Cape Verde: Neither a Cape, nor Verde. Discuss...

Bom dia MPA/IDs-

Naoko, Jean-Baptiste, and I send a big hello from Cape Verde; which despite its name is actually a rather brown archipelago. It’s also really small, barren, dusty, and if we spoke Portuguese would be a very good place to do an internship (as it is, still not bad). Naoko and I are working in the Ministry of the Economy, Growth, and Competitiveness, which is a mouthful of a name for an organization. We are involved in starting a government “enterprise development agency” to support small businesses. It’s brand new and still hasn’t been approved or funded, but it looks very promising, even despite a cabinet reshuffling this week that gives us a new minister and could change things. Some of the projects we’re working on for the agency are an IT business plan competition and a linkage program that tries to develop ties between groups of local farmers and some of the country’s hotels and restaurants. We’re really in the brainstorming/information-gathering phase now (and may be for the entire time we’re here), but the discussions, when we can understand them, are engaging. JB has been almost camped out at the US Embassy trying to get his new student visa. He finally succeeded and is ditching us this week to island-hop before he goes back to Boston. He starts the summer program for the HKS mid-career degree pretty soon.

Oh, and for those of you who were in Brazil and heard me whining about not seeing any monkeys...I saw one here! Except he was on a leash. Someone brought him to an outdoor cafe, tied him up in a tree and sat down and had lunch. This was in addition to the chickens running around under the chairs and the two pigs on the beach in front of the cafe.

I had a suggestion I wanted to toss out to everyone. I have run across a bunch of interesting policies out here that I think would make good SYPAs, but I'm not really interested in any of them. Maybe we could create a place where we could specifically post SYPA ideas for other people to look at? Is there a way to create a sub-forum for that on this blog?

Hope everyone is having a great time and learning a ton. Can’t wait to see you all back in Boston,

Eric