Easily - because you don't have $1,000.

Because your current system is portable and well known in a place where land use and other rights are less solid?

Because no one around you has the technical capacity to update / maintain / repair the system?

Because if you invest in something in a less developed area - someone may come and take it (yes, this includes the govt and various officials who may start talking about permitting etc etc).

Interestingly, this same question is asked and answered at the country scale for major industries. Why ship unrefined / unprocessed product that takes up 10x the volume when you could process locally for the whole country? Because the market doesn't trust the systems in that country well enough to invest $5B that has a 20 year payback even if its "easy math".

If you want to experience some culture shock, read about some Westerners who have spent significant time living with Africans. Not just "living in Africa" in some expat enclave, but living with the people.

I don't feel I have enough of a grasp to summarize it. And I'm not saying it's bad or good in particular. I'm just saying, expect serious culture shock in this area of culture. You'll come away with a greater understanding of why attempted Western interventions have been less successful than expected, if nothing else.

Friend of mine spent 6 months in Goma working as a nurse. Came back with mild PTSD. It wasn't the nursing that did it.

Any pointers to anything to read about this?

Do you have any recommendations?

There is very little long term planning in Africa.

Poverty is a big factor in long term planning. For example in America poor people pay more for toilet paper because they can’t buy a large pack of toilet paper rolls, instead they often can only afford to buy one roll at a time. This is a well documented effect of poverty or financially constrained living.

It's not the only factor though. I've talked with my father-in-law who does a lot of work in Haiti. His observation is that it is a much more systematic problem. Kids don't learn to plan ahead because the schools only teach memorization and they don't play with toys like building blocks. It's very frustrating for him because he finds himself having to hand hold a lot when doing construction projects like building schools, even when the people doing the work are supposed to be professionals.

For example, if he orders a truckload of gravel he has to watch the entrance like a hawk and be ready to rush out the instant the truck arrives, because if he doesn't the truck will just dump the gravel right in the middle of their entrance and block everybody in until he can round up people to shovel it into wheelbarrows by hand. The idea that you might want to ask where to dump the load is not something that will ever cross the truck driver's mind. The project manager won't think about it either unless my father-in-law asks him explicitly where he is planning to store the gravel he just ordered. It's these kinds of problems day in and day out that makes reconstruction so difficult.

Learning how to think ahead is something we take for granted in the west, but it's not an innate human skill. It has to be taught. Worse, if you never learned it yourself then you won't notice that your kids lack the skill. It's a difficult cycle to break.