Sarah Weiner

March 7, 2014April 1, 2014

Women at Work: A Post in Honor of International Women’s Day

March 7, 2014 – Sarah Weiner

One morning, while getting ready for work—at a leisurely, “island” pace that law school no longer affords—Vai Leka showed up on my doorstep wanting to go with me. My two-year-old neighbor was going through a stage of stealing her father’s shoes, and the photo I snapped of her, pencils in tow, ready for work, is one of my favorites from the two years I spent in Tonga as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Having researched women’s rights in developing countries during college, I arrived in Tonga keenly aware of its gender inequalities. However, as I settled in to my village, I of course realized that I knew little about the way men and women actually interacted in day-to-day life in the small archipelago. Women actively participated in town meetings, ran stores, and trekked into the capital for their coveted government jobs. Furthermore, my conversations with them revealed that the women in my village wanted the same thing as the men: a way to support their families and opportunities for their children to do the same.

One theme of Professor David Kennedy’s course at Harvard on Law and Economic Development is that development is about making hard choices—prioritizing certain policies based on your idea of what brings about development (and what development means) under the reality of limited resources. Reflecting back, this is exactly what I had to do. Not that it wouldn’t have been a worthy pursuit, but my time in the Peace Corps was not the time to be advocating for gender equality under the law. It was the time to be teaching children and youth—girls and boys—English, computer, and other skills that would help them compete for Tonga’s limited jobs.

Perhaps that is why a recent World Bank report, Gender at Work caught my eye. It calls for bold action to address the inequality that exists between men and women in the sphere of work. It focuses on making the economic case against exclusion, so the argument resonates both with people who see development as an increase in GDP and those who see development as improvements in human rights. Among its many findings is that in 128 countries, there is at least one law that contains a sex-based differentiation, “meaning women and men cannot function in the world of work in the same way.” There are five or more such differences in 54 countries.

At yesterday’s kick-off for the LIDS-WLA International Women’s Day exhibit at Harvard Law School, Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us, Dean Martha Minow suggested that perhaps by “changing the pictures on the wall, we can change biases.” Symbolism can be powerful. Changing the pictures on the wall matters, as does changing the laws on the books. Maybe Vai Leka, so eager to go off to work with me in her father’s shoes, will grow up to be Tonga’s first female Prime Minister. Or maybe she will be a teacher that inspires her students to change the course of Tonga’s history. And maybe she can become this woman in the current environment. But we owe it to girls like Vai to remove obstacles in their way so that all girls—in developed and developing countries alike—have a chance at joining the large group of women around the world that “inspire change and inspire us.”

March 7, 2014April 1, 2014

Spotlight on LIDS Project Partner: Qorax Energy

March 7, 2014 – Sarah Weiner

This semester, a LIDS team supervised by Orrick LLP is completing a project for Qorax Energy, a renewable energy social impact firm focused on bringing international power engineering expertise to the Somaliland electricity market. I recently spoke with C. Nicolas Desrosiers, a co-founder of Qorax about his experience starting a social enterprise, the legal challenges he has faced, and how the LIDS team will be helping him this semester.

Can you briefly explain what led you to start Qorax Energy?

I had spent the year before starting Qorax working at a university in Somaliland and, for a short time, at Somaliland’s Ministry of National Planning & Development. In the course of my year there, I saw many challenges and opportunities but the most striking was the energy crisis. Somalilanders pay some of the highest prices for energy in the world, often more than ten times what consumers in the U.S. pay, and they also have incredibly high unemployment. I developed the idea for Qorax Energy with Nigel Carr and Abdishakur Mohamoud. Our mission is to reduce this high expenditure in Somaliland and other areas where electricity markets are inefficient. Together, we saw an opportunity to dramatically lower energy costs for consumers, deliver high returns for investors, and create local employment opportunities in a new sector.

Another major motivation was dissatisfaction with international development as it is typically practiced. Charity-based models often have unintended depressive impacts because giving away or heavily subsidizing goods and services inhibits the ability of local entrepreneurs to compete. I saw many development agencies bring in highly paid foreign contractors to do jobs Somalilanders could perform just as well – if not better, with their intimate understanding of local conditions. We were determined to build Qorax as an alternative to this model.

What do you think is the biggest legal challenge to working in a frontier market like Somaliland?

Somaliland is a special case because it lacks international political recognition. Finding the correct ways to manage the movement of money is a primary concern. Foreign investment in modern Somaliland is a relatively new phenomenon, so there are few precedents, particularly for international start-ups like Qorax. There is significant investment underway in multiple market sectors from countries like Kuwait, Turkey, China, and South Africa, but no commercial projects from Western investors. Creating the correct channels to manage both the injection and repatriation of capital to minimize perceived risk is a big challenge.

Nonetheless, it’s the challenges like these that are precisely what attracted us to deploy Qorax’s inaugural project in Somaliland. We see a big potential to catalyze sustainable growth in the energy sector – an opportunity that certainly exists elsewhere on the continent. We are confident that we can build on our success in Somaliland by providing similar services elsewhere. So far, we have received a great deal of encouragement and support from Somalilanders.

Last time we spoke, Qorax had a lot of exciting new initiatives on the horizon. Can you talk a little more about how Qorax will be growing in the next few years, and specifically, how the work of the LIDS team will help the company with that growth?

Qorax completed the construction of its training center in Hargeia this past December, and classes for the initial cohort of 50 students began in January. When they graduate in August, Qorax will support them with access to capital, logistical support, and quality control so that they can operate microenterprises selling clean tech consumer products, such as solar lanterns and related products.

Now that this ball is rolling, we have been actively expanding our operations beyond Somaliland. Our long-term goal is to create a network of energy and entrepreneurship centers. Because our model is partnership-based, each of the in-country subsidiaries is a joint venture with a local educational institution or labor organization. Selecting the correct structure and managing the precise legal and governance relationships between these entities and the U.S. entity is complicated. This is of critical importance since Qorax focuses on frontier and post-conflict markets, where the local foundation for legal institutions and recourse may be weak. The LIDS team is playing an integral role in helping us address these critical legal and structural questions.

LIDS will also play an integral role in advising us on the creation of a non-profit arm called Qorax Foundation, which will focus on research and education related to energy access issues in decentralized contexts.

As someone coming from an urban planning perspective, what do you think is the role of lawyers in helping companies like Qorax Energy? In international development more generally?

A lot of the coursework in my urban planning program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is centered on creating socially-optimal policies. The legal structures involved in robustly institutionalizing these policies for the long term gets less attention.

More specifically, as part of our alternative to traditional international development approaches, we hope to refine our multi-stakeholder joint venture model in order to create businesses in frontier markets with international resources. Identifying the right legal model for this arrangement is of primary importance.

For more information on Qorax, please visit www.qoraxenergy.com.

You can follow Qorax Energy’s progress on its Facebook page: www.facebook.com/qoraxenergy.

August 30, 2013April 1, 2014

Summers in International Development: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

August 30, 2013 – Sarah Weiner

This past summer, I worked for the Legal Transition Team (LTT) at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). LTT is a small unit within the Office of the General Counsel that focuses on legal reform in the countries where the Bank operates. EBRD is unique among development banks for its emphasis on developing the private sector, so LTT’s overarching mission is to encourage reforms that promote investment and the growth of small and medium enterprises.

My work fell in the public procurement sector and primarily consisted of helping my supervisor complete a region-wide assessment of procurement legislation. Broadly speaking, a public procurement law regulates the procedures through which governments award contracts to private entities and thus sits at the front lines of curbing corruption in many countries. In my role, I analyzed each country’s procurement law with the help of an objective questionnaire that identifies whether each law contains the elements of the benchmark set by LTT. I then produced graphs illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of each law with regard to several categories, such as transparency and efficiency.

The most interesting part of my internship was communicating those results to government officials in each country and working with them to ensure that our data was accurate and fully reflected the progress of recent reforms. I can’t imagine another summer job where I would have gotten exposure to such a variety of different legal systems and had the platform to communicate with (and be heard by) so many different governments. Although the vast majority of my communication with government officials was done over the phone, the highlight of my summer was meeting with representatives from Tajikistan in person, as they happened to be in London for a conference. Navigating that meeting reminded me of one of the reasons I sought out an internship in international development—discussing the law with someone from a different culture, background, and legal system from your own makes your work that much more challenging and interesting!

In short, my internship at EBRD exposed me to the ways international organizations engage in policy dialogues with governments to promote legal reform. Further, I was included in office-wide meetings discussing EBRD policies, initiatives, and challenges and got an overall sense for the way a multilateral development bank operates—all while meeting and working with interesting people from all over the world!