Guest blogger Brian McBrearity will be reporting from time to time about his experiences working in Zambia on SME and financial services development. His Zambia Journal posts will appear about once a week here on NextBillion.net. This is the third in the series; read his previous posts here and here.

My past posts have offered questions without answers, observations without insights, reality without reasons. While the economic picture of Zambia is still a murky haze in my mind, a few lights are beginning to shine.

There seems to be a cultural rejection of risk and aggression in Zambia, which carries over to the business environment. From my business experiences here, few local managers exist. Those that do lack the confidence to make decisions with conviction, lack the willingness to accept the risk that comes with those decisions. They defer to others, or make decisions by consensus opinion. This weak management style leads to second-guessing, and overall inefficient business practices.

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Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has written a long and worthwhile piece on the economics of remittances. This is must-read stuff for any of us who have been following the recent debates in the press (and on this site) about remittances and development. The comments are already flying over at MR. An excerpt:

Yes, in many regards remittances are more like inflation -- albeit in a parallel currency -- than like real wealth transfers. But there are also some important efficiency gains.

We also should not assume that distribution and efficiency are fully separate. Perhaps the remittances go to people who know better how to invest the money. Perhaps not.

Acumen Fund's Eric Cantor reports on the recent AirJaldi Summit and points to the revolutionary potential of wireless mesh networks to empower communities. Our own work on a new model for rural connectivity points in the same direction. WiFi mesh can be deployed easily, without sophisticated engineers. Some of the newest equipment has very low power needs, so can be readily and affordably paired with solar panels.  Advanced mesh also has much expanded range, throughput, and interference management—so it can manage 10 hops with no loss of capacity, cover areas a mile square or greater, provide 15 Mbps bandwidth or more. By empowering a range of user devices—phones and PDAs as well as computers—mesh is more broadly accessible, even to those for whom literacy is a barrier.

Most importantly, WiFi mesh offers the potential of radically lower costs, especially for rural areas: in a pilot we are developing for a province in rural Vietnam, we project a cost of access (and in-network VOIP telephony) of less than $1 per household per year. Whether as stand-alone entrepreneurial efforts, community-owned systems, or low-cost extensions to mobile networks, we believe that mesh WiFi networks are the means to bring low income rural areas into the global conversation and the global economy.