For everything, a battery

Each morning, the power at our apartment building goes out for a short time. It is a fairly predictable schedule; sometime between 7:00 and 7:30, the lights will flicker out and the room will dim to the available sunlight. This outage occurs as the electrical generator is refilled with diesel. Our building has 24 hour electricity and that is far more than the vast majority of the country. Liberia seems to run on diesel, but the generator is just one example of dedicated power generation.

Without a stable grid system, battery generation is also key. Mobile phones are not just pervasive because they allow people to communicate, they are pervasive because they work more consistently than anything else for the price because of great batteries. If they allowed only 30 minutes of talk time and needed to be recharged more than once every two days on standby, they wouldn't fit the environment. The environment is inconsistent, yet the phone persists.

Notebook computers, like mobile phones, offer flexibility that is requisite with limited electricity, but Liberia also has limited space in its offices. Due to a lack of infrastructure maintenance, I expect that my office space might just be off limits. The inconvenience may only be temporary, but disruptive for that time. The inconsistent power can mean no air conditioning and has several times. Air conditioning is optional parts of the United States, but in a tropical area, the humidity and heat can really dampen productivity. Having a laptop at least allows a worker to attempt to find AC. Having a portable computer could really add days to to productivity each year and in ways that someone used to American standards might not guess.

For all of the individual freedom that batteries allow, I'd prefer the demand for them be built on better shared systems. Government workers are not road warriors for the most part. They sit at a fixed location and do a many narrow scope tasks each day. The environment is prescribed and the systems that support it should be as predictable. Coordination is hard and there is nothing like individual freedom to remind one of its difficulty.

The systems that drove mobile phone and notebook adoption in the United States are very different from what drives them in Liberia, yet the resulting products serve both areas. Seeing an iPhone in Monrovia is not common compared to $20 Nokias, but the base functionality is the same, people want to talk from where they are and need a reliable product. The commonality is unifying despite the wealth disparity that exists between these countries. Then again, not much allows a common sense of the world like sunlight at 7:15 am. If only Monrovia had a good coffee shop to go along with that light.