Senegal (left): Children said goodbye last year to Gorgui Ba Toure the day he closed service in Senegal to become an Exchange Volunteer in Malawi. Rwanda (below): Four CorpsAfrica volunteers built a mudbrick structure for agricultural cooperatives in a banana tree forest earlier this year.

are led by outside saviors and my desire to create a new paradigm of smart, humble, effective, locally-led development that leads to smallscale, high-impact projects that are appropriate and sustainable. You can’t tell people what to do, you have to show them. CorpsAfrica gives young Africans the chance to be agents of change that lead by doing.

What amazes me most about the Volunteers is how much they resemble us in our Peace Corps days. They’re eager for adventure and full of questions; they’re patient, proud, and idealistic. They’re having a blast and making friendships that will last a lifetime. Like Peace Corps Volunteers, CorpsAfrica Volunteers learn the importance of listening, respect, and friendship in development efforts. The new alumni association will provide continued support for these emerging African leaders through job fairs, professional development conferences, scholarship programs, and the “entrepreneurship incubator” fund for alums with job-creating ideas. BELLE ANGE AND ALPHA If the Volunteers take just one thing away from this experience, I hope it’s humility because that’s what will help them change the world. Belle Ange Niyonshuti, a CorpsAfrica Volunteer in Rwanda, discovered the difference between helping and serving. “Every time I was in my community,” she told me, “I had the feeling of gratitude, and I knew that I was just as served as the person I was serving.”

Alpha Ba had studied English and German at the University of Saint Louis in Dakar before joining the first Senegal volunteers and organized a recycling program. As an Exchange Volunteer, he used his French skills at the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi.

Alpha is extremely tall — maybe that’s why the refugees asked him to build a basketball court. Alpha wrote the proposal and we helped him pitch it to the National Basketball Association. To our delight, the NBA funded it and sent some of their legendary players to coach the team of African refugees. It seemed like a dream to all of us, including Alpha, and he extended his service in the camp for another year to implement the project. Alpha has gained greater confident about his own abilities as a young leader capable of making positive change. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next.

Each of the CorpsAfrica countries is staffed by locals who maintain their own boards and cultivate local donors and partners. The organization is about Africans for Africa, and that is its greatest strength. As CorpsAfrica expands across the continent, cultural diversity and pan-African experience will create a powerful network for humble, collaborative, and innovative social change. CORPSAFRICA’S GROWTH This summer, we received more than 1,600 applications for 75 positions in the four countries. We get daily requests from young people from countries such as Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana who wonder when CorpsAfrica will come to their own countries. Most of these nations are on the short list for expansion, which we hope will happen soon. Our goal is to have 250 volunteers in every African country in ten years. That’s 13,500 CorpsAfrica Volunteers annually, a mix of people serving in their own countries and in other African countries, and funded primarily by new African donors, as local ownership and sustainability remain fundamental to our mission. Then we can start talking about CorpsAsia. Ambitious, yes, but I’m driven by the knowledge that this is so doable. Getting this organization to the place it is now has required me to harness many of the skills I developed during my two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer: resilience in the face of uncertainty, unrelenting dedication to the mission, and, most importantly, an ability to recognize how much I have to learn. I definitely had a transformative experience during my Morocco service and I gained at least as much as I gave. The community-led projects we implemented and the extraordinary cultural exchange that took place made the Peace Corps unique at its inception and remains at the heart of what keeps the organization relevant today. These are life lessons that we learned not in the classroom but at our individual sites.

Now is our chance to pass this baton and promote African-led development, philanthropy, and leadership. Together, we can build on Sargent Shriver’s original vision and on Peace Corps’ decades-long investment in human development so that young Africans—who also want to learn, grow, and make a difference—can do so too, through service. 1 Liz Fanning served in Morocco from 1993 to 1995 and is the founder and executive director of CorpsAfrica. She hopes all RPCVs will pay the Peace Corps forward by supporting CorpsAfrica with a monthly donation at www.corpsafrica.org/pay-it-forwardcampaign.html. Contact Liz at lfanning@corpsafrica.org. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Morocco Senegal Malawi Rwanda Number of CorpsA frica V olunt ee rs 7 18 19 20 19 16 12 21 21 15 13 12

18 22 20 75 7 18 43

38 72 0 265 CorpsAfrica Volunteers in Four Countries More than 400 community-led projects impacted 63,000 people.

Liz Fanning received NPCA’s 2019 Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service in June.

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