West Africa has spent decades training plumbers, electricians and carpenters, only to watch too many of them finish their certificates and disappear into an informal economy with no customers, no capital and no path to owning anything. A new platform launching Friday at Booker Washington Institute is betting it can fix that gap in Liberia first — and then export the fix across the region.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
Monrovia – The idea behind FIXAARS starts from an uncomfortable but familiar observation: training a generation of skilled tradespeople does not, by itself, employ them. A young Liberian can finish a plumbing, electrical, carpentry or refrigeration program at a respected TVET institution and still struggle to find paying customers, while the household two streets over struggles just as hard to find a technician they can trust. “Liberia does not merely need more training programs. Liberia needs a functioning market around the training,” FIXAARS said in announcing the launch. “Training gives people skills. A market gives those skills customers, income, business ownership, dignity, and economic value.”
It is a gap Liberia shares with nearly every country in West Africa that has invested in technical education without building the market infrastructure to match it — TVET graduates who can wire a house or fix a compressor, but who have no reliable way to find customers, get paid securely, or build a track record that turns one job into a career.
The platform is the brainchild of John S. Morlu II, Liberia’s former Auditor General, whose past work auditing government waste and inefficiency has fed directly into how he thinks about fixing markets rather than simply funding programs. Where Morlu’s earlier public role was about tracking where money went wrong inside government, FIXAARS applies a similar instinct to the private sector: build the accountability and verification infrastructure first and let the market do the rest.
The Numbers Behind the Urgency
The scale of the problem in Liberia alone helps explain why the platform’s founders see this as urgent rather than incremental. World Bank data cited by FIXAARS show that roughly 87 percent of Liberian workers are engaged in smallholder farming or unregistered microenterprises — work that sits almost entirely outside any formal, trackable economy — while about 14.8 percent of Liberians between ages 15 and 24 are neither employed nor in education or training. Those are not abstractions; they describe a generation of young people whose skills, where they exist at all, are going largely unmeasured and underused.
Liberia’s numbers are also not unusual for the subregion. Across West Africa, youth unemployment and underemployment remain stubbornly high even in countries that have poured resources into vocational training, precisely because training completion rates have outpaced the growth of markets able to absorb new tradespeople. That mismatch — skilled hands with nowhere reliable to work — is a regional condition as much as a Liberian one, which is part of why a platform built to solve it in Kakata has an obvious next customer base just across any of Liberia’s borders.
Why This Is Bigger Than Liberia
FIXAARS’s own rollout plan makes the subregional ambition explicit. The founders describe Liberia as the first market, not the only one, with Kumasi, Ghana, already identified as the platform’s next launch location. That sequencing matters. It signals that FIXAARS is not being built as a Liberia-specific fix for a Liberia-specific problem, but as a model for connecting TVET training to real markets anywhere in West Africa where the same disconnect exists — which, by most measures of regional youth employment, is nearly everywhere. A platform that can prove verified-technician marketplaces work in Monrovia and Kakata has a straightforward case to make in Accra, Freetown, Conakry or Abidjan, all of which are wrestling with versions of the same problem: skilled young people, informal economies, and households that default to word-of-mouth because nothing more reliable exists.
For Liberia specifically, being the proving ground carries its own value beyond the jobs FIXAARS might create directly. A successful launch positions Liberian founders, Liberian institutions and a Liberian TVET pipeline as the origin point for a regional solution — a rare instance of Liberia exporting a model rather than importing one, at a moment when much of the country’s economic conversation has been dominated by extraction, aid dependency, and crises imported from elsewhere.
From Technician to Entrepreneur
The platform’s ambitions go beyond matching individual jobs to individual workers. FIXAARS is designed to help a technician progress from completing small assignments to managing customer relationships, assembling a team, winning institutional contracts and eventually employing other TVET graduates — a carpenter building a furniture and property-maintenance company, an electrician building an installation and maintenance business, a refrigeration technician building a company serving hotels, clinics and supermarkets. “We are building an economic engine through which skill can become income, income can become enterprise, and enterprise can create additional jobs,” the company said.
A Direct Invitation to the Diaspora
FIXAARS is also making an explicit pitch to Liberians abroad — in the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia — to treat skilled trades as an investment category rather than something to fund informally through relatives. The platform’s logic separates capital from craft: a diaspora Liberian does not need to be a plumber to own a plumbing company, supplying capital, governance, equipment and customer acquisition while qualified local technicians supply the licensed technical work. For a diaspora community that already sends remittances home to repair houses and support family businesses, often without reliable oversight, FIXAARS is pitching a way to convert that flow of money from consumption into ownership — a property owner abroad selecting a verified provider, tracking an assignment, and paying securely, rather than relying entirely on informal trust networks stretched across an ocean. That pitch, too, extends naturally to the wider West African diaspora, not just Liberia’s own, which is part of the platform’s calculation in choosing Ghana as its second market.
What the World’s Investors Already Know
Part of the case FIXAARS is making to skeptics is that skilled trades are not a consolation-prize sector. In the United States, Alpine Investors built Apex Service Partners into a national platform spanning plumbing, electrical and HVAC businesses, reporting more than 8,000 employees and a $3.4 billion continuation transaction in 2025, with funds affiliated with Apollo agreeing to acquire a minority stake in 2026. Diane Hendricks, co-founder of building-supply distributor ABC Supply, was estimated by Forbes in July 2026 to be worth roughly $21.7 billion; John Menard Jr., who built the Menards home-improvement chain from a construction business, was estimated at roughly $16.2 billion. None of that guarantees Liberian tradespeople become billionaires. It does argue, in FIXAARS’s framing, that what private equity is consolidating for billions of dollars in the United States has been left fragmented and invisible in Liberia and across West Africa — and that there is real value sitting untapped in the region’s skilled-trades economy.
Why Kakata, Why BWI
The choice of venue is not incidental. Booker Washington Institute represents one of Liberia’s oldest and most respected traditions of technical education and launching a market-building platform there is meant to draw a straight line between the classroom, the workshop and the customer. Friday’s launch is expected to draw government officials, TVET institutions, skilled professionals, students, entrepreneurs, development partners and members of the Liberian diaspora — an audience that mirrors the full chain FIXAARS is trying to connect, from training to transaction.
The pilot begins in Liberia in partnership with BWI and interested government agencies, with Kumasi next in line. Whether the platform ultimately succeeds will depend on the unglamorous work of verification, trust-building and steady adoption rather than the launch-day optimism of any press release. But the ambition on display Friday is not modest: to turn a Liberian classroom tradition into the opening chapter of a subregional market — one that, if it works, gives West Africa’s tradespeople a business model long available to their counterparts elsewhere, and gives Liberia a rare claim to having built it first.
