Most investors who chase opportunities in developing economies reach first for the obvious hardware: factories, warehouses, logistics routes. Alejandro Betancourt López flips that order. Before anyone breaks ground on a major operation, he funds the training programs and schools that turn local residents into the workforce a business will later lean on. He treats human development as the first move, not the thing you add once profits arrive.
That instinct grew out of years running companies across several continents. As founder of O’Hara Administration, an investment group with holdings in energy, finance, technology and consumer retail, he has watched what happens when money lands in a community with no matching investment in its people. The result, he argues, tends to let both the investors and the local population down.
Talent First, Concrete Later
“Once you make an investment in an emerging market and you see you need talent, you create a pool for-or try to form a pool of talent by creating an environment, building formation centers and all of that,” Betancourt López said in a recent interview. “So it goes hand in hand, it comes natural.” The training infrastructure, in his framing, is upstream of everything else.
Rather than fly in seasoned staff from elsewhere, he prefers to build the classrooms and workshops that let a community run operations on its own. His money has gone toward educational facilities, including the construction of a new school wing and support for university initiatives, and much of that spending lands well before any revenue shows up. He wants locals staffing the work, not watching it.
People Beat Ideas
Ask what he screens for first and the answer skips right past the spreadsheet. “My first point of focus when choosing an investment is people,” he has said. “There are 10,000 good ideas out there. But not all of them come to be a successful venture-because there are many factors that make them successful. The most critical one is the people.”
That belief explains a career that hops between oil and gas, fashion eyewear and ride-hailing. He keeps steering toward founders and teams rather than one familiar industry, and the same instinct threads through the rest of his portfolio, where education and training tend to arrive alongside the primary business instead of trailing behind it.
Jobs Hold the Whole Thing Together
For him, social responsibility runs deeper than a ribbon-cutting. “Social responsibility is not only to build a school or build a hospital, but also to make sure that you have job creations, that all the people in that community have something to do and have an income, have something to go to and to wake up for every day,” he said. Without steady work, he warns, even a well-funded project can leave a town worse off once the initial excitement fades.
He talks about these shifts with real detail. He describes places where an arriving business lifted schools, wages and daily mood at the same time. Formation centers, in his telling, belong in the same category as roads and power lines: the base a serious operation needs if it wants to last, and a foundation that’s far harder to lay after the fact than before it.
