Global Phil anthropy Forum 2012
Toward a
New Social Contract
April 16-18, 2012
Washington, DC
This book includes transcripts from the plenary sessions and keynote conversations
of the 2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference.The statements made and views
expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views
of GPF, its participants, the World Affairs Council of Northern California or any of its
funders. Prior to publication, the authors were given the opportunity to review their
remarks. Some have made minor adjustments. In general, we have sought to preserve
the tone of these panels to give the reader a sense of the Conference.
The Conference would not have been possible without the support of our partners
and members listed below, as well as the dedication of the wonderful team at the
World Affairs Council. Special thanks go to the GPF team — Suzy Antounian, Sylvia
Hacaj, Naomi Mandelstein, Britt-Marie Alm, Anne Calvert, Ashlee Rea and Sawako
Sonoyama — for their work and dedication to the GPF, its community and its mission.
Video, podcasts and transcripts from the 2012 and past GPF Conferences can be
found at philanthropyforum.org
Strategic Partners
Foundation Partners
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Fundación AVINA
Horace Goldsmith Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Foundation Members
Inter-American Development Bank
GHR Foundation
Humanity United
Legacy Venture
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
NoVo Foundation
Omidyar Network
The David & Lucile Packard Foundation
Joan and Lewis Platt Foundation
The Margaret A. Cargill Foundation
The MasterCard Foundation
Skoll Foundation
United Nations Foundation
United States Agency for International
Development
Vodafone Americas Foundation
Supporting
Organizations
The William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation
International Finance Corporation
The World Bank
Members
Anonymous (1)
The Clara Fund
Suzanne DiBianca
Mr. & Mrs. William H. Draper III
The Hand Foundation
Wendy Ramage Hawkins
David and Anita Keller Foundation
Felipe Medina
MicroCredit Enterprises
Sall Family Foundation
The Summit Charitable Foundation Inc.
The Global Philanthropy Forum is a project of the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
This collection of transcripts is a publication of the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
Copyright ©2012 World Affairs Council of Northern California. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without the express permission of the authors is prohibited.
Photo Credit: Inside Photos by Nick Khazal
FOREWORD������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ iii
Jane Wales
GLOBAL PHILANTHROPY FORUM ADVISORY COUNCIL������������������������������������� vi
2012 Conference Agenda������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ix
Speaker biographies���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxiii
Contents
Toward a New Social Contract:
New Roles. New Responsibilities.����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1
Jane Wales, Rajiv Shah, Peter Robertson
Untethered Journalism: The Role for Independent Media�����������15
Amadou Mahtar Ba,Tom Porteous, Hunter Walk, Ron Elving
Innovation in Philanthropy���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������25
Tony Blair, Jane Wales
Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner����������������������������������������������41
Judy Miller, Steven M. Hilton, Richard Blewitt, Robert Zoellick
Not Your Parents’ Giving:
Leveraging All Sectors for Change����������������������������������������������������������������63
Carol Civita,Tony Elumelu, Laurence Lien, Mark Kramer
A Different Kind of ROI: The Role for Private Capital�����������������������77
Annie Chen, Jed Emerson, Liesel Pritzker Simmons, Ron Cordes
Social Good: By All (Private) Means Necessary�������������������������������������93
Elizabeth Littlefield, Laila Iskandar, Julie Katzman, Jayant Sinha, Jane Wales
From Blueprint to Scale: The Case
for Philanthropy in Impact Investing������������������������������������������������������������� 117
Jacqueline Novogratz
The New Egypt and the Core Responsibilities
of Governance�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 128
Hossam Bahgat, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Barbara Lethem Ibrahim, Jane Wales
A Talk by Bassem Youssef������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������149
How to Do What We Do — Only Better:
The Role for Evidence�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 157
Anthony Lake, Caroline Anstey,Luis Ubiñas, Jane Wales
Scaling Solutions in Global Health Delivery���������������������������������������� 181
Barbara P. Bush, William Campbell, Neeraj Mistry, Jeff Richardson
When States Fail to Protect����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 197
Cindy McCain, Randy Newcomb
The Case of Climate Change���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 209
Christiana Figueres, Christine Morse
FOREWORD
From the Arab Spring and the financial meltdown to weather extremes and civil
conflict, we are experiencing rapid and sometimes wrenching change that no
single actor can manage on its own. Governance — the management of shared
problems and the stewardship of shared resources — is a process that takes us
all. National governments cannot solve all problems. Nor can markets. Nor can
the most ingenious civil society actors and the philanthropies that support them.
It takes us all.
Yet the social contract — the means by which we allocate responsibility and
resources for shared governance is in flux. It is contested.And so philanthropists,
social investors and leaders of the public and civic sectors came together at the
2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference to consider what roles each might
play in solving hard problems together.
Jane Wales
The Global Philanthropy Forum (GPF) is a dynamic, international network of
more than 1,800 agile and engaged philanthropists, donors and social investors.
They are both the architects and beneficiaries of the information age, and they
want to see its benefits more evenly shared. Our purpose is to build a learning
community and to inform, enable and enhance the strategic nature of our work.
Members treat the GPF community as an informal brain trust, and we use the
annual gathering to recharge, renew and often reconsider our approach to a
given problem. Together we reflect on our own innovations, assess what works
and what doesn’t, and consider when an idea requires more time, dollars and
political will to maximize its impact.
At the 2012 Conference, former prime minister of Great Britain Tony Blair spoke
to the ways philanthropies and private enterprises can step in when the public
sector may fall short. He challenged philanthropists to take on a more daring
approach to giving, to disrupt conventional thinking and to take risks that governments cannot. He encouraged donors to continue forging partnerships with
change-makers at the community, national and global levels.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Nigerian philanthropist and businessman Tony Elumelu discussed his efforts
to advance “Africapitalism” as a primary vehicle for building economies and
improving lives throughout the continent. Having himself transformed a failing
Nigerian commercial bank into a two billion dollar pan-African powerhouse,
Elumelu now trains business leaders and helps finance local enterprises that
can contribute to what he calls “economic prosperity and social wealth” in subSaharan Africa. Fittingly, he was in conversation with FSG’s Mark Kramer, who
has written widely on the ways that corporations can create “shared value” for
both company shareholders and society’s stakeholders.
Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz, is among the earliest and most effective champions of investments in “social enterprises” that produce both a social
and a financial return. However, in a “Let’s Learn” session, she used ten years of
evidence to challenge the notion that investment dollars alone can build small
and growing enterprises that provide goods, services and income-generating
opportunities for the poor. Like their counterparts in the developed world, small
enterprises in the developing world go through many phases — from business
plan to proof of concept to the moment for scale. And they too need patient
capital. Novogratz argued that investors waiting on the sidelines for the next
game-changer will wait a long time if the “early assist” in forms of philanthropic
grants and loans is not there. She relied on a thoughtful study undertaken by the
Monitor Group with the Acumen Fund.
Global Philanthropy Forum 11th Annual Conference
On the following pages, you will read the words of ingenious leaders from the
public, private and social sectors who have dedicated their lives to securing
human rights, reducing poverty and advancing global health. As you read some
of the stories told and strategies discussed, you will see evidence that the social
contract is changing and that we all have a positive role to play in the evolving
new order.
Jane Wales
President and CEO, World Affairs Council and Global Philanthropy Forum
Vice President,The Aspen Institute
Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas described moments when evidence
prompted a fundamental shift in the foundation’s strategy. He stressed that
accountability is the single most pressing challenge philanthropists and foundations face today. They must take risks and be willing to fail; however, this
entrepreneurial approach must be coupled with a strategy that takes into
account lessons learned. A believer in building what he calls an “impact culture,”
he argued that learning is a central philanthropic value that requires a commitment to evaluative processes.
UNICEF leader Anthony Lake spoke to recent findings with the potential to turn
the notion of triage on its head — at least in the delivery of health care to children in need, and the realization of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Conventional wisdom argues that the greatest efficiencies and therefore the
most gains will be made by giving priority to “low-hanging fruit,” the children
most easily reached with time-tested interventions. However, UNICEF’s elaborate
set of peer-reviewed studies and simulations suggest otherwise. By focusing on
the poorest and most marginalized, UNICEF may, in fact, save the lives of more
mothers and children, making far swifter progress toward the MDGs, on budget
and on time. Importantly, those most desperately in need will have been served.
What is referred to as an “equity-based approach” is, in Lake’s words, not only
“right in principle,” but also “right in practice.”
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GLOBAL PHILANTHROPY FORUM ADVISORY COUNCIL
FAZLE HASAN ABED
Founder and Chairperson
BRAC
FOLA ADEOLA
Co-founder
Guaranty Trust Bank
SYED BABAR ALI
Advisor
Packages Limited
LAURA ARRILLAGAANDREESSEN
Founder and Chair
Stanford Center on
Philanthropy &
Civil Society
BRIZIO BIONDI-MORRA
Chair
Fundación AVINA
RICHARD BLUM
Chairman
Blum Capital Partners, LP
PAUL BREST
President
The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation
LARRY BRILLIANT
President
Skoll Global Threats Fund
JEAN CASE
Co-founder and CEO
The Case Foundation
LAURA CHEN
Executive Chair
ZeShan Foundation
RICHARD CURTIS
Co-founder and Vice
Chairman
Comic Relief
HERNANDO DE SOTO
Founder, President, and
CEO
Institute for Liberty and
Democracy
KEMAL DERVIŞ
Vice President and Director,
Global Economy and
Development
The Brookings Institution
vi
WILLIAM H. DRAPER, III
Director
Draper Richards Kaplan
Foundation
WILLIAM DRAYTON
Founder, Chair and CEO
Ashoka
PEGGY DULANY
Founder and Chair
The Synergos Institute
PETER GABRIEL
Co-founder, WITNESS
Co-founder, The Elders
ROBERT GALLUCCI
President
The John D. & Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation
WILLIAM H. GATES, Sr.
Co-chair
Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation
JULIETTE GIMON
Family Council Member
The Flora Family
Foundation
VARTAN GREGORIAN
President
Carnegie Corporation of
New York
STEPHEN HEINTZ
President
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
ESTHER HEWLETT
Chair
New Global Citizens
STEVEN HILTON
Chairman, President & CEO
Conrad N. Hilton
Foundation
WALTER ISAACSON
President and CEO
The Aspen Institute
WYCLEF JEAN
Founder
Yéle Haiti
TERESA HEINZ KERRY
Chair
The Heinz Family
Philanthropies
ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO
Goodwill Ambassador
UNICEF
Founder, The Batonga
Foundation
LATA KRISHNAN
Chair
American India Foundation
CAROL LARSON
President and CEO
The David & Lucile Packard
Foundation
ANNIE LENNOX
Founder
The SING Campaign
GRAÇA MACHEL
Founder and Chair
Foundation for
Community Development
NACHIKET MOR
Chair
SughaVazhvu Health Care
LUIS ALBERTO MORENO
President
Inter-American
Development Bank
JOHN P. MORGRIDGE
Chairman Emeritus
Cisco Systems, Inc.
ALI MUFURUKI
Chairman and CEO
Infotech Investment
Group Ltd.
CATHERINE MUTHER
Founder and President
Three Guineas Fund
ARYEH NEIER
President
Open Society Foundations
PAMELA OMIDYAR
Founder and Board Chair
Humanity United
SALLY OSBERG
President and CEO
Skoll Foundation
SUSAN PACKARD ORR
Chair
David and Lucile Packard
Foundation
ALAN PATRICOF
Founder and Managing
Director
Greycroft LLC
JAN PIERCY
Executive Vice President
ShoreBank International
JUDITH RODIN
President
Rockefeller Foundation
EDWARD SCOTT
Co-founder
BEA Systems, Inc.
Co-founder & Chairman
Center for Global
Development
ADELE SIMMONS
President
Global Philanthropy
Partnership
JEFFREY S. SKOLL
Founder and Chairman
Skoll Foundation
STERLING SPEIRN
President and CEO
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
LARS THUNELL
Executive Vice
President and CEO
International Finance
Corporation
B. STEPHEN TOBEN
President
Flora Family Foundation
ARCHBISHOP
DESMOND TUTU
Chairman
The Elders
LUIS UBIÑAS
President
Ford Foundation
JANE WALES
President and CEO
World Affairs Council
and Global Philanthropy
Forum;
Vice President
Aspen Institute
WILLIAM S. WHITE
Chairman, President
and CEO
Charles Stewart
Mott Foundation
TIMOTHY E. WIRTH
President
United Nations
Foundation
& Better World Fund
TAE YOO
Vice President,
Corporate Philanthropy
Cisco Systems, Inc.
MUHAMMAD YUNUS
Founder
Grameen Bank
STEERING GROUP
Heather Grady
Randy Newcomb
Lorene Arey
Bernardo Guillamon
Sally Osberg
Matt Bannick
Russ Hall
Jan Piercy
Jennifer Buffett
Jacob Harold
Joan Platt
Peter Buffett
Noosheen Hashemi
Kathy Reich
Kathy Bushkin Calvin
Wendy Ramage Hawkins
Elspeth Revere
Nick Deychakiwsky
Laurene Powell Jobs
Reeta Roy
Suzanne DiBianca
David Keller
Virginia Sall
William H. Draper III
Michael Madnick
Vicki Sant
Emily Fintel Kaiser
Felipe Medina
Chuck Slaughter
Gabrielle Fitzgerald
Judy Miller
June Sugiyama
Gary Ford
Christine Morse
Catherine Zennströom
vii
MONDAY: APRIL 16, 2012
9:30am Making the Most of GPF and Speed Networking
A brief introduction of what the Global Philanthropy (GPF) is all
about and how to make the most of the Conference. Meet long-time
members and newcomers and become a part of GPF’s welcoming
culture. As part of this session you will be able to jump-start your
GPF connections in timed, 5-minute “speed meetings.” Please be
sure to bring the Speed Networking Access Card you received at
registration.
2012 Conference Agenda
Jane Wales, President and CEO, World Affairs Council and Global
Philanthropy Forum; Vice President, Aspen Institute
10:30am Break
11:00am Opening Plenary — Toward a New Social Contract:
New Roles. New Responsibilities.
Resource-strapped states unable to meet their citizens’ basic needs
turn to the international community for help. Yet OECD states face
both fiscal and political constraints, as their citizens’ increasingly
challenge international aid budgets, no matter how modest. Going
forward, when the demand for governmental resources outstrips
supply, how can to the public, private, civic and philanthropic
sectors combine their resources and core competencies to provide
the basic necessities of life? Each is part of a new social contract
that recognizes that none of us is secure in an insecure world,
none of us is healthy in an unhealthy world, and none of us can
consistently prosper in a world that is not prosperous.
Welcome by Jane Wales
Special Address: Rajiv Shah, Administrator, USAID
Peter Robertson, Chairman, Board of Trustees, World Affairs Council
of Northern California (m)
12:00pm Lunch
12:45pm Untethered Journalism: The Role for Independent Media
By bringing societal choices and governmental actions to light, a
free press can provide the transparency needed for the parties to
the social contract to hold themselves and others to account. Yet
many governments seek to curb those freedoms either through
outright censorship, or through more subtle measures that have a
chilling effect on independent reporting. At the same time, advances
in information technology have given birth to a new class of citizen
journalists. But it has also enabled the narrowcasting of information
that can distort the story, and contribute to polarization. Panelists
will highlight the importance of accountability in our social contract,
and the essential role the media plays.
Amadou Mahtar Ba, CEO, African Media Initiative
Tom Porteous, Deputy Director, Human Rights Watch
Hunter Walk, Director, Product Management, YouTube
In conversation with … Ron Elving, Senior Washington Editor,
NPR news (m)
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
1:45pm Break
2:00pm Group Sessions — Transitions
Roosevelt Making Room for the Philanthropic Sector in China
Panelists will address the context and the role of the growing
philanthropic sector in China and its effect in helping support
and shape new socio-economic realities. Panelists will explore the
issues in which philanthropy is engaged in China, as well as where
it can be uniquely effective. They will highlight areas that are ripe
for collaboration, particularly for donors and grantmakers from
the US. Discussion will also touch upon lessons learned from the
evolution of philanthropy in China, and implications for a changing
social contract.
Kara Hurst, Vice President, BSR
Donghsu (Jaff) Shen, CEO, Fuping Development Institute
Zhenyao Wang, Dean, Beijing Normal University One Foundation
Philanthropy Research Institute
Paula Johnson, Director, Center for Global Philanthropy,
The Philanthropic Initiative (m)
Culpepper Enabling Strategic Philanthropy in Brazil
Philanthropy in Brazil has been traditionally conducted through
corporations and grantmaking foundations have been rare.
However, philanthropy and the social sector are evolving in Brazil
as donors seek new ways to be strategic. Panelists will discuss ways
that the public, private and social sectors are increasingly working
together to build a more sustainable and equitable society.
Marcos Kisil, President, Instituto para o Desenvolvimento do
Investimento Social (IDIS)
Daniela Nascimento Fainberg, Founder, Instituto Geração
Fernando Rossetti, Director General, Grupo De Institutos
Fundações E Empresas
Luiz Ros, Manager, Opportunities for the Majority, Inter-American
Development Bank (m)
Dumbarton rom Revolution to Reconciliation in the Middle East
F
and North Africa
Over the past year, we saw the power of the individual asserted
in the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa with the
tremendous and once unimaginable takedown of entrenched
regimes. There was much destruction of the old, but the new
has not yet been built. What will be the basis of their new social
contract? What institutions and processes need to be put in
place, and how will responsibilities be assigned? Panelists will
discuss how countries in the region are working to find their
footing on protecting rights and providing services and economic
opportunity, and what they can learn from the social sector.
Hossam Bahgat, Founder and Director, Egyptian Initiative for
Personal Rights
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Conference Agenda
Guy Ellena, Director, Manufacturing, Agribusiness and Services
Dept., Europe, Middle East and North Africa, International
Finance Corporation
Regan Ralph, Executive Director, Fund for Global
Human Rights (m)
Sulgrave Meeting Basic Needs in a Governance Vacuum
Areas of greatest need are often those most difficult to assist. In
countries like Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia
and Libya, the state is often unwilling or unable to uphold security,
rule of law, the provision of basic services, or the protection of
human rights. When these basic inputs are absent or fragile,
what can other actors do to fill the vacuum left by a collapsing
or newly formed government? Panelists will discuss how to
reliably assess what is being provided, by whom and what is still
needed, and, once identified, how to provide basic services safely
in these environments. Discussion will touch on how multilateral
organizations, aid agencies, academics and philanthropists are
coming together on these problems.
Nicholai Lidow, Fellow, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation
Gabriel Stauring, Co-founder, i-ACT and Stop Genocide Now
Amy Sun, Co-founder and President, FabFolk Inc.
Elizabeth Gore, Vice President, Global Partnerships,
UN Foundation (m)
3:15pm Break and Special Security Check
PHOTO ID REQUIRED to enter Ballroom.
4:00pm Innovation in Philanthropy
Transparency, accountability and competence are essential to
governance. And each has shot to the top of the public agenda
wherever citizens demand that government provide public goods
both reliably and equitably. What are the new ways in which the
philanthropic sector can play a transforming role in promoting good
governance? How can we encourage, strengthen and fulfill this role
for philanthropy?
Special Address: Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, Great Britain and
Northern Ireland
In conversation with … Jane Wales
5:00pm Break
6:00pm Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Reception
7:00pm Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner
Judy Miller, Vice President and Director, Conrad N. Hilton
Humanitarian Prize
Steven M. Hilton, President and CEO, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Presentation of Prize to Richard Blewitt, CEO, HelpAge International
Special Address: Robert Zoellick, President, The World Bank
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
TUESDAY: APRIL 17, 2012
9:00am
Not Your Parents’ Giving: Leveraging All Sectors for Change
Modern-day philanthropists are redefining the field to encompass
all private means of financing positive social change. Panelists will
include a corporate CEO from Nigeria, a Member of Parliament
from Singapore, and a philanthropist from Brazil with a family
foundation — dynamic leaders solving problems and contributing
to positive outcomes for the societies in which they live and far
beyond. Whether it be to put their company to the service of
social goals, to connect the public and civic sectors, or to devise
strategic grantmaking programs, these leaders for change are
having a profound impact in new ways. In the process they are
changing both the definition and the practice of philanthropy.
Special Address: Tony Elumelu, Heirs Holdings Limited; Founder,
The Tony Elumelu Foundation
Carol Civita, Philanthropist, Victor Civita Foundation
Tony Elumelu
Laurence Lien, Member of Parliament, Singapore;
Chairman, Lien Foundation
Mark Kramer, Co-founder and Managing Director, FSG (m)
10:00am A Different Kind of ROI: The Role for Private Capital
Both private and philanthropic capital has a role to play in
spurring economic activity in developing economies, and
producing not only economic, but social and environmental
benefit. Panelists will focus on the ways that private
capital — including risk-loving capital — can be deployed. And
they will explore the ways and which investment capital and
philanthropic grants can be combined. Finally, speakers will
consider whether and how transparency and accountability can
be assured.
Annie Chen, Chair, RS Group
Jed Emerson, Executive Vice President, ImpactAssets
Liesel Pritzker Simmons, Vice President and Director, Program
Development, IDP Foundation, Inc.
Ron Cordes, Co-founder, Cordes Foundation (m)
11:00am Break
11:30am Group Sessions — Innovation
Roosevelt Impact Investing: Redefining Returns
Opportunities for impact investment promise financial returns
coupled with positive social and environmental impact.
Many foundations are exploring ways to leverage all of their
resources by aligning their grantmaking and investment goals.
Impact investing not only efficiently complements public and
private sector financing, but is also contributing to radical new
approaches to organizing and providing social services. Panelists
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Conference Agenda
will discuss the ways in which impact investing is both shaping
and being shaped by the changing social contract. They will also
cover investment funds, rating systems and accreditations, as well
as strategies for successful investment and the impact investing
infrastructure necessary for these to succeed.
Amy Bell, Vice President, J.P. Morgan
Simon Merchant, CEO, Jacana Venture Partnership
Tracy Palandjian, CEO, Social Finance, Inc.
Luther Ragin, Jr., CEO, Global Impact Investing Network
Antony Bugg-Levine, CEO, Nonprofit Finance Fund (m)
Culpepper Collaborating to Maximize Comparative Advantage
To operate effectively in a complex and rapidly changing world,
philanthropic, development and private sector organizations are
recognizing their own comparative advantages, and partnering to
build on the strengths of others. Jumping off from insights gained
at the recent Bellagio Initiative on the Future of Philanthropy and
Development as well as well as their deep experience, panelists
with deep expertise will share their views on how innovative
partnerships based in systems thinking have the potential to
identify breakthrough solutions and take them to scale. Panelists
come from the UN system, the World Bank, civil society and
the foundation world, and will delve into specific achievements
gained through cross-sectoral collaboration and more responsive
development and philanthropic efforts.
Jennifer Barsky, Partnerships Coordinator, International Finance
Corporation
Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, General Secretary, World YWCA
Romesh Muttukumaru, Deputy Assistant Administrator,
Partnerships Bureau, UNDP
Heather Grady, Vice President, Foundation Initiatives, The
Rockefeller Foundation (m)
Dumbarton Finding Market-based Solutions to Social Problems
By addressing pressing social needs such as healthcare, sanitation,
agricultural and financial services, businesses may not only advance
the social good, but may increase their economic value, their
competitiveness and their appeal to potential employees. This
shared value approach can result in powerful innovations that can
be applied not just in the private sector, but in the philanthropic and
public sectors as well. In India and elsewhere there are examples of
companies successfully innovating to bring products and services
to new markets, revolutionizing their value chains to decrease costs
and improve their offerings.
Wiebe Boer, CEO, The Tony Elumelu Foundation
Laila Iskandar, Chairperson, CID Consulting
Srivalli Krishnan, Founder and CEO, eFarm
Ashwin Naik, Founder and CEO, Vaatsalya Healthcare
Lalitha Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, FSG (m)
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Sulgrave Seeding Environmental Entrepreneurship
While there has been much growth in business related to
environmental sustainability, opportunities remain in clean
technology, waste management and product design sectors,
among others. Panelists will discuss how incorporating
and valuing a “triple-bottom line” is not only good for the
environment, but also good for business and the community. New
green-minded innovations in how we meet and provide for basic
needs will be crucial as we move forward, and this session will
provide first-hand examples of how philanthropists, businesses
and governments are working together to promote these
solutions.
Javier Flores, Director, Strategy and External Affairs, Grupo
Ciudad Saludable
Manoj Sinha, Co-founder and President, Husk Power Systems
Alfredo Suárez Rivero, CEO, AliBio
Tao Zhang, COO, New Ventures, World Resources Institute (m)
12:45pm Lunch
1:30pm Social Good: By All (Private) Means Necessary
The world of development finance offers real opportunities to
leverage public, private and philanthropic capital in new as well as
traditional ways. Over the past few years, private capital has been
mobilized to address public goals in developing economies and
emerging markets. Ms. Littlefield will discuss the ways in which
the private sector is uniquely positioned to target and maximize
growth in emerging markets, and consider how these efforts can
be best complemented by public and social sector contributions
within a coherent strategy.
As the cohort of actors pursuing social impact expands and
diversifies, the role for private finance evolves along with it.
Panelists will highlight new mechanisms for financing the social
good as well as creative twists on the old, including “variable rate
impact bonds” and pricing schemes that factor in the true cost of
social impact. Panelists will discuss the importance of engaging
stakeholders across sectors to shape giving and investing
strategies, and the forms of catalytic investments necessary to
help investees grow and succeed.
Special Address: Elizabeth Littlefield, President and CEO,
Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Laila Iskandar, Chairperson, CID Consulting
Julie Katzman, Executive Vice President, Inter-American
Development Bank
Elizabeth Littlefield
Jayant Sinha, Partner, Omidyar Network in India
In conversation with … Jane Wales
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2:45pm Break
3:00pm From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy
Conference Agenda
in Impact Investing
Attracted by the prospect of achieving the combination of marketrate returns and social benefit, traditional investors have begun
to respond to the emerging asset class of impact investments.
While there is good reason for their growing interest in impact
investing, the number of investment-ready social enterprises will
be constrained so long as supporters and would-be investors stay
on the sidelines until the enterprise is ready to scale. Philanthropic
grants and patient capital are needed for the planning and proof of
concept phases of enterprise development. How can philanthropists
most effectively use their grant dollars to propel inclusive business
models forward?
Special address: Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder, The Acumen Fund
3:30pm Break
3:45pm Group Sessions — OPPORTUNITIES
Roosevelt The Key to Sustainable Cities
Our globalized world is — and will continue to become — increasingly
urban. By 2050, it is expected that nearly 70 percent of the world’s
population will reside in cities, an increase of nearly 20 percent
as compared with 2009. This important shift will bring with it
increased pressure on infrastructure, government services, natural
resources, climate and many other aspects critical to quality of
life. One approach to addressing the urban challenge is to focus
on cities that are fair, democratic and environmentally sustainable.
Panelists will explore ways that philanthropy can support the
development of more sustainable cities and consider ways that this
agenda can catalyze broader collaboration in this field.
Ana Mercedes Botero Arboleda, Executive Director,
Fundación Corona
David Gómez Álvarez, Executive Director, Jalisco Cómo Vamos
Ricardo Young, Entrepreneur
Emily Fintel Kaiser, Director, Global Relations, Fundación AVINA (m)
Culpepper New Schools of Thought in Education
While we may all have equal potential, we do not have equal
opportunity. Improving access to education will help entire
generations of young people to learn, live and contribute in
powerful and productive ways. Panelists will highlight revolutions
in the financing and delivery of education — and the opportunities
they allow for gathering and evaluating data. Ways for government
to leverage philanthropic and private giving in education will be
highlighted.
Ron Bruder, Founder, Education for Employment
Wendy Ramage Hawkins, Executive Director, Intel Foundation
Aleph Molinari, President, Fundación Proacceso
Ruth Turner, CEO, Tony Blair Faith Foundation
Deepali Khanna, Director, Youth Learning, The MasterCard
Foundation (m)
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Dumbarton Co-funding Opportunities in Global Health
The challenges we face in global health are complex and
persistent, and they affect each of us differently. Government
alone often lacks the ability, the funds or the political will to
address the issues necessary to improve the health and well-being
of its citizens. Without health, individuals cannot reach their full
economic, social and intellectual potentials — and neither can
states. To overcome these challenges, philanthropists, private
sector actors and governments are contributing to new pooledfunds that can achieve much more than any sector on its own
in terms of improving research, financing and services in global
health. Panelists will speak to the strategy behind these funds,
the different forms they can take, their achievements to date and
opportunities for collaboration.
Jennifer Alcorn, Program Officer, Global Policy and Advocacy,
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Paolo Sison, Director, Innovative Finance, GAVI Alliance
Amanda Glassman, Director, Global Health Policy, Center for
Global Development (m)
Sulgrave Pricing Nature into the Market
We stand at a critical juncture: we are able to provide a better
standard of living for more people than ever before, but with the
global population at 7 billion and counting, the need to reduce our
impact on finite planetary resources grows more urgent. The value
of services offered by nature is not considered in commercial
markets because it is difficult to put a price tag on them.
Increasingly, corporations, foundations and civil society are paying
attention to ecosystem services and how to value their inputs. As
a result, we are gaining a better understanding of their benefits
and costs as they are diminished or replenished. This panel will
look at how actors in the private, philanthropic and public sectors
are looking at both collaborative and individual efforts to count
the true value that nature provides.
Conference Agenda
8:00pm The New Egypt and the Core Responsibilities of Governance
The next generation of Egypt’s leaders will have the opportunity
to build a new social contract, one which trusts and empowers the
citizen, offers consistent services, advances equity and protects
human rights. Panelists will discuss the arc of liberation in North
Africa and the challenges ahead in a revolution that is not quite
over. They will focus on the role of nongovernmental actors,
including faith-based and other citizen organizations. And they
will describe the societal stresses and strains as a new social
contract is forged.
Hossam Bahgat, Founder and Director, Egyptian Initiative for
Personal Rights
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Founder, Ibn Kaldun Center for Development
Studies and Arab Organization for Human Rights
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim, Founding Director, John D. Gerhart
Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement
In conversation with … Jane Wales
9:00pm A Talk by Bassem Youssef
Bassem Youssef, a physician turned satirist has emerged as the
“Jon Stewart of Egypt.” Shocked by the state media’s inaccurate
coverage of events in Tahrir Square, Dr. Youssef made his own
video-taped report from the site of the demonstrations that
toppled Egypt’s government. It went viral via YouTube and he
has since been offered his own television show, where he applies
his sardonic wit to the coverage and analysis of events that are
changing the world. He will bring his satire and his point of view
to the GPF.
Bassem Youssef, Host, The Bassem Youssef Show
Barry Gold, Program Director, Marine Conservation, Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation
Michael Jenkins, President, Forest Trends
Craig Hanson, Director, People and Ecosystems Program, World
Resources Institute (m)
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5:00pm Break
6:00pm Foyer
Reception
7:00pm Ballroom
Dinner
7:45pm Presentation of Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project Winners
June Sugiyama, Director, Vodafone Americas Foundation
Patricia Mechael, Executive Director, mHealth Alliance
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Conference Agenda
WEDNESDAY: APRIL 18, 2012
12:00pm 7:30am Table Talks
Roosevelt Co-designing for Impact
To maximize the efficacy of their interventions, strategic
philanthropists and aid agencies increasingly engage the
communities they seek to serve in assessing needs, defining
objectives, designing solutions, gathering relevant data and
ascertaining results. So too should individual governments. As an
essential (but often overlooked) first step, donors must ask the right
combination of social actors what issues they want to tackle and
how they define success. In this way, the desired social, cultural,
political and economic changes can be identified, and interventions
designed accordingly. Panelists will explore the practical elements of
philanthropic approaches that start with local ownership, and also
identify ways in which governments can and should do the same.
Breakfast Buffet
9:00am How to Do What We Do — Only Better: The Role for Evidence
What have we learned and how has that knowledge informed
our strategy? Measurement and evaluation (M&E) are essential
learning tools when it comes to setting and honing the strategy
pursued by donors, lenders and service providers — be they
intergovernmental organizations, international agencies or private
foundations. We will hear from three leaders– the executive
director of UNICEF, the managing director of the World Bank,
and the president of the Ford Foundation — who will describe the
ways in which evidence has led to changes in their organization’s
strategy. While M&E is an essential learning tool for grantor and
grantee — in a new social contract there is a wider community to
serve. M&E can also to contribute to field-wide learning. And so
speakers will use the GPF as a means for sharing the knowledge
gained. And they will reflect on the role for evidence in enhancing
the contributions of each sector to the social contract.
Special Address: Anthony Lake, Executive Director, UNICEF
Caroline Anstey, Managing Director, The World Bank
Luis Ubiñas, President, Ford Foundation
In conversation with ... Jane Wales (m)
10:30am Break
10:45am Scaling Solutions in Global Health Delivery
Despite significant advances in health research and
unprecedented levels of funding, much of the world still lacks
the ability to effectively and efficiently bring health care to
those who need it most. Why is this the case? What are the
main bottlenecks? Speakers will discuss the most promising
interventions for health care delivery globally, and will highlight
much-needed incentives across sectors to take health care
interventions the last mile. Opportunities to leverage giving and
for collaboration across sectors will be emphasized.
Group Sessions — Accountability
Mathias Craig, Founder, blueEnergy
Kate Gross, CEO, Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative
Dominic Muren, Founder and Principal, The Humblefactory
Katherina Rosqueta, Executive Director, Center for High Impact
Philanthropy, University of Pennsylvania (m)
Culpepper Growing Community Philanthropy’s Role
Locally-rooted foundations are strongly positioned to make an
impact in their communities because they invest in the localities
of which they are a part, and because their personal relationships
and knowledge of the community improves the efficacy of their
programs. What is the need, and what are the best methods, for
building sustainable and local capacity for community development
as government and other sectors reduce small-scale investments?
Panelists will discuss the unique contributions of community
philanthropy, and how governments should leverage their impact.
Sombat Boonngamanong, Director and Founder,
The Mirror Foundation
Mirza Jahani, CEO, Aga Khan Foundation USA
Amita Puri, CEO, Charities Aid Foundation India
Jenny Hodgson, Executive Director, Global Fund for Community
Foundations (m)
Barbara P. Bush, CEO and Co-founder, Global Health Corps
William Campbell, Senior Advisor, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Neeraj Mistry, Managing Director, Global Network for Neglected
Tropical Diseases, Sabin Vaccine Institute
Jeff Richardson, Vice President, Global Health Access,
Abbott Fund (m)
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Break
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Conference Agenda
Dumbarton Measuring What Matters
As Albert Einstein once said, “Not everything important can be
measured, and not everything that can be measured is important.”
With increasing demands to produce evidence of progress,
philanthropists, private actors and governments must be careful to
reflect on what can actually be measured in a given situation, and
whether or not it can tell us something useful. Through rigorous
evaluation and sharing of meaningful results, accountability is
enhanced. Panelists will present creative new evaluation schemes
that enable actors of all types to see and understand both
successes and short falls, and to be agile in shifting course when
necessary.
Matthew Forti, Performance Measurement Practice Area Manager,
The Bridgespan Group
Jean Rogers, Executive Director and Founder, Sustainability
Accounting Standards Board
Tjip Walker, Deputy Director, Learning, Evaluation and Research,
Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning, USAID
Jody Fitzpatrick, President-elect, American Evaluation
Association (m)
Sulgrave Making Human and Civil Rights Personal
The government has certain key responsibilities to citizens, but
it often falls to these very citizens to hold them accountable.
One crucial role of the individual is to be a witness to civil and
human rights, and to speak out — loudly — when either is violated.
Often, the ability to be an effective witness is aided by local
or foreign organizations. This panel will address creative ways
that individuals are working with philanthropists and social
sector actors to hold governments, and even watchdog groups
themselves, accountable.
Patrick Alley, Director and Co-founder, Global Witness
Michael Callen, Postdoctoral Scholar, Center of Evaluation for
Global Action, UC Berkeley
David Tolbert, President, International Center for Transitional
Justice
Kim Keller, Executive Director, David & Anita Keller Foundation
(m)
1:00pm Lunch
Closing Plenary — Global Governance
that provide relief as well as policing when possible. Working
alongside these agencies are nongovernmental organizations,
which offer traditional relief — shelter, food, water, health care — as
well as assistance in mediating an end to the conflict and creating
mechanisms for post-conflict reconciliation. They in turn rely on
the support of donors, ranging from individual governments, to
large staffed foundations to individuals responding to an appeal.
Our speaker is one of those individuals. She has traveled the globe
to help those who fall victim to civil conflict and state collapse.
At home she is a voice for post-conflict de-mining so that future
generations do not fall victim to the detritus of yesterday’s wars.
Cindy McCain, Business Owner and Humanitarian
In conversation with ... Randy Newcomb, President and CEO,
Humanity United
2:00pm The Case of Climate Change
At a time of fast-paced change, the demand for global governance
outstrips the supply. No issue better illustrates this disparity than
that of climate change. Many far-sighted commercial actors have
altered their practices, reducing their carbon footprint and investing
in technologies designed to prevent climate change or mitigate
its effects. Concerned individuals have made energy-conscious
choices both as citizens and consumers. National governments and
regional organizations have advanced policies pricing carbon and
regulating energy use. But — in the face of the existential threat that
climate change can pose - a global agreement continues to elude
us. Conferees will hear from an international leader committed to
closing the gap between governance demand and supply.
Special Address: Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary, UN
Framework for Climate Change
Introduced by Christine Morse, CEO, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation
2:30pm CONFERENCE ADJOURNS
1:30pm When States Fail to Protect
Individuals face mortal peril when the state they inhabit collapses
into chaos or violent conflict. The loss of human life can be
attributed not only to the violence that ensues but also to the
widespread deprivation that results. In an important move
forward, the international community embraced the norm of the
“Responsibility to Protect,” this asserts that states are required
to protect their citizens from mass atrocities. However, the
international community is loath to intervene when states fail to
meet this most basic obligation. They rely instead on UN agencies
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Caroline Anstey
Managing Director, The World Bank
Caroline Anstey is currently managing director of the World Bank. Since she joined
the World Bank in 1995, she has worked in various positions including: chief of
staff to President Zoellick from 2007 to 2010; country director for the Caribbean;
director of media relations and chief spokesperson; and assistant and speechwriter
to former World Bank President, James D. Wolfensohn. Prior to her current post, she
was vice president for external affairs at the World Bank.
Speaker biographies
Before joining the World Bank, Anstey worked as political assistant to the Rt.
Honorary James Callaghan MP, and as editor of the BBC weekly current affairs
program “Analysis.” She also served as secretariat member of the InterAction
Council, a group of former Heads of Government that develops recommendations
on political, economic, and social issues.
A UK national, Anstey holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and a
Post-Doctoral Fellowship from Nuffield College, Oxford.
Jennifer Alcorn
Program Officer, Global Policy and Advocacym Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation
Jennifer Alcorn joined the Gates Foundation in 2008 and leads their Private Donor
Engagement and Middle East portfolios.
She works closely with a range of givers interested in having an impact on global
health and development issues to identify opportunities for co-funding alongside
the foundation.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Alcorn was a director of Partnership Operations
with the United Nations Foundation, which was founded by Ted Turner with a $1
billion dollar gift in 1999. In this role, she developed cross sector partnerships
across global health, energy and climate change, water, and other issues important
to the work of the United Nations.
Jennifer holds a BA in History and Historic Preservation from Ursuline College. She
currently resides in Seattle, Washington with her husband and son.
Patrick Alley
Director and Co-founder, Global Witness
Patrick Alley is a director of Global Witness and co-founded the organization in
1993. He took part in Global Witness’ first investigations into the Thai-Khmer Rouge
timber trade in 1995, and since then has taken part in over fifty field investigations
in South East Asia, Africa and Europe, and in subsequent advocacy activities.
Based on the organization’s experience in tackling conflict diamonds, and former
Liberian President Charles Taylor’s arms for timber trade, Alley focuses on the
thematic issue of Conflict Resources, particularly in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, and in the past in Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire. Alley also leads Global Witness’
work on forest issues, especially challenging industrial scale logging in the tropics
and the role of forests in combating climate change. In addition, he is involved in
the strategic leadership of Global Witness.
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Global Witness was jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on
conflict diamonds, which led to the establishment of the Kimberley Process
Certification Scheme, and co-founded the Publish What You Pay Coalition, which in
turn led to the creation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
Hossam Bahgat
Founder and Director, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights
Hossam Bahgat is the founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal
Rights (EIPR), a Cairo-based independent human rights organization which seeks to
protect and promote the personal rights and freedoms of individuals and communities. Since 2002, the EIPR has used research, advocacy and litigation to promote and
defend the rights to privacy, religious freedom, health, and bodily integrity.
An outspoken critic of the Mubarak government’s violations of basic rights, Bahgat
played a prominent role as revolution swept Egypt in January and February 2011.
Since then, the EIPR has expanded its scope of work to include transitional justice,
the protection of civil liberties and political rights, the promotion of economic and
social justice and reform of the criminal justice system.
With training in political science and international human rights law, Bahgat is
also a board member of the International Network for Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Fund for
Global Human Rights. Bahgat is the recipient of 2010 Alison Des Forges Award for
Extraordinary Activism from Human Rights Watch.
Barnett Baron
President and CEO, Give2Asia
Barnett Baron is president and CEO of Give2Asia, a nonprofit that meets the philanthropic needs of individuals, corporations, and foundations by offering services in
project design, due diligence, advised grantmaking and impact monitoring.
Prior to joining Give2Asia, Baron served as executive vice president of the San
Francisco-based Asia Foundation from 1994 to 2011. He was founding chairman of
the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium (APPC) in 1994 and served on its board
until 2005.
Prior to joining The Asia Foundation he was vice president for International
Programs at Save the Children (1991-93) and served for 16 years with the
Population Council, initially in Africa and later in Asia. As the Council’s Senior
Representative for East and South Asia, based in Bangkok, Thailand, Baron was
responsible for supervising the Council’s demographic, economic, and contraceptive research and assistance programs in 15 Asian countries.
He was assistant professor of political science at Columbia University from 1970
to 1972 and returned to Columbia as a Visiting Scholar at the East Asian Institute
for the 1988 — 91 academic years, where he organized and directed the first
comparative study of contemporary philanthropy in East Asia (Philanthropy and
the Dynamics of Change in East and Southeast Asia, East Asian Institute, 1991).
Baron is widely published in the fields of Asian and international philanthropy. He
received his BA in government and history from New York University (1963), and
his MA (1964) and PhD degrees (1969) in political science from Yale University.
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Speaker Biographies
Amadou Mahtar Ba
Chief Executive, African Media Initiative
Amadou Mahtar Ba is chief executive of the African Media Initiative (AMI), an
unprecedented pan-African effort aimed at providing the continent’s media owners
and practitioners with the tools they need to play an effective role in their societies.
AMI aims to strengthen the media sector in Africa to ensure the accountability
of governments and other institutions and to promote social development and
economic growth.
Ba is also a co-founder and chairman of AllAfrica Global Media, Inc — owner and
operator of allafrica.com — an international multi-media content service provider,
systems technology developer and the largest distributor of African news and
information worldwide. Prior to starting AllAfrica, Ba served from 1996 to 2000
as director of communications and marketing for BICIS Bank, a subsidiary of
the French banking group BNP Paribas. From 1993 to 1996, Ba helped lead the
successful restructuring and privatization of the Panafrican News Agency (PANA).
Ba is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council for the Future of
journalism, advisory board member of the Reporting Developing Network Africa,
a member of the Advisory Committee of the Knight International Journalism
Fellowship administered by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) as well as
a member of the Africa Policy Advisory Board of ONE.
Ba has been selected in 2011 as one of the 100 most influential Africans by New
African Magazine. He is also listed among the 500 influential Africans leaders of
the Africa24 Magazine published in March, 2011. He was educated in Senegal,
France and Spain and is fluent in French, English, Spanish, Fulani and Wolof.
He holds a master’s degree from the Ecole Française des Professionnels de la
Communication in Paris and from the Paris 7 University (Jussieu).
Jennifer Barsky
Partnerships Coordinator, International Finance Corporation
Jennifer Barsky is the partnerships coordinator with the International Finance
Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. In this capacity
she manages global partnership development with corporate and private philanthropies. Barsky also serves as IFC relationship manager for US, Spanish and
Portuguese development agencies and has advised IFC’s clients on developing
community-based foundations as part of their strategic community investment. She
was previously responsible for establishing the World Bank Foundations Program.
Before joining the World Bank Group in 2006, Jennifer served as the founding
director of the Nike Foundation. Her prior decade of professional experience
was in corporate social responsibility and international development with
SustainAbility and the United Nations Development Program in New York and
Angola.
She has also consulted for a range of public and private sector clients including
Shell, BP, Calvert Foundation, UNOPS, Oxfam and TrickleUp and served as Adjunct
Lecturer at Columbia and New York Universities.
She began her career in finance and then as a journalist in Mexico, Nigeria, Finland
and the US.
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Barsky received a master’s of international affairs from Columbia University and a
BA from McGill University.
Amy Bell
Vice President, J.P. Morgan
Amy Bell is vice president of J.P. Morgan’s Social Finance business unit, which
provides financial services to the growing market for impact investments. Bell
manages the group’s principal investment portfolio, which seeks to earn a reasonable rate of return alongside of achieving positive impact on low-income and
excluded populations around the world.
Deals completed to date include investments in MicroVest II, LeapFrog Financial
Inclusion Fund, IGNIA, Bridges Social Entrepreneurs Fund, and the African
Agricultural Capital Fund.
Prior to joining Social Finance, Bell worked for several years for J.P. Morgan in
the Investment Bank’s Mergers and Acquisitions group and the Consumer/Retail
Coverage group. In addition, she worked in Financial Advisory Services for Deloitte
where she specialized in forensic accounting.
Richard Blewitt
CEO, HelpAge International
2012 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Recipient
Richard Blewitt is the CEO of HelpAge International, a global network striving for
the rights of disadvantaged older people to economic and physical security, healthcare and social services. HelpAge focuses on the development and strengthening of
civil society structures in the developing world and on building linkages between
civil society and government.
Blewitt has held senior positions with the British Red Cross Society, Save the
Children, and the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Immediately
prior to his appointment with HelpAge International in November of 2006, he
served as director of policy and communications with the International Federation
of Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva. His work in disaster relief and development has taken him to Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan, North Korea, and, more
recently, Myanmar.
Bell holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s in professional accounting from The University of Texas at Austin and is fluent in Spanish.
He is a founding trustee of The Survivors’ Fund which supports the rights and
needs of victims of the Rwandan genocide. Until 2001 he was a trustee of The
London Lighthouse which provides community-based services to people living
with HIV/AIDS.
Tony Blair
Blewitt holds a BSc with honors in business management from the University of
Surrey and an MA from London University’s School of Oriental & African Studies.
Former Prime Minister, Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Tony Blair served as Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from May
1997 to June 2007. He was also the leader of Britain’s Labour Party (1994 to 2007)
and the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield, England (1983 to 2007). Tony Blair
is currently working in the Middle East as Quartet Representative. He represents
the United States of America, the UN, Russia and the European Union, helping the
Palestinians to prepare for statehood as part of the international community’s effort
to secure peace.
The Tony Blair Faith Foundation promotes respect and understanding of and
between the major religions and to make the case for faith as a force for good
in the modern world. Through education and social action programmes, the
Foundation creates opportunities for people of all faiths and none to come
together to learn directly from each other and to take joint action on shared
humanitarian goals.
The Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) helps some of Africa’s most
dynamic leaders deliver the change their people need to relieve poverty. AGI
currently operates in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, advising the
Presidents of each country, with a team of AGI’s staff working full-time at the centre
of all four governments. By combining these in-country teams of experts with
Tony Blair’s unique experience as a leader and reformer, AGI is helping to build the
capacity of partners to tackle poverty and attract investment sustainably.
He has also launched the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, which increases participation in sport by young people - by inspiring more adults to become trained coaches
at the school and sports clubs which need them most. The Foundation is working
to ensure a sporting legacy in the North East of England for the London 2012
Olympics and Paralympics which Mr. Blair helped to bring to the United Kingdom.
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Speaker Biographies
Wiebe Boer
CEO, The Tony Elumelu Foundation
Wiebe Boer is chief executive officer of The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF). As
CEO, he manages the day-to-day operations, strategy development and execution
for the Foundation.
His vision is for The Tony Elumelu Foundation to be a benchmark for 21st century
African philanthropy. In his capacity as CEO of the Foundation, Boer is also a
director of Mtanga Farms, Tanzania; a member of the advisory board of Digital
Divide Data (DDD) Kenya, and he serves on the board of the African Grantmakers
Network.
Previously, Boer was associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the
world’s leading charitable organisations with more than 90 years of commitment to Africa. His work with the Rockefeller Foundation in Africa focused on
areas that included impact investing, climate change, agricultural development,
China’s engagement with Africa, and impact sourcing. He joined the Rockefeller
Foundation in 2008 after three years as a consultant with McKinsey & Company
where, in addition to serving numerous US corporate clients, he helped the government of Kenya develop a long-term economic development strategy. He also spent
several years in Mauritania managing a USAID-funded food aid development project
for World Vision.
Born and raised in Jos, Nigeria, Boer earned his doctorate in history at Yale
University and undergraduate degree at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
USA. He is married to Joanna-Marie, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, and together
they have three young sons.
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Sombat Boonngamanong
Ron Bruder
Director and Founder, The Mirror Foundation
Founder and Chair, Education for Employment
Sombat Boonngamanong is the director and founder of The Mirror Foundation, a
nonprofit organization working in the northern Thai province of Chiang Rai. They
operate programs that help the hilltribe people of Mae Yao sub-district to combat
their everyday struggles with unemployment, poverty, drug addiction and lack of
Thai citizenship.
Ron Bruder is the founder and chair of Education for Employment (EFE), a network
of nonprofits committed to creating employment opportunities for youth in the
Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The aim of The Mirror Foundation is to promote social change, human rights
and universal equality through mutual cooperation, self-education and an active
community. Last year The Mirror Foundation celebrated its 20th anniversary and
started more initiatives on tackling issues such as human trafficking, the environment, and disaster recovery.
A social franchise of independent, locally-run affiliates, EFE identifies critical skill
gaps in the local economy, then develops and delivers targeted training programs
for youth with limited opportunity. Graduates are linked to jobs through partnerships with employers, civic and educational organizations. After graduating its first
class in 2006, EFE expanded rapidly, with independent affiliates in Egypt, Jordan,
Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen, and sister support organizations in the US
and Spain.
Through the Foundation, Boonngamanong links the interests of children, teachers,
and parents so that everyone can participate in the educational process. Using the
Internet, he is also actively extending this community to the rest of Thailand, its
government, and even international neighbors. In 2000, he was recognized as a
Social Entrepreneur for Change and was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship.
Honored by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People for his
nonprofit work with EFE, Bruder began as a serial entrepreneur. In 1977, he
founded The Brookhill Group, which owns and manages properties throughout the
US with a focus on creating investment partnerships to develop or redevelop shopping centers, office buildings and multi-family homes.
He also established Bannok TV, a network that supports the hilltribe lifestyle
in Northern Thailand through archiving traditional ceremonies, songs, customs,
costumes, farming processes, weaving methods and hunting techniques. This initiative received recognition from the World Bank.
Bruder was an attendee at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
He has served as a delegate of the Council on Foreign Relations to the Jeddah
Economic Forum, and a contributor to the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar.
Ana Mercedes Botero Arboleda
Executive Director, Fundación Corona
Ana Mercedes Botero Arboleda has served as the executive director of Fundación
Corona in Bogotá Colombia since December 2010. She started her professional
career at the Center International Studies at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá
as coordinator on international political affairs. Shortly thereafter, she joined the
United Nations as assistant lawyer at the Law of the Sea Office serving in New
York and Geneva headquarters. Subsequently, she joined the Colombian Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and served as a delegate in international negotiations on security,
political and human rights issues, as well as illicit drug trafficking.
In 1994 she joined Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) as director of the Secretariat
and External Affairs, responsible for CAF´s communication strategy and the overall
delivery of the organization’s mandate. She acted as the liaison officer with CAF’s
shareholding governments and Board of Directors and was the coordinator for
protocol, logistics and secretariat services to CAF’s governing bodies. In 2003,
Botero was appointed head of a new office, responsible for the strategy and implementation of CAF’s Social Responsibility and Community Development Program.
Under her leadership, a high-impact set of tools were developed based on shared
values, social inclusion and human rights in order to strengthen basic capabilities
for empowerment and improving living standards of poor communities.
Botero was appointed Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in
1998 and is a volunteer member of Special Olympics International. She is a lawyer
with two master’s degrees, one in law and the other in international affairs from
Columbia University in New York.
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Speaker Biographies
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University, a MBA from New York
University, and a post master’s degree in accounting and taxation from Iona College.
Antony Bugg-Levine
CEO, Nonprofit Finance Fund
Antony Bugg-Levine is the CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund, a national nonprofit and
financial intermediary dedicated to effectively mobilizing and deploying capital to
build a just and vibrant society. In this role, Bugg-Levine oversees more than $225
million of capital under management and a national consulting practice, and works
with a range of philanthropic, private sector and government partners to develop
and implement innovative approaches to financing social change.
Bugg-Levine is the co-author of the newly released Impact Investing: Transforming
How We Make Money While Making a Difference (Wiley, 2011).
Most recently as managing director at The Rockefeller Foundation, Bugg-Levine
designed and led the Rockefeller Foundation’s Impact Investing initiative. He
convened the 2007 meeting that coined the phrase “impact investing” and currently
serves as the Board chair of the Global Impact Investing Network.
A former consultant with McKinsey & Co., he also teaches at Columbia Business
School. A native of South Africa, he served in the late 1990s as the acting communications director at the South African Human Rights Commission.
Barbara P. Bush
CEO and Co-founder, Global Health Corps
Barbara P. Bush is CEO and co-founder of Global Health Corps (GHC), an organization that mobilizes a global community of emerging leaders to build the
movement for health equity. Over the past two years, GHC has sent 126 fellows
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from nine countries to work with nonprofit and government health organizations
like Partners In Health and the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Burundi, Uganda,
Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, and the United States.
Before joining GHC, Bush worked for two years at the Smithsonian Institution’s
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where she supported design programs
for high school students and faculty. After graduating college, she worked for Red
Cross Children’s Hospital in Capetown, South Africa and interned for UNICEF
in Botswana. She has traveled with the UN World Food Programme, focusing on
the importance of nutrition in ARV treatment. Bush is a member of UNICEF’s
Next Generation Steering Committee and is on the Board of Directors of
Covenant House International and PSI. She is a Draper Richards Foundation Social
Entrepreneur and a fellow of the Echoing Green Foundation, which selected GHC
as one of the 14 most innovative social start-ups worldwide out of 1500. Bush graduated from Yale University with a Humanities degree in 2004.
At Hill and Knowlton, a global public relations company, she led the US Media
Relations practice. For 12 years before that, she was the Director of Editorial
Administration for US News a World Report magazine. From 1976 through 1984,
Calvin served as Senator Gary Hart’s press secretary in his Senate office and 1984
Presidential campaign.
Throughout her career, Calvin has taken an active role in a range of philanthropic
activities. She is a graduate of Purdue University and the recipient of numerous
awards for leadership and philanthropy.
William I. Campbell
Senior Advisor, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
William Campbell is currently a senior advisor to the Chairman for JPMorgan Chase
& Co. where he was most recently chairman of Chase Card Services, the nation’s
second largest credit card organization.
Postdoctoral Scholar, Center of Evaluation for Global Action, UC Berkeley
Michael Callen
From 2005 to 2007 he served as chairman of Visa International, leading the organization to its IPO in 2008, the largest in US history.
Michael Callen is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Institute on
Global Conflict and Cooperation and visiting scholar at the Center for Effective
Global Action at UC Berkeley. He completed his PhD in economics at the University
of California, San Diego in 2011.
Prior to his executive roles at JPMorgan Chase and its predecessors, Campbell
oversaw Citigroup’s Global Consumer Business from 1996 through 2000. He also
serves as president of Sanoch Management, a consulting and investment firm for
financial companies, start-ups, and venture capital firms.
His current research focuses on reducing violence and improving political institutions in developing countries. Randomized control trials in support of this agenda
have been recently completed in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Uganda and are
ongoing in Pakistan and at the newly established American University Afghanistan
Behavioral Research Laboratory. This research has been funded by the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the National
Science Foundation, the International Growth Center, and the International
Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie).
In 2001, together with his wife and daughters, he created The Campbell Family
Foundation. One of the primary missions of the foundation is to provide Campbell
and his family with opportunities to become more active and involved philanthropists. Their strong desire to impact lives directly has motivated them to take a
leadership role in The END Fund.
Callen has published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the British Journal
of Political Science and has work under invited resubmission at the Journal of
International Economics.
Kathy Bushkin Calvin
CEO, United Nations Foundation
Kathy Bushkin Calvin is the CEO of the United Nations Foundation. The United
Nations Foundation was created in 1998 with businessman and philanthropist
Ted Turner’s historic gift to support UN causes. The UN Foundation builds publicprivate partnerships to address the world’s most pressing problems, and works to
broaden support for the UN through advocacy and public outreach.
Prior to joining the UN Foundation in 2003, Calvin served as president of the AOL
Time Warner Foundation and was the chief architect of the company’s corporate
social responsibility initiatives. She joined America Online in 1997 as senior vice
president and chief communications officer, following a career in politics, journalism, and public relations.
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Speaker Biographies
Campbell is also an avid supporter of the arts and serves as vice chairman of the
Brooklyn Academy of Music and as a member of the executive committee of The
Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation.
Annie Chen
Chair, RS Group
Annie Chen incorporates her personal values in managing her portfolio under the
RS Group, an organization that seeks to maximize impact through blended value,
utilizing both investment and philanthropic capital to generate positive social, environmental and financial returns.
Chen believes that one of the most pressing challenges of our time is driving the
planet and its inhabitants toward sustainability. She is committed to giving her
time and resources towards social and environmental causes that could create
positive systemic change. Believing the potential for change through social entrepreneurship, Chen hopes to enhance the development of social entrepreneurship
throughout Hong Kong and Asia. Chen was born and raised in Hong Kong. She
obtained her BA from Brown University and her LLB from Columbia Law School.
After practicing tax law in San Francisco and Hong Kong for nearly a decade, Chen
joined her siblings in managing her family office that provides a range of services
for three generations.
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Carol Civita
Philanthropist, Victor Civita Foundation
Carol Civita is a philanthropist, committed to strengthening the growing philanthropic sector in Brazil. She is an active supporter of various organizations, enabling
them to develop their work, network and partner with others. She has served on
various boards and committees for international and Brazilian nonprofits in the
fields of health, education, entrepreneurship and the environment. These have
included Operation Smile, Lar da Misericórdia, Make-a-Wish, Projeto Gota d’Agua,
and Child Fund. She also serves on the board of “Tempo de Mulher,” an organization
dedicated to informing and empowering working women from Brazil’s emerging
middle class.
A member of the Civita family in Brazil, she learned about philanthropy from the
Victor Civita Foundation, her family’s foundation which has contributed to the
improvement of teacher quality in Brazil for the past 25 years. Founded in 1985,
the foundation aims to both develop and recognize the value of teachers in basic
education and strives to work towards a country with sufficient schools, good
teachers, incentives for teaching activities and material for pedagogical practices.
Ronald D. Cordes
Co-founder, Cordes Foundation
Ron D. Cordes has enjoyed a 25+ year career in the investment industry, having
co-founded and then sold AssetMark Investment Services to Genworth Financial
in 2006. He is currently co-chairman of Genworth Financial Wealth Management,
which is responsible for over 24 billion dollars of assets under management for
individual and institutional clients.
Cordes speaks and writes extensively in the field of impact investing, and chairs
the Executive Committee for ImpactAssets, a new initiative to catalyze capital for
impact investments formed in partnership with the Calvert Foundation.
Along with his wife Marty, he is co-founder of the Cordes Foundation and co-chair
of the Opportunity Collaboration, a global poverty business retreat. He is also a
regent of the University of the Pacific as well as chairman of the Advisory Board for
the University’s Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship, and serves on the Board
of FairTrade USA, MicroVest Holdings, the Sarona Frontier Markets Fund, and the
East Bay Community Foundation.
He is co-author of The Art of Investing & Portfolio Management (McGraw hill,
2004) and was recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005.
He holds a BS in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mathias Craig
Founder, blueEnergy
Mathias Craig started blueEnergy, a social impact organization that connects the
poorest, most isolated communities to energy, clean water and other essential
services and trains leaders to work globally for a more sustainable, equitable
world. He provides the organization with administrative, programmatic, and
figuerfundraising leadership.
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Speaker Biographies
Since its founding, blueEnergy has been extensively recognized for its innovative
work by CNN Heroes, Larry King Live, the Tech Awards (winner of 2007 Economic
Development Award), the Energy Globe Awards (National Winner for Nicaragua
and Finalist for Energy Globe World Award, 2008), and, most recently, the Ashoka
Fellowship.
Craig has over seven years of involvement in wind energy and has had significant
experience living throughout Latin America. He has spent a considerable amount
of time in Nicaragua and has strong ties to the peoples of the Caribbean Coast. He
holds a BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California,
Berkeley and a MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Craig is fluent in English, French, and Spanish.
Guy Ellena
Director, Manufacturing, Agribusiness and Services Department, Europe,
Middle East and North Africa International Finance Corporation
Since September 2010, Guy Ellena has been the director of the Manufacturing,
Agribusiness and Services Department for the Europe, Middle East and North Africa
(EMENA) region of the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Based in Istanbul, Ellena is responsible for an investment portfolio of more than
US$4 billion and an annual program of over US$1 billion. Previously, and for over
10 years, Ellena was the Director of IFC Health and Education Department and was
in charge of a fast growing portfolio of health and education investments, totalling
US$1.1 billion in 2010.
Ellena joined the World Bank Group in 1986 and occupied successive operational positions as a Health Economist in several regions where he carried out
policy work for the Bank. Prior to joining IFC, Ellena was a researcher and health
economics/policy consultant for the French Government’s development agencies.
He holds a master’s degree in economics as well as a PhD in Health Economics
from the University of Aix-Marseille (France).
Tony O. Elumelu
Chairman, Heirs Holdings Limited
Founder, The Tony Elumelu Foundation
Tony O. Elumelu is chairman of Heirs Holdings Limited, an African investment
company committed to economic transformation in Africa through long-term
investments that generate economic prosperity and social wealth. He is also
founder of The Tony Elumelu Foundation, an Africa-based and African-funded
philanthropy, whose mission is to identify and groom African business leaders
and entrepreneurs to achieve the Foundation’s central objective of enhancing the
competitiveness and growth of Africa’s private sector. His reputation as a prominent African business leader is founded on his vision and strategy for United Bank
for Africa Plc (UBA), a single country bank he transformed into a Pan-African financial services institution serving over 7 million customers in 20 African countries
and operating in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. He retired as group
chief executive officer of UBA in 2010.
In 2003, the government of Nigeria conferred on him the national honor of
Member of the Order of the Federal Republic. This year, New African magazine
named him one of the Top 100 Most Influential Africans in the area of business and
finance. He also serves as chairman of Transnational Corporation (Transcorp).
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Ron Elving is the senior Washington editor for NPR News directing coverage of the
nation’s capital and national politics and providing on-air political analysis for many
NPR programs.
Emerson holds master’s degrees in both business and social work administration,
has written over thirty articles/papers and co-edited multiple books on topics as
diverse as sustainable investing, performance metrics and measurement, impact
investing and sustainable hedge fund investing. He works with foundations, investment funds, individuals, social enterprises and businesses to assist those who seek
to maximize the total value of their investing and entrepreneurship in order to
attain their personal and professional visions.
Elving can regularly be heard on Talk of the Nation providing analysis of the latest
in politics. He writes the “Watching Washington” column on NPR.org and is heard
on the “It’s All Politics” weekly podcast along with NPR’s Ken Rudin.
His various papers may be found at www.blendedvalue.org and he has a new book
entitled, Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a
Difference (Wiley, 2011).
Under Elving’s leadership, NPR has been awarded the industry’s top honors for
political coverage including the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, a 2002 duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for excellence
in broadcast journalism, the Merriman Smith Award for White House reporting
from the White House Correspondents Association and the Barone Award from the
Radio and Television Correspondents Association. In 2008, the American Political
Science Association awarded NPR the Carey McWilliams Award “in recognition of a
major contribution to the understanding of political science.”
Christiana Figueres
He is married to Dr. Awele V. Elumelu and together they have five children.
Ron Elving
Senior Washington News Editor, NPR
Before joining NPR, Elving served as political editor for USA Today and for
Congressional Quarterly.
Over his career, Elving has written articles published by The Washington Post, the
Brookings Institution, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, and the
American Political Science Association. He was a contributor and editor for eight
reference works published by Congressional Quarterly Books from 1990 to 2003.
His book, Conflict and Compromise: How Congress Makes the Law, was published
by Simon & Schuster in 1995. Recently, Elving contributed the chapter, “Fall of the
Favorite: Obama and the Media,” to James Thurber’s Obama in Office: The First Two
Years.
Elving teaches public policy in the school of Public Administration at George
Mason University and has also taught at Georgetown University, American
University and Marquette University.
With an bachelor’s degree from Stanford, Elving went on to earn master’s degrees
from the University of Chicago and the University of California-Berkeley.
Jed Emerson
Executive Vice President, ImpactAssets
Jed Emerson is executive vice president of ImpactAssets, a nonprofit financial
services firm creating impact investing products to bridge the asset owner/impact
fund market. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for Social Investing at
Heidelberg University in Germany and a senior advisor to The River Star Group, a
family office based in Hong Kong pursuing a sustainable/impact investing strategy.
He has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford Business schools.
He is internationally recognized as a thought leader, originated the concept of
“blended value” and has presented his work at the World Economic Forum, The
Clinton Global Initiative and other events around the world.
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Speaker Biographies
Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change
Christiana Figueres was appointed as the new executive secretary of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon on May 17, 2010. The appointment was endorsed by the
Bureau of the Convention.
Figueres has been involved in climate change negotiations since 1995. She was a
member of the Costa Rican negotiating team and represented Latin America and
the Caribbean on the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism in
2007, before being elected vice president of the Bureau of the Conference of the
Parties 2008-2009. In 1995 she founded the Center for Sustainable Development of
the Americas (CSDA), a nonprofit think tank for climate change policy and capacitybuilding, which she directed until 2003. From 1994-1996, she served as director of
the Technical Secretariat, Renewable Energy in the Americas (REIA).
Figueres began her life of public service as minister counselor at the Embassy
of Costa Rica in Bonn, Germany in 1982. She served as director of International
Cooperation in the Ministry of Planning in Costa Rica (1987-1988), and was then
named chief of staff to the Minister of Agriculture (1988-90). Figueres has served on
several boards of non-governmental organizations involved in climate change issues,
including the Voluntary Carbon Standard. She is also a widely published author
on the design of climate solutions, and has been a frequent advisor to the private
sector on how to play a leadership role in mitigation.
Figueres holds a master’s degree in anthropology from the London School of
Economics, and a certificate in organizational development from Georgetown
University. She was born in San José, Costa Rica in 1956 and is married with two
children.
Jody Fitzpatrick
President-elect, American Evaluation Association
Jody Fitzpatrick is the president-elect of the American Evaluation Association
and a faculty member with the School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado
Denver. She is the author of two books on program evaluation and many articles
appearing in the American Journal of Evaluation, New Directions for Evaluation,
and Evaluation and Program Planning. She has 35 years of experience conducting
evaluations in education, social services, and employment with a particular focus
on women and families.
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Her interests include ethical issues, context and its influence on evaluation, evaluation use, and measurement. Fitzpatrick’s own practice and writings are eclectic,
encouraging evaluators to contribute their skills to improve public and nonprofit
management by considering the appropriate questions a particular evaluation
should address; stakeholders to involve; and data collection and analysis that is both
valid and valued by the audiences for the evaluation.
Fitzpatrick earned her PhD from the University of Texas, Austin.
Javier Flores
Director of Strategy and External Affairs, Grupo Ciudad Saludable
As Director of Strategy and External Affairs, Javier Flores is responsible for the
international expansion of Grupo Ciudad Saludable (GCS), a social enterprise based
in Peru. GCS works alongside the public and private sectors in Latin America and
South Asia to implement an inclusive model of integrated solid waste management
that incorporates informal waste collectors into municipal waste management
systems. Its model focuses on three key areas: (1) organizing recyclers and
promoting their inclusion in municipal waste plans, (2) influencing public policy
and (3) engaging public and private entities in waste management and scalability of
the model. GCS has organized over 11,500 waste collectors creating employment
and improving health and living conditions for over 9 million people in rural and
poor urban regions in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and India.
Grupo Ciudad Saludable has received international recognition by Ashoka, Avina,
Schwab Foundation and Skoll Foundation. For its environmental impact, GCS
received the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living
Environment, Global Development Network Award, Bravo Latin Trade Award, Globe
Energy Award, Global Fairness Initiative Award, and Prince Albert Medal.
Matthew Forti
Performance Measurement Practice Area Manager, The Bridgespan Group
Matthew Forti is a manager in the Boston office of the Bridgespan Group, where
he has advised leading organizations in global development, youth development
and other fields in various aspects of their work, including strategic clarity, growth
strategy, organizational effectiveness, and funding models.
Forti is also Bridgespan’s Performance Measurement Practice Area manager, where
he helps clients design and implement performance measurement systems that
promote continuous learning and improvement, including with the Goldman
Sachs Foundation’s 10,000 Women initiative (to support underserved women
entrepreneurs globally). Matt has also written extensively on this topic, including
two published articles: Measurement as Learning (The Bridgespan Group, Spring
2011) and Ten Thousand Strong (London Business School Business Strategy
Review, Spring 2011), a semi-monthly blog series called Measuring to Improve. He
has spoken on this topic at multiple gatherings, including the William Davidson
Institute Global Summit on Educating Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School’s
Performance Measurement for Effective Management of Nonprofit Organizations,
and at InterAction’s 2011 annual conference.
Forti has served on several nonprofit boards and is the founding board chair of One
Acre Fund, a nonprofit that assists over 100,000 smallholder farming families in East
Africa to triple their crop yields.
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Speaker Biographies
Amanda Glassman
Director, Global Health Policy Center for Global Development
Amanda Glassman is the director of Global Health Policy and a research fellow at
the Center for Global Development, leading work on priority-setting, resource allocation and value for money in global health, with a particular interest in vaccination.
She has 20 years of experience working on health and social protection policy and
programs in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world.
Prior to her current position, Glassman was principal technical lead for health
at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she led health economics and
financing knowledge products and policy dialogue with member countries,
designed the results-based grant program Salud Mesoamerica 2015 and served as
team leader for conditional cash transfer programs. From 2005-2007, Glassman was
deputy director of the Global Health Financing Initiative at Brookings and carried
out policy research on aid effectiveness and domestic financing issues in the health
sector in low-income countries. Before joining the Brookings Institution, Glassman
designed, supervised and evaluated health and social protection loans at the InterAmerican Development Bank and worked as a Population Reference Bureau Fellow
at USAID.
Glassman holds an MSc from the Harvard School of Public Health and a BA from
Brown University.
Barry Gold
Program Director, Marine Conservation Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Barry Gold is director of Marine Conservation at the Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation, where he leads efforts to ensure healthy oceans through approaches
that integrate human use with conservation and that foster sustainable jobs and
economic development. This includes work to shift fisheries management to
an incentive-based system, which research shows can end overfishing, rebuild
depleted stocks, and sustain fishing communities.
Gold has dedicated his career to working at the interface between environmental
science and policy. Before joining the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, he
worked at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where he led the Foundation’s
efforts to protect and restore ecological systems, using sustainability as a guiding
concept. Prior to the Packard Foundation, he was chief of the Grand Canyon
Monitoring and Research Center, where he was responsible for leading an effort
to understand and protect some of the most highly prized scenic and natural
resources in the US while balancing potentially conflicting social, economic, and
political interests.
Gold has held senior staff positions in the US House of Representatives and
the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently president of the Board of
the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, the leading affinity group for
environmental funders, and serves on a number of other boards and external
advisory committees for organizations such as the National Socio-environmental
Synthesis Center, the Collaborative Institute on Oceans, Climate and Security, and
the Conservation International — Science Advisory Council.
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He has degrees in biology, ecology, and political science and a DSc in Technology
and Human Affairs from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2007, he was elected
a Fellow of the AAAS.
Gore holds a BS in animal science and a master’s in financial development from
Texas A&M University.
David Gómez-Álvarez
Vice President, Foundation Initiatives The Rockefeller Foundation
David Gómez-Álvarez is the executive director of Jalisco Cómo Vamos. In the international arena, he also has been consultant for the Bureau of the Development
Policy at the United Nations Development Program at New York, and project
assistant at the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management branch of the World
Bank Institute, Washington DC.
Heather Grady joined The Rockefeller Foundation in 2010. As vice president for
foundation initiatives, she sets strategic direction for the Foundation’s broad initiatives of grant making and oversees initiatives on issues including climate change,
employment, health and transportation. She provides vision, leadership and direction to help achieve the Foundation’s mission to expand more equitable growth
opportunities and build resilience, and oversees the Foundation’s program staff, a
diverse group of professionals working in the US, Asia and Africa.
Executive Director, Jalisco Cómo Vamos
In the political field he has been director of Electoral Training and Civic Education
at the Consejo Electoral del Estado de Jalisco, and electoral councilor at the Local
Electoral Council of the Instituto Federal Electoral in the State of Jalisco, as well as
advisor to IFE’s General Council in Mexico City.
As part of his academic background he has been director of the Master Program
in Policy and Public Management at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios
Superiores de Occidente (ITESO), and assistant professor at New York University’s
Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Has taught courses in political
theory, political science and political analysis, as well as in government, public
administration and public policy in academic institutions such as Centro de
Investigación y Docencia Económica, ITESO, El Colegio de México (COLMEX) and
El Colegio de Jalisco.
Gómez-Álvarez received his bachelor’s degree in public administration at COLMEX,
a MSc in public policy at The London School of Economics and Political Science,
a MPhil in Public Administration, and a PhD in Public Administration at New York
University. Additionally, he holds various specialization and international certificates.
Elizabeth Gore
Vice President, Global Partnerships, United Nations Foundation
Elizabeth Gore is the vice president of Global Partnerships for the United Nations
Foundation, currently managing partnership and cause marketing strategies implemented in programs and campaigns of the United Nations.
Gore directs large-scale partnerships with global corporations and organizations to
bolster support for UN programs. She leads strategic grassroots efforts such as the
innovative Nothing But Nets and Girl Up campaigns, the Shot@Life global vaccines
campaign, and a faith-based campaign for malaria programs and the Global Fund.
Additionally, she manages partnerships with members of the UN Foundation’s
Global Entrepreneurs Council and with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In
2010 Gore joined Summit on the Summit and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise
awareness for the global clean water crisis on behalf of the United Nations.
Prior to joining the UN Foundation, Gore served as the director of development
and corporate relations for the Points of Light Foundation. In 2008, Gore was
named by People as one of the top 100 Extraordinary Women. She has been
featured on multiple media outlets including: ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fortune,
Glamour, The New York Times, People, and Time. She is a World Champion
Equestrian.
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Speaker Biographies
Heather Grady
Prior to joining The Rockefeller Foundation, Grady was the managing director
of Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative, founded by former Irish
President Mary Robinson. There, she managed strategy and operations, and helped
lead programs on employment, climate justice, corporate responsibility and
women’s leadership. Throughout her career Grady has managed development and
humanitarian programs with Oxfam Great Britain and other international organizations, and has lived and worked for over twenty years in a diverse range of settings,
including Viet Nam, China, Egypt, Sudan and the Gaza Strip.
She has written and taught on international development, human rights and
climate change, and served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. She is
a member of the Global Philanthropy Committee of the Council on Foundations.
She is conversant in Vietnamese and Chinese. Grady received a bachelor’s degree
from Smith College and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard
University.
Kate Gross
Founder and Chief Executive, Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative
Kate Gross is CEO of the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative (AGI). AGI works
side-by-side with national governments, to build their capability to implement the
policies that will lift people out of poverty, enabling them to build power stations
and roads, deliver healthcare, and improve the lives of subsistence farmers. AGI
currently operates in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Liberia.
Prior to leading AGI, Gross advised Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister
Gordon Brown as Private Secretary for Parliamentary and Home Affairs from 20042007, and has experience in a variety of UK government departments and the
European Commission. Gross is a Fellow of the African Leadership Network and
was selected as one of the 2011 “40 under 40” development leaders in the UK.
Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda
General Secretary, World YWCA
Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, a human rights lawyer, has been the World YWCA
general secretary since 2007. Her leadership of the World YWCA movement
extends across 108 countries with a reach of 25 million women and girls.
She provides leadership for the YWCA movement’s priorities in women’s
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inter-generational leadership, women’s rights and movement building with a
special focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights, HIV and AIDS, violence
against women, peace with justice, and economic empowerment.
She has over 10 years of experience with the United Nations, where she served as
regional director for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM),
now UN Women, and as a human rights officer with UNICEF in Liberia and
Zimbabwe. She is the current president of the NGO Committee on the Status of
Women, Geneva. Gumbonzvanda recently served as commissioner for the UN
Commission on Information and Accountability on Women and Children’s Health.
Gumbonzvanda has a master’s degree in private law with specialization in
constitutional property law from the University of South Africa and completed
postgraduate work on conflict resolution at Uppsala University, Sweden. She serves
on various boards of development organizations including Action Aid International,
CIVICUS and Save the Children UK. She is the founder and chairperson of Rozaria
Memorial Trust. She is an active member of women’s organizations including the
Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association.
Craig Hanson
Director, People and Ecosystems Program World Resources Institute
Craig Hanson is director of the People and Ecosystems Program of the Worlds
Resources Institute (WRI), which seeks to reverse the rapid degradation of ecosystems and assure their capacity to provide humans with needed goods and services.
He has helped launch a number of WRI projects including the Forest Legality
Alliance, Project POTICO and Southern Forests for the Future. In addition, he
developed and launched WRI’s Ecosystem Services Initiative. He is the lead author
of Southern Forests for the Future, the Corporate Ecosystem Service Review, the
Corporate Guide to Green Power Markets series, and the Tax Reform, Energy and
the Environment series (with The Brookings Institution).
Prior to becoming director, Craig managed the Green Power Market Development
Group-US and launched the Green Power Market Development Group-Europe.
Prior to joining WRI, he was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company
for five years in the United States and Europe.
Hanson earned an MSc in environmental change and management from Oxford
University, with a concentration in conservation biology and forestry. While at
Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he earned an MA in philosophy, politics and
economics with an emphasis on environmental economics. He has a BA from
Georgetown University.
Wendy Ramage Hawkins
In addition to 20-plus years managing education philanthropy for Intel, Hawkins
has developed and managed numerous global, national and local education
programs, including Intel Teach, a global teacher professional development initiative. She is responsible for the Intel Science Talent Search, the most prestigious
high school science competition in the US, and the Intel International Science &
Engineering Fair, the largest and most admired competition of its type in the world.
Prior to joining Intel, Hawkins managed residential education programs at Stanford
and was director of development and membership at the World Affairs Council of
Oregon. Hawkins is frequently sought out as a speaker, writer, advisor, and consultant in education, philanthropy, and corporate social responsibility.
Hawkins holds a degree in Psychology and German Studies from Stanford
University, where she graduated with distinction.
Steven M. Hilton
President and CEO, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Steven M. Hilton has worked in philanthropy for nearly 30 years. In 1983, he joined
the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation established by his grandfather, initially holding the
positions of program assistant and program associate. In 1989, he was named vice
president of programs and was elected to the board of directors. He was named
president in 1998, and in 2005, his responsibilities expanded to include CEO.
Hilton oversees the Foundation’s worldwide humanitarian work. He previously
served on the governing board of the Conrad N. Hilton Fund for Sisters. He also
served on the boards of the Archdiocesan Finance Council, the BEST Foundation
for a Drug-Free Tomorrow, Loyola Marymount University, Southern California
Grantmakers and the St. Joseph Center.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Hilton worked in hotel management and was
involved in aquaculture.
A graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Hilton also earned a
MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He has been honored by the
St. Joseph Center and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (Southern California
Chapter). Hilton was the inaugural recipient of the Yunus Social Innovation Medal
presented by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus.
Jenny Hodgson
Executive Director, Global Fund for Community Foundations
Jenny Hodgson is the executive director of the Global Fund for Community
Foundations (GFCF) based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has been working in
the field of philanthropy and development since 1992.
Wendy Ramage Hawkins is executive director of the Intel Foundation. The Intel
Foundation is active worldwide, awarding grants totaling approximately $40
million each year.
The GFCF is a grassroots grantmaker working to promote and support institutions
of community philanthropy around the world. Since it was established in 2006, the
GFCF has awarded $2.6 million in grants to 141 community foundations and other
local philanthropic institutions in 45 countries. Hodgson has led the organization
since 2007.
Focusing on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics),
increasing opportunities for girls, women, and under-represented minorities, and
supporting the volunteerism and philanthropic efforts of Intel’s employees in
education, their communities, and in response to disasters around the world.
Hodgson started her career as volunteer teacher with a British NGO in Kabale,
Uganda. She then moved to Moscow, working as a consultant for the Charles
Stewart Mott Foundation, and for Save the Children in Georgia and Russia. In 1998
she became co-director of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) Moscow office. In
Executive Director, Intel Foundation
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Speaker Biographies
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2000 Hodgson moved to Kenya, where she worked as a consultant to CAF, Allavida,
and the Ford Foundation’s Eastern Africa office. From 2004-2006, while based
in Singapore, she worked as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, the European
Foundation Centre and others.
Hodgson has a BA with honors in English literature from Emmanuel College,
Cambridge and a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins
School for International Studies.
Kara Hurst
Vice President, BSR
Kara Hurst plays a crucial role in BSR’s global expansion by overseeing the US East
Coast offices as well as BSR’s Conference and Partnership Development teams. A
skilled Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practitioner, Hurst’s areas of expertise
include corporate transparency, responsible supply chain management, management structures, CSR and public policy and industry collaboration.
Since joining BSR, Hurst has developed and led several industry practices, including
pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, media and entertainment, travel and tourism,
and information and communications technology. She also led BSR’s work on
social entrepreneurship and cofounded and facilitated several groundbreaking
industry initiatives, including the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition and the
Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative.
Prior to joining BSR, Hurst worked in California’s Silicon Valley as the executive
director of Open Voice, an East Palo Alto public-private venture that uses web-based
media to develop and empower communities. Hurst has also worked in politics, for
former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and the late US Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan.
Hurst holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California,
Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College of Columbia University. She
is the co-author of a recently published children’s book on pro bono service and
volunteering. In 2009, she was named an Aspen Institute Ideas Festival Fellow.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Founding Director, John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic
Engagement
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim is founding director of the John D. Gerhart Center
for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement, established in 2006 at the American
University in Cairo. She served for 14 years as regional director for West Asia
and North Africa for the Population Council and before that as a program officer
at the Ford Foundation regional office in Cairo. She holds an MA in sociology
from the American University of Beirut and PhD in sociology from Indiana
University. She has held visiting scholar residencies at the Center for the Study
of Philanthropy, The City University of New York; the Center for Contemporary
Arab Studies, Georgetown University; and the Center on Philanthropy, Indiana
University. Currently she serves on the board of WINGS, the Worldwide Initiatives
for Grantmaker Support and the Ibn Khaldun Center, Cairo.
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Speaker Biographies
Her book (with Dina Sherif) From Charity to Social Change: Trends in Arab
Philanthropy was published by AUC Press in 2008 and in Arabic in 2010. In 1999
she was inducted into the International Educators’ Hall of Fame. She received the
Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies
in 2003.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Founding Chairman, Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies
Saad Eddin Ibrahim is emeritus professor at American University in Cairo and
founding chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, Cairo,
Egypt and serves on numerous international boards. Ibrahim is one of the Arab
world’s most prominent political sociologists, who has published widely on Islam,
politics, democracy and civil society. He became the center of international attention in mid-2000 when he was arrested by the Mubarak regime and tried three
times on politically-motivated charges. He was convicted twice by state security courts for accepting foreign funds without government permission and for
publishing information that “tarnished Egypt’s image abroad.” Each time he was
sentenced to seven years of hard labor. In 2003, after 15 months in prison, Egypt’s
highest appeals court acquitted him of all charges.
Ibrahim has received numerous awards, including the Pagels Award, New York
Academy of Sciences; American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholar
Award; Sakharov Prize nomination from the European Parliament; International
PEN Writers in Distress Award; International Human Rights Award of the Lawyers
Committee on Human Rights; the Bette Bao Lord Prize for Writing in the Cause of
Freedom from Freedom House, and the Middle East Studies Association Academic
Freedom Award. After his acquittal he continued to write and speak out on behalf
of democracy and human rights despite legal harassment and exile from 2007 to
2011. When the Mubarak regime was forced to step down by an unprecedented
popular uprising, he returned to Egypt where he currently writes in the independent press and advises new political groups and young activists working to
establish a democratic civil state.
Laila Iskandar
Chairperson, CID Consulting
Laila Iskandar is the chairperson of CID Consulting, which was awarded the “Social
Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2006 at the World Economic Forum by the Schwab
Foundation.She has extensive experience in diverse fields, such as formal and non
formal education, international development and grass roots community mobilization. Her international assignments have included serving as jury to UNESCO’s
International Literacy Prize, acting as resource person from the Arab region to
UNESCO’s Literacy Decade (UNLD), and Education for Sustainable Development
(ESD). Iskandar was also the education advisor and policy advisor at the Girls
Improved Learning Outcomes (GILO) program, a USAID-Funded project.
In addition, Iskandar was consultant to the Minister of Environment on solid waste
management issues in Egypt. She has worked with the informal waste sector for
over 30 years and has designed, developed and implemented community-based
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
solid waste projects. She has liaised with various global networks of recycling organizations to survey, research and advocate for the informal waste sector in policy
analysis, national strategy and global aid programs.
Iskandar has studied economics and political science at Cairo University and Near
Eastern studies and international education development at the University of
California, Berkeley and Columbia University.
Mirza Jahani
CEO, Aga Khan Foundation U.S.A.
Mirza Jahani is CEO of Aga Khan Foundation U.S.A. (AKF USA). Since joining AKF
USA in November 2009, Jahani has focused on widening and deepening partnerships with US-based organizations, strengthening support to the Aga Khan
Development Network (AKDN) civil society development portfolio and promoting
impact investments for AKDN projects in Africa and Asia as a way to boost development resources and foster public- private partnerships.
Before that he served for 15 years as CEO of the Aga Khan Foundation in the
United Kingdom, East Africa and Tajikistan, helping to conceptualize, implement
and secure funding for programs in rural development, health, education, and civil
society, often in post-conflict environments. Jahani began his career in the early
1980s as an economist with the United Kingdom’s Department for International
Development (DFID). He served with DFID again from 2004 to 2009 as Senior
Governance Advisor in Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Central Asia, and the Democratic
Republic of Congo.
Jahani was born in Uganda and educated at London, Harvard and Cambridge
Universities, where he earned his doctorate in 2009. He and his wife Nazira have
two children, Rabia and Rumi.
Michael Jenkins
President, Forest Trends
Michael Jenkins is president of Forest Trends. From 1989-1999, he was the associate director for the Global Security and Sustainability Program of the MacArthur
Foundation. Jenkins’ responsibilities with the Program included all grant-making
in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as overarching program management.
In 1998, he was in a joint appointment as a Senior Forestry Advisor to the World
Bank. Before entering the MacArthur Foundation, he worked for three years as an
agroforester in Haiti with the USAID Agroforestry Outreach Program. Previous to
that, he worked with a Washington-based development organization, Appropriate
Technology International, as a technical advisor. In the late 1970s, Jenkins was
a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay working in agriculture, apiculture, and
forestry projects.
He has traveled and worked throughout Latin America, Asia and parts of Africa, and
speaks Spanish, French, Portuguese, Creole and Guaraní. He has contributed to a
number of books and articles, and with Island Press published The Business of
Sustainable Forestry: Strategies for an Industry in Transition. He holds a master’s
of forest science from Yale University.
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Speaker Biographies
Paula D. Johnson
Director, Center for Global Philanthropy at The Philanthropic Initiative
Paula Johnson is the director of the Center for Global Philanthropy at The
Philanthropic Initiative (TPI) and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Hauser Center
for Nonprofit Organizations.
She works with donors, foundations, and corporations to develop global giving
strategies and works with colleagues throughout the world to strengthen giving
within other countries. She provides leadership to New England International
Donors (NEID), an affinity group of New England donors who give and invest
outside of the United States. In her capacity as a Fellow at Harvard’s Hauser Center,
Paula leads research to develop better data, analysis and understanding around
global philanthropic giving.
From 2002-2007, Ms. Johnson was a research fellow with the Global Equity
Initiative (GEI) at Harvard University where she spearheaded its focus on global
philanthropy. She has helped to establish and strengthen independent foundations
in Asia, South America, and Africa and has worked on a number of initiatives to
build philanthropic capacity around the globe. She has authored several seminal
studies on global philanthropy exploring global institutional philanthropy, diaspora giving, the promotion of philanthropy, and the global role of community
foundations.
Johnson is a founding trustee of The Kelsey Trust, a private foundation that focuses
on issues of education, children-at-risk, and the environment. She received an A.B.
from Brown University and a M.Sc. with distinction from the London School of
Economics.
Sigrid Kaag
Assistant Secretary-General and Assistant Administrator, Bureau for
External Relations and Advocacy, UNDP
Sigrid Kaag is heading UNDP’s Bureau for External Relations and Advocacy (BERA)
as assistant secretary general and assistant administrator since August 1, 2010. In
this function, Kaag is advising UNDP’s Administrator in the direction and strategic
leadership of the organization as part of the senior management team. She oversees
UNDP’s strategic external engagement, organization-wide communication and
advocacy as well as resource mobilization. She manages a network of UNDP representative offices in Asia, Europe and North America.
Kaag was regional director for Middle East and North Africa for UNICEF from
December 2007 to August 2010. Prior, she served as chief of staff in the Office of
the UNICEF Executive Director, from April 2006 until December 2007. Kaag was
senior UN adviser to the United Nations/World Bank Joint Assessment Mission for
Sudan in the office of the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General
in Khartoum during the period 2004-2005, when she moved to New York to join
UNICEF. Prior she has worked at the International Organization for Migration (IOM)
from 1998-2004 in Geneva, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees (UNRWA) in the Middle East, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well
as for Shell International.
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Kaag, a national of the Netherlands, obtained her first degree in Middle East studies
at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in 1985, followed by a master’s in philosophy in international relations from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, in 1987.
She received a second master’s degree in politics and economics of the Middle East
from University of Exeter in 1988.
Emily Fintel Kaiser
Director, Global Relations Fundación AVINA
Emily Fintel Kaiser currently serves as the director of Global Relations of
Fundación AVINA. She has been with AVINA since 2002 in various institutional roles
and has served as a member of its executive team since 2006.
AVINA identifies opportunities for systemic change in Latin America, linking and
strengthening the individuals and institutions in the region that can drive change
toward a more sustainable future. The foundation brokers alliances around shared
action agendas that can contribute to a regionally relevant scale of impact and has
invested more than $450 million partners’ initiatives since 1994. Fintel Kaiser leads
AVINA’s Global Relations strategy, which connects allies and strategies in the field
with the work of other international organizations.
Kaiser is also the Executive Director of AVINA Americas, a sister organization of
Fundación AVINA based in Washington, DC. AVINA Americas serves as a vital bridge
with leading organizations in North America, building mutually beneficial partnerships to accelerate shared change agendas in Latin America.
Kaiser lived in Latin America for ten years and her professional background also
includes positions at the Inter-American Dialogue, Inter-American Foundation and
INCAE Business School in Costa Rica. Fintel Kaiser has a master’s in International
Relations from the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International
Studies (SAIS). She is also an honors graduate of Cornell University, where she
obtained her bachelor’s of science.
Julie T. Katzman
Executive Vice President and COO, Inter-American Development Bank
Julie T. Katzman is the executive vice president and COO of the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB). After over 15 years working as an investment banker,
primarily in private equity, Katzman joined the IDB Group in 2009 as general
manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF). The MIF is the largest provider
of development oriented grant financing in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Approximately 18 months later, Katzman was appointed executive vice president
of the IDB.
Under Katzman’s leadership, the MIF refined its strategic approach and developed
an evaluation framework to catalyze change by focusing its grant resources strategically in three areas - Access to Finance, Basic Services and Markets and Capabilities.
Katzman is currently responsible for managing the overall operations of the
IDB. She is particularly focused on furthering the IDB’s emphasis on results and
improving access and availability of these results through innovative tools as a way
to bring the Bank’s achievements to a larger audience and strengthen the case for
development.
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Speaker Biographies
Katzman has served on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards. Currently, she
serves on the Board of Advisors of Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, and the Board
of Directors of the International Center for Research on Women. She graduated
summa cum laude from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University
and earned her master’s in management with distinction from the Kellogg School
at Northwestern University.
Kim Keller
Executive Director, David & Anita Keller Family Foundation
Kim Keller is executive director of the David & Anita Keller Family Foundation, a
Bay Area-based family foundation committed to human rights as the cornerstone
to peace and justice and the backbone to social, economic and political development. The Keller Family Foundation supports organizations that develop, protect or
promote human rights laws and norms wherever needed and whenever possible.
Keller is also a member of The Philanthropy Workshop West and currently serves on
the boards of Mother Jones (Foundation for National Progress) and Accountability
Counsel.
Prior to taking on her role at the Keller Family Foundation, Keller worked in
academic research and policy analysis for Bay Area nonprofits including the
Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and
the Palo Alto Institute for Research and Evaluation, the nonprofit branch of the
Department for Veterans’ Affairs’ Palo Alto Health Care System.
Keller is a graduate of Wellesley College and the London School of Economics and
Political Science where she earned a MS in health, population and society. She has
two cats, loves her succulent garden and enjoys running in Golden Gate Park.
Deepali Khanna
Director, Youth Learning The MasterCard Foundation
Deepali Khanna is the director of youth learning at The MasterCard Foundation.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Khanna was the Eastern and Southern Africa
regional director for Plan International. As a member of the senior management
team at Plan, Khanna was responsible for operations in 12 countries and managed
an annual budget of $135 million for the well-being of children and youth. Khanna
was nominated to Plan International’s Supervisory Board and was a member of the
International Management Team and Global Steering Committee. She has vast experience working with children and youth and has represented Plan in various global
forums at the UN and the World Bank.
Previously, Khanna held a number of positions within the international development
sector with assignments in India, Kenya, Vietnam, and South Africa. Her operational experience has been directly associated with partnership programs in Nepal,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Albania, Egypt, Northern & Southern Sudan, Darfur,
Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and
Zambia.
Khanna is a recipient of the prestigious Medal of Friendship, which was awarded
to her in 2003 by the President of Vietnam for her exemplary work in Hanoi. She
received a master’s of development studies from The Delhi School of Social Work at
Delhi University, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Miranda College in Delhi,
India.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Marcos Kisil
President, Instituto para o Desenvolvimento do Investimento Social
Marcos Kisil is currently president of the Instituto para o Instituto para o
Desenvolvimento do Investimento Social (IDIS), a leading institution in promoting
philanthropy in Latin America and a member of the Charity Aid Foundation
International Network. In addition, he is a professor at the University of São Paulo’s
School of Public Health. As a an expert in private social investment in Latin America,
he serves as board member of several organizations including the Brazilian branch
of the BirdLife International and Resource Alliance. He is a founding member of
Worldwide Initiative in Grantmaking Support (WINGS).
Prior to returning to Brazil, he served as the director for Latin America and the
Caribbean at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Michigan for over 15 years.
Kisil has received a medical degree from the University of São Paulo and a PhD in
Public Administration from George Washington University School of Government
and Business Administration.
other stakeholders, through a “click-and mortar” sustainable business model. eFarm
has been featured in several Indian main stream print and broadcast media and was
showcased in the case study on Creating Shared Value in India by FSG.
Krishnan earned her MBA in finance and a bachelor’s in taxation and had worked
for over eight years in leading banking and insurance firms in sales and marketing
roles. Krishnan and her spouse, Venkat Subramanian, both quit their corporate
careers to start eFarm in 2008. As ‘couple-preneurs’, they balance work and family
by bringing in their complementary skills and interests. Krishnan heads business development, finance and HR, and Subramanian manages technology and
operations.
Krishnan loves to travel and connect with people. She is often found backpacking
across remote villages or buzzing bazaars — bonding with her grass root customers.
She actively voices the agri crisis in various public forums, such as at TiE, NASSCOM,
CII, TEDx, Action For India and Jagriti yatra, stressing the need for a collaborative
effort across multiple players.
He is a senior fellow of Synergos Institute and a member of the editorial board of
the Alliance Magazine.
Anthony Lake
Mark Kramer
Anthony Lake is the sixth executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund
(UNICEF). Over a career spanning 45 years of public service, Lake has worked
at the most senior levels of the US government, including his tenure as national
security adviser (1993-1997). He also served as the US President’s special envoy in
Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Haiti. Lake’s experience in international development began
in the 1970s, as director of International Voluntary Services, one of the world’s
oldest peace organizations. He has also served on the Board of Directors of Save
the Children and the Overseas Development Corporation.
Co-founder and Managing Director, FSG
Mark Kramer is the co-founder and managing director of FSG and the author of
influential publications on shared value, corporate social responsibility (CSR), catalytic philanthropy, strategic evaluation, impact investing and adaptive leadership.
Kramer oversees FSG’s consulting practice and helps drive the vision and growth
of the firm. He has led consulting engagements across all of FSG’s impact areas,
with particular emphasis on philanthropic strategy for private and community
foundations, CSR, evaluation, and impact investing. He also leads the research on
many of FSG’s publications and publishes regularly in Harvard Business Review,
Stanford Social Innovation Review, and is the co-author of the forthcoming book,
Do More Than Give (March 2011).
He is a frequent speaker around the world on topics in catalytic philanthropy,
collective impact, creating shared value for corporations, new approaches to
evaluation and shared measurement, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and
adaptive leadership.
Before co-founding FSG, Kramer served for 12 years as president of Kramer Capital
Management, a venture capital firm, and before that as an associate at the law firm
of Ropes & Gray in Boston, and as a law clerk to Judge Alvin B. Rubin, Fifth Circuit,
US Court of Appeals.
After earning his BA and MBA at Brandeis University and University of Pennsylvania,
respectively, he went on to achieve his JD at the University of Pennsylvania Law
School.
Srivalli Krishnan
Founder and CEO, eFarm
Srivalli Krishnan is the founder and CEO of eFarm, a for-profit social enterprise
based in Chennai, India which focuses on the agricultural supply chain and forward
marketing issues faced by farmers. eFarm is a unique combination of simple business practices and ICT tools, which enable a farmer to connect efficiently with all
xlviii
Speaker Biographies
Executive Director, UNICEF
Over the past ten years, Lake has been an International Adviser to the International
Committee of the Red Cross, and Chair of the Marshall Legacy Institute. From 1998
to 2007 he served on the Board of the US Fund for UNICEF, with a term as chair
from 2004 to 2007, after which he was appointed a permanent honorary member.
Nicholai Lidow
Fellow, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation
Nicholai Lidow is a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California Institute
on Global Conflict and Cooperation. His current research focuses on state-building
and the domestic food economy in Mogadishu, Somalia. His projects leverage
cutting-edge technology, including the use of satellite imagery and mobile phones,
to collect representative data in insecure environments. Lidow has also conducted
extensive fieldwork research in Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sri
Lanka. In 2006, Lidow teamed up with filmmaker Britton Caillouette to produce the
award-winning documentary “Sliding Liberia.”
Lidow received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2011. His
dissertation, “Violent Order: Rebel Organization and Liberia’s Civil War,” explains
variation in rebel abusiveness and group factionalization by focusing on the principal agent relationships that exist between international financiers, rebel leaders,
and their top commanders. He received a BA with honors in political science with
a minor in physics from Stanford University.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Laurence Lien
All these topics — from immigration to parenting in a multicultural family — are part
of Tell Me More, the one-hour daily NPR news and talk show that made its national
premiere on April 30, 2007, on public radio stations around the country.
Laurence Lien is a champion of the nonprofit sector in Singapore. He
is the chairman of the Lien Foundation and CEO of the National Volunteer &
Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) and the Community Foundation of Singapore. He is
the president of the Centre for Non-Profit Leadership and the deputy chairman
of the Caritas Singapore Community Council. Lien is currently also a nominated
Member of Parliament and advocates for the social sector and civil society.
Martin, who came to NPR in January 2006 to develop the program, has spent
more than 25 years as a journalist — first in print with major newspapers and then
in television. Martin joined NPR from ABC News, where she worked since 1992.
Before joining ABC, Martin covered state and local politics for the Washington
Post and national politics and policy at the Wall Street Journal, where she was
White House correspondent. She has also been a regular panelist on the PBS series
Washington Week and a contributor to NOW with Bill Moyers.
Member of Parliament, Singapore
Chairman, Lien Foundation
Under his leadership, NVPC has become an important enabler and capacity builder
in the nonprofit sector in Singapore. The Lien Foundation itself has become a
leading foundation that is forward-thinking and innovative in its approach. The
foundation has taken a radical approach towards tackling challenging social
concerns, such as end-of-life issues and water and sanitation problems in Asia.
Prior to his work in the nonprofit sector, Lien served in the Singapore
Administrative Service, which forms the top echelon of public service leaders in
Singapore. Lien holds degrees from Oxford University, the National University of
Singapore, and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. In 2010, Lien
was awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship.
Elizabeth Littlefield
President and CEO, Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Elizabeth Littlefield was appointed by President Obama as the tenth president
and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). From 2000 until
2010, Littlefield was CEO of Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGA), a policy
and research center dedicated to advancing access to financial services for the
world’s poor. During that time, Littlefield also served as the World Bank’s director of
Financial and Private Sector.
Prior to joining CGAP, Littlefield was J.P. Morgan’s managing director in charge
of capital markets and financing in emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa. She
has also served as debt trader in those regions, as well as started J.P. Morgan’s Less
Developed Country (LDC) debt trading department in London.
Littlefield taught financial sector development as an adjunct professor in the
masters program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International
Studies. She has served on the Board and Executive Committee of Women’s
World Banking, The MasterCard Foundation and Calvert Foundation, among others.
She was the founder of the Emerging Markets Charity in the UK. Littlefield also
provided consultancy to several microfinance institutions in West and Central Africa.
Littlefield is a graduate of Brown University and also attended Ecole Nationale de
Sciences Politiques in Paris.
Michel Martin
Host, Tell Me More NPR
Michel Martin is curious about many things. “I wonder what it’s like to leave everything and everyone you know for the promise of a better life, to run for President, to
be a professional athlete, to parent children of a different race,” she notes. “I am fascinated by people who live lives different from my own. And at the same time, I feel
connected to all of these lives being a journalist, a woman of color, a wife and mother.”
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Speaker Biographies
A native of Brooklyn, NY, Martin graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College at
Harvard University in 1980 and has done graduate work at Wesley Theological
Seminary in Washington, DC.
Cindy Hensley McCain
Business Owner and Humanitarian
Cindy Hensley McCain has dedicated her life to improving the lives of those less
fortunate both in the United States and around the world. As a member of the
Board of Trustees for the HALO Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to land
mine removal and weapons destruction in war-torn countries, McCain is dedicated
to the worldwide removal of land mines. She also served on the Board of Directors
for Operation Smile, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to repair cleft lips,
cleft palates and other facial deformities for children around the world. McCain
recently joined the Board of Directors for the Eastern Congo Initiative. She has
travelled to the region four times in the last two years and is committed to raising
awareness on the travesties facing women and children in the Congo.
She holds an undergraduate degree in education and a master’s in special education from the University of Southern California (USC) and is a member of the USC
Rossier School of Education Board of Councilors.
McCain is the chairman of her family’s business, Hensley & Company, which is one
of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributors in the nation. She resides in Phoenix
with her husband, US Senator John McCain.Together, they have four children.
Patricia Mechael
Executive Director, mHealth Alliance
Patricia Mechael is the executive director of the mHealth Alliance, which is hosted
by the United Nations Foundation, and faculty at the School of International
and Public Affairs and Earth Institute, Columbia University. She has been actively
involved in the field of International Health for 15 years with field experience in
over 30 countries primarily in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
For over 10 years, Mechael has published and spoken extensively on the strategic
role of mobile telephony and relevant software applications within an ecosystem
of eHealth, public health, and telecommunications actors in low and middle
income countries as well as the increasing need to engage women and girls more
effectively in designing and implementing the solutions aimed at improving their
health and quality of life.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Mechael serves as an Advisory Committee member for the Design with the Critical
Mass Initiative and the Malaria Consortium. She has recently been awarded the
Johns Hopkins University, Knowledge for the World Award. This award honors
alumni who exemplify the Johns Hopkins tradition of excellence and have brought
credit to the University and their profession in the international arena through
their professional achievements or humanitarian service. Prior to joining the
mHealth Alliance, she was director of Strategic Application of Mobile Technology
for Public Health and Development at the Center for Global Health and Economic
Development at the Earth Institute.
She has a master’s in international health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health and Hygiene (1998) and a PhD in public health and policy from the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2006), where she specifically examined
the role of mobile phones in relation to health in Egypt.
Simon Merchant
CEO, Jacana Venture Partnership
Simon Merchant is co-founder and CEO of Jacana Venture Partnership, a private
equity business that aims to create new jobs in Africa by investing in the growth
of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Merchant is an entrepreneur with a
background in finance, IT and venture capital. His previous roles include heading
up Morgan Stanley’s technology mergers and acquisitions business for Europe and
co-founding and leading the development of a market leading software business
that was sold to a US public company in 2005.
Jacana is a leading African SME investment group that blends private equity experience from the developed world with high quality local teams in key markets. The
business was founded in 2008 and some of Jacana’s teams have been operating in
Africa since 1999. The group has 18 investment professionals in three offices (Accra,
Nairobi and London) and its assets under management total $45 million for investment in SMEs in six African countries. So far, Jacana’s teams have invested nearly
$20 million in 19 portfolio companies employing over 500 people.
Judy M. Miller
Vice President and Director, Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize
Judy M. Miller oversees all aspects of the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, from
the nomination and evaluation process to the final selection of recipients by an
independent international panel of jurors. From 1998 to 2009, she led the planning
and execution of an annual humanitarian symposium, held in Geneva, New York,
and Washington, D.C., which also included a ceremony honoring the new Prize
recipient. Beginning in 2010, the Prize has been presented at a Conference hosted
by the Global Philanthropy Forum.
Miller also supervises the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s communications efforts.
Over a communications and marketing career spanning four decades, Miller has
led campaigns in advertising, public relations, politics, and government affairs for
corporations, foundations and government agencies. In 1975, she became the first
woman executive in a major Japanese corporation (Suntory) and in 1981, was
the first woman retained to work openly with men within the Kingdom of Saudi
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Arabia (Ministry of Information) and later represented the King Faisal Foundation
International Prizes presented annually in Riyadh. Miller served eight years as
commissioner of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and has received
several awards for her work to improve the lives of women and girls.
Neeraj Mistry
Managing Director, Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases Sabin
Vaccine Institute
Neeraj Mistry joined the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases as
Managing Director in July 2010. He focuses on advocacy and resource mobilization efforts, creatively bringing like-minded groups and individuals together for the
common purpose of controlling and eliminating neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).
A South African public health physician, Mistry was a founding member and former
vice president of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria (GBC). He brings extensive experience in global health policy and programming, having worked in developing and developed countries, and in the public and
private sectors in clinical practice, health policy and social development.
Following the completion of his medical training at the University of the
Witwatersrand Medical School in Johannesburg, Mistry focused on HIV/AIDS,
occupational health, family practice and sexual and reproductive health. Mistry
also worked at the National Health Service (NHS) in London and with Merck &
Co. Inc. dealing with public affairs for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He holds
a master’s degree in health policy and economics from the London School of
Economics and Political Science.
Aleph Molinari
President, Fundación Proacceso
Aleph Molinari is the president of the Fundación Proacceso, a nonprofit that uses
the educational benefits of technology to catalyze the social and economic development of marginalized communities in Mexico.
In 2009 the Fundación Proacceso launched its main project, the Red de
Innovación y Aprendizaje (RIA), or the Learning and Innovation Network, a group
of centers that connect underserved populations to quality education and technology. The RIA aims to bridge Mexico’s digital divide and provide its users with
the tools they need to participate in their communities and the world at large. In
just under three years the RIA has expanded to 70 centers in 34 municipalities
with more than 230,000 registered users and more than 57,000 course graduates.
The RIA has been presented at the OECD Annual Forums 2010 and 2011, the World
Bank CSO meetings, TED Talks, Harvard University and the World Technology Forum.
Molinari is part of New Ventures, the World Technology Network and the World
Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community. He was recently presented with the
2012 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award.
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Molinari studied economics and critical Ttheory at the University of British
Columbia in Canada. In 2006 he directed a documentary film on the trash cycle
and the lives of trash pickers in Mexico City. The time that Molinari spent in some
of Mexico´s most impoverished communities inspired him to start the Fundación
Proacceso in order to foster social change through technology.
Christine M. Morse
CEO, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation
Christine M. Morse has lead the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation since its creation
upon the death of Ms. Cargill in 2006. The Foundation is one of three grantmaking
organizations formed by Ms. Cargill, a generous and humble woman; the others
are Anne Ray Charitable Trust and Akaloa Resource Foundation (collectively the
Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies). Guided by her deep personal understanding
of Ms. Cargill’s philanthropic philosophy, Morse leads the Foundation in developing organization strategies, establishing funding priorities and evaluating the
effectiveness of programs. Morse brings thirty years of experience in business to
the Philanthropies, with particular expertise in investment strategy and management. She is a Certified Financial Planner and holds a BA degree in accounting from
Gustavus Adolphus College, where she has served on the Business Advisory Council
and the Board of Trustees. As a visiting Instructor at the college, she taught courses
in accounting, finance, economics and management.
Dominic Muren
Founder and Principal, The Humblefactory
Dominic Muren is founder and principal of The Humblefactory, a design laboratory in Seattle, Washington which develops tools and technologies that
increase the capabilities of Makers around the world. Since his early career
founding the popular industrial design blog IDFuel.com, and writing for
Treehugger.com — dubbed “The Green CNN” — Muren has been exploring the
opportunities and consequences of how we make the objects we need. His most
recent book Green’s Not Black & White: The balanced guide to making ecodecisions has been reprinted in six languages. Since 2006, he has been writing
about a new, open-hardware-based, human-scaled ethos for manufacturing at
Humblefacture.com. In 2010, he was awarded a TED Global fellowship for his work
on Humblefacture, and named PopTech Social Innovation Fellow in 2011. His most
recent project, Alchematter.org, is an online platform that hosts global conversations about what can be made and how to make it, in order to accelerate the
development of open, distributed, community embedded manufacturing. In addition to his work at The Humblefactory, Muren lectures in industrial design at the
University of Washington.
Ashwin Naik
Founder and CEO, Vaatsalya Healthcare
Ashwin Naik is the founder and CEO of Vaatsalya Healthcare, an award winning
social enterprise, focused on building a network of hospitals in Tier II and Tier III
towns in India. While 70% of India’s population lives in semi-urban and rural areas,
the majority of the healthcare facilities are in urban areas and not accessible to
these families. Vaatsalya is bridging this gap by building primary and secondary care
hospitals in semi-urban and rural areas.
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Recently, AllWorld Network ranked Vaatsalya fifth in its list of 25 fast growing
companies in India. It was also named one of five hot startups to watch in India
by Forbes Magazine in 2011. Vaatsalya has been recognized as the winner of
the BiD Challenge India in 2007 for the best business in development in India,
LRAMP Award for Innovation in 2008, Sankalp Award for Social Enterprise in
2009 and Frost & Sullivan Healthcare Excellence Award in 2010 for its innovative
business model.
Naik has been named World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2012, Asia21
Young Leader in 2011, Senior Ashoka Fellow in 2010, finalist for the India Social
Entrepreneur of the Year Award by Schwab Foundation in 2010 and a TED India
fellow in 2009. In 2008, One World USA nominated him as one of the finalists for
Person of the Year, for his contribution in bringing affordable healthcare services to
underserved populations.
Naik has a medical degree from Karnatak Medical College, Hubli and a MS from
University of Houston,Texas.
Daniela Nascimento Fainberg
Founder, Instituto Geração
Daniela Nascimento Fainberg is the founder of Instituto Geração. In 2005, she
created the New Generation Program, a social initiative in Brazil that engages
and motivates privileged youth to pursue philanthropy and social engagement.
Driven by the success generated from the first group of young leaders, Nascimento
Fainberg founded Instituto Geração, the first Brazilian nonprofit organization that
encourages and supports the new generation of privileged individuals to re-think
their roles and practices towards social change.
Nascimento Fainberg has 14 years of experience promoting philanthropy and
social investment. Her career started at the São Paulo office of the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, where she monitored the Latin American projects. Later, she moved to
the Institute for the Development of Social Investment (IDIS) where she created
and managed their Family Philanthropy Program. She is on the Advisory Board
of Akatu Institute for conscious consumption and is also a fellow for Americas
Business Council Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides a platform for
Latin American emerging leaders.
Nascimento Fainberg received her degree in social sciences from the University
of São Paulo. She is a frequent speaker at Brazilian and international forums on the
role of the next generation in social change.
Randy Newcomb
President and CEO, Humanity United
Randy Newcomb is president and CEO of Humanity United, a leading private donor
in the field of international human rights. Humanity United seeks to build peace
and advance human freedom in the corners of the globe where these ideals are
challenged most. Newcomb oversees Humanity United’s international grant-making
portfolio, as well as its direct advocacy and policy activities, and leads the organization’s long-term strategy. He speaks and writes frequently on international human
rights issues and has appeared as an expert commentator for such media outlets as
CNN, ABC News, and National Public Radio.
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Previously, Newcomb was vice president of Omidyar Network, a philanthropic
investment firm, co-founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his spouse, Pam
Omidyar. Prior to Omidyar Network, Newcomb led Golden Gate Community Inc.
for 14 years, a community development agency based in San Francisco.
Newcomb holds a doctoral degree from the University of San Francisco and
master’s degrees in development economics and cross-cultural studies from
the University of Bath, England. He has been a fellow of the Center for Social
Innovation at the Stanford University and an international development fellow of
the University of Bath, England.
Jacqueline Novogratz
Founder and CEO, Acumen Fund
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global
venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of
poverty. Acumen Fund aims to create a world beyond poverty by investing in social
enterprises, emerging leaders and breakthrough ideas. Under Novogratz’s leadership, Acumen Fund has invested more than $72 million in 65 companies in South
Asia and Africa, all focused on delivering affordable healthcare, water, housing
and energy to the poor. These companies have created and supported more than
55,000 jobs, leveraged an additional $200 million, and brought basic services to
tens of millions.
Prior to Acumen Fund, Novogratz founded and directed The Philanthropy
Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership programs at the Rockefeller
Foundation. She also founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda.
Novogratz currently sits on various boards, including Harvard Business School
Social Enterprise Initiative, IDEO.org and the Aspen Institute. She is a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum Global Agenda
Council for Social Innovation, and the Department of State’s Foreign Affairs
Policy Board.
Novogratz has been featured in Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Her
best-selling memoir The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor
in an Interconnected World chronicles her quest to understand poverty and challenges readers to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink their engagement with
the world.
She has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in economics and international relations
from the University of Virginia. She has received honorary doctorates from the
University of Notre Dame and Wofford College, and the Freedom From Want Award
from the Roosevelt Institute in 2011.
Dele Olojede
CEO and Founder, NEXT
Dele Olojede is the publisher of NEXT, NextOnSunday and 234NEXT.com, which
provide news and informed opinion primarily for a Nigerian audience to further
the common good. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former foreign editor at
New York Newsday, he is chairman of the Global Network Initiative International
Advisory Council and a member of the governing board of the Aspen Institute’s
Africa Leadership Initiative. In 2010, the Global Forum for Ethics in Business
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honored him as an exemplar of ethical business leadership and Fast Company
named him one of the 100 Most Creative People. Most recently, Olojede was
awarded the John P. McNulty Prize, in recognition of his groundbreaking work to
deliver unbiased information to the Nigerian public, demand government transparency, and advance journalistic standards in the country.
A frequent public speaker on the good society, Olojede has reporting experience
from over 50 countries, as Bureau Chief for New York Newsday in Johannesburg,
in Beijing, and at the United Nations. He was educated at the University of Lagos
and Columbia University in New York, though he claims that all he ever needed to
know he learned at Modakeke high school. He persists at golf despite very little
hope of ever getting very good at it.
Tracy Palandjian
CEO, Social Finance, Inc.
Tracy Palandjian is passionate about finding ways to mobilize investment capital
to drive social change. Palandjian co-founded Social Finance, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to connecting the nonprofit sector with the capital markets by structuring
and managing innovative investment instruments which generate both a beneficial social impact and a financial return. The Social Impact Bond, which is core to
Social Finance’s current work, has become recognized for its potential in providing
financing solutions to some of the most persistent social challenges in the US
and abroad.
Prior to Social Finance, Palandjian worked at McKinsey & Co. and Wellington
Management Co., and was a managing director at The Parthenon Group, a global
strategy consulting firm, where she established and led the Nonprofit Practice. She
is a co-author of Investing for Impact: Case Studies Across Asset Classes. She is
the chair of the Board of Directors of Facing History and Ourselves, and serves on
the boards of the Robert F. Kennedy Center and Agassi Graf Holdings. She is also
a member of the Investment Committee of Milton Academy. Palandjian graduated
magna cum laude from Harvard College and holds an MBA with high distinction
from Harvard Business School where she was a Baker Scholar.
Tom Porteous
Deputy Program Director, Human Rights Watch
Tom Porteous is the deputy program director at Human Rights Watch and is based
in Washington DC. He joined Human Rights Watch in 2006 as the London director
responsible for communications and advocacy in the United Kingdom.
Porteous has a background in journalism, diplomacy, and UN peacekeeping. In
the 1980s and early 1990s he was a freelance correspondent for the Guardian
newspaper, the BBC, and other media, first in Cairo and later in Berlin, Algeria, and
Morocco. He worked in UN peacekeeping operations in Somalia and Liberia. He
also served as conflict management adviser for Africa in the UK’s Foreign Office
from 2001 to 2003.
Porteous studied classics at Oxford University.
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Amita Puri
Speaker Biographies
Regan E. Ralph
CEO, Charities Aid Foundation India
Executive Director, Fund for Global Human Rights
Amita Puri is CEO of Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) India, a grantmaking organization with a mission to promote effective giving and increase the flow of resources
from individuals and organizations to the nonprofit sector in India. CAF develops,
implements and manages projects with a network of credible NGOs, providing
support and resources towards improving their effectiveness and enabling them to
set up foundations. Last year CAF supported 164 organizations across 17 states in
India. In the last two and a half years, funds raised by CAF have increased by over
300%. She has been with CAF India since April 2009.
Regan E. Ralph is the founding executive director of the Fund for Global Human
Rights, which supports frontline human rights activists in seventeen countries
across the globe. Prior to launching the Fund, Ralph was vice president for Health
and Reproductive Rights at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C.
where she led advocacy, policy, and educational strategies to promote the quality
and availability of health care for American women. From 1992-2001, Ralph helped
build and ultimately directed the Women’s Rights division of Human Rights Watch,
where she developed campaigns to ensure the prosecution of sexual violence
in conflict as a war crime, to secure recognition of gender-based persecution as
grounds for asylum, and to promote women’s rights in countries including Russia,
Egypt,Turkey, South Africa, Pakistan, and Mexico.
Puri has worked both for the private and nonprofit sector. After completing her
master’s degree in business management, she joined Standard Chartered Bank
where she worked for eight years across retail and corporate banking functions.
She also has worked for CRY, India’s leading child rights organization first as head
of global operations and then as general manager, resource mobilization. Over the
span on nine years, she set up CRY’s UK operations and introduced new channels
of fundraising.
Puri is a frequent resource person for the South Asia Fund Raising Group (SAFRG)
and Resource Alliance. She is also an India Advisory Member of the Asia Venture
Philanthropy Network.
Ralph is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, and studied international law at the London School of Economics and Arabic at the American
University in Cairo. She serves on the boards of EG Justice and WITNESS, the
advisory council of the Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program at
Georgetown University Law Center, the advisory committee of The Council for
Global Equality, and the global practitioner council at Stanford University’s Program
on Social Entrepreneurship.
Luther M. Ragin, Jr.
Jeff Richardson
CEO, Global Impact Investing Network
Vice President, Global Health Access, Abbott Fund
Luther M. Ragin, Jr. is the CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a
nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact
investing. The GIIN builds critical infrastructure and supports activities, education, and research that help accelerate the development of more robust impact
investing industry.
Jeff Richardson, vice president of Abbott Fund, oversees its Global Health Access
program primarily in the developing world. Abbott Fund is the philanthropic arm
of the global health care company Abbott.
Prior to joining the GIIN, Ragin served as vice president for Investments at F.B.
Heron Foundation from 1999 to 2011. He oversaw the Foundation’s endowment,
building a portfolio of more than $260 million. Prior to joining the Foundation
in 1999, Ragin was the chief financial officer of the National Community Capital
Association, a trade association of community development financial institutions
that provide access to capital in low-income communities. Other significant experience includes eight years as chief financial officer of Earl G. Graves, Ltd., and seven
years with Chase Manhattan Bank.
Ragin holds a BA and MPP from Harvard, and is a graduate of Columbia University’s
Executive Program in Business Administration. He is a member of the board
of directors of Social Finance, Inc., ShoreBank Corporation, and the Threshold
Group. He is a William Henry Bloomberg lecturer in Public Management at the
Harvard Kennedy School and a senior research fellow at the Hauser Center for
Nonprofit Organizations.
Abbott Fund’s Global Health Access program focuses in the areas of HIV/AIDS,
maternal and child health, nutrition, non-communicable and neglected
tropical diseases.
Richardson previously served as a managing director in Burson-Marsteller’s
US healthcare practice. Prior to joining Burson-Marsteller, he was the executive director of the GMHC, the largest US AIDS service organization. He served
under Governor Evan Bayh as Secretary of the Indiana Family and Social Services
Administration and Commissioner of the Indiana Department of Human Services.
Richardson has been an adjunct professor at Indiana University and the City
University of New York and currently teaches as a guest lecturer at Northwestern
University on global health issues. He started his professional career at Eli Lilly
& Company.
He received all three of his degrees — law, master’s in public administration and
bachelor’s — from Indiana University.
Peter Robertson
Chairman of the Board of Trustees, World Affairs Council of
Northern California
Peter Robertson was vice chairman of the Board of Directors for Chevron
Corporation, one of the world’s largest energy companies, for seven years until
April 1, 2009.
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He joined Chevron in 1973 and over his 36 year career he had a wide variety
of responsibilities, including: the direction of Chevron’s worldwide exploration and production and global gas businesses, corporate strategic planning and
corporate policy, and government and public affairs. He is a senior independent
advisor at Deloitte LLP, a non-executive director of Jacobs Engineering Group and
Universal Pegasus International, and an advisory director of Campbell-Lutyens. He
is co-chairman of the US Saudi Arabian Business Council, chairman of the World
Affairs Council of Northern California and a member of the International House
Board at Berkeley. He is a past chairman of the US Energy Association.
Before joining the Bank, Ros was the global manager for Markets and Sustainable
Enterprise at the World Resources Institute (WRI); he directed the Sustainable
Enterprise Program and also participated as a member of the Executive
Management Team. Ros also led WRI’s Sustainable Growth in Emerging Economies
team, which engages the private sector in key economies such as Brazil, China,
Mexico, Indonesia and India. He served as an advisor to the Dupont Global VicePresident for Emerging Markets Growth & Latin America Presidency. In this capacity,
he provided strategic advice on how to meet the needs of low-income markets in
Latin America.
A native of Edinburgh, Scotland, he holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Edinburgh University and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania,
Wharton School, where he was a Thouron Scholar.
Prior to working at WRI, Ros was the director for the National Environmental Fund
at the Ministry of Environment in Brazil, where he funded more than 100 projects,
including those with local communities and indigenous people in the Amazon
region. He worked as a task manager for the World Bank, managing projects in
Brazil for the Global Environmental Facility.
Jean Rogers
Executive Director and Founder, Sustainability Accounting Standards
Board
Jean Rogers is the executive director and founder of the Sustainability Accounting
Standards Board (SASB). The mission of SASB is to establish and maintain industrytailored key performance indicators that foster integrated reporting on material
sustainability issues by publicly listed companies and provide decision-useful information to investors and the public.
Rogers has over 20 years of experience working with global clients to integrate
sustainability into strategy and operations in order to reduce risk and improve
performance across the triple bottom line. For the past 10 years, she was a principal at Arup, a global consultancy focused on sustainable development. She
worked with leading clients in the utilities, infrastructure, manufacturing, healthcare and real estate sectors in the US, Europe, and Asia. Internally for Arup, Rogers
led the integration of sustainability strategies into the firm’s 20 global lines of
business. Prior to Arup, Rogers was a management consultant with Deloitte, where
she honed her skills in corporate strategy, operations improvement, and metrics,
helping Fortune 100 companies to address their most pressing environmental
issues and capitalize on market opportunities.
Ros has a BS in Economics, a post-graduate degree in Latin American Economics,
and MSc in international relations and environmental economics from the
University of Brasilia, Brazil. He was also recently selected among the top 6 business leaders working for a great cause “Executivos de Grandes Causas” by Época
Negócios, a leading business magazine in Brazil.
Katherina Rosqueta
Executive Director, Center for High Impact Philanthropy, University
of Pennsylvania
Katherina M. Rosqueta is the executive director of the Center for High Impact
Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania. Before accepting her appointment
to launch the Center, Rosqueta was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where
she served clients in the areas of strategy development, capability-building, and
post-merger management.
Luiz Ros
Prior to joining McKinsey, Rosqueta worked in community development, nonprofit
management, and venture philanthropy. She served as a consultant to the founding
team of New Schools Venture Fund; founding director of Board Match Plus, a San
Francisco program dedicated to strengthening nonprofit boards; and program
manager of Wells Fargo’s Corporate Community Development Group. She has
held numerous volunteer and civic leadership positions including board president
of La Casa de las Madres (San Francisco’s oldest and largest shelter for battered
women and their children); chair of the United Way’s Bay Area Week of Caring,
and co-founder and executive committee member of the Women’s MBA Network.
She currently serves on the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Responsibility
Advisory Committee to the trustees, the board of GuideStar, and the board of Asian
Mosaic Fund.
Luiz Ros was appointed manager for the Opportunities for the Majority (OM)
Sector Office of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in January 2008, with
responsibility for promoting and coordinating activities corresponding to the OM
initiative. He joined the IDB in 2007, as principal business development specialist
for the OM Office.
Her work and comments have been cited in numerous publications including the
Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Slate, and BusinessWeek. Rosqueta received
her BA cum laude from Yale University, an MBA from The Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania, and was a 2011 recipient of the Brava! Women in
Business Achievement Award. She and her husband Michael Idinopulos live in
Philadelphia with their three children.
She is a former Loeb Fellow at Harvard University who has authored multiple
publications and won several awards. She is a registered professional engineer
in California and a USGBC LEED Accredited Professional. Rogers holds a PhD
in environmental engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and an
ME in environmental engineering and a BE in civil engineering, both from
Manhattan College.
Manager, Opportunities for the Majority Inter-American Development Bank
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Fernando Rossetti
Secretary General, Grupo De Institutos Fundações E Empresas
Fernando Rossetti has served as secretary general for the Grupo De Institutos
Fundações E Empresas (GIFE) since 2005. He is also the current chairman of the
Board of the Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support (WINGS).
He has also served on the Board of many NGOs such as the Brazilian News Agency
for Children’s Rights, ANDI. For over a decade, he has produced a weekly video
column on social responsibility and public policies through the Futura Channel,
the leading education cable channel in Brazil.
He is also co-founder of Aprendiz, a Non-Governmental Organization in Brazil
which develops an integrated, sustainable and educational social technology
called Learning Neighborhood for children and youth social and educational development. During his tenure as executive director from 1999 to 2002, he developed
methodologies to introduce communication strategies for child and adolescent
education programs.
Rossetti received his master’s degree of social sciences from the Institute of
Philosophy and Human Sciences at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. He
worked as the education reporter and South Africa correspondent for the main
Brazilian daily newspaper called Folha de S.Paulo. His work with Folha continued
in New York as well, where he attended the Human Rights Advocates Training
Program at Columbia University. He also published a book titled Media and School:
Perspectives for Public Policies during his consultancy for UNICEF.
Kenneth Roth
Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
Kenneth Roth has served as executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993.
Under his leadership, Human Rights Watch has gone global, growing ten-fold in size
and vastly expanding its reach. It now operates in more than 90 countries, among
them some of the most dangerous and oppressed places on Earth.
During Roth’s tenure, Human Rights Watch has worked tirelessly to bring justice to
victims of the worst abuses, documenting war crimes from Bosnia to Congo, from
Iraq to Sierra Leone. Hard-nosed advocacy laid the groundwork for international
treaties banning land mines, cluster munitions, and child soldiers. Under Roth’s
leadership, Human Rights Watch has expanded its work on the rights of women,
children, refugees, and migrant workers. It has helped spotlight previously ignored
topics such as the rights of gays and lesbians, and, prompted by the HIV/AIDS
pandemic, the link between health and human rights.
Roth, who graduated from Yale Law School and Brown University, has authored
more than 160 articles and chapters on a wide range of human rights topics. Before
joining Human Rights Watch as deputy director in 1987, he served as a federal prosecutor in New York and on the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington.
Rajiv Shah
Administrator, USAID
Rajiv Shah serves as the 16th administrator of the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) and leads the efforts of more than 8,000
professionals in 80 missions around the world.
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Since being sworn in on December 31, 2009, Administrator Shah managed the
US Government’s response to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince,
co-chaired the State Department’s first-ever review of American diplomacy and
development operations, and now spearheads President Obama’s landmark Feed
the Future food security initiative.
Before becoming USAID’s administrator, Shah served as under secretary for
Research, Education and Economics and as chief scientist at the US Department of
Agriculture. Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Shah served for seven years
with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where his positions included director of
agricultural development in the Global Development Program, and director of strategic opportunities.
Originally from Detroit, Shah earned his MD from the University of Pennsylvania
Medical School and his MS in health economics at the Wharton School of Business.
He attended the London School of Economics and is a graduate of the University
of Michigan. Shah previously served on the boards of the Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Seattle Public Library, and the Seattle Community
College District.
Shah is married to Shivam Mallick Shah and is the father of three children. He lives
in Washington DC.
Dongshu (Jaff) Shen
CEO, Fuping Development Institute
Dongshu (Jaff) Shen is a social entrepreneur with extensive experience in large
state-owned companies, investment company management, consulting firms and
nonprofit organizations.
He also has valuable resources of social capital and government relationships to
develop and implement strategic plans in risk control.
In 2002, Shen founded and managed the Fuping Development Institute (FDI) and
Fuping Social investment Co., Ltd., both committed to supporting social innovation. In addition, he is the founder of the Beijing Leping Foundation (BLF). These
organizations focus on promoting social justice and sustainable development in
China through encouraging social innovation and social entrepreneurship. FDI and
BLF are primarily concentrated on three core business areas: providing microcredit
for low-income groups, investment and management for social enterprises, and
training for excellent social entrepreneurs.
Shen has a BA in oriental studies and a law degree from Peking University.
Liesel Pritzker Simmons
Vice President and Director, Program Development, IDP Foundation, Inc.
Liesel Pritzker Simmons is the vice president and director of program development for the IDP Foundation, Inc., a private foundation with a mission to mobilize
resources and strategic support to increase educational opportunities.
Established in 2008, the IDP Foundation has supported and developed a wide
range of programs in the education sectors most notably the innovative IDP Rising
Schools Program in Ghana, which leverages microfinance networks to empower
low cost private schools with trainings and financial services.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
Pritzker Simmons is also co-founder of Opportunity International’s Young
Ambassadors for Opportunity (YAO), a global network of young professionals who
are passionate about microfinance. Pritzker Simmons attended Columbia University,
where she studied African history. She has volunteered at schools and microfinance
institutions in India and Tanzania, but unfortunately has forgotten most of her
Swahili. She lives in New York City with her husband, Ian Simmons.
Jayant Sinha
Partner, Omidyar Network India Advisors
Jayant Sinha is managing director of Omidyar Network India Advisors, where he
leads overall investment strategy and operations in India. In his role, Sinha helps
Omidyar Network manage and develop the India-based portfolio across our Access
to Capital and Media, Markets & Transparency initiatives.
Sinha brings more than 20 years of experience in investing and strategy consulting
to his role as managing director, as well as a deep understanding of managing
investments and advising businesses in India.
Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Sinha was managing director of Courage Capital
Management, where he led technology and India-related investing for a global
special situations hedge fund. Prior to joining Courage Capital in 2006, he spent
12 years with McKinsey & Company as a partner in the Boston and Delhi offices.
During his career with McKinsey, he led a variety of strategic, operational, and
transaction-related projects with corporations in North America, Europe, and India.
Sinha’s experience also includes serving as president of Internet Business Capital,
an early stage venire capital firm, and consulting positions at Stone & Webster and
Synergic Resources Corporation.
Sinha has an MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School, an MS in
energy management and policy from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor
of Technology with distinction from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Manoj Sinha
Co-founder and President, Husk Power Systems
Manoj Sinha has raised both equity and debt capital for Husk Power Systems.
Currently, he has helped in raising over $3.5 million in equity capital (both dilutive
and non-dilutive) and has also got a commitment of $1 million in debt capital.
Sinha also manages corporate relationship with Fortune 500 companies and is
involved with new business development opportunities outside of India.
Over the past eight years, Sinha has successfully led multi-national teams in
semiconductor companies, Intel Corp and Micron Technology, to design and
manufacture microprocessors and memory chips (DRAMs). Sinha spearheaded the
design of an “Atom” microprocessor (a processor that powers most netbooks in
the world), which generates approximately $1.5 billion in revenue per year. While
working as senior design engineers at Intel Corp and Micron Technology, Sinha was
also granted seven US patents for creative and new methods for chip design.
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Speaker Biographies
Sinha brings a tremendous experience of capital markets since he worked as
Investment Banker at UBS in New York City as well as in Corporate Development
role at a major financial services company. More recently, as a general manager of
multiple digital products, Sinha led revenue generating initiatives and worked with
sales, marketing and product development teams to increase the revenue by 30%.
Sinha earned his BTech in electronics engineering with honors from Institute of
Technology, BHU in 1999 and later an MS in electrical and computer engineering
from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sinha also received an MBA from
Darden Graduate School of Business in 2009, where he was awarded the Genovese
Fellowship. He is also a mentor to social entrepreneurs from the Unreasonable
Institute, a 2008 Pop!Tech fellow and 2009 Global Social Benefit Incubator fellow.
Paolo Sison
Director for Innovative Finance, GAVI Alliance
Paolo Sison is director for Innovative Finance at GAVI Alliance, a public-private
global health partnership committed to saving lives and protecting people’s health
by increasing access to immunisation in poor countries.
GAVI is a leading force in innovative finance for development, having developed
the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, the Pneumococcal Advance
Market Commitment and recently the GAVI Matching Fund.
Before joining GAVI, Sison spent ten years in investment banking in London,
most recently as director, Global Banking and Markets at HSBC, where he was
responsible for equity and equity-linked origination in the financial services
sector across Western Europe and CEEMEA. His markets experience includes fixed
income, hybrid products and derivative structuring. Previously, he spent six years
in Manila and in Tokyo, with Ayala Corporation’s Strategic Planning Group and with
Mitsubishi Corporation’s Development & Coordination Department. During this
time he looked after the business groups’ investments in the financial services and
industrial sectors, and was actively involved in business development in the AsiaPacific region.
Sison holds an MSc in Finance from London Business School, an MBA from the
Asian Institute of Management and an AB Theology (magna cum laude) from the
Asian Seminary of Christian Ministries.
Gabriel Stauring
Co-founder, Stop Genocide Now and i-ACT
Gabriel Stauring co-founded Stop Genocide Now in 2005 and i-ACT in 2009. He
personally visited the Darfuri refugee camps in Chad to put a face and voice to the
survivors of the Darfur conflict, believing in the power of community, compassion,
and personal responsibility.
Stop Genocide Now (SGN) seeks to change the way the world responds to genocide by putting a face to the numbers of the dead, dying and displaced. SGN is a
grassroots community dedicated to working to protect populations in grave danger
of violence, death and displacement resulting from genocide. Through active
education, advocacy and policy change, SGN resolves to change the way the world
responds to genocide. The organization has spearheaded many successful grassroots campaigns that have raised political attention on Sudan.
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i-ACT uses innovative technology and education-based campaigns to build personal
relationships between the displaced victims and advocates. The group has brought
technology and internet to the camps and is instituting an all-camp soccer program.
Stauring holds a BS in behavioral science from California State University at
Dominguez Hills, and spent several years working with abused children and their
families in Southern California.
He acts because it is personal: “I can’t help but think what it would be like if it
were my kids sitting in the middle of the desert with so much danger and so little
hope.”
Alfredo Suárez Rivero
CEO and Founder, AliBio
Alfredo Suárez Rivero is the CEO and founder of Alianza Biosfera (AliBio). Based
in Mexico, AliBio creates biotechnology solutions for agriculture, aquaculture, and
water treatment that help reduce the use of synthetic chemicals, energy, and wastewater and increase the sustainability of these sectors.
They work with customers to create solutions that have been tailored to meet
customer needs. Since he founded AliBio in 2003, he has also started the AliBio
Global Inc. and AliBio USA in 2011.
Suárez Rivero was named “Entrepreneur of the Year in Biotechnology” in 2010 by
Ernst & Young Mexico, and AliBio was a finalist for the American Express award for
innovative and sustainable companies in 2010. AliBio has also received awards from
CONACYT, the national council of science and technology, and is also certified by
the Organic Materials Review Institute, which provides independent review of the
products intended for organic production, in 2006 and 2010.
Suárez Rivero has previously served as the associate director for the environmental
division of Grupo Mardupol Ecoterra Project from 1997-2002 and presided over
the administration board for Intra Mantenimento, Intra Metal Construction from
1980-1997.
Suárez Rivero has a graduate degree of civil engineering and a diploma of heavy
construction from engineering from the University of Nacional Autonoma de Mexico,
Unam.
June Sugiyama
Director, Vodafone Americas Foundation
June Sugiyama is the director of the Vodafone Americas Foundation. Sugiyama has
been in the Foundation’s leadership role for the past 11 years. In that role, she
developed various community support and partnership strategies.
Most recently, she led the Foundation’s transition to support technology related
programs, a strategy to better align with Vodafone’s expertise in technology and
innovation.
Sugiyama served on the board of Northern California Grantmakers (NCG) and
participates in the Arts Loan Fund and the Emergency Loan Fund of the organization. She also serves on the advisory board of the Foundation Center in San
Francisco, the advisory committee of the Vodafone Group Foundation & United
Nations Foundation Technology Partnership and served on the board of the
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Speaker Biographies
National Japanese American Historical Society, the Business Arts Council in San
Francisco and Nobiru-kai, a Japanese newcomers association. Sugiyama received
her teaching credential and liberal studies degree at San Francisco State University,
master’s and specialist credential at University of San Francisco, and has teaching
experience with schools throughout the Bay Area, especially in the Japanese
Bilingual Programs.
Vodafone Americas Foundation is affiliated with Vodafone Americas Inc., part of
the international British wireless telecommunications company called Vodafone
Group Plc. Headquartered in the UK, Vodafone is considered one of the largest
telecommunications companies in the world, with over 80,000 employees and
operations in 25 countries across five continents. It currently holds 45% interest in
Verizon Wireless in the United States. It has always been a policy of the company to
support the community where it has operations; currently there are 27 foundations
forming the Vodafone network of foundations worldwide.
Amy Sun
Co-founder and President, FabFolk Inc.
Amy Sun is the founding architect of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) global initiative for field on-site technology development, the Fab Lab
program. She additionally founded and now directs the Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Fab
Lab, the first such facility in an active conflict zone.
Sun co-founded Fab Folk Inc., a nonprofit organization committed to building technical capacity in a locality, improving individuals’ abilities to develop themselves
and their communities and bringing access to tools and knowledge that cultivate
and support innovating practices.
Sun is an electrical engineer and recently earned a PhD at MIT’s Center for Bits
and Atoms where she investigated synthetic programmable boundary layers with
the goal of developing innovative energy transport mechanisms. Prior to graduate
studies at MIT, Sun was a senior engineer and project leader at Lockheed Martin
Space Systems Company for diverse programs, including the Airborne Laser, Fleet
Ballistics Missiles, and the Mobile User Objective System.
Sun brings a rich history of commitment to community and youth in informal
technology education and development. Outside of professional projects, she
generally works on energy, robotics, communications, or inane fun toys. She builds
robots for competition in BattleBots and is a mentor and judge for its educational
arm, BattleBotsIQ. She is currently heavily involved in the deployment and growth
of Fab Labs around the world, enabling grassroots technology development by, for,
and of the community.
David Tolbert
President, International Center for Transitional Justice
David Tolbert is the president of the International Center for Transitional Justice
(ICTJ). Previously, he served as registrar (assistant secretary-general) of the Special
Tribunal for Lebanon.
Prior to that was assistant secretary-general and special expert to the United
Nations Secretary-General on UN Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials. From 2004
to 2008, Tolbert served as deputy chief prosecutor of the International Criminal
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Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He had previously been the deputy
registrar of the ICTY and at an earlier time served at the ICTY as chef de Cabinet
to President Gabrielle Kirk McDonald and senior legal adviser, registry. From
2000 to 2003 Tolbert held the position of executive director of the American Bar
Association’s Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative, which operates ruleof-law development programs throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union. He also held the position of chief, General Legal Division of the UN Relief
Works Agency in Vienna and Gaza. In addition, Tolbert taught international law and
human rights at the post-graduate level in the United Kingdom and practiced law
for many years in the United States.
Foundation, Ubiñas was a director at McKinsey & Company, leading the firm’s
media practice on the West Coast. He served technology, telecommunications and
media companies, working with them to develop and implement strategies and
improve operations.
Tolbert was Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of
Peace and served as a member of the American Society of International Law Task
Force on United States Policy toward the International Criminal Court (ICC) during
2008 and 2009. He also represented the ICTY in the discussions leading up to the
creation of the ICC and the Rome Conference and served as an expert to the ICC
Preparatory Committee Inter-Sessional meetings.
Ubiñas is a graduate of Harvard College, where he was named a Truman Scholar,
and Harvard Business School, where he graduated with highest honors. He is a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations.
Ruth Turner
Executive Director, Tony Blair Faith Foundation
Ruth Turner is executive director of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. She joined
the Prime Minister’s Office in May 2005 as director of Government Relations, and
worked for Tony Blair until he left Government on June 27, 2007.
Turner established the Tony Blair Sports Foundation then set up the Tony Blair Faith
Foundation in 2008. The Foundation is a 501c3 in the US, a registered charity in the
UK, and operates projects worldwide. Turner is on the Board of the Yale University
Center for Faith and Culture, and a Council member of Salford University.
Ubiñas serves on several nonprofit, government and corporate boards and advisory committees, including the World Bank Advisory Council of Global Foundation
Leaders, the Advisory Committee for the US-China 100,000 Strong Initiative and the
boards of the New York Public Library and the Collegiate School for Boys. He also
serves on the Board of Electronic Arts and on the U.S. Advisory Committee on Trade
Policy and Negotiation.
Lalitha Vaidyanathan
Managing Director, FSG
Lalitha Vaidyanathan is a managing director with FSG, a nonprofit think tank and
consulting firm founded by Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School
and Mark Kramer.
Vaidyanathan is currently leading the firm’s efforts to establish a presence in India.
She has led all of the firm’s engagements in the sub-continent including developing
Shared Value strategies for the Godrej Group, CSR Landscape report for the World
Bank, and strategic evaluations for the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation and
UN Women. Prior to her assignment in India, Vaidyanathan was based in FSG’s San
Francisco office where she led many of the firm’s Shared Value engagements in
the US including for Medtronic, Mattel and the United Health Group. Vaidyanathan
has co-authored influential thought leadership pieces for the firm including the
recently published Creating Shared Value in India and Catalytic Philanthropy
in India. In 2009, she co-authored Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and
Social Impact.
Before entering government, Turner was an award-winning social entrepreneur.
She founded or was a director of numerous social businesses in the fields of homelessness, health, climate change, housing, media and scientific inventions, ranging
from micro enterprises to companies with annual turnovers of £200million. This
includes: non executive director of Places for People group, the UK’s largest social
housing provider; Investment Committee member for the National Endowment
for Science, Technology and the Arts; founding trustee of the United Utilities Trust
Fund; co-founder and chairman of The Big Issue in the North Ltd; and establishing
the Citizens Council for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.
Vaidyanathan started her consulting career with McKinsey & Co. and subsequently
founded and ran a venture-backed technology company in the San Francisco Bay
Area. She holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Cambridge University and
a MBA from Harvard Business School.
Luis A. Ubiñas
Jane Wales
President, Ford Foundation
Luis A. Ubiñas is president of the Ford Foundation, the second-largest philanthropy
in the US with more than $10 billion in assets and $500 million in annual giving.
The foundation operates worldwide and has offices in Asia, Africa, and Central and
South America.
Since taking leadership at Ford in 2008, Ubiñas has built a program strategy
focused on increasing the participation of poor and marginalized individuals and
communities in the economic, social and political opportunities afforded by their
societies. He has focused on how new technology and social media can reshape
the way nonprofits deliver results for those they serve. Prior to joining the Ford
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Speaker Biographies
President and CEO, World Affairs Council and Global Philanthropy Forum
Vice President Aspen Institute
Jane Wales is president and CEO, World Affairs Council and Global Philanthropy
Forum, vice president of the Aspen Institute; and host of the nationally syndicated
National Public Radio interview show It’s Your World.
From 2007 to 2008, Wales served as acting CEO of The Elders, chaired by
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and in 2008, she was chair of the Poverty Alleviation
Track for the Clinton Global Initiative.
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Previously, Wales served in the Clinton Administration as special assistant to the
President and senior director of the National Security Council. She simultaneously
served as associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy, where her office was responsible both for advancing sustainable economic
development, through science and technology cooperation, and for developing
policy for securing advanced weapons materials in the former Soviet Union. In the
Carter Administration, Wales served as deputy assistant secretary of state.
In the philanthropic sector, Wales chaired the international security programs at
the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and she
directed the Project on World Security at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. She is the
former national executive director of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which
shared in the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize during her tenure.
Hunter, Walk
Director, Product Management, YouTube
Hunter Walk focuses on YouTube as a platform for social good, activism and
free expression. He views YouTube’s relationship with ‘good’ as supported by
three main pillars: Causes & Non Profits; Education; and finally, Activism and Free
Expression, and hopes to foster this further with his new role.
He previously led consumer product management at YouTube, delivering hundreds
of billions of playbacks a day to the world’s largest video community. Since joining
Google in 2003, he has also managed product and sales efforts for Google’s contextual advertising business.
Prior to this, Walk was a founding member of the product and marketing team
at Linden Lab. Here, he helped build the noted virtual world Second Life, the
massively multiplayer online platform, where hundreds of millions of user generated items are exchanged for real money and which entertains millions around the
globe.
Earlier, he was a management consultant and also spent a year at Late Night with
Conan O’Brien, broadcasting to an audience of insomniacs, truckers and college
students.
Walk has a BA in History from Vassar and an MBA from Stanford University.
Tjip Walker
Deputy Director for Learning, Evaluation and Research, Bureau of Policy,
Planning and Learning, USAID
S. Tjip Walker is deputy director for Learning, Evaluation and Research in USAID’s
Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning where he leads agency efforts to promote
organizational learning, including more consistent and effective use of research and
evaluation to inform development practice.
Walker also leads efforts to adapt monitoring and evaluation techniques to complex
environments. Previously at USAID, Walker served as the technical lead for the
Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, as senior conflict and governance
advisor and Nigeria country representative for the Office of Transition Initiatives,
and as a program manager for USAID/Cameroon. Earlier in his career, Walker was
an assistant professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at
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Speaker Biographies
Charlotte. Walker holds an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School, a PhD in political
science from Indiana University and a life-long commitment to harnessing analysis
to improve development practice.
Zhenyao Wang
Dean, Beijing Normal University One Foundation Philanthropy Research
Institute
Zhenyao Wang is currently Dean of the Beijing Normal University One Foundation
Philanthropy Research Institute. He also serves as the professor and doctoral
advisor for the university’s School of Social Development and Public Policy.
He has extensive experience in the government as well, serving as the general
director of the Department of Social Welfare and Charity Promotion and the
Department of Disaster Relief. He has given professional presentations for the
Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, the China
Song Ching-ling Foundation, the Chinese Cultural Exchange Association, and the
Chinachem Charitable Foundation in Hong Kong.
Wang has received his BA in Nankai University, MPA at Harvard University, and PhD
in Law at the Peking University. His research field includes social security policies
and practices, social welfare, emergency management and social assistance.
Ricardo Young
Entrepreneur
Ricardo Young is an entrepreneur, who studied public administration at the
Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo. He also holds degrees from PDG / EXEC, the
Institute of Learning and Research (INSPER) and the Systemic Leadership Program
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He serves on numerous boards, including Fibria, Amata, Kimberly-Clark, Sustainable
Planet of Editora Abril and the Ethical Fund of the Santander Group. In addition, he
is a board member of various NGOs such as Ethos and UniEthos Institute, Institute
for Democracy and Sustainability (IDS), Todos pela Educação (Education for All),
Akatu Institute and Nossa São Paulo Network. He is also a former board member of
international organizations such as Global Reporting Initiative, and Accountability.
He was a Green Party senatorial candidate from São Paulo in 2010, in which
he successfully received over four million votes. He is host of the Sustainability
Program at Terra TV, and collaborates with the daily newspaper, Folha de São Paulo
and Carta Capital magazine. A renowned speaker, Young is an international expert
in the areas of social responsibility, and sustainable management and development.
Bassem Youssef
Host, The Bassem Youssef Show
Born in 1974, Dr. Bassem Youssef is best known for Al Bernameg, The Program.
Appalled by the performance of the Egyptian official media, he started this show
eight weeks after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
It all started with one camera in his home, where he criticized the media for
spreading fear, lies, and deceit during the revolution. With his superb sarcasm and
political wit, this video instantly became a web sensation in Egypt. Nine episodes
later, he was picked up by a major television network “ONTV.” The Program has
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now transformed to The Bassem Youssef Show aka The B+ Show, and is now aired
on television two days a week. Modeled after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, his
program falls under a unique category of political satire — a category which was
not established in this part of the world before him. The YouTube viewership alone
for his videos exceeds 55 million views — a phenomenal rate in Egypt and the
middle east.
Originally a cardiothoracic surgeon, he graduated from Cairo University and is
currently an attending surgeon. He is also licensed to work in the United States and
United Kingdom, and has worked in the field of cardiac transplantation and cardiac
assist devices in the US and Berlin. As he worked to bring those medical concepts
to Egypt, the revolution erupted. He assisted the medical efforts in the makeshift
clinics in Tahrir square. He hopes to continue to remedy the constant attacks Egypt
faces throughout the revolutionary powers.
Fighting the status quo, he is considered by many as a game changer in media and
politics. He has even become a target for attack by supporters of the new and old
dictatorship in Egypt.
Speaker Biographies
He served in the President’s Cabinet as the 13th US Trade Representative from 2001
to 2005 and as deputy Secretary of State from 2005 to 2006. From 2001 to January
2005, Zoellick served in the US cabinet as the 13th US trade representative where
he forged an activist approach to free trade at the global, regional, and bilateral
levels, while securing support for open markets with the US Congress and a broad
coalition of domestic constituencies. He was instrumental in completing the accession of China and Chinese Taipei to the WTO. He also completed or substantially
advanced the accessions to the WTO of Cambodia, Saudi Arabia, Viet Nam, Russia,
and others. From 1985-1993, Zoellick served at the Treasury and State Departments,
as well as briefly in the White House.
Zoellick received a number of awards, including: the Knight Commanders
Cross from Germany for his work on unification; the Alexander Hamilton and
Distinguished Service Awards, the highest honors of the Departments of Treasury
and State, respectively; and the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished
Public Service. He earned a JD magna cum laude from the Harvard Law School, a
MPP from the Kennedy School of Government, and a BA (Honors, Phi Beta Kappa)
from Swarthmore College.
Tao Zhang
COO, New Ventures, World Resources Institute
Tao Zhang serves as COO of New Ventures at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
New Ventures is WRI’s center for environmental entrepreneurship, helping environmentally-focused SMEs in six key emerging markets compete in a global economy.
In this role, Zhang manages New Ventures’ Global Hub in Washington DC and its
global network of six Local Centers in Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia and
Mexico. New Ventures has so far helped facilitate $277 investment into 345 environmental SMEs and two successful IPOs from the six key emerging markets.
Zhang is also co-founder of ACBridge Capital Advisors, a China-focused government
and investment consultancy firm where he led a team in advising private equity
and venture capital investors, SMEs and multinational companies in the IT and
environmental fields. Under his leadership, the firm has assisted a number of investors and multinational companies in evaluating, negotiating and closing a variety of
transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Zhang received a BA from Beijing Foreign Studies University, an MBA from Wake
Forest University as a Babcock scholar, and an MPA from Harvard University as
a Mason Fellow. Zhang is an avid reader, a frequent speaker, and a prolific writer
when he has the time — his articles have been published and re-published extensively in leading Chinese and international media outlets including the Wall Street
Journal, Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily and online portals such as Sina.com.
Zhang is a native speaker of Mandarin and has an associate degree in French.
Robert B. Zoellick
Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner Keynote Speaker
President, The World Bank
Robert B. Zoellick became the 11th president of the World Bank on July 1, 2007.
Prior to joining the Bank, Zoellick served as vice chairman, international of the
Goldman Sachs Group.
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Monday, April 16
Welcome: Jane Wales, President and CEO, World Affairs Council and
Global Philanthropy Forum; Vice President, Aspen Institute
Special Address: Rajiv Shah, Administrator, US Agency for
International Development
Welcome and Opening Plenary
Toward a New Social Contract:
New Roles. New Responsibilities.
Moderator: Peter Robertson, Chairman, Board of Trustees, World
Affairs Council of Northern California
Jane Wales
Welcome to the Global Philanthropy Forum. I’m Jane and I’m really pleased to see
you. I wanted to first say a word about the pretty bags on your chair. Make sure
you got the color combination you like.These were created by a group of artisans
in northwest India who specialize in this kind of hand-woodblock printing. I hope
you enjoy them and use them the next time you go shopping.
Also, for those of you who have smartphones — which is probably 99.9 percent of
you — and those who have tablets, I encourage you to use the Global Philanthropy
Forum app, which is mobilegpf.org. You can access the Conference agenda,
updates on the agenda and speakers’ bios; and you can, in fact, manage your own
schedule. I obviously need that.
Let me just say a word about the Global Philanthropy Forum for those of you
who are new to us.We’re a community.We’re committed to international causes.
We aim to be strategic. We want to achieve results. For those of you who are
newcomers, you won’t feel like newcomers for very long. By lunchtime you’ll
probably declare yourselves old-timers, and that’s because you will be.
(From Left to Right) Rajiv Shah and Peter Robertson
We started way back in 2001 as a learning community, and in more recent years
we have worked with colleagues around the world who want to replicate the
Global Philanthropy Forum model. So, please take advantage of their presence
here. Take advantage of the philanthropists who come from Brazil, who come
from Singapore, who come from India, who come from China.They are creating
their own communities very much like this one, and that’s part of your extended
family as well.
What brings us together this year is a sense that the social contract is fraying but
that it’s also evolving — and that social contract is the means by which societies
allocate responsibilities and allocate resources when it comes to managing
shared problems, seizing shared opportunities and providing for the public good.
If you look around the world, whether it’s evidenced by the Arab Spring, by
weather extremes, by civil conflict or the financial meltdown, we’re certainly
very aware that we’re experiencing very fast-paced change — sometimes very
wrenching change — and no single entity can manage these processes on its own.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
We’re told that governments can’t solve all problems. I think that could also be
said about markets.The same can even be said about the most ingenious of civil
society actors. It really takes us all, so we’re coming together to take a look at what
a new social contract might look like — how newly empowered social actors can
contribute to that — and to ask ourselves the question: As responsibility shifts,
does accountability appropriately expand?
I’d argue that any new mechanisms we might look at would need to capture some
attributes and some assets of each sector that’s involved even in the current social
contract. So, it needs the accountability and the transparency that democratic
governments provide. It needs the efficiency and the scale that the private sector
brings. It needs the agility and the responsiveness of civil society actors. And to
all that mix I hope that we think of philanthropy as adding real-life risk-loving
capital as well as a commitment to the long view.
Today we’ll hear about each of those actors. Of course, the social contract
begins with capable governments, with competent governments, and also with
markets that are robust and vibrant and finally with civil society playing its role.
So, this afternoon we’re going to hear from Tony Blair, former prime minister of
Great Britain, who will talk about ways to strengthen accountable governments.
Later we’ll be hearing from Cindy McCain, who will talk about the role and the
responsibility of the international community when governments fail to live up
to their obligations, fail to hold up their end of the social contract, fail to protect
their citizens from unspeakable harm. So, whether it’s in the Congo or in Libya
or in Syria, the question is: What happens when governments can’t live up to
their responsibility to protect?
When it comes to markets, we’re going to hear from many people, particularly
tomorrow. We’ll hear, for example, from Tony Elumelu from Nigeria. We’ll hear
from Jayant Sinha.We’ll hear from Elizabeth Littlefield.We’ll hear from a number
of folks who will point out that economic growth is essential, of course, but
that the social contract should produce some equity within that. That is to say,
growth should be felt at all levels of society. So, what does that suggest by way
of investments in small and growing enterprises and in the environment within
which markets operate? We’ll hear a great deal about that.
Finally, I want to point to a phrase that’s often used by Antony Bugg-Levine, who
will be speaking as well. He notes that any new social contract requires a combination of capital, commerce and community — and that’s where civil society
comes in. You will be hearing from very inventive and very courageous civil
society leaders who will talk about the role they can play and who will inspire us
to think about more opportunities like that. So, whether it’s an inventive leader
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Toward a New Social Contract: New Roles. New Responsibilities.
like Tracy Palandjian, who’s been a champion of social impact bonds, or Barbara
and Saad Ibrahim, who’ve been champions all their lives for human rights, we’ll
be reminded of what this kind of leadership can provide.
But, more importantly I think, we’ll be reminded that the social contract is not
just about the provision of material goods, the basic necessities of life — it’s also
about human dignity, and that is the higher value and that is something for which
we all have responsibility. So, before turning this over to Peter Robertson and
Rajiv Shah, who will paint the truly broad picture and help us understand this
world in which we’re trying to do good, I want to thank you for the role that
each of you plays.
So, Peter and Raj, I turn it over to you.
Peter Robertson
Good morning and welcome to our opening plenary session. Let me also pass on
my welcome to an audience that’s joining us by way of the web.
My name, as Jane said, is Peter Robertson, and I’m chairman of the board of the
World Affairs Council of Northern California. This morning we have the opportunity to hear a special address from Dr. Rajiv Shah, who serves as administrator
of the US Agency for International Development [USAID]. Dr. Shah’s career has
been shaped by both the public and private sectors, including a seven-year
tenure with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s a trained medical doctor
and health economist with an MD [Doctor of Medicine] from the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School and a master’s degree in health economics from the
Wharton Business School. Before becoming USAID administrator, Dr. Shah served
as under-secretary for research, education and economics and as chief scientist
at the US Department of Agriculture.
Dr. Shah takes a markedly un-siloed approach to development.While continuing
to team up with government bodies and encouraging civil sector engagement,
he notes that a key aim of USAID in 2012 is to partner more closely with the
private sector in order to stay relevant.These are his words, not mine, but given
my life in the private sector, those words make me very happy. So, please join me
in welcoming Dr. Rajiv Shah.Thank you.
Rajiv Shah
Hello. Good morning.Thank you, Peter, for those very kind comments and for that
very kind introduction — and thank you, Jane, for having us here and for holding
your always very successful meeting right here in Washington. Hopefully, it will
encourage quite a lot of active participation from our government.
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I’m thrilled to be here, and I’m very, very excited that so many friends and
colleagues whom I get to work with and learn from are here as well. I won’t
name everyone, but I do want to recognize Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley, who
has done quite a lot to make sure that our government under this administration
in our international affairs is able to partner more effectively with philanthropy
and the private sector. So, thank you, Ambassador, for being here.
I thought I would do something a little bit unconventional and talk through a
few slides before we get into the discussion.
This is a photograph of the signing of the UN [United Nations] Charter in 1945,
where 50 governments and a number of NGOs [non-governmental organizations]
gathered in San Francisco to sign the charter that would form the United Nations.
I thought we’d do that in recognition of where the [Global Philanthropy] Forum
is based. Now, inspired by the world coming together in that way, the World Affairs
Council of Northern California came together and quickly became, as many of
you know, an environment in which the private sector from the West Coast
and across the country could engage and think more effectively about how to
participate in international affairs.
In 2001 another remarkable transformation was occurring, this time in American
philanthropy; but the long-storied history of philanthropists from the Rockefeller
and Carnegie Foundations doing work started to create more visible space for
the West Coast philanthropists. I had a chance to work for a number of years,
as Peter mentioned, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but so many
important philanthropic efforts from the West Coast brought into the sector not
just a renewed sense of vision and purpose but also a real commitment to use the
same kind of rigor and analytics that define achieving success in the corporate
environment and to bring that to the challenges we’re jointly trying to tackle
globally. That’s why Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton had a chance to come
speak at the World Affairs Council and to use that as a setting to demonstrate
her core commitment to making sure that American foreign policy did much
more, in a far more practical and pragmatic way, to engage with you, the global
community of people who work on public-private partnerships and development
and in world affairs more broadly.
This approach is more critical than ever, of course, and it’s critical because it’s
both necessary to achieve success when we tackle a series of sometimes seemingly insurmountable problems — and I’ll talk about some of those problems
in a moment — and because, in an environment where we do face real fiscal
challenges around the world, our commitment to international philanthropy as
a country has actually gone up, not down. It’s been stunning to learn that in just
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Toward a New Social Contract: New Roles. New Responsibilities.
this past year, and despite the long hangover of the global financial crisis, the 50
largest private donors have given more than $10.5 billion — and that is an all-time
high in terms of commitments to international affairs.
Today we at USAID are working to capture the tremendous potential represented by these commitments through a series of new partnership tools that
we’ve helped create over the past several years. Dr. Maura O’Neill is here — you
might want to put your hand up; she leads a number of our efforts in that space,
including the Development Innovation Ventures program that I’ll speak about
in a moment. We came to our commitment to use more public-private partnership in development because of a recognition that that would be the only way
to resolve some of the most pressing problems we face.
This slide is a photo of people crowding around a water well in India. We know
that in the next 40 years the world will welcome another 2.5 billion people — the
equivalent of adding to our population more than two Chinas — and this is
happening in an environment where climate change coupled with the way we
use resources will put quite a lot of pressure on the global food system; and that
will be compounded significantly by challenges like access to water.
We live in a world where Yemen may be the very first place where a major city
actually runs out of water. We live in a world where the challenges of climate
change have led to floods and glacial melt and other issues in Pakistan — I just
got back from there last week — that are putting a tremendous amount of pressure both on their own ability to sustain themselves and on the five-decade-long
history of the Indus Water Treaty that is very much linked to peace and stability
in that part of the world. So we know that the only way we’re really going to get
ahead of the curve when facing these large, interconnected global challenges is
to bring new tools, new technologies and new partners to the task of resolving
those issues.
Today I’d like to spend some time talking about a few specific priorities where
we would like to partner more effectively with you and a number of the institutions that you represent. One is in building resilience to disasters. We know that
droughts and floods are getting worse and more common. In fact, in my first week
on the job I had the opportunity to address the challenging and tragic earthquake
in Haiti. But even as those events become more frequent, we have better tools
and systems not only to deal with them after the fact but also, and even more
importantly, to be prepared, to reduce risks, to build resilience into economies
and populations around the world.
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Second, we’ll talk a little bit about food security. This is the president’s top
global development priority, and we believe that it’s possible to recommit
ourselves — the public and private sectors — to essentially ending hunger and to
do that in a meaningful way over the course of the next several decades.
Finally, I want to share with you some opportunities we think exist in the areas of
health, family planning and education — particularly focused on kids — because
if we give more children around the world the chance to lead healthy and
productive lives, we can help society after society and country after country
reap what economists and demographers call a “demographic dividend” — an
opportunity to turn the global youth bulge, which is a disproportionate increase
in the number of people around the world who are 14 and under, into a real
opportunity for development and social advancement as opposed to a real threat
from the challenge of so many hundreds of millions of people not having the
opportunity to live out their potential.
This is a photograph of the Dadaab refugee camp, and this is the waiting area
where women and children came in — and still continue to come in — from other
parts of the region. Dadaab is at the edge of Somalia and Kenya in southern Kenya,
and it has grown over time from 70,000 to 80,000 refugees to now being the
world’s largest refugee camp, with nearly 0.5 million people. These 0.5 million
people are almost exclusively women and children.
This photograph was taken last September [2011] during a visit when the famine
and the strife in Somalia were at a peak, and people were coming in at about
4,500 individuals per day. We met women and children who had gone through
unspeakable human tragedy on the multi-week trek to walk to this place to get
safety and food and security.We met women on cots who were nursing or taking
care of one child while literally right next to them the body of their other child
was wrapped in a cloth because they didn’t know what to do with it because the
child had just passed away.We met families who had been part of what was really
the dramatic and under-recognized tragedy of last year: that in this region nearly
40,000 children under the age of five perished through no fault of their own
because they couldn’t get enough food, and they couldn’t get enough sustenance.
The global response to this effort, which ultimately cost nearly $2 billion — more
than half of which came from the United States — was, I think, one of the big
success stories of last year. We probably saved tens of thousands of lives even
though it’s challenging to measure and report on something that didn’t happen.
And the people who led the response took great personal risks to be in difficult
environments, often working very quietly with local partners and nonprofit
organizations and using technologies — getting people vouchers on their cell
phones so that they could buy food in local markets.
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Toward a New Social Contract: New Roles. New Responsibilities.
And whether it was small actions on the ground in south and central Somalia
or big actions taken by Cargill, for example — which donated $7 million worth
of rice because it happened to have a ship nearby; and after a conversation I
had with their leadership team, they determined they would repurpose those
supplies and send them to Mogadishu and let the [UN] World Food Programme
distribute that food — whether it was those kinds of big actions or the small ones
that were taken by the Somali-American community and NGO groups outside
of Minneapolis mostly, these actions made a huge difference. It just reaffirms the
point that we were all making that in fact it is those types of partnerships that
generate the most gains.
This slide is one of my favorite examples of how we can get ahead of the
problem. Precisely in that environment where people were facing so much
risk and challenge, through a partnership between USAID and Swiss Re, the
reinsurance company, we were providing insurance — rainfall-indexed weather
insurance — to families that largely were pastoral in nature or had very small
farms. And, in fact, when it didn’t rain, they were able to validate that using
satellite data and make payments, so 700 families, some of whom are represented
here, got through the drought without needing humanitarian assistance, without
needing to move their families, without needing to make treks to camps. They
were able to sustain their communities because an insurance product had been
created. I am not an insurance expert, but I’m told by the folks at Swiss Re that
in addition to the satellite technology that allows us to report on rainfall data in
a way that’s non-controversial and the other strategies for reaching smallholder
producers with products and technologies like that, actual recent advances in
actuarial science have made it possible and profitable for them to engage in
these types of activities. These are the types of partnerships that we hope will
come out of the next three days of dialogue here and that we hope to advance
in our work with you.
But resilience is not all about preventing disasters or mitigating the effects of
those disasters. President Obama has asked us, and Secretary Clinton has asked
us, to make food security and reinvesting in agriculture the central focus of our
development mission abroad, so we’ve launched a program we call Feed the
Future, which is designed to accelerate our investments in helping countries
feed themselves.
Ultimately, agricultural development is anywhere from eight to 10 times more
efficient per US taxpayer dollar than providing food aid at times of crisis. And in
that same context, in that same part of the Horn of Africa where we saw drought
take hold and real vulnerabilities exposed, we also saw that in western Kenya
they had tripled maize yields because they were using better seeds and locally
approved practices for growing corn. In other parts of the continent, they’ve
expanded their use of orange-flesh sweet potatoes — sweet potatoes that have
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more beta carotene and more vitamin A and thereby prevent river blindness and
diarrhea. In other parts of the world, like Bangladesh, for the first time in decades
they will be self-sufficient in rice because of partnerships that we’ve been able
to put in place, with the government of Bangladesh but also with the international scientific and research community, including some private companies
like Syngenta and DuPont that play a big role in helping those advances reach
the most vulnerable populations. These examples show that public investment
is simply not enough — that we can do partnership much more effectively if we
work together.
This next example is a slide of a child receiving a measles vaccination in Ethiopia.
We’ve seen similar vaccination efforts around the world lead to huge, huge gains
in child welfare and lowering child mortality. In fact, at the beginning of this
administration we partnered with the United Kingdom and with companies
like GlaxoSmithKline and partners like Rotary International — which I hope is
represented somewhere in the room today or at least over the next few days — to
help reach millions of additional children with new vaccines and to help once
and for all to fully eradicate polio, which we are just on the verge of doing. And
by engaging in those kinds of partnerships, we’re able to get new vaccines out
to kids who never would have received them before.
In fact, there is one vaccine that everyone in this room has probably had, as well
as your children perhaps most recently, called the Pneumovax vaccine, to help
treat kids and prevent them from getting pneumonia. Now, we don’t have a lot
of children, fortunately, who die from pneumococcus here in the United States
because they can go to a hospital and get treated, but abroad it is the single largest
disease killing kids, with more than 1 million kids per year perishing when they
get pneumococcus or suffer from pneumonia. Because of this partnership we put
together, we were able to raise significant resources to invest in kids’ getting the
vaccine. We worked with an alliance called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and
Immunization [GAVI], and the companies that sell the vaccine offered a 70 to 75
percent price break because we were buying 10 years’ worth of vaccine at much,
much higher volumes.That partnership meant that just six months after we did
that deal, when I walked into the camp at Dadaab and saw those little children
walking across the line from Somalia, those kids were getting the Pneumovax
vaccine.That’s extraordinary because that vaccine cost $54 per dose here in the
United States four years ago, and people just assumed that you couldn’t get the
product to kids in very, very resource-poor settings, but again it is an example of
how when we work together that kind of success is possible.
This is another example I just love that makes the same point. Over the past 15
years, we’ve seen huge advances in our ability to save kids’ lives all around the
world. One area that’s been stubborn, though, has been trying to save kids in the
first 48 hours of life; birth asphyxia, or not being able to breathe immediately after
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birth, is one of the top causes of that. Many of you have probably been in a birthrelated situation, and when my kids were born you would see the bag mask that
the doctors would have right next to the child being born. That little bag mask
contraption costs $850 in this country, which is just too much for our partners
around the world in very resource-poor settings, so we worked with Laerdal, a
European medical device company, and created a version of it that cost $18 by
replacing some of the materials. By changing the design, you get maybe not as
good a product as our children will get in hospitals here, but you get something
that works — along with a doll called NeoNatalie that allows the community
health workers to train and learn how to use it. This device and its application
in countries around the world have led to a significant reduction in neonatal
mortality. Today in Bangladesh alone we’ve seen the largest and fastest reductions in neonatal mortality that we’ve seen anywhere in the world for the past
50 years.They’ve done it in five, and they are setting the bar for what is possible.
So, based on these types of partnerships and based on that kind of success story,
on June 14 Secretary Clinton will host a meeting here in Washington — you’re
all invited — that we’re calling the Child Survival Call to Action. Because of the
technology that we now have, the partnerships we now have, the scale and the
ability to reach mothers giving birth and children seeking to survive, we believe
it’s possible for the first time in history to say that within a generation we can
literally end preventable child death. For those who want to talk about the statistics of that, I’m happy to do that later. That’s about 6 million kids per year who
we think we could save compared with what is currently about 7.5 million kids
who die. The point is that they can be saved easily and efficiently, and doing so
can help change what’s possible in country after country after country. So, we
urge you to come to the Child Survival Call to Action to partner with us to figure
out how to make this more successful over time.
This is the final example I’d like to share, and it’s one that talks about how we
can work with the financial services industry. It is actually true in many of the
countries where we work. I mentioned that I just got back from Pakistan, but
a few weeks ago I was in Ethiopia, and the same is true there. Local banks and
local financial services providers tend to have significant capital and assets at
their disposal that they’re not investing aggressively in their own entrepreneurs,
in their own business and in their own productive capacity to drive success over
time. I’m not a financial sector expert, so I don’t know exactly why, but I do know
that when we provide local credit guarantees to those banks, and when we work
with partners like General Mills, who’s helping us train agro-business leaders
throughout Africa and other parts of the world, all of a sudden those banks
seem able to start providing capital — lending, equity, other resources, technical
support — to the types of entrepreneurs who can change the country over time.
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This is an example called Good African Coffee. I’m sure many of you here know
Andrew Rugasira, but I was thrilled just last weekend to open the New York Times
and see Andrew in full form talking about his business. I remember probably eight
or nine years ago having a real conversation with him that started like this:“Look,
we have all the assets and resources and capacities we need…” — anywhere in
the world but certainly, he’s from Uganda, in Uganda — “to change our nations, to
create a more dynamic and effective environment; and we don’t really need aid in
the traditional sense, but what we do need are partners — partners that see us as
entrepreneurs, partners that can vouch for our ability to be successful, partners
that can connect us to retail chains in London and San Francisco and Minneapolis
and Washington, DC, so that we can access markets and be successful.” I was
proud when I read the article to see that USAID has been one of the biggest
supporters of Good African Coffee and that one of our credit guarantees to a
local Ugandan bank has allowed them to secure significant resources to expand
their operations.
As you go through the next three days and as you think about partnerships and
priorities, please think about how you can bring more than your financial and
philanthropic resources to bear. Think about how you can help entrepreneurs
connect to markets around the world. Think about whether we could partner
with you through any of our new tools, whether it’s this credit authority, our
ability to do public-private partnerships, the new venture fund that Maura has
created called the Development Innovation Ventures program and many of the
other structures that are out there. You often represent a community of people
with resources, knowledge, connections and awareness of how to help others
succeed that is potentially, well, it frankly is, much, much, much more powerful
than the dollars and the resources we all bring traditionally.And for aid agencies
like USAID, as Peter mentioned, to be relevant in the future we believe our role is
to help you offer those technical resources, those insights, and to bring whatever
made you successful over time to the kinds of partnerships that we can help
facilitate around the world. And if we can do that together, we’re confident we
can achieve dramatic, dramatic results.
So, thank you for the opportunity to be here. I look forward to the dialogue, but
I also really do believe that the goal of aid and aid agencies and development
partners around the world should essentially be putting ourselves out of business.
The only way we’ll ever do that effectively is if we can figure out how to partner
with you, how to bring your knowledge and resources to the types of places
where we work, and if we can together report on the success stories so that it’s
not so surprising to see Andrew Rugasira featured in the New York Times — that
just becomes our weekly reading routine.
Toward a New Social Contract: New Roles. New Responsibilities.
Peter Robertson
I had all these questions laid out here, and you answered every one of them, but
I’ll just dig into a couple of the points that you made. In my business of energy,
one of the biggest problems we face is scale — getting things that can scale up.
There are lots of ideas that work and small opportunities, but how do you scale
things to make a difference? I think in today’s world we need to be looking at
issues that solve a million problems or 10 million or 100 million, so how do we
integrate the concept of scale into USAID strategy and programs?
Rajiv Shah
That’s a great point. It is the central challenge because you can go around the
world and see projects.They’re all good projects, but not all of them have achieved
real scale, and not all of them will continue after donor resources go away.We’re
trying to rethink how we structure our work and pursue our work, and it starts
with whom you choose to work with. If you choose to work with partners who
fundamentally are not able to scale efforts or fundamentally don’t have business
models that are sustainable without significant external assistance, you’re at a loss
from the very get-go. So, we’ve implemented a set of reforms that I call USAID
Forward that are essentially designed to help shift or, I should say, expand and
diversify our partner base quite considerably; and if we’re successful — and I’m
confident we will be successful — by 2015 we will have essentially moved about
30 percent of our total program spending from our traditional set of partners to
a very diverse set of mostly locally based partners, and that amounts globally to
about $5 billion per year. It will be really extraordinary.
I was in Pakistan and I had a chance to see that in action.When I went a couple of
years ago, we were doing some good projects helping dairy farmers, and we said,
“This doesn’t feel scalable.” I mean, it’s great every time you meet a dairy farmer
who is struggling to send his kid to school and you help him do better — that’s
a great thing — and then the kids go to school and you can feel good about it.
But in a country of 185 million people, 45 percent of whom depend on the agriculture sector for employment, if you don’t have a strategy that reaches millions
of people, you’re not going to be very significant. So, we rethought the way we
worked.We restructured our partnerships.We engaged in partnerships with the
two biggest milk processors — Engro and Nestlé — and now over the course of
the next five years we think we’ll move a million people out of poverty; and we’ll
do it not because we’re financing it so much but because we’re linking those
producers to very dynamic companies that see a lot of opportunity over the next
several years to grow their business.
Thank you very much, and I wish you luck over the next three days.
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Peter Robertson
When I read this guy’s bio, I assumed he must be about 65 years old with all the
things that he’s done, so you tend to believe him when he says he’s going to do
these amazing things.
Technologies. There are lots of technologies that can move the needle in development. There are new communication technologies that a lot of people have
talked about.There are affordable energy technologies that are coming by.There’s
development in agriculture. You talked about some of the health solutions, but
what do you think are the big, game-changing technologies that can really make
a difference here?
Rajiv Shah
I think in every sector where we work, technology can make a huge difference.
I personally believe that if you look over the past 15 years, the huge proportion
of populations that now have access to mobile communications appears to be
one of the profound game changers that makes a lot possible that otherwise
wasn’t. What that makes possible I don’t think we fully know yet, but I’ll give
you just two examples.
One is in education. We launched a series of scientific and technical challenge
grants called All Children Reading. The idea is that if actual students in schools
around the world are benefiting from our work — if they can get and use technology that’s appropriate for their setting — they can improve literacy and
reading outcomes at grade level every year. And the amount of innovation we
saw result from that grant project was amazing. We had 450 applicants. More
than 60 percent were from outside the United States. About half were from
the private sector. And most innovations were designed around creating tabletbased computing and using tablet-based computing to make sure that every kid
anywhere in the world has access to a curriculum and instruction.That’s a great
example of what’s possible now that wasn’t possible a few years ago.
Toward a New Social Contract: New Roles. New Responsibilities.
program. It’s why we’re engaging the big private companies more effectively in
that effort, and it’s why we really value the work of Bill Gates and Howard Buffett
and others who have made that a big focus.
Peter Robertson
I’m an energy guy, so I can’t help myself, but I think Bill Gates said at one point
that if he could reduce the cost of anything to poor people around the world it
would be the cost of energy — because smartphones don’t work without electricity, and a lot of the agricultural things need pumps and electricity. Have you
seen any moves forward for technologies in the energy area that can help remote
locations and that really are scalable and that work?
Rajiv Shah
Yeah. I think you would know more about that, so I’d ask for your answers.
Peter Robertson
Yeah but I want them to hear about it.
Rajiv Shah
When we look at solar energy in particular, it’s hard to believe what we’re seeing
now — solar-powered lighting that includes everything from streetlights to flashlights. In distributed and rural settings, we’re making a big difference.
I think there’s a real opportunity to design more for the types of settings you’re
describing because most of the technology development that goes into that
sector is probably not designed to serve the needs of people who live in the dark,
who don’t have access to any energy, who don’t have a supportive infrastructure
to fix things when they break down, and I think that’s probably an area of huge,
huge opportunity.
On the other end of the spectrum, very traditional technologies like agricultural technologies are probably the most profound way to help the bottom
billion — the world’s most vulnerable billion people. If we could use water more
efficiently in the production of African agriculture, for example, we could move
180 million kids out of a condition of malnutrition, using adapted forms of nonbiotechnology-related improved seed varieties that we use everywhere else in
the world. It should be non-controversial. It should be relatively easy to do from
a breeding perspective, and it should be very, very low cost to small-scale farmers
who would demand low cost inputs anyway. It’s just a matter of getting it done.
That’s why we’ve tripled our research funding as part of our Feed the Future
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Monday, April 16
Amadou Mahtar Ba, Chief Executive, African Media Initiative
Tom Porteous, Deputy Program Director, Human Rights Watch
Hunter Walk, Director of Product Management, YouTube
Moderator: Ron Elving, Senior Washington Editor,
National Public Radio
Untethered Journalism:
The Role for Independent Media
Ron Elving
Welcome to our plenary session “Untethered Journalism:The Role for Independent
Media.” My name is Ron Elving. I am senior Washington editor for NPR [National
Public Radio] News. I also would like to welcome our web audience and let you
know that we’ll be taking your questions via Twitter using #GPF2012.
You all know that we live in an increasingly connected world where NGOs,
philanthropists and private-sector actors are increasingly providing the services
that were previously the purview of government alone.And as the social contract
continues to evolve, we are learning how to allocate those responsibilities across
sectors, taking advantage of the unique strengths of each, to strengthen a stilldeveloping system of global governance. In this session, we turn to the media and
to the role the media can play and must play in holding each of us accountable
to our commitments under that new social contract.
(From Left to Right) Amadou Mahtar Ba, Hunter Walk, Tom Porteous and Ron Elving
Joining me for this important conversation are three distinguished panelists.
I’m going to begin here in the middle with Amadou Mahtar Ba, who is the chief
executive of the African Media Initiative, an unprecedented pan-African effort
aimed at providing the continent’s media owners and practitioners with the
tools they need to play an effective role in their societies. He is also known
as the co-founder and the chairman of AllAfrica Global Media, an international
multimedia content service provider, a systems technology developer and the
largest distributor of African news and information worldwide.
At the end of the panel we see Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human
Rights Watch. He joined Human Rights Watch in 2006 as the London director
responsible for communications and advocacy in the United Kingdom. In the
1980s and early 1990s, he was a freelance correspondent for The Guardian
newspaper, the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and other media, first in
Cairo and later in Berlin, Algeria and Morocco.
Hunter Walk, closest to me here in the middle, is the director of product management at YouTube, where he focuses on YouTube as a platform for social good,
activism and free expression. He views YouTube’s relationship with the first of
those responsibilities — social good — as supporting three main pillars: causes
and nonprofits, education, and finally activism and free expression, and he hopes
to foster this further with his new role.
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I’d also like to acknowledge the presence with us of a scintillating personality
whom you’re going to hear more from tomorrow night; he is Dr. Bassem Youssef,
and some of you may have already heard of him. He is sometimes referred to as
the Jon Stewart of Egypt. He has made much, both in serious and in light fashion,
of the events of recent years and recent months in Cairo, took matters into
his own hands, as it were, after the events of Tahrir Square and he began with
a YouTube mock-news broadcast now known as the Bassem Youssef Show on
Egyptian TV.We’re looking forward to learning more about how he has combined
various media and satire to convey fundamental truths about events in Egypt,
something that has sometimes been practiced in this country as well.
So, to begin our discussion, I’d like to direct one question to all three of our panelists and get each of them to respond to it. I’m going to start immediately with
you, Hunter:What do we mean by “untethered journalism”? That term untethered
can mean “released.” It can mean “liberated,”“unleashed.” But untethered can also
mean “without any restraint” or “without any reference point.” So, which of those
two extremes comes to your mind when you hear “untethered journalism”?
Untethered Journalism: The Role for Independent Media
Amadou Mahtar Ba
Thank you for that question. Good afternoon, everyone.
I must confess I have no idea. I simply don’t know.What I know for a fact, though,
is that societies — particularly where I’m coming from, African societies — have
evolved to a point where everybody has a voice. And everybody having a voice
creates and enlarges the space — the traditional space that has been controlled
by governments for forever. And by doing that, [governments were] basically
clamping down on everybody’s — all citizens’ — rights but also ambitions, toward
holding them to account and demanding transparency and accountability. So, I
think this context is basically coming at an age when everybody now has a voice,
and that can be related to journalism, which actually is a good thing, but at the
same time, it puts huge challenges on the profession at large.
Ron Elving
And,Tom, I can’t resist asking you if you can give us some thoughts on this subject
both in your current role with Human Rights Watch as an advocate and also from
your perspective as a journalist.
Hunter Walk
That’s a great question. I think YouTube inherently is a platform that goes to the
heart of untethering, and it untethers from traditional restrictions on who gets
to create and who gets to watch. So, rather than choose, I think it’s a mixture of
both of those because they are different sides of the same coin. The explosion
of the ability of people to create video — YouTube gets more than 60 hours of
content uploaded every minute — leads to an abundance. Bandwidth used to be
scarce. There were only so many blue lines on your TV program guide, so somebody had to decide what went there.And what we’re seeing with YouTube is that
the audience gets to decide and creators get to decide. So, I think it’s untethered
from the scarcity and the traditional cost model of production.
On the other side, what we really see is the first, I’d say, global media citizen.
Seventy percent of YouTube’s traffic comes from outside the United States, and
every video thus ends up with a worldwide audience. The ability to watch
things simultaneously and together and to comment and interact is a much more
engaged citizenship than maybe somebody who experiences video just locally
or is more passive — has to sit back and watch but doesn’t have the ability to
respond. So for us, I think untethering is about the abundance and the global
aspect of new media.
Ron Elving
And it’s an extraordinary expression of how different things are from just a very
few years ago, let alone a generation or two.
Tom Porteous
Thank you.That’s just what I was going to do. Good afternoon, everyone.Attentive
readers of the program might have expected to see Ken Roth, my boss, here. I’m
obviously not Ken Roth, but I jumped in at the last minute, and he apologizes
for his absence.
I wanted to spend the weekend reading about freedom of expression and so forth,
but I ended up spending half my weekend trying to get two of my colleagues
out of detention in Bahrain because they were arrested yesterday morning at a
demonstration outside of Manama — a good example of the efforts of autocratic
regimes in the Middle East to keep journalism and freedom of expression as
tethered as possible.
To answer your question in the way that you suggest, as a former journalist, I
believe very much in responsible journalism, whatever that is. But I think you can
imagine that as a human rights advocate I also will defend the right of journalists to be totally irresponsible as long as they don’t go so far as actually inciting
violence. I think that’s where their right to freedom of expression ends. So, in a
nutshell that’s the answer. I defend responsible journalism. I believe journalists
have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be rigorous in their research, to do all the
things that I was trained to do as a journalist with the BBC and The Guardian,
but at the same time I do believe in the importance of freedom of expression. I
believe that we should respect the rights of people to be unrestrained in what
they say within the limits that I’ve described.
Amadou, from your perspective?
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Ron Elving
Gentlemen, let me throw this one out and let any of you answer it as you see
fit. Do you think that in some sense or another the rules as we may have understood them in conventional journalism — traditional, legacy forms of journalism,
newspapers, broadcast, now the various cable outlets and so on all moving onto
the internet with websites — do you think that the rules that have traditionally
applied to journalism are applicable, make sense, have a role to play, when you’re
talking about the kind of independent media that YouTube represents or any of
the many social media represent?
Hunter Walk
From my perspective at YouTube, yes, of course, and we see that in multiple layers.
The first is what we might think of as traditional journalists or traditional news
agencies using YouTube as another broadcast platform. In that case it’s taking
exactly the type of content they’ve already been creating and, because of the
distribution model, actually expanding their reach. But even more interesting,
I think, is that we see journalists playing two new roles that were a little bit
different from your image of the reporter with a flipbook going out and getting
the primary material — and that’s context and curation.
The world is being documented. The world is being documented because
everyone has a camera in their pocket, and for reporters we see YouTube being
not just an end point for content they create but a starting point. It’s the place
they find stories. It’s the place where they take content that’s coming up and
often lacks context. Around the Arab Spring, for example, a tremendous number
of videos came through without much description because it was all they could
do to get it out, get it uploaded, get it on an SD [Secure Digital] card. And organizations like Storyful, which is composed of ex-journalists, would curate the
content — add some context. In the event that a video came in and wasn’t what
it purported to be, they had enough information to point out,“Well, that building
was taken down 10 years ago, so this isn’t new.”And that’s a very, very important
role. That’s a layer that sits on top of everyone having a voice, and it doesn’t
mean that the individual uploader doesn’t have the same morality or ethics of
journalism, but context is what sometimes can turn a three-minute video into a
movement, into a story.
Amadou Mahtar Ba
I think what we have seen over the past few years everywhere around the
world is that the way we collect, disseminate and consume news and information has changed radically. But there is one thing that remains fundamental.
The fundamental principle that remains is the critical importance of media in
strengthening societies and actually in helping uplift societies. If you analyze a
little bit what happened in North Africa, in what you’ve called the Arab Spring, it
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Untethered Journalism: The Role for Independent Media
is the vulnerability of autocratic regimes — and not only their vulnerability but
their total weakness; but at the same time, it showed the fact that when people
can have some channels and those channels can reach people in the country and
around the world, you see the true manifestation of the importance of media no
matter the regulations that exist around the media landscape. So, I think despite
all the changes that we are witnessing now, it is important that journalists keep
on the ball, watching and reporting.
Now, just to comment on what my friend here just said: Is defending the rights
of journalists being irresponsible? I come from a space where I hear that every
day. But I hear that not from the right guys or the right ladies. I hear that from the
bad guys. Basically, we have studies around the continent.We show that we have
three socioprofessional categories, which are the least trustworthy, and they are
in order: the police, the politicians and the journalists. So, whenever you talk to
politicians, they will always tell you,“Well, these guys are irresponsible,” and they
put some facts to your face. So, based on that, we have decided to do something
against that, and I’ll come back to that a little bit later.
Ron Elving
Tom?
Tom Porteous
When you talk about traditional media or traditional journalism, I assume you’re
talking about the traditional media in the Western sense, but there’s also the other
kind: the traditional media of the autocratic dictatorship.
When I was in Berlin at the end of the 1980s, I remember sitting in the living
room of a friend of mine in East Berlin, and he had a pile of the daily newspaper
of the Communist Party, which was called Neues Deutschland. And, he said,“You
see that pile of newspapers there. It is against the law for me to have that pile
of newspapers there.” Because the official discourse — the official media — was
so contradictory from one day to another or from one month to another, the
discourse would change and it would be contradictory, so it was subversive to
have an archive of the official communist newspaper.
That’s the kind of journalism that Human Rights Watch struggles against the
whole time, this control of information by autocratic regimes. I would say that
what’s going on now with the media, with these amazing changes in information
technology, is a challenge both to the traditional media — in the sense that I think
you meant but also to the traditional media in autocratic regimes.And we’ve seen
that very clearly in the immense impact of social media in the Middle East and
North Africa in the past year. It’s been an incredible experience to see how young
activists have been able to use social media, video, multimedia, YouTube and so
forth to challenge decades of ruthless dictatorship.
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The other thing that’s changing, of course, is the economy of the media as a result
of the information revolution. I think that most of the newspapers and broadcasters are struggling, frankly, to find a model. With the advent of the internet
and such choice that that presents consumers with, how can they actually make
money out of what they do unless they are funded by the government, like the
BBC or NPR to some extent?
I think that’s a real challenge, and it’s something that affects Human Rights Watch
and organizations like Human Rights Watch very directly because in our work
of doing what is essentially investigative journalism with an advocacy edge — in
other words, going to a country and doing an in-depth investigation into some
sort of human rights crisis or issue — we’re finding that we’re increasingly alone.
The journalists whom we used to find in those kinds of situations are not there
because their organizations don’t have the money that they used to have to do
that kind of thing, which is something that we take very seriously. It’s an opportunity for us because obviously we are then the only provider of that news, and that
means the media is coming increasingly to us for the information that we are able
to provide with our own funding model, which is obviously different and relies
on philanthropy. So, that’s one area, which clearly affects Human Rights Watch
and other NGOs, in which the changes in the media are having quite a big impact.
Ron Elving
Yes, Hunter.
Hunter Walk
The question that Tom brought up of audience — “In this world where does audience move?” — is a very interesting one, and we have great data on that.
When I was doing my 2011 Year in Review, I was looking for interesting stats,
and I happened upon one that totally shocked me, but when I started to think
about it and talked to some folks, it made sense. I was looking at each country’s
per capita internet user: Who watches the most YouTube? So, of the folks who
are online within the country, how much YouTube do they watch? The US is a
big market for us, Brazil, UK — all these countries are quite sizeable in terms
of the audience. The creators on YouTube are almost the equivalent of cable
channels in the amount of audience they have. They get millions of people. But
what surprised me was that the answer by far was Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia
internet users watch three times as much YouTube, on average, than US internet
users. Why? Because when you’re all of a sudden given choice. When you’re all
of a sudden given abundance, when you’re untethered from what was previously a small set of media options and you’re able to see and experience at both
a hyperlocal — what goes on around you — as well as a global level, what do
Untethered Journalism: The Role for Independent Media
people care about? It turns out that people vote with their feet and vote with
their attention and add to or sometimes shift away from the traditional media
sources they’ve relied upon.
Ron Elving
I had no idea there were that many office workers in Saudi Arabia, but I guess
now we have an indication that that’s the case.
Hunter Walk
This might be more important than the GDP [gross domestic product] in terms
of charting growth.
Ron Elving
Surely we can all agree that the use of social media that we saw in terms of
some of the regimes that were overthrown in recent years was a positive thing
that was inspiring to the world. We all saw people rising up and finding their
voice and then finding these extraordinary electronic tools connected to these
extraordinary global networks that enabled people to have instant attention to
problems that otherwise had festered for decades and generations.
But let’s pause for a moment and look at some of the other things that the traditional media have done. One of the things they have done is provide a certain
kind of attention to problems that were addressed by philanthropy, including
global philanthropy.And to some degree the community has come to understand
how to use those media, how to communicate through those media.And if those
media are going to be substantially weakened or altered or led toward some form
of transformation, if not extinction, how exactly does the global philanthropy
community make use of this new, much more diffuse energy and these much
more widely distributed tools to call attention to the causes that are the causes
of global philanthropy?
Amadou Mahtar Ba
I think the global philanthropy community would benefit a lot from these new
forms of media. Let’s keep in mind that in the traditional model you still had a
gatekeeper, right? And because of that gatekeeper role, a lot of things were filtered.
Today it’s actually the citizens, who by themselves engage with whomever they
want — the philanthropy community, for instance. So, if I were working in this
field, I would boost all my communication resources, put a lot of them in new
media.This does not mean that we sideline traditional media because traditional
media is still doing excellent work, particularly in some areas like Africa, where
radio is still by far the dominant means if you want to reach citizens.
Ron Elving
Tom, thoughts?
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Untethered Journalism: The Role for Independent Media
Tom Porteous
Hunter Walk
Yes, I think that the traditional media still plays a very important role. Human
Rights Watch’s theory of change is quite simple: We go and we do our human
rights research, whether on a crisis in Syria or something more long running
in Africa — the connection between human rights abuses and development in
Ethiopia, just to give a recent example. Then we try to use that information to
persuade people who have the power and the influence in a particular situation to do something about it. Obviously the media is an important part of that
advocacy effort, and we still use the traditional media because the traditional
media is still very, very powerful. But the new media presents us with all kinds of
opportunities, which I hope we’re grasping.A number of my colleagues now are
regular tweeters and have some quite large followings in their own communities.
I believe one of the biggest tweeters is our Pakistan researcher, who has a huge
following in Pakistan, and it’s a good way for him to do some of his advocacy on
Twitter, literally.
So, big question: How do organizations that are doing good make use of all this
technology? I have a very specific answer. Find me after the panel or, if you’re
watching, you can e‑mail me, hunter@google. At YouTube we have a program
that’s specifically aimed at working with nonprofits. It launched a few years
ago, and it’s now operating in four countries with 17,000 nonprofits, hundreds
of which have more than 1 million views of videos. It’s people really creating a
presence, not just claiming a small name space and talking to themselves.
I think we still haven’t really grasped the enormity of the opportunities that are
presented, but let’s not forget that there are also challenges in this new media.
The new media is just as much a tool available for the bad guys as it is for the
good guys. So, after the failure of the first uprising in the Middle East, which was
in Iran in 2009, everyone was talking at that time about social media — and it
failed. The uprising was completely stamped out by the regime, and since then
the Iranian regime has moved to deal with the threat by basically closing down
the internet in Iran, and they’re proceeding with that quite swiftly.
And, of course, one should also not forget that in terms of the Arab Spring there
are some places that are doing better than others; but even where it’s doing best,
say, in Tunisia, there is a transition under way and the end of that transition is still
not clear. In the past few weeks, we’ve issued a number of press releases criticizing the authorities in Tunisia, for example, for handing down seven-year prison
sentences to two writers for remarks that were deemed offensive to Islam, using
repressive legislation from the era of the previous regime. One of the recommendations that we’re making in all these transitions — whether in Tunisia or in
Libya or in Egypt — is that one of the priorities should be to repeal this kind of
repressive legislation and to bring in legislation that is in compliance with international treaties, which many of these states have actually signed up to already.
So, there are huge challenges, and I think that the role of human rights organizations is to continue to be extremely vigilant particularly when it comes to
freedom of expression in the new transitioning states of the Middle East and
North Africa.
One of the priorities for me is figuring out how to work effectively through
foundations because there is a lot of capacity building that needs to be done in
terms of helping the downstream organizations tell their story.Video is where 15
years ago you’d say,“You guys, I know you’re busy. I know you’re understaffed, but
you really need a website.”And then 5, 10 years ago it would be,“Guys, you’ve got
to figure out how to let donors give you money online.” And now it’s,“How are
we going to use video?”When I talk to a lot of NGOs, I ask them what their goals
are with video, and it’s often fuzzy:“Awareness — I want awareness.”That’s great;
that’s a first step, and it means a lot: “I want to be heard. I want to understand
who is watching me.” But I want to get to the point where we are as analytical as
the media company and the advertising community are. They know that if they
get 1,000 views of a video, they’ll get a check for $25 in terms of advertising. I
want people to know that 1,000 views of a video turns into $50 of donations, or
200 clicks turns into a petition or 250 people registering for an e‑mail list want
to know more, want to become active.
That’s not going to happen without the help of folks in this room, so I hope to
continue the dialogue, but I think what we really need are people to get out
ahead of this and start figuring out how we get our organizations to start using
this. How do we make sure that they have funding for it? Right? So, again, this gets
into the dirty area of,“Oh, well, that’s not spending on direct programs.Those are
operational costs.”And of course all good organizations want to minimize operational costs and put all the money toward program spending. But you should see
the leverage that people can get out of understanding media.
One of the most effective nonprofits on YouTube told me that they’ve been using
social media so well that they’ve gotten their cost to raise a dollar down to seven
cents. So when I hear that, I say, “How can we get you more money? How can
we get this story to spread so that everybody can tell it?” There is great, great
content in this room and through the organizations that you support, and it’s a
real shame if that content is not coming online because I can tell you: People
want to watch it.
Ron Elving
Thank you, Hunter. I heard a murmur pass through the room when you said seven
cents to the dollar. I think that is highly useful information.
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title
Monday, April 16
Tony Blair, Former Prime Minister, Great Britain and Northern Ireland
In conversation with … Jane Wales
Jane Wales
Innovation in Philanthropy
We have an opportunity to talk to someone who has experienced governance
up front, been responsible for governance and found it so fascinating to see
what the philanthropic community does, what impact it has, that he’s chosen
to go that route as well. Mr. Tony Blair currently represents the Quartet on the
Middle East — that is to say the United Nations, the United States, Russia and the
European Union. Their task is to try to prepare the Palestinians for statehood,
looking at ways to build market economies, build leadership and build healthy
politics in the region.
He has also created three foundations since leaving the job of prime minister. One
is the Tony Blair Faith Foundation [TBFF], which he is going to be kind enough
to speak about a bit. Another is the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative [AGI],
and the third is the Tony Blair Sports Foundation. So, please, I’m going to ask you
to welcome not only the former prime minister, but also the current philanthropist,Tony Blair.
Tony Blair
Thank you. Good to see you. Thank you very much indeed, Jane and everyone.
It’s a real pleasure to be with you here at the Global Philanthropy Forum and
to see such a distinguished gathering of people in the world of philanthropy. I
can speak about it both from the perspective of having been in government
and the perspective today, as Jane was just saying, of being the founder of three
philanthropic institutions myself.
Tony Blair
I’ll tell you this very briefly about government:When you come into government,
you are immensely optimistic that government can solve everything, and really
the rest of your time in power is an education. In the UK [United Kingdom], our
election campaigns last four weeks.Yours go on a little longer than that because
you’re really keen on them. Another difference between the systems is that we
have our election campaign, and then if you win you literally go straight into
government. So, Thursday night you realize you’ve won, and by Friday morning
you’re with the queen. Right? So, this is a big thing for us.
I remember when I came into power, I actually walked through Downing Street
as prime minister for the first time on May 2, 1997, and my party had been out of
power for 18 years. We’d lost four elections in a row. I don’t recommend it, but
it was a long time in opposition. There is a tradition in the British system when
you go through the door of Downing Street for the first time:There’s a corridor
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from the front door down to the cabinet room at the end, and the tradition is
that all the civil servants, the people who work in either administration, line up
on either side of the corridor to applaud the new prime minister. Now, we’d
been out of power for 18 years, so they were used to the other lot. So, as I was
going down the line, there were people sobbing and this type of thing, and by
the time I got to the end of the line I was feeling sort of guilty about the whole
thing. I remember that I then went through the door into the cabinet room, and
I’ll never forget the cabinet secretary sitting there. He’s a very powerful figure
in the British system, and he just said to me in that very British way,“Well done.
What now?”And the “What now?” really was what the next 10 years were about.
In the course of that, I did learn about the power of government but also, as I
shall say in a moment, its limitations.
A consequential risk of the continuing travails of the global economy is that in
concentrating on our own challenges we lose the appetite to help others. What
we may call, as Jane has called it,“the global social contract” — a sense of responsibility on the part of the better off to help the worst off — can come under strain.
For my 10 years as prime minister, the social contract was growing, but that was
in different economic times. Now the preoccupation with countries is bound
to be internal, so debate about how we reshape and reinvigorate this global
social contract and the role of philanthropy in it is very timely.This is absolutely
the right moment for government to do all it can to promote philanthropy and
certainly nothing to harm it.
The strangest sentiment in politics — by which I mean not politics in the partisan
sense but the broader polity of society — is cynicism.The party political debate
may at times give us much to be cynical about, though it is an essential part of
a vibrant democracy. But in larger terms, the history of the past half century
should give us cause for celebration as well as concern. Many more people live
in freedom. Many fewer live in poverty.
Change for the better, therefore, does happen. Progress is alive. And change
happens, as you know all too well, through committed people; and it happens
when those committed people are motivated by a desire to improve the lives of
others — when that desire is accompanied by a strategy for change, not just a
vision of it, when it’s creative and when it challenges rather than accommodates
the status quo.
Change comes sometimes through committed people in government, and some
change can happen only through government.When I think of my own 10 years
in office of reforms in health or education, law and order, advances in civil rights,
peace in Northern Ireland — those changes required the power of government.
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But as I said a moment ago, those 10 years taught me something else: the limitations of government. This is where the desire and the strategy get blocked by
the politics of vested interest, by bureaucracy, by the innate tendency to inertia
of a system designed to manage the world, not change it. Government in this
guise loves process. It rewards caution. It disdains risk, and it distrusts creativity.
It thinks in a linear way, and challenges that don’t fit neat government definitions or which stretch across boundaries disappear into the machinery, never to
reemerge and certainly not as solutions.
When acute crisis threatens, government often acts with speed, but all too often
it can ponder endlessly and then proceed at a glacial pace.
So, it is into this space, not as a substitute but as a compliment to conventional
government and politics, that the philanthropic sector has marched. Today its
contribution is vast. In the United States, it dwarfs government spending, for
example, on overseas aid, which is why imaginative leaders like Rajiv Shah, who
is the new head of USAID, whom I know you heard from this morning, want to
work with it and not apart from it. And it’s why when I left office, finally shorn
of power, I decided to exercise influence by joining it.
As well as my responsibilities as Quartet representative, I’ve created three new
philanthropic organizations. I have a sports foundation in the northeast of
England, which encourages grassroots sport and reflects my belief that sport is
an essential, not an optional, element of modern education for young people.The
two global foundations are the Africa Governance Initiative and the Tony Blair
Faith Foundation. Both reflect lessons that I learned in government but in respect
of which I found traditional ways of government inadequate. Both relate directly
to the new social contract that is the theme of this year’s Forum, and both have
taught me a lot about global philanthropy and its opportunities.
The Africa Governance Initiative is based on this idea — that the problems of
Africa cannot be solved by aid alone. The fundamental challenge today is not
simply external flows of money but internal systems of governance.What’s more,
this is not just about honest government, important though that is. It’s also about
effective government. The biggest challenge for many governments, by the way,
elsewhere as well as in Africa, is getting things done; it’s delivery, deciding priorities, creating mechanisms for achieving them and tracking the performance until
the objective is actually achieved.
This is true even for sophisticated systems of government like our own. It is true
in abundance for those of emerging countries. So, what I saw all too often was
that leaders would take power. They have the will and the vision. They may be
completely honest and abhor corruption, but once in power they find that the
levers of effective implementation are missing. They get overwhelmed by the
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pressure of the job events for which they are unprepared and a bureaucracy
that can often be a major part of the problem, not the solution. By the way, they
usually have a stack of well-written reports from international institutions, telling
them what they should do but no one helping them with how they do it. And it
is the how, not the what, that is usually the issue.
So, my Africa Governance Initiative, now in six African nations, puts teams of
people — all of whom have hands-on experience of doing it, whether in government or in the private sector — into the country, working alongside the country’s
leaders to build the necessary capacity and to transfer skills to help decide
priorities, develop plans of action, build the infrastructure of implementation
and track performance.And the results — and this is in areas as diverse as health
care, encouragement of private-sector investment and even in seemingly small
but in truth crucial areas like the organization of the president’s time in private
office — are transformative.
But the concept at the heart of it is very different from the traditional donorrecipient relationship of government aid. It is live-in technical help, not fly-in/
fly-out consulting. It helps deliver the country’s priorities, not our priorities. It
includes, through my interaction with the leaders, the politics as well as the
technical theory. It works to bring quality private-sector investment in — and not
regard it as an enemy.And it focuses as much on the rule of law as on small-scale
community projects. Above all, it’s based on partnership and not dependence.
In this sense it absolutely fits the notion of the new social contract. It implies a
maturing of the relationship between wealthy and emerging nations and the role
of philanthropy and the private sector in helping those nations to help themselves. So, the value of AGI lies not just in the work it does but in the approach
it symbolizes.
Likewise with the Faith Foundation. Again this was formed as an idea during my
time in government. Even before 9/11 and certainly since then, I could see that
the use of hard power and even the use of traditional systems of soft power were
inadequate to deal with the strain of fundamentalist ideology that was religious in
nature. I started to understand that however much we flinch from acknowledging
it, the extremism is not based simply on a set of political aims. It was based on a
profound distortion of faith. I began to analyze conflict in the world and found
that the majority had a religious or cultural element. I became convinced that
we could not confront the extremism unless we were prepared to engage with
religion as religion, not as a derivative of politics.
I could also see that driven by the unstoppable force of globalization — in
person through migration, online through the internet — it is in the nature of
today’s world that people of different cultures and faiths will mix together, live
together and work together as never before. Therefore, understanding the faith
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Innovation in Philanthropy
of the other — learning about it and learning to live with it in peace — becomes
a central objective of a policy to secure peace. In this way, a new part of a new
social contract is respect for difference, for diversity, for the minority’s rights as
well as the majority’s power.
In the years since 9/11 and again following the Arab revolutions around the
Middle East and North Africa, my conviction as to the importance of this has
grown. What’s more, though those peddling a poisonous and exclusivist view
of religion — which sees those who have a different faith as the enemy — are
immensely well-organized and funded with a multiplicity of websites dedicated
to their cause; by contrast, virtually nothing organized or funded comes the other
way. So a wholly maligned view of the West is often fostered in Muslim nations;
and in the West, there is widespread misunderstanding of what Islam really
stands for.This is not confined to Muslim/Christian relations; there are strains of
extremism also in Christianity itself, in Judaism, Hinduism and even Buddhism.
The intolerance to of minorities also encompasses persecution of Bahais and
sects within a faith — that is, intra-religious as well as inter-religious extremism.
So the Tony Blair Faith Foundation has designed program of education and
action, now in 20 different countries, all with the aim of fostering knowledge,
understanding and therefore respect between among those of different faiths.We
know we cannot by ourselves change the balance of argument and debate, but
we believe we can show that through inter-faith collaboration, we can encourage
the acceptance of “the other” and that this should become part of mainstream
government and international policy that is every bit as important as conventional soft-power diplomacy. So in both cases, I have entered a new sector for
me — philanthropy — to try to point the way on issues that I dealt with deeply in
government but in respect of which I always felt traditional government fell short.
It has been my luck to have entered this field at a time when it is more exciting
and dynamic than ever.The work being done by those represented here today is
extraordinary and inspiring in its breadth, reach and impact. My reflections on
the sector having now experience of it, both as a partner to me in government
and now as a player in the sector itself, are as follows.
First, the best philanthropy is not just about giving money but giving leadership.
The best philanthropists bring into their philanthropy the gifts that made them
successful: the drive, the determination, the refusal to accept that something
can’t be done if it needs to be. It is creative, not passive; it seeks to disrupt, not
follow, conventional thinking. It steps into areas government is too fearful or
too risk adverse to go. It uses technology and its power to change the world in
innovative ways. It is visionary, seeing the connections, the trends, the patterns
that others don’t.
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
It is change-making, no matter at which level — community, nation or globe — it
is operating.
In this way, it can also help government institutions, again global or national, to
change. Here is where partnership among the public, private and philanthropic
sectors today is of the essence. The real challenge for government, especially
following the financial crisis of the past three or four years, is to change itself.
Government has to become more strategic, more about empowering than
controlling. In this endeavour, creative partnership with those in the business or
philanthropic sector can be a huge part of that reform. This can happen within
countries, but also globally, for example through the World Bank or UN. The
ability to leverage government or IFI [international financial institutions] power
through working with the philanthropic sector is enormous and only just being
fully comprehended.
Philanthropic foundations could also do more to work with each other — one
reason why this Forum is so important.There are synergies, shared experiences
and contributions that can happen if we talk to each other as friends and not
rivals. One small example: In Sierra Leone, AGI and TBFF now cooperate in
delivering the government’s anti-malaria program through using the unparalleled reach of the faith infrastructure — churches and mosques — to disseminate
important public health messages about malaria prevention.
My conclusion is about the new social contract itself.There is a political debate
about globalization — good or bad? In my view, this is an entirely pointless
discussion. Globalization is a fact, and it is propelled forward by people through
technology and travel.The real debate is therefore: How do we make globalization
work — and for the many, not the few? The answer lies, in part, in understanding
that the key dividing line in politics today is less traditional ideas of left versus
right, than the struggle between the open minded and the closed — between
those who see in globalization an opportunity to open up the world so that it
is not riven with conflicts of race, nation and faith; and those who find such an
open world too frightening and close down in the face of it. Central to this goal
is the fight against poverty and injustice, whether social, economic or political.
The open-mind seeks to imbue globalization with common bonds and a shared
sense of justice.The closed-mind seeks to retreat behind the walls of identity of
race, nation and faith.
At the core of this new social contract is the open-mind: optimistic, not cynical;
celebrating difference, not scared of it; and believing that to be committed to
the service of others, is a life purpose worth striving for. It is what you represent
here, and I am honored to be part of it, a refugee from conventional politics, who
has found a new lease on life in philanthropy!
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Innovation in Philanthropy
Jane Wales
Thank you so much.You know, the last time I saw you I was in Monrovia in Liberia
with a group of philanthropists from here — several are in fact at this Conference:
Cate Muther and Joan Platt and Dave Keller. I’m seeing some of them.You made
the mistake of staying at the same hotel, and we saw you heading for breakfast.We
determined that your breakfast should not be lonely, that you should meet with
all 15 of us, and it was a wonderful conversation. So I want to get a sense from
you of how your work is going in Liberia, where there is an extraordinary leader.
Tony Blair
First of all I was a little worried about where this story about seeing me in the
hotel was going for a moment! I remember the breakfast.
The work in Liberia is going really well. You can never engage in a partnership
with a government unless you’ve got an inspirational leader. I think Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf is such a leader. But it’s also the work we’re doing — for example, helping
create the program for the new government and implement it and so on. Let me
just emphasize that the real problem for many of these countries is just getting
the basics done — you know, getting the lights on, getting the port in proper
hands. Today in development, infrastructure, electricity and power are so vitally
important. People who don’t have that can’t have anything. So, it’s basically about
practical methods of implementation, and that’s what we work on.
I think the international donor community has had a bit of a shock in the past few
years, and it’s the right moment to reassess the type of help it gives and the type
of relationships it has. I think it’s far healthier if it is one of genuine partnership,
not a donor-recipient relationship. I always say to any of the countries that I work
with in Africa,“Our ambition with you is to wave the donor community good-bye.”
Jane Wales
You mentioned during your remarks the importance of attracting foreign investment.There are many countries — Egypt is one of them — that attracted foreign
investment and had very high rates of growth — 5 percent rates of growth — but
the development wasn’t broad-based; it wasn’t felt by the populace at large.What
are the barriers to the kind of broad-based development that’s needed, not just
in Egypt but elsewhere?
Tony Blair
I would say they’re threefold. Obviously if you’ve got corrupt systems of government, it’s very difficult to make progress. And I’m a great believer now. I always
say to people, the interesting thing — the reason I do the African governance and
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why I’m passionate about governance — is that the journey of politics is basically
this: You start at your most popular and least capable and you end at your most
capable and least popular.That’s the journey of politics.
What I found over that period of 10 years is that there are some very basic things
that countries need to do whatever your situation, but particularly if you are a
country that is emerging and developing and if you’ve got a young population.
You’ve got to decide your priorities.You’re not going to be able to do everything,
so take three things and get them done.You know, whenever I read of a country
report that says,“We’ve got 150 priorities,” I know nothing’s ever going to happen.
Get three; get them done.
Realize that you’ve got to get your economy moving, and there are ways you do
that now.What makes a successful economy is not terribly hard to work out, and
there are plenty of very smart people who can tell you, but making the changes
necessary to do it is very important.
You’ve got to provide proper education for your young people. That is obviously absolutely essential, and I do believe that having the basic infrastructure
right is important. If you’re going through a period where you’ve been through
major political change, as has happened in North Africa, that is the absolute key
thing. This is my constant refrain to people in the Middle East and North Africa:
Democracy is the beginning. It’s not the end. Right? You’ve then got to make the
decisions, and those decisions are difficult.
One other thing is quite controversial, but I will say it anyway — I always say
this to the leaders I work with:“Be completely open about where you get your
ideas from.” When I was doing health care reform in the UK — and we’re very
proud of our National Health Service, but it did require reform and indeed still
does — I brought in people from the outside who weren’t British, and this caused
a certain degree of consternation. My attitude was “Get the ideas from wherever
you need them,” and I think idea nationalism is a really regressive thought. You
know what I mean?
So, decide on your priorities and focus on implementing them. Bring in the best
ideas to get things done. Get practical. That’s one of the reasons why I’m a big
supporter of the philanthropic sector because they will often get things done
in circumstances where years later government is still wandering around in
no-man’s-land.
Jane Wales
Speaking of setting priorities, in Sierra Leone you’re very active in trying to
address the acute problem of maternal health. Say something about what the
leadership has done there.
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Innovation in Philanthropy
Tony Blair
In Sierra Leone they’ve now implemented a free health care policy for children
under five and pregnant women, and the result of that is that there’s been something like a million more children seen in hospitals and about a quarter million
more mothers seen. The results of that are staggering. There’s been a halving of
deaths from diseases like malaria. There’s been a major improvement in child
mortality figures. Here was the problem they had:They had the money from the
donors; it was about organizing a system.
One of the other things I learned in government — and it was such an amazing
thing — is when you’re in opposition, the saying is the doing. Right? Because all
you do is issue statements.You come into government and you think, I’m sitting
around at number 10 Downing Street.There’s a very great British system here.
Jane Wales
It’s a good address.
Tony Blair
Yes, good address, in some respects. And you think, Right. I’ll thump the table
and I say. ‘Let something be done.’ You think then it gets done — and that is a
big mistake because it doesn’t work like that at all.You’ve got to make sure that,
for example, if you’re introducing your maternal/child mortality policy, you’ve
got the trained workers out there; you’ve got to make sure the clinics are open;
you’ve got to have the drugs properly there.They’ve got to have the refrigeration
where it’s necessary. You’ve got to have people knowing about it, able to use it.
You’ve got to manage that system — and that’s where I think the big problems are.
Jane Wales
And, back to the economy, of course markets are systems, right? They involve
legal infrastructure and physical infrastructure. As you’ve been advising leaders
on jump-starting their economies and ensuring that the full population benefits,
how have you been thinking about the wider infrastructure that needs to be in
place, including educated workers and educated consumers?
Tony Blair
Again, you’ve got to find somewhere to start.And there may be plenty of people
who wouldn’t agree with me about this, but this is my sense working with
governments in developing countries: I would get the economy growing. I would
get infrastructure done, as I was saying, particularly around power, electricity,
roads, ports — the basic stuff. If you’ve got resources, get them developed by
people who can transfer intellectual capital and really make sure that they’re
also there to help the development of the country. In other words, I would put
the economic development first.
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Don’t misunderstand that. I’m not saying you ignore education and so on, but
if the economy isn’t growing and you’re not generating income, you’ve always
got a problem.
This is where reliance on the donor community can be a blessing and a curse at
the same time. In one of the African countries that we work in, when we first got
there literally 70 percent of the time the finance minister was negotiating with
the donor community. That’s not healthy. One of the things I think that China’s
entry into Africa has done is made us sit up and think about how effective we’re
being. I understand why some people get very anxious about it — and I’m not
saying there aren’t issues surrounding some of the China investments and so
on — but the difference was described to me by one African leader.
He said, “Let me tell you the difference. When I want to get a road built from A
to B, you might not think it’s important because you want to do a small-scale
project in some bit of the country. But I’m telling you it’s important to get this
road from A to B.” He said,“I will spend months, possibly years, negotiating with
the international donor community.The guy from China comes. I tell him I need
a road from A to B, and the next day someone is there with a shovel. And that,”
he said,“is the difference.”
It’s quite interesting to have that competition within the sphere now, and I’m not
saying we imitate it, but we should reflect on how we can become far more effective partners in development. My view is that for today’s African countries — and
I think you can broaden that — without the basic infrastructure none of these
things like health and education are ever going to work.
Jane Wales
Speaking of partnership, you’ve partnered with one of the leading philanthropists on the continent, and that’s Tony Elumelu. I think you’re sitting right there
aren’t you? Yes!
Innovation in Philanthropy
private-sector investment that’s quality and that’s about transparency? It’s also
frankly about making sure that when someone wants to invest, their investment
experience is positive. We’ve formed a partnership [Blair Elumelu Fellowship
Programme], and so-called Blair Elumelu Fellows are Africans who have experience doing that. We help them work alongside the governments of those
countries to make sure it actually happens.
There are plenty of examples of when inward investment has been done badly
or not transparently, and it’s hard to think that you’re ever going to get these
economies really moving well unless you get inward investment coming in; then
you’re also encouraging the small-business sector within the country, which is
another thing that Tony works on.
Jane Wales
Yes.And small and growing enterprises — that’s part of your focus in other parts
of the world, including in your work for the Quartet, isn’t that right?
Tony Blair
That’s on the Palestinian side, although there are a few political issues there
that occasionally get in the way, so that’s a different thing altogether. We’d need
a new forum to tackle that one, I think. But I’m trying, and I don’t mean to be
pessimistic about it at all.
Jane Wales
Let me take you back to Egypt for a little bit and back to your Faith Foundation.
How should we understand the role of faith in Egyptian politics? I think when
Americans hear about faith and politics coming together, they have images of
the revolution in Iran. Is that a fair analogy? Is that completely wrong given that
Iran may not be the best model for a country like Egypt for a variety of reasons?
Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Hey!
Jane Wales
There he is.Tell me something about that partnership.
Tony Blair
Tony Elumelu is one of the guys who’s now an emerging philanthropist in Africa
who had a very successful career in business and now wants to put something
back. We’re partnering and trying to bring in people who can help develop the
private-sector capacity of these countries. So, for example, how do we attract
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No, I think it’s different from that, although there are people here probably better
qualified than me to talk about it. I met the head of the Muslim Brotherhood
from Tunisia just a short time ago, and part of the difficulty is that in those societies their governments provided stability, but internally they often presented to
their own citizens a picture of oppression or corruption and lack of opportunity.
So, parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in a sense became people who were
prepared to stand up against a system that people felt was wrong.
I’m constantly saying to people,“We had to go through a lot of evolutions before
we got our democracy into shape.” I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of improvements to make, but basically we think the fundamentals of the system are sound.
I mean, we took several centuries in Britain. Now we don’t have that luxury, but I
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think there will be a process of change whereby people go through this in places
like Egypt. Let’s assume that parties that are overtly religious get into power. If
they don’t deliver for people, the important thing is then to preserve the right
for people to put them out again. I think what will happen in time is that people
start to organize and agitate around a body of ideas that is very open to the world.
I’m sure that will happen, too, so I’m long-term optimistic. I think short-term it’s
quite challenging for reasons that are obvious, but long-term there’s no doubt
that in the end the onward march of liberty is healthy.
Jane Wales
What are the risks that there will be an illiberal democracy where there are
elections but the majority curtails the rights and the freedoms of the minority?
Tony Blair
I think that depends on people standing up and standing out against that. I can
tell you all the challenges and all the difficulties, but I’m reluctant to let go of
that essential optimism that in the end people decided that they wanted to take
their destiny in their own hands. I think that is still there, but I do believe that
this issue of religion and faith is a major part of the debate today.
I first came across this issue in Northern Ireland, where people would often say
to me,“Oh, it’s nothing to do with Catholics and Protestants, really.”And, I would
say, “That’s a pity because the guys engaged in it think it is.” So there’s a limitation there. When I deal with the Israeli/Palestinian question, religion is an issue.
I mean, how are you going to solve Jerusalem unless it’s a component there? I
understand why some political leaders rejoice in religion or whatever, but most
political leaders think, Let’s tread very carefully here. I really do believe that this
concept of interfaith understanding is a vital part of making the world work today.
And I think that’s true in some of these emerging democracies where people
have got to understand that democracy is not just about the freedom to vote; it’s
also about a free attitude of mind, and freedom of religion is a major component
of that.You need to be open to people who are different.
In Europe today we have major issues to do with cultural and faith questions,
and we’ve got to be prepared to explore those as faith issues and try not to say,
“Oh well, let’s try to make them into a bit of politics.” Of course they’ve got their
political dimension, but they’re often based around ideas that have to do with
religion itself, and you’ve got to focus on that.
Jane Wales
I want to focus a little bit on global governance. We’ve been talking about individual nation-states, but there are challenges that are shared — like climate change.
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Innovation in Philanthropy
How are we doing when it comes to the political will necessary to manage global
problems? How are we doing in terms of the mechanisms of global governance?
Do we have them right? Do we have them in place?
Tony Blair
I think we’ve got a long way to go on both, actually.
The problem today is that many challenges are global; and there’s something
a little unreal when you’ve got a constant political debate, for example, about
the economy in a country when, yes, of course domestic policy considerations
matter, but certainly for an economy like the UK’s you’re going to be affected
in a major way by what’s happening around you. Issues to do with climate
change, for example, obviously can’t be dealt with on a national basis. I think
the problem is that the post-war institutions we created are not really adequate
to deal with the fundamentally global nature of the challenges we have today.
They don’t recognize the fact that the geopolitics of the world has changed.They
don’t recognize the fact that the problems have changed — and it’s very hard to
change the institutions.
I once got involved in the debate about reforming the UN Security Council,
and by the time it was over I wished I’d never got involved in it because the
politics is immensely difficult. I would like to see our way out of this financial
crisis, and some of the major global questions that we’re dealing with today: one,
institutions that better reflect the politics of the world today and, two, to try to
find better mechanisms for dealing with some of these questions than the ones
we’ve got today.
The other thing just to realize about world leaders today — again, it’s one of the
things I always say to people about politics — is that contrary to all appearances
political leaders in the end are human beings, and it doesn’t always seem like
that. They seem like they arrived from outer space. But actually, by the way you
voted for them in our systems, you get under immense pressure of events, of
things that come at you; today’s media world and environment are completely
different from even 20 years ago. And today, certainly if you’re the British prime
minister but probably the same for the president of the United States, you’ve got
so much more that you’re expected to do in global terms.
I used to say about the G8 [Group of Eight] that the point of it was that you got
everyone in a room together where you could talk about issues, and they were
forced to talk about them. But there should be more-rational ways of decisionmaking today, and that’s something we’re going to have to confront at some point
because otherwise we’ll end up with paralysis in circumstances where major
issues need affecting. You take an issue, for example, that wouldn’t be regarded
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by most leaders as a major political question today — such as water as a resource.
It’s a major thing. How are you going to make sense of that within the various
frameworks that we have at the moment? It’s very hard.
Jane Wales
You’ve made me think of another question because we just had a panel on the
role of new media, and I wanted to ask you more broadly about the information revolution and its impact on governance. On the one hand, it decentralizes
authority and power, and that can undermine states to some extent; on the other
hand, it provides lots of tools for the delivery of services, for the consultation of
your citizens. Do we have a sense yet of the net effect on governance?
Innovation in Philanthropy
that question because we wouldn’t create those self-same systems today with
this technology. If we were starting from scratch, we’d have different systems.
So, yes, there’s lots you can learn from our systems. There are good things to
learn about predictable rules, and rule of law and even systems of professional
qualifications — all of that. But due to technology alone, if you’re creating an
education system today, look at it completely differently from how someone in
that Wodehousian post-war era would be looking at these things.” And I would
apply that across many, many different areas of government.
Tony Blair
We have a sense of the net effect in that it’s revolutionary — and it is.The social
media is a revolutionary phenomenon, and I think it has exactly the two consequences you identified.
It’s impossible for governments today to restrain the flow and the exchange of
information.They can try as hard as they like, but it doesn’t work; that’s why even
in some of the most closed societies you see the boundaries being pushed back
and the doors opened.That’s actually a positive thing, but it also makes the business of governing tough: One of the things that happens today in politics — and
it’s really important to understand this from the point of view of people making
these decisions — is that in the old days, when I was first the British prime
minister, waves of opinion would build and then you would try to deal with them
and then they might hit tidal wave force at a certain point. Today you can go
from nothing to tsunami force fast, and that means the business of government is
also far more difficult — communicating with people is more difficult; stopping
rumors that are foolish is more difficult.
The second consequence of this revolutionary phenomenon, of course, is that
it’s immensely enabling.Technology in itself is a reason why government is going
to have to reform radically. It’s a really interesting thing to say this, having been
part of that system for those 10 years, but I always used to say to people in the
UK that if Clement Attlee came back to Britain today (he was the great leader
of the post-war Labour government in 1945), there’s so much he just wouldn’t
recognize about society — how it looked, how it worked, the technology, the
travel, everything — until he came into Whitehall, and then he’d feel completely
at home.That bit is still chugging along.
The technology — the social media — this is one of the things I mention when
I’m advising people in emerging countries, and they say to me,“How long will it
take us to get a system like the West, say, in education or health?” I say,“Don’t ask
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39
Monday, April 16
Judy Miller, Vice President and Director, Conrad N. Hilton
Humanitarian Prize
Steven M. Hilton, President and CEO, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
Presentation of Prize to Richard Blewitt, CEO, HelpAge
International
Special Address: Robert Zoellick, President, World Bank Group
Conrad N. Hilton
Humanitarian Prize Dinner
Jane Wales
As you may have gathered from Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu and Tony Blair, this
evening is dedicated to the awarding of the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. We’ve
been very, very fortunate that the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation has entered into
a partnership with the Global Philanthropy Forum, where they generously allow
this extraordinary event to take place during the Conference. The prize, as you
know, is a $1.5 million award that goes to a charitable or nonprofit organization
that has made a significant contribution to ending, to reducing, to alleviating
human suffering.
I get to introduce to you the woman without whom none of this could happen,
and that’s Judy Miller. She’s vice president of the foundation and director of the
Hilton Humanitarian Prize, and she takes the process from start to finish — the
whole process of helping identify and vet the various nominees who are decided
upon by an international panel of jurors. I want to thank the Hilton Foundation
Board of Directors, the Hilton family and others for this extraordinary honor for
all of us to get to participate in this, and thank Judy in particular for her yeoman’s
work from start to finish. She’s had 30 years of experience in international
marketing in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, but this is where her heart
is. So, please welcome Judy Miller.
(From Left to Right) Robert Zoellick, Richard Blewitt, Steven M. Hilton
Judy Miller
Thank you, Jane. It’s always a wonderful, warm welcome and a pleasure to be
back here at the Global Philanthropy Forum — another extraordinary program
that you’re putting on.
As Jane mentioned, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation started this prize in 1996.
This is our seventeenth celebration. It seems to have gone so fast. Every year
we get at least 200 nominations from around the world, and our jurors have a
very difficult job trying to pick just one every year. But when you look at the
brochure that’s on your table and see the organizations that have been honored
and received this prize, you will see that they are really among the best of the
best. One thing that is very new in the past several years is that they’ve formed
a collaborative where they are working together in the field and finding ways
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2012 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference
to partner with one another.These very disparate organizations possibly will be
making a new path to learn lessons on how we can model a different type of
collaboration, maximizing and leveraging each other’s impact.
Some of the jurors are with us here tonight, and I’d like them to stand and be
recognized for their great contributions: Catherine Bertini, former executive
director of the World Food Programme, who also received the World Food Prize
for her great contributions to stopping hunger around the world; Princess Salimah
Aga Khan, international ambassador for SOS Children’s Villages; Jim Galbraith,
board member of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, who has been on the jury
since the very beginning; Strive Masiyiwa, founder and executive chairman of
Econet Wireless and a major philanthropist in his own right — he has numerous
programs in Africa that he supports. Eric Hilton is a board member of the Hilton
Foundation and the son of our founder, Conrad N. Hilton. Eric has participated
in every single jury meeting since 1996. He’s decided to step down and let
another family member take his place, but we want to recognize his wonderful
contributions and obviously his expertise in choosing the organizations that we
are saluting. He will be replaced by a new member of our jury, Hawley Hilton
McAuliffe, who will be joining the jury from here on. Amartya Sen and Dr. Gro
Brundtland also send their regrets but also their great well wishes to HelpAge.
We have several of our [Hilton Humanitarian] Prize Laureate representatives
here, and if they could just stand so that everybody knows you’re the organizations that have received this prize — please stand if you represent one of the
seventeen Laureates.
And, of course without the board of our Hilton Foundation, this would not be
possible. They are the funders of everything that the Hilton Foundation does.
So would all the board members of the Hilton Foundation please stand and be
recognized?
Steven M. Hilton
Good evening! My name is Steve Hilton. I’m the president and the CEO of the
Hilton Foundation. It’s a pleasure being back here at the Global Philanthropy
Forum, and Jane Wales is a wonderful partner. So, Jane, thank you for being you.
It’s now my great pleasure to introduce tonight’s keynote speaker, Robert
Zoellick, the eleventh president of the World Bank. He has an enormous and
important job: He must be diplomatic and persuasive as he works with 187
member countries, convincing them to work with him to shape a global agenda.
He must be a multifaceted leader, inspiring a staff of more than 10,000 working
in Washington and 130 countries. He certainly needs to know something about
finance. Last year, the World Bank dispensed more than $20 billion in loans and
grants — a lot of money.
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Robert Zoellick has proven over the past five years that he has all these required
talents. Prior to joining the Bank, he served as managing director and chairman
of Goldman Sachs’ Board of International Advisors. The previous two years, he
was deputy secretary at the US State Department and was the department’s chief
operating officer. For four years, Mr. Zoellick was the US trade representative,
taking an activist approach to free trade at the global, regional and bilateral levels.
In short, the man seems to have done it all. But since he has recently announced
that he will step down after his term is up later this year, I thought we should
spend more time on some of his accomplishments at the World Bank.
Robert took over the reins of the World Bank at a very tumultuous time, but he
immediately set out to calm the waters, and a New York Times editorial put it this
way:“He stabilized it, steered it ably through a global economic crisis and leaves
it financially stronger, more focused and more inclusive. A tough act to follow.”
But most of us in this room tonight aren’t dealing with bank panics and bailouts.
We’re focusing on other kinds of crises: poverty, disease, hunger.And Robert was
right there with us. In the midst of dealing with the historic economic crisis, he
urged his member countries not to forget the poor. Under his leadership the
World Bank provided more than $247 billion to help developing countries boost
growth and overcome poverty. He has been praised for his transparency efforts,
launching a major effort to open up the Bank’s massive database to all countries
to obtain access to information so that developing countries can help drive their
own growth out of poverty.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great pleasure to introduce Robert Zoellick.
Robert Zoellick
Thank you very much, Steve, and thanks to the Hilton Foundation for inviting me
to be here with all of you this evening.
It’s a special pleasure for me to be able to join this impressive gathering of
philanthropists, humanitarians and friends in celebrating the presentation of this
prestigious award. I’m especially pleased to be able to congratulate personally
the recipient of this year’s Hilton Humanitarian Prize: HelpAge International.
For almost 30 years now, HelpAge has recognized that support for older people
is more than a humanitarian issue — it’s also a development issue. Aging is
part of poverty and economic growth, labor supply and productivity, gender
equality, global savings and public spending for pensions, health care and other
social services.
Global aging stands out among demographic shifts. More people are living more
years around the world. By 2050, 20 percent of the world’s population will be
over age 60.The fastest growth in aging is happening in some of today’s youngest
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countries — in Peru and Nigeria, for example, where the number of people over
the age of 60 is expected to more than triple by 2050, and in Vietnam, where it
will almost quadruple by 2050.
So, what do these numbers mean?
They certainly reflect impressive successes in development: People are living
longer and healthier lives.At the same time, these demographic trends pose challenges, especially in emerging markets.Across the developing world, countries are
growing old before they grow wealthy. China’s demographics present the most
dramatic example: By 2030 almost 25 percent of China’s population — that’s 350
million people — will be seniors. Yet today less than a quarter of workers have
any form of pension coverage. The world will need to address global aging, so
HelpAge will only become more important in the years to come.
HelpAge is also helping people think freshly about age-friendly health care and
the still-too-rare recognition of the special problems of the elderly in humanitarian relief. HelpAge supports the elderly in Darfur by helping provide shelter,
literacy programs and mobile eye-care clinics. HelpAge is exploring how solar
energy can assist vulnerable people coping with long, cold winters in places like
Kyrgyzstan. It’s helping alleviate the impact of HIV/AIDS in one of the poorest
areas of Kenya by providing business loans and training to grandparents so that
they can secure a sustainable living and support themselves and their families.
HelpAge’s knowledge and experience are pathbreaking, and we will all gain from
its efforts. So, thank you.
Global aging is just one aspect of how our world has changed over the past 60
years since organizations such as the Hilton Foundation and the World Bank
were founded. Both were created in the same year — 1944 — when a world war
was still raging. Forward-looking individuals were already thinking about how
to shape the peace and how to rebuild for the future. That generation — businessmen and entrepreneurs, such as Conrad Hilton, and the policymakers and
statesmen who came together at Bretton Woods to devise a new international
economic system — saw clear connections between economics and security.
They had witnessed the failed diplomacy of the 1920s, the global financial breakdown in the 1930s and the humanitarian horrors of two wars. Hilton promoted
his hopes for reconciliation and nonviolence through his philanthropy but
also through his entrepreneurism: His hopes for a better post-war world were
reflected in a Hilton corporate motto, World Peace Through International Trade
and Travel.
The delegates at Bretton Woods planned for the peace by building a multilateral
framework based on the lessons of the failures after World War I. They created
international institutions that encompassed monetary and currency issues, trade,
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investment and development, and the reconstruction of broken states coming out
of conflict. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development — the
cornerstone of what became the World Bank Group — was a key element of
their design.
Initially the World Bank helped reconstruct western Europe. Indeed the Bank’s
first loan was to France in 1947 for $250 million — which in real terms is still
the bank’s largest loan to date. But with the Marshall Plan, the bank shifted its
emphasis to other parts of the world — Japan became a member in 1952 — and
the Bank broadened its activities, seeking to finance growth and overcome
poverty in developing countries.
Conrad Hilton participated in rebuilding the post-war world by establishing
Hilton hotels in western Europe and the Middle East.These architectural monuments to modernism were “little Americas” away from home, spaces that realized
the new and powerful reach of the United States. The London Hilton in Park
Lane, for example, was the first structure in London that rose higher than St.
Paul’s Cathedral.
In that world developed economies accounted for about 80 percent of global GDP,
with the United States alone accounting for more than 40 percent. Developed
economies accounted for over two-thirds of global trade, and most of today’s
developing countries were still colonies. Russia, China and even India remained
largely isolated from the world economy.
That was then. What about today?
The international economy is now struggling to recover from the greatest
blows since the 1930s. Developing economies are compensating for the stumbling industrialized world. Over the past five years, developing economies have
provided two-thirds of global growth.Today China alone is consuming more than
half the world’s cement and about half the world’s iron ore, coal, lead and steel.
Half the world’s pigs are eaten in China and one-third of the world’s soybeans
and eggs. China is the world’s biggest consumer of minerals, such as copper,
zinc and nickel. These figures may well decline as China is built — yet India and
others will follow.
For the decade before the financial crisis, economies in sub-Saharan Africa were
growing at about 5 percent a year. Today most of the African countries have
already recovered and returned to that rate. If those growth rates could be maintained,African GDP would double in about 12 years, generating public revenues
for investment in people, productivity and infrastructure unheard of in previous
years and reducing poverty and creating hope. Africa can become a future pole
of world economic growth.
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Half a century ago, the world looked to the industrialized countries for development models.Today developing countries — even as they remain home to billions
of poor people — are looking to one another for ideas, whether it’s Mexico’s
and Brazil’s conditional cash transfer systems that provide an innovative safety
net, Turkey’s reform program or India’s IT [information technology] services.
Developing countries are increasingly becoming sources of investment and even
foreign aid: In 2008 new emerging donors contributed between $12 billion and
$15 billion in development aid. That’s equivalent to about 10 to 15 percent of
the amount provided by traditional, developed-country donors. And that’s likely
a conservative estimate.
The dynamics of the international economy have shifted radically since 1944.
Even the changes in the past few decades, since organizations such as HelpAge
began in 1983, have been immense. The past quarter century has seen more
people make greater strides to overcome poverty than in all of world history.The
number of poor in developing countries has been cut in half.
So, what does all this mean for the future? It means we can’t keep using the
models of yesterday for the world economy of today and tomorrow.The economic
and security problems of the 1940s have changed drastically. Yet recall those
topics on the agenda at Bretton Woods — currencies and exchange rates, trade
and investment, reconstruction of broken states and development — and then
reflect on the news you read today. These issues remain very current, although
the context is vastly different.
When I came to the World Bank in 2007, many questioned whether the Bank was
even necessary in a world in which private-sector capital flows to developing
countries had dwarfed public development assistance. But I had a different
vantage point, gained from some historical perspective, personal experience
and my sense of the international landscape: Institutions matter. the World Bank
was never simply about loans and grants. Its role has been — and remains — to
develop market economies in an open international economic system, fostering
growth, opportunity and hope and overcoming poverty within a better political
and security order.
There’s enormous potential for addressing these challenges, with new development partners providing fresh ideas and resources, and new information and
technology to help us solve some very old problems. But we need a new model
that connects all the global players. We need a “modernized multilateralism”
that is fluid and flexible, in which emerging economies join new networks of
countries, international institutions, foundations, civil society organizations and
the private sector.
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Just as the international economy has changed over the past half century, the
World Bank has also changed.Today the World Bank Group consists of four policy
and financing arms: that original International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development [IBRD], which provides long-term loans at very attractive rates; the
International Development Association, or IDA, which is a special fund of grants
and credits for the 79 poorest countries; the International Finance Corporation,
or IFC, which is our private-sector arm; and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee
Agency, which offers investors insurance against political risk.
To work better within this changed world economy, international institutions
and regimes — including the World Bank Group — need to modernize, too. Some
look at today’s multilateral organizations and see only their weaknesses and their
failures, and they advocate abandoning these organizations altogether.
I’ve suggested a different perspective.The world’s multilateral bodies offer a very
thin but vital connecting tissue that draws together sovereign nations that pursue
common interests.The pragmatic approach is to make these institutions, with all
their imperfections, work better. So this evening I’d like to share with you five
lessons I’ve learned at the World Bank Group.
First, we need to do development with clients, not to them. Developing economies are the World Bank’s clients and partners — not objects of policy. It’s an
important but essential shift of mindset. Clients have vastly different needs. If
the best textbook solution doesn’t fit the client’s political economy context, we
haven’t helped solve the problem.
The focus on clients may seem like common sense, but I was struck during the
debate over the next president of the World Bank by how some academics and
economists were repeating the errors of the past: They thought that they knew
the three or four areas to focus on for developing countries. I have preferred
to listen to our clients. My approach has been to apply the World Bank Group’s
unique experience and research — combined with innovative finance — to
address what our developing clients tell us matters to them. No one size can fit all.
Take countries dealing with fragility and conflict. In 1944 the R in IBRD stood
for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan; today countries such as Afghanistan,
Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Liberia and South Sudan need to find ways to combine security and development so that they can break the cycles of fragility and violence,
poor governance and poverty.These countries are home to what Paul Collier of
Oxford University termed the “Bottom Billion” — actually about a billion and a
half people — who can’t start climbing the ladder of growth and opportunity and
whose problems spill over to harm their neighbors.
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The World Bank has created a new hub in Nairobi that will help us become faster
and more flexible in supporting these fragile states while building knowledge
about what works best.
investments across agriculture run the whole value chain — from research to property rights (including for female farmers) to seeds, irrigation, fertilizers, storage and
marketing — and always encourage private-sector development.
Other countries are the source of vast mineral or energy resources. The key
challenge for these lands is good governance — to fight corruption, avoid the
“Dutch disease” of imbalanced growth, and invest in inclusive and sustainable
development.
When the food and fuel crises were overtaken by a global financial crisis in 2008,
the World Bank mobilized more than $220 billion of financial commitments to
support developing countries, disbursing much of it rapidly. Equally important
was that we tried to address specific market breakdowns by expanding trade
finance, recapitalizing banks in developing countries and purchasing distressed
assets. We worked with others to meet specific regional needs, for example, a
credit contraction in central and eastern Europe and borrowing backstops to
permit expansionary budgets in Southeast Asia.
Middle-income countries have a different set of needs.These countries — Brazil,
China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey and others — are today’s most dynamic
emerging economies. And it’s hard to imagine any significant problem — of the
world’s economy, environment or, increasingly, diplomacy and security — that can
be addressed without their involvement.Yet these countries still face enormous
development challenges:They are home to some 75 percent of people still living
under two dollars a day. They still need the Bank’s assistance, but increasingly
important to them is the sharing of knowledge and experience — and then to
encourage them to assume greater international responsibilities.
Our middle-income clients are seeking the World Bank Group’s help in understanding how to avoid the so-called middle-income trap. In 1960, 101 economies
were classified as middle-income, but by 2008 only 13 had made it to high-income.
For example, China and the World Bank recently completed something called The
China 2030 Report, which is a joint study of the strategic issues confronting
China’s development prospects over the next 20 years. The report aims to be
a practical guide for China’s policymakers — but it offers key insights to other
middle-income countries that face many of the same challenges that China does.
The World Bank put our problem-solving approach to work when developing
countries were hit by the soaring food and fuel prices at the end of 2007. Some
World Bank economists, thinking in aggregate terms, said that returns from high
commodity prices would allow most countries to offset the danger. Others
suggested that the problem would best be handled by humanitarian agencies,
not by long-term development institutions. But tens of millions of people had
no cushion to soften the blow. Families were going without meals. Farmers
couldn’t get the inputs they needed. Food riots broke out. It made no sense to
speak of the long term unless populations and governments could address their
short-term needs.
So, we addressed critical short-term needs by working with UN agencies to set up
the Global Food Crisis Response Program and to create a rapid financing facility to
support farmers. But at the same time, we recognized an opportunity to promote
longer-term growth by promoting productivity and production. Today the Bank’s
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Today the Bank continues to work with all of its clients but also with attention to
fundamental long-term investments to lay the foundations for recovery, especially
infrastructure, safety net programs to protect the poor, and human capital and
financing for the private sector.
Second, the new global economy demands diverse and innovative financing.
Every three years the Bank needs to replenish its fund for the poorest countries,
the IDA. Even now, during a period of financial limitations, the World Bank’s
shareholders — its 187 member countries — decided that the institution’s priorities and performance warranted first-rate financial support. So, in 2007 and in
2010 we had two record-breaking IDA replenishments that raised more than $90
billion. And in 2010 the shareholders also backed our first IBRD capital increase
in more than 20 years, enabling the institution to meet its clients’ needs in a time
of crisis and maintain our AAA rating.
To make the most effective use of these funds for our clients, we have to be
innovative. So, for example, we’re helping countries and farmers manage systematic risks through financial innovation to counter weather variability, such as
droughts.We established a Crisis Response Window to help low-income countries
deal with the impact of natural disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and
severe economic shocks.We’ve brought financial innovation to bear on plans to
develop medicines, to lower the costs of humanitarian food and supplies, support
biodiversity and create natural-disaster insurance.
A good example of how we can use innovative financing to produce results
through partnering with foundations is the Global Polio Eradication Initiative — a
partnership among the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the United Nations
Foundation. Through this program foundations pay off the present value of a
country’s IDA credits when the country has successfully completed a vaccine
distribution program to eliminate polio. In essence, this program allows developing countries to mobilize ultimately what becomes grant funding to eradicate
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polio — but only if the money has been deployed to achieve results.To date, the
program has provided $147 million to deal with polio eradication in Nigeria and
Pakistan, and it hopes to scale up to support areas such as routine immunization
and maternal/child health.
The World Bank Group has also developed novel ways to finance and tackle environmental issues. We were able to raise more than $7 billion from governments
for new Climate Investment Funds to help countries improve energy efficiency
and technology, lower their carbon emissions and protect against climate change.
With these funds we’re able to mobilize more than $50 billion worth of projects
in 45 developing countries. So, as negotiators debate what a “green fund” may
look like, the World Bank has one up and running.
Third, the private sector is the main engine for jobs and innovation.
The Bank’s private-sector development begins with public policies to strengthen
the environment for investment, whether domestic or foreign, including through
an educated, skilled and healthy workforce. The Bank’s Doing Business report
helps countries assess how they compete with others in empowering entrepreneurs, particularly smaller businesses.
IFC invests in and also provides technical assistance to companies and financial
enterprises that can support developing-country businesses and markets. IFC
makes its own investments but is increasingly mobilizing other investors to join
in. IFC is also investing in building markets for investment and innovation. For
example, IFC is committing about $3 billion through about 180 private equity
funds to build markets through which investors can supply long-term risk capital
to owners of local companies.
I was especially pleased that in 2010 IFC created the new Asset Management
Company [AMC] that supplements the traditional model of raising money
in bond markets and then investing it. The AMC taps sovereign wealth funds,
pension funds and other institutional investors and then channels their investments to profitable opportunities that have been identified by IFC.This venture
opens up an entirely new channel of financial intermediation. The AMC already
totals more than $4 billion, about $3 billion of which had little previous exposure
to Africa and other less recognized emerging markets.
Fourth, we need to democratize development.
One of the many messages of the crowds that shook the Middle East in 2011
was that global economic freedom must be combined with good governance,
citizen voice and social accountability. These are crucial for economic development. Inclusive and sustainable development depends on shifting from an elite,
top-down approach to one that empowers individuals and communities. For
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development institutions this means that investments in civil society and social
accountability are as important to development as are investments in infrastructure, firms, factories and farms.
The World Bank has been supporting civil society organizations for almost 30 years,
but now we’re ramping up that engagement. Later this week I’ll be announcing
the formation of a new Global Partnership for Social Accountability — a dedicated
partnership to provide long-term support to civil society groups in developing
countries that are working on keeping their governments accountable. Over the
next four years, the World Bank plans to put in about $20 million of seed money
to get the partnership going and to raise what I hope will be a much larger fund.
I hope that this new partnership becomes an integral part of the World Bank
Group’s work going forward.
But “democratizing development” also means giving people the tools to gather
data and to assess the knowledge and the information to better understand
development issues, along with opportunities to share insights.
We are seeing the power of sharing information through two transformative policies that the World Bank rolled out in 2010 that are making the institution more
accessible, transparent and accountable. Our new Policy on Access to Information
releases vast numbers of documents, giving the public more information than
ever before about the Bank’s projects, its analytic and advisory activities and the
proceedings of its Board. We modeled on the freedom of information programs
in India and the United States, and it’s the most extensive such policy of any
multilateral organization.
Our Open Data Initiative makes thousands of datasets freely available to anybody
with an internet connection — from a PhD student in Australia to a farmer in
Kenya; they can download our data, analyze it and come up with their own
solutions. The Bank is also working with communities to map their own social
infrastructure — whether health clinics, schools or water sources — so that
villagers can hold officials to account. The next step is that we want to allow
people to use handheld devices to let the Bank know, from any location, what is
really going on with their projects.
This data is already being used in an innovative partnership with the Hewlett
Foundation, the African Economic Research Consortium and the African
Development Bank to produce new indicators that measure the quality of health
and education services in sub-Saharan Africa. These indicators will be an important tool for governments in monitoring results as well as for citizens — parents
in particular — to challenge poor governance.
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Democratizing development is a key to modernization. It is based not just on
government intentions or experts’ theories but instead on a rigorous commitment to results, openness and accountability. Both donors and recipients are
properly insisting on value for their money.
My fifth and last point is the need to promote good governance and to combat
corruption.
The World Bank has a fiduciary duty to ensure that our funds are being used
for their intended purposes. It is outrageous to steal from the poor. But our
anti-corruption work has to go further than that. Governments need to take
ownership if these efforts are going to succeed.They need to be accountable, too.
The World Bank is investigating corruption and bringing cases against those
who commit fraud and theft. We have set up a preventive unit to try to learn
from experience, assessed specially in sectors, such as roads, that are prone to
fraud and theft. But we have to do more. We need to set standards, live them
and promote their broader adoption. The Bank can help build institutions that
prevent corruption, improve transparency and involve civil society in supporting
good governance.The Bank can also help governments — increasingly, at the subnational level — to strengthen their financial management, their procurement
systems, auditors and other systems that will promote accountability.
But we’re still going to have to break through harder obstacles. We’ve put some
new tools in place, including an agreement with our counterparts in the regional
development banks on cross-debarment of firms and individuals that cheat or
steal; we’ve added new penalties; we added something called the Stolen Asset
Recovery Initiative, or StAR, that would assist governments in recovering funds
that are stolen by people who have looted their countries’ treasuries; and we’ve
started an International Corruption Hunters Alliance, to support the investigators, prosecutors, judges and others who often take on extraordinarily dangerous
work.
So, I hope tonight I have been able to give you an idea of why modernizing multilateralism is important and a sense of what it has meant for the World Bank Group.
Over time the World Bank’s aim should be to help countries take another
step — to move beyond aid.There will always be a need for humanitarian aid; and
for some time to come, poor and conflict-riven countries are going to require
development assistance. The goal, however, should be to move beyond dependency. Our aim should be to shift from a paradigm of charity to one of mutual
economic benefit.
Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner
commodity prices, spiking fuel costs and natural disasters. It would facilitate
foreign direct investment, innovative financing and technological transfer so
that developing countries can modernize their industry, agriculture and services.
It would support good governance and openness — transparency — to ensure
that governments pay more attention to citizen voice and social accountability
and that private-sector initiative is rewarded, basic services are delivered and
prosperity is broadly shared. It would support multilateral innovation to forge
progress to open trade and investment, access to energy, food security, competition in services and climate change.
It would support innovative partnerships — between governments, international
institutions, the private sector, civil society groups and foundations — so that
these actors could leverage one another’s strengths, share experience and learn
from each other and work together to bring better development solutions. It
would be a world in which all countries could tap the energies and the genius of
all: young people, the elderly and not least girls and women — an underrealized
source of growth everywhere.
Much of the World Bank’s history has been associated with the third world — a
term that no longer fits today’s reality.After all, with the end of the Cold War and
the demise of the second world, developing countries should at least move up
one! But, more to the point, developing countries are not just some subsidiary
category. They are diverse. They are growing — economically and in influence.
They want more voice. And they want to be stewards of their own futures. The
third world is now an outdated concept, but development is not. In fact, lessons
of development — just like principles of sound economics — are increasingly
applicable to all countries.
And that is what modernizing multilateralism should really be all about: learning
from the past, adapting for the present and creating for the future.
Thank you.
Judy Miller
Thank you so much, Mr. Zoellick. I’m sure that every issue you have raised tonight
affects virtually every organization in this room.You have established the World
Bank as a resource that will help the developing world especially.
It is now my pleasure to turn the mic back to Mr. Steve Hilton, president of the
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
What would such a world look like? It would provide poor countries with
better access to world markets while allowing them to hedge against fluctuating
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Steven M. Hilton
Thank you, Mr. Zoellick. It was interesting because a lot of us in this room tend
to look at things a little bit closer and to hear that perspective; from this level, I
found fascinating.
Those of you who are familiar with the prize and the Hilton Foundation may
recall that my grandfather, Conrad Hilton, created the Hilton Foundation some
70 years ago, and his personal philanthropy has helped the most disadvantaged
and vulnerable people throughout the world. Our board created the Hilton
Humanitarian Prize in 1996.
Okay, please show the [HelpAge] video.Thank you.
That video showed how difficult it can be to grow old in many parts of the
world, and it demonstrated the importance of the work of HelpAge. It is now my
pleasure to call to the stage the CEO [chief executive officer] of this incredible
organization, Richard Blewitt.
Richard came to HelpAge International with a wealth of humanitarian experience. He’s held senior positions with the British Red Cross Society, Save the
Children and the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Richard’s
work in disaster relief and development has taken him all over the world. Prior
to joining HelpAge, he was director of policy with the International Federation
of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Geneva, but for the past six years
Richard has led HelpAge International’s work throughout the world.
So with that I will turn the mic over to Richard. Congratulations.
Richard Blewitt
First, I want to thank all of you who are here tonight, and I want to thank the
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Steve Hilton, Judy Miller and their team, the board
of the Hilton Foundation and of course the distinguished panel of jurors. I would
also like to acknowledge my global board represented here — by Tilak [de Zoysa]
and by Cindy [Cox Roman] and by extension our global network of very rooted
affiliates working on our shared mission in 70 countries around the world.
Today of course is a very exciting day for HelpAge International; in our 30-year
history, this is one of our greatest achievements, so thank you.We’re both honored
and privileged to receive the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. But this award
is not just about us. We accept it on behalf of the aging population across the
developing world, who will benefit from this recognition — and the timing is
spectacular.
In April this year the World Health Organization [WHO] created a historic opportunity for us.They dedicated World Health Day 2012 to global aging populations.
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As Dr. Margaret Chan, the director-general at WHO, said last weekend in Geneva,
“When a 100-year-old finishes a marathon, we must rethink the conventional
definitions of what it means to be old.” Past stereotypes developed in past centuries no longer hold during our era of longevity. HelpAge was privileged to be in
Geneva as one of the invitees. Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum
was also there. He’s 75, and he has no problem running the World Economic
Forum. He said that this year the World Economic Forum has put the mismanagement of global aging on its global risk register. Business understands — and I
think the World Economic Forum understands — that aging really does need to
be better handled in the future.
I see from our experience at HelpAge huge policy and program gaps around the
world, but in equal measure there are solutions, and some nation-states and civil
society actors are making good progress. I was saying to Eric Hilton last night
that one of the good things that happened on World Health Day is we had 20
million people tweeting on older people’s health around the world.That shows
the power of social media because probably there were only about 30 people in
the room in Geneva with the UN, but 2 million people were engaging.
It’s great that Robert Zoellick has been here tonight as the keynote speaker.The
World Bank has for many years supported old-age income security and pensions,
and they make a real difference for older people and their grandchildren. Girls
in South Africa living with their grandmothers who have a citizen’s pension are
centimeters taller as a result of the grandparents and how the grandparents use
the pension.
As Robert said, “Many countries are growing old before they grow rich.”
Developing countries are aging around four times faster than we’ve aged in the
United States or in the UK. It’s a very, very dramatic story. So, many developing
countries have the dual challenge and opportunity of youth bulges but also aging
populations, and they’re going to need great policy solutions to address those
challenges and opportunities.We need to enable older adults to break out of the
models of dependency and disability to one of economic development and social
value creation.This is both economically smart and the right thing to do from an
ethical perspective; it is our duty.
However, we mustn’t flatter ourselves — this is a daunting challenge. More than
three-quarters of those over 60 live in countries of extreme poverty with limited
resources.Through our work with older people in the developing world, we hear
one thing over and over again:They tell us that their greatest asset is their health
and their physical strength. Unfortunately, as we know, health and strength are
temporary, and as the health begins to fail it becomes difficult for these older
people to continue the physical labor through which they earn their income
and their families’ livings; and it is these same older people who have no access
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to social security of any kind. Their vulnerability to poverty is extreme, and it’s
worsened by the crippling cost of medical care, assuming they can access any
medical care at all. Older people, however, remain resilient even in pain.
Thirty-five million people around the world today have dementia. Every four
seconds a new person in the world gets dementia.There will be 70 million people
with dementia by 2020. Peter Piot was speaking at a conference on Alzheimer’s
and dementia about three weeks ago in the UK. He’s likened dementia to where
we were with HIV/AIDS 20 years ago: stigma, a lack of diagnosis, a lack of
research, a huge complex care challenge and a huge global economic challenge.
One percent of GDP has been lost in its current form last year. And, if we make
that personal, one in three of us — assuming most of us are going to live to at
least 85 — is going to have dementia. Something needs to be done. Investment
needs to be made to take the challenge and find solutions.
On a more practical level, one of the challenges we face is that many children
are migrating to urban areas, and traditional forms of family support are eroding.
Many people don’t have children to take care of them; or, as often happens, many
people have children nearby but their kids simply don’t have the resources to
support them.
So, I’ve talked about the problem, but as Steve Hilton, who visited our program
in Kenya saw, older people are making huge contributions to family, community
and society. They’re heroes. In poorer communities around the world, older
people are breadwinners and entrepreneurs. They’re playing a vital role in
caring for grandchildren, especially in households where parents have died of
HIV/AIDS. Older people are householders and farmers. They’re volunteers and
community servants. They’re fighting passionately for the rights of the vulnerable, and they’re unendingly generous to their children and grandchildren. One
of the strange things I find is we’ve all got grandmothers, and we all appreciate
our grandmothers, but somehow older women don’t feature in development. I
think we have to consider why that is and do something about it moving ahead.
When I came to HelpAge, I had experience in the humanitarian and development
sector, like Steve was saying, but I was completely age-blind. Despite all of my
work on international development for 17 years, I never did anything to promote
a program on aging. In the years since, of course, I’ve come to understand the
need to work across the generations, in terms of both immediate aid and longerterm development.
Today I’m shocked when I see how few resources are allocated to older people
compared with other vulnerable groups.They are simply neglected.And as I learn
more every day, this gap is not just a matter of moral lapse. It is a shortsighted view
of the world, and it will lead to financial disaster. Truly we fail both the ethical
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Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner
and the economic obligations when we ignore aging populations. It’s incredible!
There is no UN agency dedicated to age. There are probably four people who
work in a dedicated way in the whole United Nations on aging, which is a bit
mind blowing. How is it that we have serious plans and effective immunization
programs for children around the world — a wonderful achievement of public
health in many countries globally — but nothing of the sort for aging adults?
Surely in our century, where our aging populations will outnumber children,
we can make strides here that would align this to the new demographic reality.
There are very, very few NGOs helping older people in poor countries. In contrast
there are hundreds of organizations doing great work with children. You know,
I find it an awesome responsibility to be the chief executive of almost the only
global NGO working on aging and trying to network. We have to find a way to
bring others into this cause, and we’ve got to get the children’s agencies to work
on the generational questions in a more integrated and effective way.
The old-age health challenge in developing countries is also daunting. I’ve talked
about dementia before, but non-communicable diseases are growing day by day.
The World Health Organization released some data last week: 60 to 80 percent
of people over 60 in India, Ghana and South Africa have hypertension, and only
5 percent are receiving any form of treatment. The health care systems are
completely inadequate for the issues of the diseases of old age, and there’s very
little tension and will to actually change the systems to deal with this.
What’s more, there remains a very limited understanding of the prevalence of
HIV/AIDS among older people, and this is a very dangerous blind spot. Prevalence
is growing as more people are surviving and living with the virus, and we’re going
to have to find solutions to the mix between age and HIV as we move ahead.
We did do work a number of years ago with UNICEF [United Nations Children’s
Fund] to make visible the question of care. Half of the world’s AIDS orphans are
cared for by their grandparents.That’s a remarkable thing.The sad indictment of
the world is that we haven’t managed to get resources into the hands of those
grandparents despite the billions of dollars that have been poured into HIV, much
of which has done remarkable things in terms of making antiretrovirals available.
But the care agenda has been hidden, and my concern now is that we’ve flatlined
the HIV/AIDS budget around the world, and it’s going to be even more hidden
and the burden of care is going to grow, particularly for older people.
When disasters strike, older people are some of the most vulnerable in the world.
Having worked for the Red Cross myself for many years, we can look at Katrina;
we can look at Japan. If you go to a developing context, things are even more
difficult for older people in crisis.And if you go to Gulu today, you will find older
people living still in Gulu — they were left behind — even though some people
have managed to go home after the conflict in northern Uganda.
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Why is this? Why are we failing to recognize that older people need special treatment in disasters? Why don’t we recognize their fragility and their sometimes
lack of mobility? And why do they have to face not being able to queue for relief
packages and therefore not receive proper assistance? We’ve done research with
the UN to highlight that only about 1 percent of funding goes to older people in
crisis contexts but they make up between 7 and 10 percent of a population in a
crisis.They simply don’t get the resources.
That’s the depressing news. Now I want to quickly turn to some good news.
I don’t want to end with the sense that nothing can be done. A lot is being
done, and a lot more can be done. We can use Peter Diamond, who is an MIT
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology] economist and a Nobel Prize winner last
year. He’s made a concept of the longevity dividend.The countries of tomorrow
are going to be the countries that actually value aging and think through the
policy agendas that are going to make a difference — to actually make aging a
positive experience economically, socially and politically. Countries that ignore
it are going to be the countries of yesterday. So, that’s a big challenge.
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Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner
In disasters we need to ensure that older people are supported to be resilient,
counted and visible, to ensure that older people have access to food and water
and health services. And then we need to collaborate with NGOs and other
service providers to make sure we can get an age-friendly response.
However, if I have learned anything in my six years with HelpAge, the third thing,
what matters more than anything, is voice — influence and accountability. This
is the key that gives older people energy for making change. And we see that
when older people stand up and are vocal, they bring about change. We believe
that one of the big solutions is old people’s associations — intergenerational selfhelp groups.We support many of those around the world, and they really deliver
for older people in terms of effective responses to home care, income security
initiatives, health promotion and tackling other community challenges. Older
people tackle conflict issues at the community level. They tackle many issues if
you empower them to do that.
Now I want to turn to some practical issues and agendas, and these are partly
covered by the film. Of the three things that older people prioritize, income
security in old age and food security are the first two. We can make sure that
microcredit and loans are tailored and made available to older people. They
currently are not. Even though Muhammad Yunus will say that Grameen Bank
gives loans to older people, the actual credit officers on the ground discriminate.
They do not give loans to older people in Bangladesh. It’s a big challenge: We’ve
got to get tailored products that will really reach the right people.
So, there are many, many opportunities that need to be taken, but somehow
we’re going to need a new global partnership on aging if we’re going to get the
momentum and the scale necessary. The Hilton Award is a major opportunity
for HelpAge and for aging populations around the world. We believe that the
prize will help us shine a much brighter light.Whenever I speak to people about
aging, I always worry that the light goes on and then when I leave their office
the light goes off. I really hope the light doesn’t go off tonight for some of you in
this room because the key challenge is to really think about what this means for
us. What does it mean for you personally? What does it mean for the institutions
that you represent?
We need to tackle the issue of aging farmers and how they can pass their knowledge to the next generation and how we can get young people wanting to farm.
We need to make sure that older women and men have equal access to economic
assets.A lot of older women lose their land rights — and that’s another issue that
needs to be worked on.And we need to make sure that older people have access
to basic pensions. How can we have 70 percent of the world with no pensions,
with no income security in old age?
This award is a tremendous honor, and now it’s the job of HelpAge to fulfill
the trust that the Hilton Foundation has invested in us. We recognize that the
aging challenge calls for the broadest possible response, and we want to work
collaboratively to form innovative partnerships with like-minded partners, with
NGOs such as the Hilton Humanitarian Prize Laureates, with aging experts and
advocates here in the US like AARP, with multilaterals in government and foundations, and particularly also the world of business.
In terms of health, if you go to Sudan, you’ll find that there is only one gerontologist in the whole country.There is one person who understands the issues of age
and disease.That’s no good.We have to train health care professionals.We’ve got
to try to get health care to remote areas so that older people can have proper
access. We can use technology to make sure that older people can actually be
able to diagnose their problems so they don’t get a stroke. If they get a stroke,
they will end up bankrupting their own families; they will become a burden to
their families.
Last night I was very lucky to sit next to Eric Hilton, who for me personifies
the partnership approach. Over dinner last night, he really inspired me with his
grounded philanthropy, with his constant search for solutions. He was looking
for answers and momentum and deep life experience that he could draw upon
for his philanthropy.
A new global and local social contract will be wise if it can harness all ages for a
better world.This award is a tribute to the millions people throughout the world
who have struggled daily with extreme poverty and discrimination. It’s through
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Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Dinner
their considerable achievement and passionate selflessness that the world has
become a better place for their grandchildren and ours. This day is theirs. This
award is theirs, and it’s our privilege to accept it on their behalf.Thank you.
Judy Miller
We have heard some startling and disturbing statistics tonight, but they are
statistics that affect all of us, and I’m sure that all of us have been thinking about
these issues in our own lives, as we’re aging ourselves. He called upon the rest of
us to take part. I would guess that this is the audience where that will resonate.
Before we end this evening, I wanted to have one more celebration. Some of you,
maybe many of you, have already heard that one of our Hilton Prize Laureates,
Jim Kim is now the new incoming president of the World Bank. So, we are very
proud of him. We’re very proud of Partners In Health. We’re very proud of all
of our Prize Laureates. Even from the time that each of these organizations had
received the Hilton Prize, we have seen the amazing progress and the advancements that they are still making. It’s very gratifying and a real tribute to our board
jurors who selected these organizations.
Our night is over.We hope you’ve enjoyed the evening.We’ve enjoyed having you.
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Tuesday, April 17
Carol Civita, Philanthropist, Victor Civita Foundation
Tony Elumelu, Chairman, Heirs Holdings Limited;
Founder, The Tony Elumelu Foundation
Laurence Lien, Member of Parliament, Singapore;
Chairman, Lien Foundation
Moderator: Mark Kramer, Co-founder and Managing Director, FSG
Not Your Parents’ Giving:
Leveraging All Sectors for Change
Mark Kramer
I want to welcome you to our opening plenary. I’m Mark Kramer, founder and
managing director of FSG. FSG is a global nonprofit strategy and evaluation firm
that works with organizations around the world on how to find better ways to
solve social problems, and it is my pleasure to moderate this session this morning,
“Not Your Parents’ Giving: Leveraging All Sectors for Social Change.”
I think we heard a very good setup for this session yesterday. We heard about
how media is being untethered and creating new opportunities and leverage
points for social change. We heard from Rajiv Shah about partnerships that the
State Department is undertaking with business and with philanthropy that makes
them much more effective. We heard from Tony Blair about the role of philanthropy in improving governance, and I think our panelists today are going to
extend and continue that conversation about new ways to leverage social change
as philanthropists that go well beyond simply writing checks.
(From Left to Right) Carol Civita, Tony Elumelu, Laurence Lien and Mark Kramer
We are very honored to have with us today Tony Elumelu. Tony is the chairman
of Heirs Holdings Limited, an African investment company that is committed to
economic transformation in Africa through long-term investments that generate
both economic prosperity and social wealth. He is the founder of The Tony
Elumelu Foundation, an Africa-based and African-funded philanthropy whose
mission is to identify and groom African business leaders and entrepreneurs to
enhance the competitiveness and the growth of Africa’s private sector. We’re
going to ask Tony to come up and speak to us, and afterward he will come join
us on a panel for a more engaged discussion.
Thank you. Please welcome Tony Elumelu.
Tony Elumelu
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you are enjoying our breakfast. I’d
like to start by thanking the organizers of this wonderful global platform, for
creating the opportunity for all of us to be here today and in fact for the week.
I would like to share a certain concept, philosophy and approach that my
colleagues and I have come up with as a way of supporting the economic
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transformation that is going on in Africa. We call it “Africapitalism,” and we’ll
spend the next few minutes discussing this, but first I would like to explain the
context for this concept and this philosophy that we have all embraced at The
Tony Elumelu Foundation.
I’ll start with my past, and it’s helping shape this new belief and way of doing
things. In 1997 I led a group of investors; I decided to acquire distressed banks
in Nigeria. We acquired a bank and were able to quickly turn it around. We did
it in a period of five years. We did an IPO [initial public offering] of the bank
and made it a public institution. We started in today’s terms with, say, about $5
million, and after a waiting period of 10 years we were able to execute the biggest
financial services measure in southern Africa — excluding South Africa — using
the distressed bank that we acquired, which we rechristened Standard Trust Bank.
It had grown to become the fifth-largest bank in Nigeria — with the third-largest
bank called United Bank for Africa [UBA] — and by that measure we created the
biggest financial services group in Nigeria and in fact in West Africa at the time.
There were learning points in this career advancement that have shaped the
philosophy that we have embraced and which we propagate today across
Africa. In 2010 I retired as the CEO of UBF [United Borneo Front], where I had
spent about 13 and a half years. When I retired I founded two institutions: the
Heirs Holdings, which is an African investment proprietary company, so that is
for-profit; and the Tony Elumelu Foundation, which is not for profit. And as Mark
Kramer said, we want to see how we can catalyze the private sector. How can we
encourage the rise of entrepreneurship in Africa? How can we assist people who
have startup businesses move from startup to medium scale, and those who move
to national growth companies, and those who are national growth companies to
move to become the African multinational corporations? This is what we intend
to do through the foundation.
What are the learning points so far in the career advancement? First, we realized
that growing the United Bank for Africa is how we started.We started with about
$5 million, so $5 million in 1997 has helped achieve a lot both for us investors
and also for the African public.With that $5 million we have been able to establish
a brand network of about 1,000 branches across Africa to recruit and directly
employ about 25,000 Africans, to pay taxes and expand into 19 African countries.
So we started thinking about how with just $5 million in 1997 we were able to
achieve a lot; at some point before the market correction the capitalization on
the exchange was $6 billion. So, a lot has happened by making a $5 million investment at some point. Now we try to relate what we have been able to achieve
with the level of aid money that comes into Africa; almost on a monthly basis, in
different sectors we get more than $5 million. If you take statistics of how $5
million at a parallel point in time seeded by world aid or donation, perhaps it
creates one-tenth of the impact that we’ve been able to achieve. So, we started
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thinking at that time, Maybe what Africa needs is truly not just aid and donor
funds. Maybe we need to rethink the intervention approach and the mechanism and how we help grow the economic transformation of Africa.
A second learning point for us was when we started we said,“Because we turned
around a distressed bank, what was uppermost in our mind was to be able to
attract customers to the banking hub.” So, we did not discriminate as the traditional Nigerian banks would do at the time.We said to ourselves that we wanted
to democratize access to banking facilities, access to banking services. It was
not a deliberate social action at the time. It was an economic action or decision
we made: If we must turn around this distressed institution, we need to open it
up. We learned quickly from it, and that is why it’s influencing today’s behavior
and thinking and philosophy. We quickly learned that even though we’re trying
to create access to banking services — or “democratize” as we said then, quite
revolutionary at the time — we realized that to do it we had to open branches
across the country.
We quickly ramped up our network to about 700 branches in the country. We
realized that these communities we went to serve had not been served before.
As the bank did well, the communities prospered; and as they prospered, the
bank did better. So we said,“Wow, there’s something interesting here. A pattern
is beginning to emerge and evolve.” We decided to replicate this system; hence
the expansion across Africa. So, within a period of five years we had a massive
expansion. We saw in Africa a lot of opportunities, but it was also lacking in
certain areas, such as payment system, trade facilitation and finance.
So, the lesson for us there is that, indeed, corporations can do good and do well
and do both simultaneously, not one waiting for the other.They don’t need to say,
“Let us wait to do well before we begin to think about how to do good.” In fact, if
you integrate both and do both simultaneously, it can even create. We operated
in communities where the villagers would have someone calling us and saying,
“We want UBA in our community, and I’m going to donate a house for UBA to
open and run a branch.”And UBA is a profit-making organization, but somebody
is saying. “We’ll give you a house to run.” So, communities were supportive of
UBA. There was shared destiny. It was a very interesting point that influenced
some of what we are doing today.
The third learning point — to me the most significant of all — was that we
invested long-term. We made long-term investments. We did not do short-term
investments. I recall one of my father’s — it was at a meeting. We had done so
well in terms of profitability, and he wanted us to increase our dividend policy,
payment policy.And, I said,“Sir, it would be nice for all to recapitalize, plow back
our profit, because of the future.” And he said, “Tony, I’m 66 years old. You’re a
very young man. I want to have my dividends now.” But we like the long-term
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investment part. Our investment history has always been one of long-term investments. UBA paid dearly for the expansion into Africa, but UBA knows in the
middle- to long-term you make significant results on good investments.
Putting all these three together, we started thinking that maybe we needed to
redefine how to engage in Africa if the purpose is to create economic growth and
development — and that was what gave rise to the concept of Africa pluralism.
Simply put, Africapitalism is a philosophy, an approach that is predicated on the
fact that for growth and economic development to occur in Africa, several things
must happen: One, we think it should be led by the private sector, but “led by the
private sector” does not mean it should be funded solely by the private sector.We
have the private sector, the public sector and the social sector. We think Africa
should be led almost like a business that has the interest of all the stakeholders.
We think that getting funds from outside is good, but it can be channeled better.
It can be done in a way that is catalytic. It can be done in a way that creates longterm and sustainable value.We should not just seek to account it as donor funds
or even investment capital for the sake of it. It should come in to address certain
specific objectives that must produce economic prosperity and social wealth in
a manner that is sustainable.
Within the framework of Africapitalism, the “African private sector” does not
necessarily mean African indigenousness; the entrepreneurs and the investors
who do business in Africa should come together and show greater commitment
to the economic transformation of Africa. We think that we can do well and do
good. From the experience that we have seen in our entrepreneurial and business life, we believe that economic prosperity and social wealth can indeed go
together.
Even after I left the United Bank for Africa as CEO, the objective of Heirs Holdings
and the Tony Elumelu Foundation is similar. It’s about growth and economic
development in Africa using different approaches.We have more along the lines
of what we did at UBA. We are calling on other private-sector players in Africa
and African entrepreneurs, those who are well endowed in Africa: If a $5 million
investment in 1997 has created this kind of economic prosperity for shareholders
and social wealth for the general public, others can do even better because
they clearly are more endowed in terms of resources. This is the basic concept
of Africapitalism. The private sector must lead. The public sector must create
the enabling and competitive environment for businesses to do well.The social
sector must redefine how to engage so that it’s sustainable and long-lasting. We
think that as we make investments we should have at the back of our minds — in
fact, it should be implicit, it should be part of our investment criteria, analysis:
Does it have social impact? Is it sustainable? Will it create value? We believe that
the interplay of all this would create a better African society.
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Not Your Parents’ Giving: Leveraging All Sectors for Change
Thank you.
Mark Kramer
Let me invite our other panelists to the stage. This is the kind of panel that you
have only at GPF, where we have a gentleman from Africa, a gentleman from
Singapore and a woman from Brazil — all of whom are remarkable examples of
effective and innovative philanthropists.
Let me introduce Carol Civita, a philanthropist who is committed to strengthening the growing philanthropy in Brazil. She is a member of the Civita family in
Brazil, and she learned about philanthropy from her family’s foundation; but, as
she will tell you, she has gone beyond the family foundation to create her own
approach and areas for impact. Carol, please join us.
Let me also introduce Laurence Lien, who is a champion of the nonprofit sector
in Singapore. He is the chairman of Lien Foundation and CEO of the National
Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre and the Community Foundation of Singapore.
He is currently also a nominated member of Parliament and advocates for the
social sector and civil society. Laurence, thank you.
I’d like to begin by asking Laurence and then Carol to say a few words about their
involvement in philanthropy and the approach they’ve brought, and then I want
to go back to Tony’s excellent comments and engage in a conversation together.
Laurence, you’ve picked some unpopular topics to focus your philanthropy on,
topics like end of life and sanitation and access to toilets.You work is not just in
Singapore but across Asia in other countries as well.Tell us a little bit about your
philanthropy and how you have leveraged impact beyond just writing checks.
Laurence Lien
Thanks, Mark, for that generous introduction.
My own philanthropic journey started about 10 years ago, when I was conscripted
into the family foundation. I say “conscripted” because when my grandfather who
founded the foundation says, “Please be on the board,” it’s not really a request
at all. It’s really an order. But I was very happy to because I was the only third
generation who was on the board.
Traditionally the area of education is very popular in our part of the world, and
we looked at the most critical problems in Singapore and around the region.We
decided that aging — elder care — was the most critical problem Singapore is
facing because we have one of the fastest-aging populations in the world.Within
elder care we picked something very unpopular: end-of-life issues — dying. And
we got people to talk about death in a culture where talking about dying is taboo.
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In the environment we picked water and sanitation, and that’s strictly outside
Singapore; we have a few offices in Cambodia,Vietnam and China. Our tagline is
“radical philanthropy,” which means picking unpopular topics, complex topics
that we are passionate about so that you have the sweet spot at the confluence
of public interest and private value; and it means tackling the root cause of the
issues, being very focused and gathering expertise over many years of working
on the issues.
So, for example, we work on national policy.We set up a center for palliative care
four years ago in Singapore.And just last year, the government decided that they
wanted the center to come up with a national blueprint, a national strategy for
palliative care in Singapore. We decided that we needed to go even beyond our
shores — beyond Singapore.
I think all of you have heard of quality-of-life indexes; we commissioned an intelligence unit to come up with a quality-of-death index. They came out with this
quality-of-death index, which ranked 40 countries around the world on end-of-life
care. Singapore was eighteenth out of 40 countries.That got our decision-makers
very upset because they like to be one, two or three. And UK, incidentally, is
number one, Australia is number two, New Guinea three and US [United States]
is number nine.This gets people talking. It holds government accountable.
We got into advocacy because, especially when you are taking a taboo topic, you
want people to talk about it and address it. We commissioned a film that came
out this year and was internationally released; if you go to lifebeforedeath.com,
you can order this. It’s won quite a few awards on the international film circuit.
It’s called Life Before Death, and it’s looking at pain relief and the lack of access.
It’s also very much a training video — a lot of little snippets, short films — for
palliative care physicians and health care professionals to work with and use in
their own countries and cultures.
In summary we like to take a more radical approach because we think that
philanthropy gives you the opportunity to take risks.You can take risks and use
your entrepreneurial instincts and skill sets. You can take a long-term view, and
you can do a lot of things that, as Tony Blair said yesterday, governments cannot
do or will not do because they don’t have the political will. And you can do
things better — a lot more responsive to the ground; you can take much more
innovative approaches.
I decided to do it on a national basis at the center and found that overseeing
your own family’s philanthropy is a lot easier than convincing other people to
do it and take a strategic view. So, that is really for the long haul. I think in Asia
the time has come. With the unprecedented wealth creation that we see, there
are a lot of people who are starting to think about philanthropy, and we want to
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Not Your Parents’ Giving: Leveraging All Sectors for Change
gather them.That’s why we are partnering with the Global Philanthropy Forum
and starting this series called the Philanthropy in Asia Summit, convening philanthropists from all around Asia to come to Singapore. If any of you have activities
in Asia, please send me an e-mail, and I’ll give you an invite and we’ll see where
it can go from there.
Mark Kramer
Great.Thank you so much, Laurence.That’s terrific and very inspiring.
Carol, you’ve begun to engage with nonprofits and communities far beyond
the way a typical foundation does. Tell us a little bit about your work and what
you’ve heard.
Carol Civita
Okay.Thank you, Mark, for the question, and thank you to the Global Philanthropy
Forum. It’s a pleasure to be here representing Brazil. I was very pleased to see a
panel about Brazil yesterday.
I would like to tell you a little about my background. My involvement with
philanthropy comes through my husband’s family. It all started in 1985 with a
visionary, my husband’s grandfather Victor Civita, who imagined a better country
through education — and he was more specific. He decided to concentrate on
teachers. He believed that teachers were the channel for the future of education
in Brazil, and he decided to publish a magazine that today is distributed to 1
million teachers in Brazil from north to south.They reach more than 5,000 public
schools in Brazil. This magazine is dedicated to helping teachers enhance their
skills in elementary classrooms.
The Victor Civita Foundation has created a prize that offers teachers recognition
for their work and benefits so that they can improve their personal skills with
higher education. After 27 years I understood that the infrastructure for the
Victor Civita Foundation was doing well, and I decided that I needed to help in
further ways. I decided to understand how the NGOs worked in Brazil. As many
of you might know, the economic growth in Brazil is very positive; we have very
favorable political grounds, and for the past years more than 340,000 NGOs have
been born in Brazil. I decided that I needed to understand how they functioned
because I personally believe that no one knows better what a community needs
than the community itself. I thought that reinventing the wheel was not necessary.
We just needed to listen to what was going on, so I started to work closer to the
NGOs and listen to what their necessities were.
The only problem I found is that with such a big number of NGOs, we needed
more collaboration; and apart from all the resources that the donors could offer
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for the NGOs, I think that the most important resource is time and putting them
together to talk to each other and share their experiences and their failures and
their success stories, which are very similar.
I like to make a parallel to that. I don’t know if you’ve watched a movie called
Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he relives his day every day.Well, since
I’ve decided not to affiliate myself with any NGOs, I’ve been participating in
many meetings for the past two years and the feeling I have is that I’ve been in
that same meeting over and over again. So, I said that I think these people need
to talk to each other; and if they are able to talk to each other and share experiences, this will allow them not to waste the resources they have because if you
put groups who are dedicated to the same causes together, they will come up
with a lot of ideas and creativity.
Mark was asking me if I could give an example of the Victor Civita Foundation’s
work. Distributing 1 million magazines in Brazil is very complicated, and getting
into schools in the Amazon is not a simple thing. So, publishing is very important.
But how do you get this magazine to the right people, to the right teachers? No
one knows it better than the community, so the magazines are canoed to the
teachers, and the community does it.
Because no one knows how to do that better than the community, I’ve decided to
use my time and my knowledge and my connections — which is what I believe I
have as an asset — to put people together and to bring the donors closer to the
causes. I also believe that if you do not understand the cause, if you do not live
the cause, if you do not experience the cause, you will not have the long-term
engagement — and this is the only way to have it. So, I hope that my children
through the Victor Civita Foundation will have the opportunity to visit the classrooms and the teachers that the foundation helps so that they understand what
is behind this and how they can be more helpful for Brazil.
Not Your Parents’ Giving: Leveraging All Sectors for Change
Tony Elumelu
I see it in a different way. I think that from time to time we live in a dynamic world.
We need to stop and assess our strategies and our approaches; and if we think
that they are not working as they should work in terms of productivity, in terms
of delivery, in terms of outcome, we should rethink the old approach.
If we look at the issue of grant making, the way we have embraced it at our
foundation is fairly different. We think, Yes we have to give grants in sectors
that are important to us that we pursue; however, we think again, based on
what I’ve espoused, that the philosophy driving what we believe in is that we
should make people fishermen rather than giving them fish every time. So, yes,
I think that you need to at some point in time question certain orthodoxies to
make progress in life.
Mark Kramer
Thank you. Laurence?
Laurence Lien
I think questions are always asked of foundations and philanthropists:“How are
you accountable?” I think philanthropists and foundations should be accountable,
but it doesn’t mean that society cannot take in the diversity and the pluralism that
all the philanthropists represent.We are accountable because we are also a public
charity that produces results for the people, but I think there are many different
approaches and I would encourage people to experiment. There’s no one way
of doing things, of solving problems in the world.There are many different ways.
And if all philanthropists would just experiment, it will emerge in the society that
they have discovered better ways of doing things. That needs to be a dialogue
among decision-makers as well as in those communities.
Mark Kramer
Mark Kramer
Thank you, Carol. What a terrific conversation. I am impressed that here we
have three outstanding philanthropists, none of whom are talking about writing
checks or doing philanthropy in a conventional sense at all. Laurence is very
involved with public policy. Tony has made a compelling case around the role
of investment and private enterprise in creating good in the world. Carol has
talked about bringing NGOs together and creating mergers, not just funding
them in their work.
Let me ask Tony first, but then I’d like to hear from all of you. Is there a risk? Is
there a problem in having philanthropists who move beyond philanthropy and
who are not necessarily supporting the nonprofit sector in traditional ways but
are finding these new vehicles for social change?
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Wonderful. Carol?
Carol Civita
In Brazil we like to use a term called social investment, and we try nowadays
not to use the words benevolence and charity. We want to go further.We want to
see what’s going to happen, and we want to make sure that all the causes will be
sustainable and engaged into society and no longer in need of donations or grant
making. We choose to have periods of involvement with the NGOs and then to
make sure that the social investment has been worth it and that the organizations
are sustainable. It’s beyond what we call the charity and assistencialism — I don’t
know if you use that word here.
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Mark Kramer
Carol, you mentioned to me earlier that the word philanthropy is avoided, in fact,
in part because of a history in Brazil of nonprofit organizations’ not really being
trusted, there being issues with corruption and so on. It’s interesting because
in the US and Europe we tend to think as nonprofits as the most trusted organizations; but in a context where nonprofits are not as trusted, there’s more of a
tendency for foundations to do things themselves, to do their own projects, to be
more like an operating foundation. Is that a trend that you see in Brazil?
Carol Civita
I think this is changing. I was talking earlier about the of the 340,000 nonprofit
organizations in Brazil; we could say that only 200 are not legitimate, which is a
very small number, but when they are not legitimate they tend to make a lot of
noise and attract a lot of attention. This is changing, and I feel today that these
organizations are very trustworthy, and we can see it because their results are
very obvious.
Most of the foundations in Brazil are what we call executive foundations. They
operate their own causes, which in some ways is very positive, but I also think
that this should not be the model for the future because when operating your
own organization at one point you might shift from concentrating on the cause
to concentrating on your organization; this is a danger because if you want your
organization to survive, sometimes you stop concentrating on the cause.This is
why I believe that if all the foundations and NGOs come together and have an
infrastructure and regulatory mechanisms to support them, they will shift from
operating organizations, which is the majority today in Brazil, to grant making
for the very trustworthy organizations that are being created.
Mark Kramer
Tony, we hear a lot about the tremendous explosion of philanthropy in India,
Latin America, China and other places. What’s happening with philanthropy by
Africans in Africa?
Tony Elumelu
We have two categories of philanthropists in Africa.The first category is the ones
we’ve always had, and they are usually funded from outside, so they receive
funds for the different causes. Now we have the modern type, which is Africa
funded and also Africa based. I think I saw somebody here from the TY Danjuma
Foundation, which is one of the Africa-funded foundations that we have, together
with The Tony Elumelu Foundation and a few in South Africa. So, I would say
across Africa there are quite a few. Something is being done to encourage this.
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We are working jointly to encourage and put in place the proper legislation in
rest of the African countries so that we all have the rules, the guides. That part
of what you talked about in Brazil — we all want to see them happen in Africa.
We think that African schools would like to participate, would like to support
humanity in a manner that is quite sustainable. But we think that some of them
do not agree about it, so some of us have a key role to play in making sure that
we don’t only do good through our own foundations but that we also collaborate
and become truly catalytic across the continent so that others can come on board
and do the same thing. I note what you said about the convening in Singapore,
and it’s something we also think about.
Mark Kramer
Terrific.And, Laurence, you work not just in Singapore but in China and Vietnam.
What has been your experience working in other countries, and how have you
found ways to be effective in those regions?
Laurence Lien
Some of the issues in other parts of the world you see manifested in Asia
too — the NGOs tend to be a bit weaker and a bit less trusted as well. In Singapore
there’s a different dynamic. I mean, charities are trusted, but they are not exactly
the most effective. Outside Singapore we find that many can’t be trusted because
of leakage and corruption; and we find that many foundations actually start their
own programs, which has its own problems: How do you scale up? How do you
sustain? If it’s a small program, how do you develop expertise?
We find that when we do work on sanitation projects, we have had to put people
on the ground, so we have field officers in Cambodia, Vietnam and China. You
have to look for the right partners.There are a lot of bad partners to work with,
so you must have that robust process of identifying good partners to work
with — and you keep deepening those relationships — but we find it’s impossible
to run away from putting your own people on the ground.
Mark Kramer
That’s very interesting. I also wanted to ask one last question. There are many
people in the room who are interested in funding in Africa, in China, in Vietnam
and in Latin America who are based in Europe or the US. What advice would
you have for them about how to be effective funding in your countries, your
regions? Tony?
Tony Elumelu
I think first is to identify credible local partners and also to ensure that there
is alignment between what you plan for the receptive African communities
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Not Your Parents’ Giving: Leveraging All Sectors for Change
and what is truly important to them. So, just like what Tony Blair said yesterday
about China and the West, it happens every time: What you consider important
in certain environments might be different when you take them to Africa. So,
find the right partner — very important — to align between what you plan to do
and what actually is required. That way we can again create this social wealth
that is important: all facets coming together — the donors, the recipient — and
making sure that how they want to intervene will actually create the true intent
of that intervention.
Mark Kramer
Carol?
Carol Civita
I agree with Tony. I think that finding the best partner is the way to go, but I also
believe that you should have a good field trip and stay in the area for a while:
understand the country and its politics.We have very favorable politics grounds
today in Brazil.The economic growth and the safety nets provided by the government within the past 25 years have been socially very relevant, and you can find
quite a few partners in the private sector, in foundations and in local NGOs. I
think this is the best way.
Laurence Lien
In addition to what has already been mentioned, I would strongly recommend
focus and really dedicating your attention to just one particular area, not just in
terms of geography but in terms of field of interest: How do you find the best
partners if you are not knowledgeable about the area yourself? Over time I hope
to see many more community-based intermediaries like community foundations
spring up in Asia because those would be the best partners, going back to the
point that communities know what is best for themselves. I would fund community foundations in the future.
Mark Kramer
Good.
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Tuesday, April 17
Annie Chen, Chair, RS Group
Jed Emerson, Executive Vice President, ImpactAssets
Liesel Pritzker Simmons, Vice President and Director, Program
Development, IDP Foundation, Inc.
Moderator: Ron Cordes, Co-founder, Cordes Foundation
A Different Kind of ROI:
The Role for Private Capital
Ron Cordes
Good morning! My name is Ron Cordes, and I am a co-founder along with my
wife, Marty, of a family foundation — the Cordes Foundation — in which we
have become active impact investors. I’m delighted to be joined by three great
panelists this morning for a conversation titled “A Different Kind of Return on
Investment.”We’re looking forward to talking about catalyzing capital in new and
different ways to solve important problems.
I’m joined today by Liesel Pritzker Simmons, vice president and program director
of the IDP [Innovation Development Progress] Foundation here in the United
States. Annie Chen is chair of the RS Group, based in Hong Kong. Jed Emerson
is executive vice president of ImpactAssets and co-author of the recent book
Impact Investing, which I learned just yesterday was the recipient of a 2012
Nautilus Award.
(From Left to Right) Liesel Pritzker Simmons, Annie Chen and Ron Cordes
Let me frame for a moment what we’re going to be talking about — this concept
of impact investing. It fits between two areas that are perhaps more commonly
understood and have been practiced for a while. On the one side is the concept
of a recoverable grant or a program-related investment, which might be things
that fall in the grant portfolio of a foundation as opposed to sitting on the
traditional investment balance sheet. On the other side are the screening of
public equities and debt — negative or positive screens, such as SRI [sustainable
responsible investments] and ESG [environmental, social and government] issues.
I believe that all of us are practicing that as part of our portfolios.
What we’d like to share with you is a discussion of the part that fits in the middle,
which is direct investments, where 100 percent of the dollars related to a particular investment would be directed with a thesis of change to solve a particular
issue area and achieve a level of financial return. So, when we talk about impact
investing today, that’s the direction that we’re going to be focused on.
We have with Annie, Liesel and myself three individuals who have been actively
involved as early adopters in catalyzing and deploying capital in our own portfolios; and with Jed we have one of the early leaders in the space who for the
past decade-plus has been writing and speaking about impact investing. Jed also
acts as an adviser to both IDP and RS Group in implementing their strategies.
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I’d like to start with you, Liesel, and have you share with us how you began this
process of becoming an impact investor at IDP. What led you to it, and what are
you doing in the space?
Liesel Pritzker Simmons
I’m quite new to the space. I’m at the beginning of my journey toward blending
my mission and my investment strategy together. The way I came at it was actually from the grantmaking side.
In 2008 I took a portion of my assets and formed a foundation, and one of our
earliest projects was a program in Ghana that focuses on low-cost private schools.
Our foundation focuses on education projects, but also, like all good strategic
philanthropists, we’re looking for scalable, sustainable solutions, so we thought
focusing on this low-cost private school sector would be a good program area
for us. Like other good strategic philanthropists tell us to do, we partnered with
a microfinance organization called Opportunity International and one of its
partners in Ghana, Sinapi Aba Trust.
There are all of these mushroom schools that pop up throughout sub-Saharan
Africa and also in Ghana; they’re private schools that are located in very poor
communities as an alternative to overcrowded government schools. Sometimes
there is no government school, and there are more than 6,000 of these private
schools in Ghana. We were interested in determining whether microfinance
institutions lend to these schools and what kind of products and services these
types of schools needed. So, we conducted market research and we started
asking microfinance institutions,“Why won’t you lend to these schools? You’re a
mission-driven microfinance institution.What’s the issue?”And they said,“Schools
don’t make good loan clients. They’re really risky. Their educators aren’t very
entrepreneurial.”There were many barriers.
After doing some research — three years and 15 trips to Ghana later — we developed a program that we’ve piloted in Ghana with 103 schools, and we have
had only one default. Our microfinance partner said,“Oh, my gosh! We can lend
to these schools. We didn’t realize that there was a market here, but your grant
opened up this market. Now we want to scale it up into our normal products
and services.”
I can speak to the impact of these loans: we see enrollment increases; we see
infrastructure increases; we see parent engagement increases — all of these
indicators. Essentially we used our grant money — a $1.3 million grant — to
develop a program that an MFI [microfinance institution] wanted to scale up
within its normal program. We were quite happy with that, but the thing that I
found completely devastating was how focused and strategic we’d been with our
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grantmaking. We had absolutely no mechanism at the foundation to then invest
in something like that.We had no mechanism to move up that supply chain and
actually invest in these programs that we think are so important to develop. So
I felt that our investment strategy was completely siloed from what we thought
was important on our grantmaking side. So that was devastating.
Now with the foundation but also with my personal assets, I’m asking,“What is
the money trying to accomplish? What is it actually trying to do?” I’m looking at
traditional notions of risk and traditional notions of return, and so that was a big
wake-up call, and it occurred because the grant we made was deemed successful.
That’s where we’re at with IDP and our investments.
Ron Cordes
Terrific.Thank you.
So,Annie you’re investing today in a geography that’s earlier in the fields of both
social enterprise and impact investing in Asia than certainly here in the US or in
Europe. So, share with us a bit about what prompted and inspired the RS Group
to look at impact investing and how you look at investing your portfolio.
Annie Chen
Okay.Thank you, Ron.
I’m from Hong Kong, and I started on this journey about four years ago. What
prompted it was a restructuring of our family trust in a way that I had to take
responsibility for my own portfolio. The type of capital that we’re dealing with
here is inherited wealth; it’s my personal portfolio and includes both investment
and philanthropic capital. The why behind my engaging in impact investing in
a way is really a journey of figuring out how I look at wealth and what is my
personal relationship with the wealth that’s inherited, that’s not created by me.
Like Liesel I started on the philanthropic side. I started by thinking that the
simplest thing would be to just give it all away because I’m not an investor by
training. I have other family members who are much more professional and
interested in investing than I was. But it’s been a journey of going from thinking
about just giving it all away through philanthropic means to finding a completely
different way to create social and environmental value using the entire portfolio — whether you call it investment capital, impact capital or philanthropic
capital. It’s a matter of using all the tools available to reach the goal of maximizing
impact, whether it’s environmental or social.We need to build in some financial
dimension to that as well to make it sustainable.
The journey has become my own personal pursuit of happiness in a way, in
terms of finding meaning in this whole process and a new way of relating to the
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assets I’ve been lucky enough to receive. But of course I got a lot of help along
the way, ranging from our family office head, who put me in touch with the idea
of responsible investing, to going out and finding advisers because Asia and even
Hong Kong, which although known as a financial hub, is still fairly behind in the
area of sustainable investing. I remember a few years ago when I approached
private banks and talked about responsible investing. They kept pushing green
funds and water funds at me, and when I asked them, “Do you know what the
UN principles of responsible investing are?” they just gave me a blank stare and
had to go back and do their homework.
I also got a lot of help with doing research and reading and meeting people who
were willing to share their experiences and knowledge in this space.
To me, impact investing isn’t an asset class. It’s really a way of looking for the
extra financial value in any investing or grant that I do; it’s a way of looking at
the entire portfolio holistically rather than just using the philanthropic piece
to engage in this. I was joking with Jed yesterday that I’m going to start calling
myself a “blended-value investor,” at least at this point.
Ultimately it’s about integrity across the entire portfolio. If I have certain values I
want to bring to bear to the philanthropic activities that I engage in, those same
values really should be embedded in the investing that I do as well.
Ron Cordes
Thank you, Annie. Before we get to Jed to provide some context, I’ll share a third
story to give you another perspective of three different ways in which individuals
have come into this field.
I was fortunate enough six years ago to have built a company with two partners — an investment management firm.We sold it to a global insurance company,
and at the time we did that Marty and I did something that we’d always wanted
to do: We formed a family foundation. We quickly became aware of the fact that
there are limitations no matter what the amount of money is.We are not the Gates
Foundation.We have several fewer zeros on our balance sheet. So, no matter how
passionate we were about a particular issue — whether it be economic empowering of women and girls or human rights, on which Marty leads the charge in
our foundation — we became frustrated with the fact that in the traditional family
foundation environment it was only the 5 or 6 or 7 percent grants budget that
we looked at as the pool of capital available to make change and do good. As an
investor by training and history, I kept looking at that other 93 to 95 percent
and saying, “Why can’t we affect the same level of change with that that we’re
doing with the 5 to 7 percent?”
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I take a go-in-with-both-feet, ready-fire-aim type of approach. Early in 2007 I
decided that what we wanted to do was to see if we could challenge ourselves.
So Marty and I went to our board and said,“Over the next 18 to 24 months, we’d
like to put 20 percent of our portfolio in” what at the time we just called “social
enterprise investing” — investing in social enterprises because the term impact
investing hadn’t even been coined yet. It wasn’t part of the lexicon. I remember
telling our board that, and they approved the strategy:We may lose some money
on these, but if we do it, we’re going to lose it brilliantly, intelligently.We’re going
to try to lose it effectively. We’re going to try to really learn something from this
that not only will inform what we do in the future but that might also inform
what other wealth holders, family foundations and investors do.
So, we became fully invested with that 20 percent in early 2008. In fact, by the
time Bear Stearns fell in the spring of 2008, we were 100 percent invested in our
impact portfolio. Any of you who happen to have been involved in the financial
markets in 2008 will remember that wasn’t a particularly good year. We fully
expected as we went through 2008 that we’d probably be sitting down and
having a somewhat sobering conversation with our board of directors in 2009
about the performance of our impact portfolio.Well, by the time we got to early
2009, the impact investments in our portfolio were actually our best performers.
We’d invested primarily in debt. We’d invested in small and medium enterprises.
We’d invested in microbanks throughout the world. In fact, my running joke at the
time was that the best investments we made were in microbanks and companies
whose names I couldn’t spell nor pronounce, nor could I probably find them on
the map, but they completely outperformed the investments we’d made in all
the blue-chip brand-name companies that had been part of the financial crisis.
What became clear to me as an investor in 2009 was that it is possible to have
this double-bottom-line impact.And then, as someone who’d been in the financial
services space, I began to explore why more people weren’t doing this: Is there
actually demand for this among investors? And, if so, why isn’t more capital being
deployed in that direction? One of the reasons I knew intuitively was that it was
really hard. Deploying that capital was probably the most difficult process I’ve
been involved with in my 30 years in the investment world because we had no
idea where to put the money. In fact, I thought it was going to be relatively easy in
2007. I’d hired a team of young MBA [master of business administration] students
and said,“Give me a landscape of what this market looks like.”
Unlike some of the things that Liesel has done in direct investing in Ghana, we’ve
looked more at a portfolio approach to investing through managers in a series
of funds, which is a business that I’ve been in before — a manager of managers.
I thought it would be relatively simple: Let’s go out. Let’s find all the databases
of impact-investing managers. Let’s evaluate their performance, and let’s put
together a portfolio.
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After about the first four weeks of google searches, this MBA team came back and
said,“There is no such database.We found three or four of them, but we have no
idea who these impact investment managers even are.” Ironically what we found
over the course of our 12- month investment cycle was that the single best source
of new impact managers was existing managers, where somebody would say,“If
you’re investing with us, you really should consider this other manager because
many of the investors with us also invest with him or her.”That’s a wonderfully
collaborative paradigm and, frankly, something that I hadn’t seen in 20 years
of hedge fund investing — one manager referring another. I thought, What a
wonderful, collaborative paradigm that’s in this space, but how unfortunate
that that’s the best they can do and that’s all they have to rely on to try to
bring investors in.
So, that led to the formation of an organization late 2009 early 2010 called
ImpactAssets, a nonprofit financial services company. I gave this presentation on
Wall Street last week. I had to stop at this point and say it again slowly:“nonprofit
financial services company.”We’re designed with a sustainable revenue model, but
at the same time we’re designed with a primary objective of being field builders
and catalyzing capital for impact investing.
Jed is involved with our senior team as our executive vice president of strategy. It’s
really a partnership between our family foundation and the Calvert Foundation,
with great support from our friends at the Rockefeller Foundation. One of the
things Rockefeller did is fund an industry study that looked at about 1,000 impact
investors and asked the question,“If you were presented with an opportunity to
do good and do well, have this double bottom line in your portfolio, is that something you’d be interested in?” Not surprisingly to me, 48 percent were interested
or very interested in learning more. Less than 1 percent were doing anything, so
that led us to ask, “Why was there this huge chasm?” People are interested, yet
they’re not catalyzing capital.
What it came down to was, in a nutshell, that this group deals almost exclusively
in their investment portfolios through their financial advisers, and their financial
advisers weren’t capable, equipped or interested in having those conversations.
Because I came out of that business and have worked with financial advisers
for 25 years, that was really the touch point for me. I said,“This is a place where
perhaps I can add value,” which led to us form ImpactAssets as a way to become
the go-to resource for financial advisers.
So, if you visit imapctassets.org, one of the things you’ll find is the ImpactAssets
50, which is the first publicly available database of impact investment managers.
We launched at the Clinton Global Initiative last year. It attempts to solve the
problem that we had in 2007: If I want to invest and build a portfolio and I want
to look at geography and an impact area, where do I go? Whom do I talk to? We
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have other products that are coming out, but they’re all premised on the idea
that if we want to catalyze investors, we need to catalyze their financial advisers
and have the gatekeepers open the gates as opposed to keeping them closed.
So, there are three stories of how folks got into impact investing.
Jed, I’d like to turn to you and share the context.Annie had mentioned one of the
themes, which you’ve promoted now for more than a decade, of blended value
and looking at the overall portfolio approach to impact. Please share how you
think about this and the window that you look out of into the space.
Jed Emerson
Sure. Thanks very much. First off, thanks to Jane and her team for inviting us to
have this discussion. I think it’s one of the most exciting conversations taking
place today in part because it really is at the intersection of investing and
philanthropy.
Traditionally we’ve thought about the process of value creation on a bifurcated
basis: You focus on creating financial worth for a portion of your life and then
you turn around and focus on philanthropic and charitable activities to give back,
if you will. I know that one of the entrepreneurs from the Bay Area said that
he didn’t like thinking about philanthropy and “giving back” because he didn’t
feel like he ever took anything away. It’s interesting when you think about the
number of folks who are coming to the conversation today with a more blended
approach to how they understand the nature of value — that the idea that you
would pursue financial returns and performance for the majority of your life and
then spend the last part of your life in some ways making up for all the things
you did to create the financial performance, it just doesn’t make sense to a lot of
folks. I think that’s part of what’s driving this: a fundamentally different way to
understand the nature of value — the value we create in our professional life and
also in our personal life — that you cannot disaggregate the value proposition.
The second piece that’s driving a lot of today’s conversation is a growing realization that no matter what the issue is that you care about and that you’re
committed to having an effect on, no matter how much money you have to give
away, it’s not enough, right? It’s just not enough.Things are moving at a scale and
with a momentum and a force today that if you took all the good grantmaking
that’s done in this room, it’s still not enough.
Tonight by the time you go to sleep 19,000 children will have died from preventable disease. The biologist E. O. Wilson says that we are now in a period where
annually we are losing 27,000 species of plants and animal on the planet, every
year. As a foundation executive or trustee, when you think about the forces
that are in motion around the world and consider your philanthropic mission
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to have an impact upon those forces — and then you consider that out of the
assets committed to your foundation 95% are at best neutral to advancing that
mission and only your 5% payout is creating impact through grants — and it’s
actually not 5% because you’re allowed to bill your administrative costs against
that if you’re a US foundation. So, perhaps it is only, let’s say, 3% of your charitable
dollar you’re investing in impact, well that is simply not a very compelling way
to manage one’s capital.Think about it:What business would you invest in if the
entrepreneur came to you and said, “I have this great proposition for you. For
every dollar that you invest I’m going to take 3 to 5% and execute my business
strategy and I’m going to take 95% and put it in a CD [certificate of deposit].” Or
even worse,“I’m going to invest in some of the companies that I actually think
are destroying value in the market.” This is not a winning business proposition
and I don’t think it’s a winning philanthropic proposition.
Let me just close by saying I think what’s really happening, in large part, is a
re-visioning and a re-understanding of fiduciary responsibility and obligation,
where you have individuals who are coming to the table saying,“It’s simply not
enough to manage our philanthropy as some sort of private investment group
that then does good things on the side; the reason these philanthropic entities
are created is to drive and create public and social and environmental value and
impact, so let’s manage all of our assets for that end.”
I know a lot of folks from the traditional financial services side would say, “But
you have a fiduciary obligation to maximize financial performance.” And I think
we forget that the very concept of fiduciary responsibility has evolved and must
now evolve again. Indeed there was a time in New York State when as a trustee
of a New York State endowment you were not allowed to invest in anything
other than — wait for it — bonds issued by the state of New York. It was not the
regulators and the legislators who came to the fiduciaries and said, “Gosh, we
think maybe you should broaden your measure of performance.” It was the fiduciaries who went to the regulators and the legislators and said,“We have a larger
obligation, and we feel that we can pursue that obligation most effectively by
broadening the set of investments that we can bring to the table to manage the
assets that we’re responsible for.”
In the past 20 years, much of the institutional investor movement to consider
off-balance-sheet risk and liability represented by global climate change has
come from the trustee community itself, saying,“In fact, if we’re not taking into
account these factors, we actually feel we’re violating our fiduciary responsibility.”
They have acted to open the window in terms of our understanding of what
it means to be a good fiduciary, and those efforts on the institutional side are
being increasingly complimented by the efforts of people such as the folks on
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the panel and others around the world who are coming to the table with a new
vision of fiduciary responsibility and obligation and what it means to manage
assets effectively. I think that’s really in large part what this conversation’s about.
Ron Cordes
Thank you.
To pivot off Jed’s comment, when I speak about this the concept of the little
pocket and the big pocket — and I’ll use US numbers because that’s what I’m
most familiar with — the way I look at that is this: Here in the US, we’re the most
philanthropic nation on the planet.We give away charitably $300 billion per year
as individuals, financials and corporations, and we’re large players in that space.
We can see the amazing things that are being done with that money to effect
change and do good. The problem is, to Jed’s comment, that the issues of the
world are so much larger than that small pocket of capital that we’re deploying.
I look from the investment world at the $37 trillion of total investment capital
that we have available here just as individual consumers in America. What if we
were able to deploy — even take a small number — aspirationally 1 percent of
that $37 trillion in the same direction we’re putting the $300 billion.That would
double the amount that we’re putting toward solving big problems.What gets me
up in the morning is: How do we get there? How do we begin to develop that
paradigm and that philosophy among people — the blended-value philosophy
that will ultimately lead them to deploy their portfolios in that direction? I think
that we as owners and holders and stewards of philanthropic capital should
frankly be the low-hanging fruit, right? We have this mission-driven money, to
Jed’s point, and why should that money not all ultimately be directed in some
way toward addressing the missions that we determined are important for those
philanthropic pools of capital?
We spent some time preparing over breakfast this morning, and we bantered
back and forth. I had a list of questions, and I asked one particular question of
the group: “What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve experienced of trying to
build an impact investment portfolio and put those investments on the books?”
Liesel had an incredibly impassioned answer to that question about some of the
work that she’s been doing with one of her financial adviser teams. Liesel, I’d
love to have you share, from a client to an adviser, how has that role been, what
challenges have you faced, and how have you tried to overcome them?
Liesel Pritzker Simmons
I’m new to this space, and I’m a new investor as well.At the very beginning of my
career as an investor, a devastating economic crisis occurred, so when I talked
to my financial advisers about moving assets toward impact and direct yield in
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scary African countries that they don’t know how to operate in, what was thrown
back at me was:“That’s really, really risky, Liesel.”And I’d say,“Well, you weren’t so
concerned about that in 2008! I don’t understand your assessment of risk, and
apparently neither do your compliance people.”
I’m just saying that there are other definitions of risk that need to be put on
the table, and my financial advisers don’t necessarily like to hear that. I’m not a
seasoned investor, so I’m still learning as well. I’ve found a very closed-minded
view of these things. And when I go to my quarterly meetings and look at the
graphs that are put in front of me and I look at the standard deviation, there’s a
lot more to those graphs that aren’t on those pieces of paper in terms of risk but
also in terms of return.There are a lot of things that those companies are doing
that my financial advisers and their managers underneath them don’t know about
both from a positive perspective and a negative perspective, so the first thing we
did was a massive screening of everything in the portfolio — good and bad.What
are all these companies actually doing? How risky are they? Are they funding
the Sudanese military as Volvo is? Volvo! I grew up with a Volvo station wagon!
Anyway, I’m just saying that there were things that I didn’t know my portfolio
was doing, and the gatekeepers of that information are my financial advisers. So
from a client’s perspective, I ask, “Why has it been such an uphill battle to just
find out what’s going on in my portfolio? Why is this information not expressed
to me on a quarterly basis?
Ron Cordes
Interesting.
When we talk about metrics and a double-bottom-line return — social and environmental on the one side, financial on the other — and this dovetails exactly to
your point, Liesel, the financial side is easy, right? We’ve got all kinds of numbers,
and spoken as someone who’s been in the industry for 25 years, we tend to make
it really complicated, right? We have all kinds of different ratios and graphs that
we can apply, particularly when performance might not be as good as we would
like it to be, so we can put it in an 82-page performance report and maybe have
you not understand that you could have done better the last quarter. It’s all very
numeric. On the other side, though, is the concept that if we’re investing for
impact, particularly in private debt and equity — direct investments — how do
we measure the impact? If we’re looking at three different investments, we can
analyze the financial returns but how do we know which one might have the
most demonstrated impact to solve the problem?
I’d like to ask Annie and Jed from two different perspectives, and I’ll call it qualitative and quantitative. Jed, you’ve been very involved since the beginning in
designing the standards with the Global Impact Investing Network, funded by
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Rockefeller and other organizations, around how we actually build a standard
set that can be applied across the space. What I’d like to look at is aspirationally
moving forward over the next three to five years and building it.
Annie, today in your portfolio as you make an impact investment and then try to
look at that social or environmental return, is it actually being achieved? What are
some of the strategies and the metrics that you look at in doing that?
Annie Chen
This is really early stage — we’ve made some of our investments only in the past
two years, and a lot of them tend to be rather long-term, whether funds or direct
investments, so we’re still learning as we go along.That said, we’re not letting the
challenge of lacking a ready-made framework for measuring impact stop us from
taking steps to go ahead and make those investments. Obviously we need to be
careful about doing it, and like any investment it has to go through a thought
process and a screening process. We try to get referrals from people, and a lot
of our investments are through funds, so we do our due diligence as much as
possible. If we need to get professional help, we do.
One particular challenge is that because a lot of the higher-impact stuff tends
to be direct investments, they are very demanding in terms of capacity and
resources, from doing the due diligence, to understanding where the impact is,
to understanding their business model. A lot of these are untested, so how do
you assess them? So far, particularly in the context of Hong Kong, I’ve taken the
approach of being the first one in, even though there may not be a track record,
to make it easier for these innovative enterprises to talk to other potential investors. So, I do understand that it’s a kind of risk taking, but I think it’s a positive
kind of risk taking that’s needed when the space is still so new.
Ron Cordes
Terrific. And that’s not only in Asia. I would add that both here in the US and in
Europe that catalytic investor role is incredibly important because there are a lot
of reasons why an investor could say,“I’m going to wait three years or five years
or seven years until this industry evolves further.” I think we all have no doubt
that in five to seven years there’s going to be a lot more information available; but,
to Jed’s point, that will be five years that we still will have not deployed capital
toward solving problems that need to be addressed today.
So, Jed, one of the things that you do at ImpactAssets is write a series of issue
briefs, which I read. So, I’m going to quote one and have you just, in the context
of this whole measurement, talk about what’s being done in the space, and aspirationally if we were sitting here five years from now what you might expect to
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see and also talk about the concept of firm impact capacity as a way to look at
managers without the full data set today and try to understand if indeed they’re
moving in the right direction.
Jed Emerson
Let me say right up front that I started the first part of my career in social work
and I’m not really a quant guy. I mean, I used to like getting $100,000 grants
because I could divide it easily between four staff positions! It worked well! I
actually find it a little ironic that I’ve spent the past 20 years being a part of this
whole innovation and metrics discussion, and part of what’s intriguing about the
current conversation is that what we’re seeing is a coming together of various
sets actors who within their own domains have developed a set of performance
metrics because the indexes that they’re finding for current use are lacking.
When you speak to any CEO or manager of a large commercial enterprise, especially those that are transnational, they talk about the inability to manage because
the standard balance sheet metrics don’t actually capture what they are dealing
with in the markets. For example, if you’re a global for-profit manager and you’re
not thinking about how AIDS affects your workforce or you’re not considering
how the use of water in a certain region affects your production capacities, you’re
going to underperform.You’re going to have increasing problems and challenges.
The fact is, the traditional kind of balance sheet metrics don’t capture a whole
host of issues that today’s managers are grappling with on an increasingly dayto-day basis that affect real-time financial performance and return.
The flipside is that more and more NGOs and people in the development space
are recognizing that while qualitative descriptions of impact and performance
and return are needed to augment a more quantitative analytic framework, telling
stories alone is not enough; in fact, if you’re moving to using a variety of different
forms and types of capital, we really have to raise our literacy in the developingworld community around how you understand and track performance of the
financial impact of social and environmental programs.
This is all coming together in these mutually supportive conversations, and the
way I think about it is this: If you think about a light spectrum, you have the visible
light or the colors that your eye can see and you have the invisible light — gamma
rays, X-rays and everything that falls outside the visible light spectrum. What we
have done is placed most of our confidence in what we can see — in the visible
light spectrum — so we have econometrics and numeracy. We basically track
things. We have ratios, and we put a great deal of faith in them. Then events
happen like in 2008, where all the numbers are correlated going down, and
people say,“Wait — this can’t happen because the model said this or the metric
was supposed to go in this direction.” So, there was a betrayal, if you will, of faith
in the numeracy that we had built this financial system around.
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I think a lot of the conversation today about metrics is a question of pushing out
the boundary of the visible light spectrum and saying that you can in fact engage
in the quantitative representation of qualitative value and performance — that
quantitative metrics need to be enhanced by other aspects of performance
measurement to get a full picture of what’s happening. When we think about
the evolution of this, again, it’s important we recognize these tools, this thinking,
these practices are all in motion. I’m personally really very comfortable with that.
A lot of people seem to think that somehow we should have figured this all
out and should have these really clean Excel spreadsheets that are churning
out blended-return statements on a daily basis. But, if you think about it, at least
in the States in traditional business practice today a lot of the metrics and the
frameworks that we take as a given came about after World War II, when a set
of accountants and businesspeople and governmental actors came together and
said, “Wow! Thank God for the war because it basically bailed us out from the
Great Depression” — but the reason the Great Depression happened is because
nobody could tell what was happening in this area.
So, we need to figure out GAAP — generally accepted accounting principles — and
FASB, the Financial Accounting Standards Board.A whole host of things came into
play in the 1940s and 1950s that laid the foundation for how we do business, and
all of that has evolved. If you think about what’s traded on the public markets
today, 30 or 40 years ago all of your higher-listed companies were ones that had
hard assets, had factories, had plants, had materials. Today if you go down that
same list, it’s Microsoft; it’s Google; it’s soft, intangible value that over time we
have figured out how to take into account. That same process is taking place
in this conversation, and it’s an evolutionary stage. The work that the Global
Impact Investing Network has advanced has been really substantial.They have a
whole set of metrics called IRIS, which is the Impact Reporting and Investment
Standards. It’s a very spiffy acronym.
Ron Cordes
We’ll just call it IRIS.
Jed Emerson
Call it IRIS.What I like about it is they said,“Let’s not start with this very nebulous
discussion about performance and impact. Let’s look at all the metrics that the
World Bank, the IFC, leading foundations, NGOs and other people have used and
tease out the core indexes that those folks have been running their businesses
against. Let’s come up with a set of 50 to 100 indicators.”What they did that was
especially cool was then they posted all that on a website and said, “What do
you think?”They basically facilitated a crowd-based process to vet these metrics
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A Different Kind of ROI: The Role for Private Capital
so that people could debate: Everybody thinks job creation is a good outcome
indicator, but what’s a job? Is it part-time? Is it 20 hours a week? Is it 40 hours
a week with benefits?
There’s a process of dialing in our assumption about what these metrics are,
and I think over time we’ll see a coming together from the bottom and the top.
So, IRIS and GIIRS [Global Impact Investing Rating System] are two standards
that can be dropped down onto the field. But, as Annie was saying, when you go
into the street and into the community, you have to do a bottom-up process of
exploring performance metrics and measurement because a lot of organizations
don’t have the capacity to report on this basis. As investors, in the same way
that philanthropy moved from charitable gift giving to outcome philanthropy,
if you will, people have had to begin making investments in the administrative
overhead of organizations to build the ability to report and track performance
and outcomes. This same process is taking place in the impact-investing arena,
so you’re looking at this as simply a part of how you do business.
More and more of these conversations about metrics will come together because
increasingly people are wanting to understand a total performance, not simply
“Did you make the grant? Did you feed the person?” but “How has that life
changed?” And they want to understand in commercial market terms the total
value proposition of the company that you’re investing in. This all is coming
together in a very exciting way.
Ron Cordes
Thank you.
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Tuesday, April 17
Special Address: Elizabeth Littlefield, President and CEO,
Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Laila Iskandar, Chairperson, CID Consulting
Julie Katzman, Executive Vice President, Inter-American
Development Bank
Jayant Sinha, Partner, Omidyar Network India
Social Good:
By All (Private) Means Necessary
Moderator: Jane Wales
Jane Wales
Good afternoon.
Yesterday we talked a good deal about the role of the public sector when it comes
to effecting social change and when it comes to the evolving social contract.This
morning we’ve been talking by and large about the private sector, including the
private-sector side of all of us; and now we’re going to look at the ways in which
the public, private and philanthropic sectors interact to advance the social good.
We’re going to start off with remarks from Elizabeth Littlefield and then be joined
by a distinguished panel of three other guests.
(From Left to Right) Jane Wales, Elizabeth Littlefield,
Julie Katzman, Jayant Sinha and Laila Iskandar
Elizabeth is the tenth president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation
(OPIC), which is the financing arm of the US government. Before that she ran
an organization that we all call CGAP — the Consultative Group to Assist the
Poor — which is a think tank that looks at questions of how to provide development finance and financial services to the poor. She was at the World Bank, where
she was the director of the financial and private sectors, and prior to that she was
an investment banker.At JPMorgan Chase she was a managing partner in charge
of capital markets and finance in the new Europe, east and central Europe, the
Middle East and North Africa. Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Littlefield.
Elizabeth Littlefield
Thank you, Jane.Thank you very much.When I look around the room here, I think
you must be so proud of what you’ve put together in the past x number of years.
I think we’ll have a round of applause for Jane.
It is really inspiring to be in a room with so much commitment, so much good
energy, so much creativity — all packed in one room and all focused on making
the world a better place. It’s a privilege to be here.
As the US government’s development finance institution, OPIC is living proof
that private investment for the public good can work and does work. In fact,
OPIC has been investing billions of dollars every single year since its inception
to accompany private investors who are investing in development in emerging
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markets.We’ve been doing that every year in a self-sustaining way so that we can
actually give money back to the taxpayer every single year. In this city, in this time,
you can’t say that enough.We’re actually a solution to the deficit, not a drain on it.
If you think about it — and this is why it’s a very important part of the conversation about private and public sectors working together — every single solitary
dollar that we catalyze from the private sector to invest in development, whether
in health clinics in Peru or microfinance in Uganda or biofuels in Liberia, every
one of those dollars that we catalyze from the private sector is one more dollar
that does not need to be spent by the public sector or philanthropists and that
can be shifted toward other priorities or back to the taxpayer.
Now, stepping back, history is filled with predictions that have been wildly off the
mark, but there are some trends that are so powerful you can chart the course of
their trajectory even 30 or 40 years out. So, what do we know?
We know, for example, that a child who is born today, before she reaches the age
of 18 our planet will be home to more than 8 billion people.
We know that before that child is 18, our global biosphere will have experienced
pressure that it has never experienced before in the history of mankind.
We know that by the time that child is 18, 3 billion more people, give or take a
few million, will have moved into the middle class, where they will be pursuing
occupations and consuming goods that are far more energy-intensive than any
generation in the history of humanity. Global energy consumption will by then
be 30 to 40 percent higher than it is today, and agricultural production will need
to double if we are to feed the earth’s population.
So, clearly we need the private sector to shoulder most of the work.The private
sector — that vast, decentralized, rough-and-tumble $60 trillion network of corporations and firms and enterprises and small businesses that already supports
livelihoods and lives around the world — is the largest lever we have.
And you know what? It’s already happening. OPIC was carved out of USAID
40 years ago because it was recognized that the private sector needed its own
dedicated agency to focus on it.At that time the money flowing from the United
States to the emerging markets was 75 percent overseas development assistance
[ODA], and the rest was foreign direct investment. Today, 40 years later, that’s
completely flipped around: 80 percent of the money flowing from the US to
emerging markets is foreign direct investment, and the rest of it is ODA. So now
every single year, more than a trillion dollars in private capital — both strategic
investments from corporations as well as portfolio investment from investors — is
flowing into the poorer nations of the world.
If the financial crisis taught us anything, it taught us that fundamentals were a
lot worse in the developed world than we ever thought, and they were \ a lot
better in the developing world than we ever thought, so now emerging markets
is considered a fundamental part of any asset allocation or any portfolio of investments. It’s no longer considered an exotic, and this matters a lot. Imagine this
Just a 1 percent shift in global asset allocation from the developed world into
the developing world equals $2 trillion additional for development. That’s not
only an astounding figure in absolute terms, it’s an astounding figure in relative
terms because it’s 10 times the amount of money that the entire planet spends
on development assistance already.
So, trying to get our collective heads around the implications of these megatrends,
the first question one asks is: How are we going to organize ourselves to deal
with the challenges that these megatrends present? Who is going to do the work,
the real work, for the massive adaptations that are needed?
So, a 1 percent shift in money from developed to developing countries is 10 times
the amount of assistance that all the rich countries, all the developed nations,
give to developing nations every year. And, of course, for the countries that are
receiving these funds, it’s not just new money. That’s important. It’s also new
money tied to newer, more efficient and more innovative generations of technology and infrastructure and services, enabling them to leap-frog. We all know
about mobile banking in Democratic Republic of the Congo enabling them to
skip over legacy systems like check cashing that we suffer from here in the US.
As Jane often remarks — and did so in her great Forbes interview — governments certainly can’t do it alone and frankly they can’t even lead it; and neither
the developed country nor the developing country budgets are anywhere near
sufficient — they’re all completely hampered by the limited time horizons of
politics. Nor, with all due respect, can NGOs and philanthropists and international
organizations do it on their own.They have their own limitations.
We all nod enthusiastically when we hear the terms private sector and getting
the private sector involved and public-private partnerships, and everyone gets
enthusiastic about it, but frankly I get the sense that we all mean completely
different things when we talk about this, and we have even less of a convergence
around what it looks like to implement a public-private partnership. It’s a culture
issue. Clearly, there are two different cultures colliding on this.
And we know that of all that energy that’s going to be supplied to the world,
sadly about 75 percent of it will still come from hydrocarbons, which are well
on their way, as we all know, to making climate change irreversible.
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So, if we are to harness the private sector to deal with global sustainability, we
need to first honestly acknowledge two intrinsic features of private firms and
how they behave in the market. I say “features” and not “problems” of the private
sector and firms intentionally because, of course, I firmly believe that a wellregulated market system is our best hope for a sustainable global economy. I
don’t want to bury modern capitalism. I want to cultivate it.
Of these two features, the first is that businesses, for thousands of years, have
focused on a very narrow definition of their resources, their production processes
and their pricing.They are not accustomed to factoring in the true, diverse environmental costs that go into the production of their products.
Take cars for example, we all focus on tailpipe emissions, and it’s of course a huge
issue. But The Guardian did an analysis a month or so ago that just analyzed the
carbon emissions that are generated by the manufacturing of that car — the
mining of the metals, the harvesting of rubber, the tanning of leather for the seats.
The total? They’re equal. It takes as many carbon emissions to make a car as will
be spent in the emissions coming from the tailpipe for the entire life of that car.
Here we have one of the biggest industries in the entire world, and we’re just
beginning to understand its full impact on the global environment.
So, we’ve got to be very clear about acknowledging this legacy and habit of unaccounted costs, or externalities of private business.
The second intrinsic feature of markets is that when it comes to the basic activity
of capitalism — owning factors of production, adding value to them and selling
a product or service for a profit — investors will almost always skew toward
short-term payoffs. Behavioral economists have a fancy term for this. They call
it myopic loss aversion. That explains to you why they’re economists and not
branding specialists or communicators.
The basic idea is that even when we know intellectually that the prospect of a
long-term investment payoff is very bright, we irrationally obsess over the prospect of short-term losses.We can’t help it.We want quick paybacks — you know,
a bird in the hand.
This is one of the reasons why today the efforts of firms and investors on sustainability initiatives look so piecemeal:The sustainability reports are separate from
the normal reports.They’re piecemeal and isolated.
Firms will embark on sustainability initiatives only if they can immediately cut
costs, reduce waste, limit risks or gain market share among socially conscious
customers. And, frankly, I would be investing in those short-term things only if
my incentive structure was set up just as theirs is.You know, with stock markets
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being the bellwether or the indicator of a CEO’s performance and quarterly
financial results driving stock prices, the odds are absolutely stacked against
long-term planning.
Let me skip ahead. If the financial crisis also showed us anything — this is the
second learning of the financial crisis — it is the wisdom of aiming for reasonable,
steady, stable, long-term returns rather than the heady quick-buck ones. A friend
of mine often says, “Any bank making more than a 10 percent ROE [return on
equity] makes me run in the opposite direction right now because something is
funny about a bank making 10 percent ROE.”
So, how do we make sure that we are clear-eyed about the full costs of business?
How do we counteract the very powerful myopia, and how do we motivate and
incentivize the private sector as a long-term endeavor?
I believe we are thankfully well past — I hope we’re well past — the notion of a
necessary trade-off between sustainability and commercial success. I also believe
we are in agreement that the ethos of sustainability will not succeed if it is seen
as something that is imposed on firms in the market economy, but it has a chance
of succeeding if it is understood as something that is essential to their operation.
Market-oriented solutions imposed on businesses such as cap-and-trade or
pricing of ecosystem services or even sustainability reporting standards are very
important but they’re clearly not enough. What we need is an entire ecosystem
of entrepreneurs and investors alike that aim for full-fledged environmental and
social sustainability while recognizing and harnessing the unique attributes of
the modern private firm.
So, it’s not one solution but rather a profusion of experiments — enthusiastic
and excited experiments — partnerships and business models being funded by
a diversity of financial instruments tailored toward these models and blends of
short- and long-term revenue flows.
I actually am extremely optimistic. I’m very optimistic that with a greater understanding between the public and private sectors — a clear-eyed clarity about what
drives and motivates each one — and innovative and generous partnerships that
leave egos aside and combine and align resources, we can absolutely harness
the markets to solve many, many of the world’s most daunting development
challenges.
In fact, this is what OPIC and its other development finance peers do for a living.
It’s funding the creation of endeavors that bring together the most innovative
business models with the most urgent problems of sustainability in the nations
that need the help the most.
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So, consider for just one second the child that I mentioned at the opening of my
comments here. By the time she has reached the age of 18, some $14 trillion will
have been spent in new electrical capacity around the world — $14 trillion will
have been spent on electrical capacity.
I’m optimistic because it is inconceivable to me that we would witness that much
investment and not see a major disruptive technology, a major breakthrough, a
major scientific invention — something that radically alters all of our plans and
the potential.
You can already see pieces of the jigsaw puzzle coming together on the table.
We have impact investors. We have B Corporations. We have public-private
partnerships. We have patient capital. And we have all of you sitting here in this
very room.
So, in sum I think we clearly can and should be using private capital as much as
possible to solve development challenges. Every single private-sector dollar we
harness for long-term problem solving means we’re freeing up another publicsector dollar for the most urgent problems. I think our superb panel today is
going to be exploring some of these promising new solutions and some of these
promising new ideas.
I’d like to close with something some of you may have heard me say before but
I’ll say it again: President Obama often quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in saying,
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” My dream for
all of us here today is that in the long arc of history, the big story of our time is
not going to be that billions of people in China and Russia and India and across
the world turned toward market economics in such a short period of time.That’s
not going to be the big story. The big story for me is that people within market
economies — investors and entrepreneurs — figured out how to transform their
capital and their know-how into answers for the common challenges that we all
face, challenges of poverty, health care, water, housing, energy, climate change
and others.
Thank you very much.
Jane Wales
Thank you so much. I’m going to introduce the panel, and then I’m going to start
off with a question for Elizabeth and move down the line.
We are joined by Julie Katzman, who is COO [chief operating officer] of the
Inter-American Development Bank — the IDB. She’s been with the bank for a
while. She used to run a major fund, which I’m going to ask her about, but she
also comes out of an investment-banking background, as well.
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Jayant Sinha runs the Omidyar Network in India, where he oversees all of their
investments as well as their grants portfolio; it is a mix of investments and grants.
And Laila Iskandar from Egypt runs something called CID Consulting, which she
founded; it works with all three sectors to find solutions to problems, including
very community-based problems, so she’ll add some on-the-ground knowledge
to this conversation.
Elizabeth, I know why you do what you do because this is your passion, but tell
me why the US government does it. I understand why it’s in our interest to see
inclusive development happen around the world, and I understand why it’s in our
interest to help American businesses do business overseas, but give me a sense of
when a government agency like OPIC is needed to ease the path for the private
sector. Is it when the risk is too great? What are the conditions?
Elizabeth Littlefield
Thank you.Thank you for that.
We see our job as helping to channel private-sector capital to solve development
challenges in emerging markets, and we do that — OPIC does that — by providing
the loans, the finance and the risk mitigation tools that remove the barriers to
investing and provide incentives. So, if we believe in a certain country, take
Afghanistan for example, it is a country, of course, that’s incredibly important
to this country; and as we pull our troops out of Afghanistan, we leave behind
some beginnings of a credible economy that can provide opportunities and
support into the future as we shift from a military- and aid-based economy to a
private one. Now many investors are not going to go and invest in Afghanistan
just comme ça. It’s probably not high on the list of places that look like attractive business environments, so we try to figure out: What is it we can try to do
in terms of providing political risk insurance, providing long-term financing, that
could incite an investor to make an investment that we think will be powerful
for that economy going forward?
Jane Wales
Thanks so much.
Julie, because you too are a public-sector actor seeking to leverage and enable
private-sector investments, when you hear the title “All (Private) Means,” what
does private mean to you?
Julie Katzman
I actually loved the title because I think it can mean so many things, and it goes
back to Elizabeth’s comment that we often use the same word to mean very
different things.
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I thought I’d give a couple of examples because I think “all private means” can
mean really private — a private company that does something that catalyzes
social good and is largely in its own self-interest. Indra Nooyi was in Cartagena
at the Summit of the Americas with us this weekend, talking about, from Pepsi’s
perspective, the forward-looking concept that resources on the planet are a
scarce resource — much as you were describing needing to double agricultural
output if we’re going to feed all the people on the planet when that child’s
18. So, for Pepsi, thinking about how to increase productivity of agricultural
resources is extremely important from the business perspective, but it also has
a developmental aspect.
We’ve done a project with Pepsi where Pepsi is giving sunflower seeds to farmers
in Mexico where sunflower isn’t really grown.And they have a big health issue in
Mexico: huge obesity rates. Pepsi needs to change to safflower oil for its snacks
so that it’s not seen as a bad actor. So, it gives out the sunflower seeds and a guarantee to purchase 100 percent of the sunflowers for sunflower oil and, together
with us, put in place a first-loss guarantee so that a bank will provide working
capital to those farmers — really a private sector “by all private means.”
Here’s a different example: In Columbia there’s a company called Public Company
of Medellin, which is a utility but it’s a mixed company. It’s a public utility but
it’s listed, and it is looking at energy conservation and saying they have a need
to lower demand and increase their efficiency but they also realize that by
having utility bills with people who are at the bottom of the pyramid they’ve
got basically a credit bureau. They could lend to their customers to purchase
more energy-efficient white goods — dryers, washers, et cetera — at much lower
interest rates. So, they’re lending using that credit database basically at 17 percent
interest versus 30 percent interest in the marketplace. At the same time, they’re
lowering energy demand. So, it’s two very different solutions.
We are a big catalyst behind the development of venture capital markets in Latin
America, and I’ll use Brazil as an example.We’ve seeded 13 different venture funds
in Brazil, 10 of which are already on fund two or fund three. They’ve been very
successful: $1 billion and eight of the top pension funds have come into those
venture funds, so it’s a lot of local money that’s been catalyzed — and that’s a way
to grow small and growing businesses, create a knowledge economy and build a
middle class. It’s a classic venture model, no ifs, ands or buts.
So,“by all private means” can mean so many different things, and I think it’s important when we talk about them to know what it is we’re talking about — what the
motivations are, who’s trying to achieve what — and also for us as a development
finance institution to try to come up with ways to enable some of those new
private actors to create these kinds of effects.
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Jane Wales
I think it should be noted that IDB started in 1959. Isn’t that right?
Julie Katzman
Exactly.
Jane Wales
So, it’s been in this business a very long time and focused on Latin America and
the Caribbean, and OPIC has been in the business since 1969. So while we sometimes treat these efforts as novel ideas, they just happen to be fresh and relevant
but they’re not utterly new.
The first panel today — Tony Elumelu, Carol Civita and Laurence Lien — described
very different approaches to philanthropy, but what they had in common was
a sense that every effort needed to be community-based. There needed to be
co-creation with the community and community feedback loops. How does the
IDB go about that? I’m thinking in particular about the Opportunities for the
Majority initiative. Could you say something about that?
Julie Katzman
Absolutely. I know Luiz Ros, who runs Opportunities for the Majority, was here
yesterday, talking about Brazil. I’ll use another example to talk about this. The
bank is a broad institution, and we do everything from very large loans for
hydro projects to things like what Opportunities for the Majority does, which is
to focus on creating platforms for the base of the pyramid that can expand and
scale quite dramatically.
On the big side, there’s an emphasis on the safeguards that relate to community — you know, making sure that you’ve consulted properly — but on the
more community-based, base-of-the-pyramid side of things, it’s a different kind
of initiative.
We have a program in Mexico called Improving Your Street. Everybody here
who has traveled to the developing world knows that so many communities
exist without services and without paved streets, and there’s a huge amount of
health information that has to do with how just the paving of the streets changed
the quality of people’s life and health outcomes. But local governments just
don’t have the resources. They don’t have much of what it takes to make this
happen. So, this was an initiative working with communities to say, “OK, if we
can organize the community and 80 percent of the community wants to basically
kick in to pave the streets, Cemex, the large cement company, will provide the
working capital. They’re basically the bank. Over the course of 70 months, the
community pays back $15 per month. They put up some money up front that
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acts like a first-loss guarantee. We’re the second-loss guarantee.The municipality
participates, so they’re committing to building the infrastructure.That’s the kind
of community involvement that we see as really essential to so many development activities going forward.
Social Good: By All (Private) Means Necessary
Jane Wales
There are some wonderful success stories, but let me give you a hard case.
Julie Katzman
Yes.
Jane Wales
Say something about the Multilateral Investment Fund.You ran that for a while.
Jane Wales
Julie Katzman
Let’s turn to Haiti. I know it’s very important for the bank to be promoting small
and growing businesses.What are the barriers to doing that in a place like Haiti?
Yes, I did.
Julie Katzman
Jane Wales
Give us a sense of that.
Julie Katzman
The Multilateral Investment Fund is the bank’s grantmaking arm, and we worked
with Elizabeth’s former organization quite substantially. It does two things: It
makes grants on the one hand, and it does investments on the other. Its investments are in two areas: microfinance institutions and the venture capital business.
On the grant side and on the investment side, it’s focused on access — access
to finance, access to basic services and access to markets and capabilities. The
grants average about $1.5 million, and it is very focused. There have been a lot
of comments like,“No one can have enough money,” okay? It’s putting out about
$100 million every year in grants. But you can’t have enough money, so it’s very
focused on being strategic and catalytic and saying, “We’re going to work in a
finite number of areas, and we’re going to have a very clear strategy at the front
end of what we want to catalyze and judge each grant by whether or not it gets
you toward that goal, how it gets you toward that goal and what kind of communication strategy is going to allow you to reach the other actors you need to reach
to be able to leverage that up and create systemic change.”
So, in youth you’ve got to be able to communicate with the other big youth investors in the not-for-profit world and connect to governments so that ultimately
the programs that work get put back into the national programming plans and
things of that sort.
Jane Wales
Latin America has had some extraordinary success stories when it has come to
economic growth and even to shrinking disparities.
Julie Katzman
Yes.
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First, the bank was in Haiti consistently since 1959.After the earthquake, to a great
extent with the help of the US government and the rest of our shareholders, we
committed to doing $200 million per year in grants in Haiti over 11 years. It’s a
total of $2.2 billion. It’s the first time that a clearly articulated sustained commitment over time in terms of grant resources has existed. We think that’s pretty
critical to actually being able to achieve real outcomes.
One of the positive things, if you can say that, that came out of the earthquake
was a different kind of cooperation among the donor community in Haiti. Each
of the institutions defined clearly where it was going to play and where it wasn’t,
so we were being much more efficient and we were quite clear. One of our
areas is private-sector development, and we think that it and education are the
two things that are really going to be different this time in the way that we’re
approaching Haiti.
We have an investment fund that’s focusing on lower-cost capital to players who
didn’t typically get capital in Haiti — it’s a crony capital banking system.The fund
is an incubator and an accelerator that brings capability to those companies that
are just starting out — other services around the microfinance side of things and
the small-lending side of things. So, we’re really looking at a different approach
to private-sector development in Haiti this time around, and I think that’s
going to address some of those concerns. The other would be on the sovereign
side — taking the doing-business approach, focusing on the two, three or four
things that can really make it easier to get a license, get a construction permit
and things like that.
Jane Wales
There are a couple of problems that are peculiar to Haiti, and one is the brain
drain. It’s way up there in terms of losing talent. Another is a need to have
development on the rural side of things — in agriculture. Do you have specific
approaches to those two problems?
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Julie Katzman
We do. Actually, through the MIF [Multilateral Investment Fund], we have an
interesting program to provide more access and finance for higher education
in Haiti. We have a couple of training programs that are targeting very specific
areas of the economy. High youth unemployment is not exactly the brain drain
but it’s critical to being able to balance the brain drain.We are working with the
diaspora.And there are members of the diaspora who are coming back into Haiti
because they see opportunity and because they feel it’s their time to really try
to help the country.
On the agricultural side, there are a couple of things. First, land titling is a big
issue around lack of productivity in agriculture throughout the world. Together
in coordination with the EU [European Union], we are in the midst of working
on land titling in Haiti.That’s going to be important.
Second, we have a very specific value chain approach, and the first product that
we’ve targeted, the first thing you grow — commodity, I guess we call it — is
mangos.That’s actually together with Coca-Cola. Every time you buy an Odwalla
Mango Tango, 10 cents of that contributes to the development of 25,000 mango
growers in Haiti, increasing their productivity. We’re taking that same approach,
and I could go into it in detail but I won’t right now, with coffee and certain other
commodities. So, it’s value chain by value chain: How do you address historical
agricultural practices? How do you change some of the dynamics that exist
between growers and exporters? How do you improve productivity? It’s a pretty
integrated and holistic way of looking at the agricultural sector.
Jane Wales
Jayant, when I saw you in Mumbai a couple of months ago, you were talking
about the various stages in the development of a company, from business plan
to scale. As you think about those stages and the tools that are available to
you — in particular, investment tools, loans, grants, et cetera — what is the right
sequencing? What intervention is appropriate at what point?
Jayant Sinha
That’s a great question, Jane, and I think when you look at market evolution,
ultimately all markets go through some very predictable stages. It’s the S-curve
of market evolution. It starts off very slow for a long period of time, followed by
a period of very fast growth, which is typically three to five years, and then it
plateaus out again. That’s a very predictable fashion of market evolution, which
has happened over and over again, and as we look at various different markets
we see that. So, as we think about financing and different financial instruments,
they have to be looked at in the context of this type of market evolution.
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During her very interesting speech, Elizabeth spoke about the fact that
commercial capital is extraordinarily important — that there’s $60 trillion of
commercial capital. And when you look at some of the social problems that we
are dealing with, particularly in India, which is of course a country of 1.2 billion
people — whether it’s affordable health care, whether it’s financial inclusion,
whether it’s education — the reality is to be able to get to hundreds of millions
people, there isn’t enough money in this room or even this town that’s going to
solve those needs. We need commercial capital that’s going to come from Wall
Street. It’s going to come from the city. It’s going to come from Dalal Street in
Mumbai. Ultimately, once markets start to take off and you start to need hundred
of millions of dollars or billions of dollars of capital to really grow those markets,
that’s when commercial capital has to take off and that’s when we need to bring
in commercial capital. I think that’s fairly straightforward, and as I’ve said we’ve
seen that over and over again as markets have evolved.
When they are starting to take off, particularly when they are in the flat part
of that S [curve], there is a really interesting role for different kinds of capital
providers to play. Very early on in the evolution, when you’re really just experimenting in a lab or at a business school, perhaps you need grants, and I think
Jacqueline [Novogratz] will speak about that later today. There is a real role for
granting as well — and we’ve seen the great success stories like Compartamos
and SKSIndia and M-Pesa; they actually started off with grants that various development institutions provided. But once we move past the grants, we have a team.
We start to form a business. That’s when the seed funding, whether it’s from
impact investors or seed venture capital funds, comes into play.
By the way, in all of this there is a tremendous role for philanthropic capital,
whether it’s to take the early risk through the seed funds or to provide grants. But
at the same time, obviously the state has a very important role to play because
even as markets take off there is the need for creation of public goods, putting in
place consumer protection codes, training of workers and so on. And, of course,
again it’s a coordination problem because all these different stakeholders have
to work together in a way that meshes very early on in this market evolution.
Then once the market starts to take off, much of the risk starts to go out: Business
models start to scale; the margins start to appear.That’s when commercial capital
comes in. But it is a dance. It has to be orchestrated, and this is where being
sophisticated about understanding these different financial instruments — what
role they play, what the risk expectations are, what the return expectations
are — becomes very important.
Jane Wales
The great advantage of sitting right next to Elizabeth is I know when there’s a
thought that just popped in her mind that she wants to say.
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Elizabeth Littlefield
Jane Wales
I really appreciate what you were just saying, and I think one of the challenges
that we have is bringing together different types of capital at the same time. OPIC
has financing instruments and insurance instruments — private equity. We don’t
have the ability to invest equity or to do first loss or to do grants.
Julie?
And what’s extraordinary is in some of the most highly developmental circumstances or the most desperate circumstances — like Haiti, for example, or many
others — we have hundreds of millions of dollars in commercial financing we
can do in different transactions that aren’t done for want of $2 or $3 million in
project preparation money, grant money, technical assistance to set up an implementing agent or first-loss money. So, that whole idea of this leverage effect I feel
is missing. People tend to say,“Well, the private market won’t do it, so the public
market should.”They don’t say,“Well, the private market won’t do it by itself, so
what’s the smallest amount of money I can spend to make all that happen, to
get that result?”
One example is Egypt. We’ve worked extremely closely with USAID. We can set
up $200 or $300 million loan guarantee facilities for Egyptian entrepreneurs, but
we need a couple of million dollars to set up the entity that’s going to do it, so we
have to go someplace else to get that money. I just want to put an emphasis on
aligning different types of capital together to get the outcome that we’re seeking.
Jayant Sinha
I think that’s wonderful that you said that, Elizabeth, because that’s exactly what
we at the Omidyar Network try to do. I think the wonderful innovation that Pam
and Pierre [Omidyar] thought through when they set up the Omidyar Network
was to create an organization that could operate both in a grantmaking mode
as well as an equity investing mode or even providing debt capital and so on.
That gives us the flexibility to be able to provide the appropriate form of capital
to really spark and ignite these markets, and it’s like a chain reaction. If you can
get it going, boom! — it can take off.That’s really what Pierre wonderfully understood, and that’s how we are set up in this very unique structure where we can
in fact do that.
One question everybody asks us is,“Does that mean the same people do the grantmaking as do the equity investing?”And the answer is yes.We do that because it is
within the context of that market system that we are operating and thinking, so
we are always asking ourselves the question: What’s the right instrument to use
here, and will that have the impact that we are looking for, the catalytic impact,
where markets can take off and we can get into the self-replicating mode?
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Julie Katzman
I was just going to say we are lucky because we do have different parts of
the organization: Some are grants, some are first-loss guarantees and some are
borrowing. In fact, Omidyar was a partner of ours in Haiti on a project that was
put in place to recapitalize, more or less, the microfinance institutions after
the earthquake. We created a structure that had some first-loss money that was
probably going to get lost and then some different tranches. And getting people
to come along with us for that bottom piece — which was the high risk; it had
to be looked at as a grant piece — was really difficult. When you call yourself an
impact investor, it’s not always about the return. It’s sometimes about the other
kinds of impact that you’re going to catalyze out the other end.
Jane Wales
I think we’ll probably turn to a lively debate on that.
Looking at India and Latin America, one of the advantages in investing in many
countries in Latin America is that the infrastructure is in place. The laws are in
place.The courts are not capricious, I mean, obviously depending on where you
are.That really matters. OPIC and IDB and others condition a lot of their work on
anti-corruption, on not having corruption. Where does this come in your grantmaking and investing, Jayant? Are you also making grants to organizations that
try to promote transparency? How do you think about a barrier like corruption?
Jayant Sinha
Those are very, very serious problems in India and across the developing world,
and there are no easy answers, unfortunately. Part of it is that we have to understand that while we would like to believe that the state is benevolent in general,
which is the view from the West, and that the state is there to provide services
and to serve the citizens — a government of the people, for the people, by the
people — that’s actually not the tradition in the developing world.
In India, for example, the state has always been a predatory state, an extractive
state; so if we expect state agencies to operate in a very accountable, highintegrity fashion, we are kidding ourselves in a way. So, we address it in two ways.
One is obviously the work that we do in terms of market-based solutions and
finding organizations to work with. We obviously do a tremendous amount of
forensic analysis. We obviously do all the reference checking to understand
whether the organizations we are working with are high integrity and above all
of that or not.That’s on the one hand.
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On the other hand, as you know, we are probably among the leading donors
globally in government transparency and accountability, and our hope is that
by using all of the wonderful technologies that are available now it’s possible to
create that visibility and that transparency on what government is doing so that
it actually brings down corruption.There’s a site that we funded called ipaidabribe.com that’s gotten a lot of press and coverage; those are the kinds of ways in
which you can actually begin to address the pervasive nature of corruption that
exists in countries like India.
Jane Wales
Laila, let’s go to Egypt for a second.You’ve been focused on the informal economy.
First I want to have a sense of how big the informal economy is in Egypt. How
much of it is women and children, and what kinds of jobs do they have?
Laila Iskandar
In Egypt the informal economy is estimated to be between 60 and 80 percent
of the economy. So all of this stuff we’ve been talking about doesn’t affect them
in any way. It doesn’t reach them. It is largely in the urban sector, but then that
involves a lot of men. In rural areas is where 50 percent of the informal family
labor is women.Yes, there are a lot of children involved, but it’s not exploitative
child labor as in sweatshops. It’s family-owned farmlands and businesses.
I’m very concerned about how when you talk about a paradigm for a new social
contract by any private means, we exclude these people. They can’t approach
banks. They can’t use loan guarantees. The very titling to their land is not there.
And the infrastructure decisions in any country — whether the money comes
from a multilateral bank or the government — are made by the government; and
you know we’ve had a corrupt government, but that corrupt government was the
darling of international finance institutions and bilaterals. So what? They didn’t
know it was corrupt? Sure they knew! So, where does that leave everybody?
Sixty to 80 percent are definitely not in on infrastructure plans of these privatesector investments.
So, they have consultations. I personally have been part of these. They’re all
Mickey Mouse, and the report goes in as the community. One was the big oil and
gas exploration. They were going to take away the fishing rights of many small
fishermen, and they asked us what we thought. Of course we told them, but
then the report said it doesn’t:“We’re going to give them alternative livelihoods
in driving and English language.”
So, what do you have today after the revolution? You have these fishermen now
stopping and interrupting, halting the production and extraction of that oil and
gas. Major losses! My advice is to not cut corners and to make sure that when
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you talk about private we know who we mean.We know that there is corruption,
not just at the national level, and among corrupt governments there are people
deposed but it’s also among the international financial infrastructure. We really
need to look at that seriously and at some very deep ethical questions about how
we praise some models and not others.
So, when a soft water company claims to have reduced its use of the water so
therefore it’s going to allow that water to be used by local communities, who
is talking about the water we draw at the springs and put into fossil-fuel plastic
bottles and transport and use gas emissions as an alternative? We’re drawing all
of these resources away from purifying the rivers that the poor drink from.That
debate is not even there. It’s not on the map.We’re applauding the private sector
for doing things that are really cosmetic.
Or the biofuels — we’re applauding the private sector for its high R&D [research
and development] so that now they can produce baby diapers — hallelujah — from
biofuels from corn oil while all of the small farmers of Brazil can go to hell and
starve to death. It doesn’t matter. We are not going to go to the oilfields of Iraq
to pull out oil to do baby diapers. We found a better place to do it. It’s in Brazil.
Jane Wales
With the help of the Gates Foundation, you’ve entered into a program to try to
bring garbage collectors from the informal economy to the formal economy,
creating syndicates, giving them the rights and the standings that workers in the
formal economy have.Tell us what you learned in that process.
Laila Iskandar
That sometimes you’re forced into privatizing small family-owned businesses
because of the political situation. These people had licenses from way back.
They’ve been doing this for 60 years, and the government gave them licenses.
Then under the mantra of global privatization and supported by the World Bank
media instrument, the multinationals came in and grabbed the city contracts.
And these people, 120,000 of them, overnight, were out on the street. It took us
a long time to learn.
They didn’t want to formalize. Why? They’ve been doing this efficiently. They
had markets. They were prospering and fighting for infrastructure and giving
their votes to whichever corrupt parliamentarian was going to bring us roads.
Never mind! This is democracy where we were. But because of the onslaught
of the formal private sector — the multinationals that couldn’t care less about
shared value — they had to face this thing about having to formalize. The space
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for it wasn’t there before the revolution. It is there now.They knew they had to
formalize. Sixty years, and first their contracts were taken away. Then their pigs
were culled. It’s a Christian minority, then their land — da, da, da, da, da.
Jane Wales
You will explain about the pigs?
Laila Iskandar
They formalized, and just two months ago it was celebrated by the liberal parliamentarians who were voted from Tahrir Square — the young ones. They were
there to support, and they’re now looking at how to extend this syndicate that
will include not just Cairo’s garbage collectors but all the people who trade in
materials up and down the Nile. It’s a massive market, and nobody documents
it or respects it even, that recycles every little scrap of thing that is left on your
dinner table; here, because you have health standards to say the bread has to be
tossed out into the garbage, it is fed to pigs and that goes into composting plants
and that goes for us to grow organic food. This is what they were doing. And
in 2009, because someone told our brilliant ex-president that swine flu equals
pig — you know, they looked it up in the dictionary: swine equals pig — someone
decided to kill all the pigs in Egypt to protect the population from swine flu.
(It’s the Mexicans that called it that.) So, 350,000 pigs were culled in the most
brutal manner in three months.That’s half our income gone just like that.That’s
private business. That’s private sector. Who are we talking about when we say
“private sector” and “by all private means”? Sixty to 80 percent of the Egyptian
private sector is informal. And it’s not just Egypt. It’s across the Middle East and
much of the developing world.
So, just to say, “Okay, if we want to do impact investing, how are going to meet
and work with these people? How do we get to them?”They can’t access OPIC,
banks, IDB,World Bank. No.This is all out. How do you reach them? The distance
between where they are and where we imagine we’re going to create returns on
investments is massive. These are illiterate, stunted, no infrastructure, no education, poor — not always income poor but agency poor. It’s a huge distance. Who
has that long-term view and wants to do all that? And what do you want for it at
the end? I don’t know.
Jane Wales
Before we get to answer that question, I did want you to tell us about the boys
involved in recycling.This is a program you incubated. I think it’s called the Spirit
of Youth Foundation. Your association runs it. Just really quickly, give us that in
a nutshell.
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Laila Iskandar
Sure. Brand-name fraud is a feature in all of the developing world for anything
that’s bottled or packaged in a container that says a brand name — like the Louis
Vuitton lacrosse T-shirts. But this is about containers, such as for shampoo. And
massive losses led to the multinationals producing their product and packaging
to ask us to find a solution to this. So what we did was interrupt the cycle.
It’s only the rich who use these products. They throw the containers in their
trashcans. Our garbage collectors serve high-income neighborhoods because
they don’t live off a fee for service. In fact, they get nothing.They live entirely off
the recycling of the materials: organic to the pigs, nonorganic to the value chain.
And they’ve learned how to recover 80 percent. So, we know where these go in
six neighborhoods that surround Cairo.They’re discrete places we were able to
survey, so we said,“Let’s interrupt this. Instead of the counterfeiters coming into
our neighborhoods and buying these bottles, let’s set up a school for the kids
whose dads lost their contracts because of the private sector; let’s bring them
in and teach them how to read and write and do that because they can’t go to
school except around the containers.”
So, they learn to read the names on the containers and to count, and all of this
requires capital for them to go out and buy before the counterfeiters. It also
requires that the parents have a vested interest in them selling to their kids rather
than to the counterfeiter, who is bound to always up the price. So, it has to be
community-based thing where everybody has a vested interest.
For many years the financing for this came from UNESCO [United Nations
Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization], where the boys used to go out
and buy, bring back to school, learn to read and write and compute, create a
school life. And they granulate these containers under safe conditions, and the
pelletized or granulated flakes are sold on the market.There’s a huge demand in
our neighborhood, and since the boys had gotten their money up front for the
containers, the flakes belonged to the school.They paid for the teachers’ salaries.
It was a self-financing scheme.
One of the multinationals came on board finally after four years, but then there
was a massive shakeup after the pigs, and the money we lost. Kids began wanting
to come to school without doing the shampoo thing, and that’s where we were
in bad shape financially because it was just a school, not a self-financing school,
so we had to supplement with money from the Gates Foundation. There was
UNESCO and now Proctor & Gamble; but can you imagine what the multinationals’ biggest fear was in supporting the buyback of their containers? They
said,“You know, if anybody in the North found out that the boys who go to this
school are earning money from these containers, we’re going to be crucified for
child labor.”
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So we said,“OK. Let’s get a letter from UNESCO.”They said,“No. It’s a communications thing. It’s a propaganda thing.You can get all the letters and go out and give
to every consumer.” So, there’s a lot of misunderstanding.We live in very different
worlds. Our issues are so different. There’s nothing wrong with kids working if
you can protect them from hazards, if you can teach them the things that will
help them in life. In fact, now many of the kids in our formal government school
want to leave that school and come to our school. Big problem.
Jane Wales; There’s also the issue of property rights, which I think you’re also
working on, aren’t you?
Jayant Sinha
I think we’re going to have a lot of opportunity to talk about Egypt tonight as
well, but if any of you want to jump in — Jayant, I mean. The informal economy
is massive in India as well, and probably the same is true in Latin America. OPIC
is active. And you know this region well from your days at JPMorgan as well as
at OPIC.
Absolutely.And, again, back to modern technology’s really being transformational
in this sense. When you look at property rights, once you start to digitize property rights so that you can get on a map and say this plot of land belongs to this
individual, and this individual can be uniquely identified, you have the opportunities to bring them into the formal economy. Hernando de Soto and others have
written powerfully about what it does to you if indeed you have access to that,
and we know the entire Arab Spring started with this whole question of a person
not being able to sell his fruit in Tunisia. That had to do with property rights, as
well.These are all powerful ways in which you can get people out of the informal
economy and into the formal economy.
Jayant Sinha
Julie Katzman
Yes, but I think that is the way economic development has happened globally
over the past two, three, four hundred years as we have seen capitalism at work,
which is that folks have gotten out of the informal sector. They’ve gotten out
of agriculture, and they’ve gotten into the formal sector. We have to create the
mechanisms.We have to create the infrastructure.We have to create the ways in
which they can do that.
And it seems, like most things, that there’s a continuum.The Brazilian government
is doing a really interesting program to take informal enterprises that are on the
high end of informal and formalize them.Why do companies stay informal? These
are small enterprises.They don’t want to pay taxes.They don’t want to be subject
to employment rules.They don’t want to have a lot of the structure around them.
You have to convince them that the cost of that — with lack of access to finance,
lack of access to other kinds of tools — is a bad trade. This program has in the
past year formalized literally hundreds of thousands of companies by providing
a package of incentives that includes credit cards and debit cards and phone
cards and training and very light regulation in terms of tax and social things to
formalize. The proof will be in the pudding to see if they stay formalized and if
they grow past the ceilings that begin to take away some of those incentives.
Jane Wales
For instance, in India there is a very transformational project under way, which
you must have heard about; it’s the Unique Identification Project that Nandan
Nilekani is heading. Right now, as Laila correctly points out, everybody is in the
informal economy. They don’t even have an identity. And because they don’t
have an identity, they don’t have an address. They don’t have any way of being
identified. You can’t give them a bank account. You can’t give them credit. You
can’t bring them into the formal economy. What we’re doing in India right now
is we’re trying to enroll 1.2 billion people. What’s amazing about this program
is the enrollment is $2 per person. And the technology and the ecosystem have
been developed whereby these 1.2 billion can be enrolled. And once we can
enroll them, we can bring them into the formal economy.
I think what we have to do as investors, as entrepreneurs, as innovators in all
of this is to find the kinds of businesses and ways in which we can bring these
people in — through creating various kinds of employment, creating the manufacturing industries and so on — so that they can in fact participate and have a
chance for a better life.That is the nature of economic development.That’s how it
has happened.And it is our responsibility to transition folks like this over through
all these kinds of mechanisms.
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On the other side, much as you were describing, in every country in the developing world there are waste-picker issues. Right? We actually do work with very
informal populations in the MIF and in the bank through the Opportunities for
the Majority and others, working with companies that now have evolved to
the point where they realize that these are issues they need to engage in with
multinationals, to say,“How can we help the waste pickers to improve people’s
lives — to move them out of the dumps yet maintain their ability to recycle the
waste, to take the middlemen out so that they receive a greater proportion of
the value of that value chain? So we get their kids in schools and we get different
kinds of enterprises now working with municipalities and making them somewhat more formal.There’s a big continuum when you talk about informality.
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Social Good: By All (Private) Means Necessary
Elizabeth Littlefield
Yes. I’d like to respond to something that Laila said a moment ago. I totally
appreciate what you say about the sometimes rapacious and irresponsible
private sector. That being said, I don’t think anyone is saying that the private
sector or business naturally gravitates automatically to being a force for good. I
don’t think anyone’s saying that. Some of the biggest problems we have in the
world — whether it’s agriculture productivity not being sufficient to feed the
planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s rural electrification — these
things aren’t problems that we’re going to be able to solve without the private
sector. So for me this session is really about figuring out the mechanisms that
we can use to harness the resources and the know-how of the private sector
to address some of the challenges that we have, whether they’re in the formal
sector or the informal sector.
Jane Wales
And capture some of the ingenuity of the citizen sector, right? I think that’s
the key.
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Tuesday, April 17
Special address: Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder and CEO,
Acumen Fund
Jane Wales
From Blueprint to Scale: The Case
for Philanthropy in Impact Investing
Good afternoon. There’s a reason I’m eyeing the audience. Back in March 2002,
we held the first Global Philanthropy Forum Conference on the Stanford campus
in Stanford, California, and I’m just looking around the room to see who was
there. Liz Ellers was there. Maya Ajmera was there. Jan Piercy I believe was there.
Susan Davis, I think you were there. You were there from the very beginning,
John Harvey and Dave Keller.
And another person was there — we invited a completely radical speaker, or at
least she had a radical idea. Her idea was that you could make investments in
microenterprises and small enterprises that could provide goods and services
and income-producing opportunities for the poor. This very beautiful woman
who was speaking came from the Rockefeller Foundation, where she’d started
something called the Acumen Fund.
Jacqueline Novogratz is an honest-to-god pioneer. We’re really lucky to have her
back, to bless us at our first Conference and bless us at our eleventh. Jacqueline
is going to unveil for us a study that Acumen did with the Monitor Group that’s
going to be released tomorrow — you’re getting the advanced scoop on it.
So, please join me in welcoming a true pioneer, Jacqueline Novogratz.
Jacqueline Novogratz
(From Left to Right) Jane Wales and Jacqueline Novogratz
Thank you so much, Jane. That was really wonderful, and it is amazing how fast
time flies. When it comes to being pioneering in any field, as you all know, it’s
never one person; it’s the efforts of so many people; so when I look out at this
room to see so many colleagues, friends and heroes, it really is extraordinary. I
was thinking that there probably couldn’t be a better place in the world to unveil
this report that’s been done by the Monitor Group in collaboration with Acumen
Fund, and the previous session was the best preamble we could possibly have had.
But really, Jane, it’s such a testament to you that you brought together so many
diverse voices around this issue of a new social contract — the role of markets,
the role of government, certainly the role of impact investors and grants — which
is really at the heart of what this report is about. I think we have a copy for
every one of you at the end of this session, and it’s been wonderful to work
with Monitor on it.
Elizabeth Littlefield, whom I have also known forever, already spoke to this. It’s
about this idea that we as a world are moving through a period of real unrest:
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questioning our systems, capitalism and the markets. I loved Elizabeth’s phrase
that she doesn’t want to bury capitalism, she wants to cultivate it, and I think
that’s something that the world is starting to talk about. We’re looking for new
ways of extending the economy to include all of us; and at the same time if
there were a single issue that is at the heart of so many of our problems, it’s the
increasing disparity between rich and poor.Today in the New York Times I read
that the United States is more unequal in terms of income than at any time in
history since the Depression.
the poor — do well and do good at the same time; and while there’s a deep need
for that, right now there’s an imbalance because so many of our enterprises
that are really experimenting with solving big problems of poverty are on the
left. They’re new. They’re emerging. They’re at the blueprint or validation stage.
As Jane said really eloquently in the Forbes interview, the impact investors who
are waiting for investment-ready enterprises are going to be waiting a long time
unless we do a better job at bringing grant- and philanthropy-based investment
into actually building those enterprises.
I had the great privilege of being in Colombia a couple of weeks ago to hear
President [Juan Manuel] Santos speak, and he’s a man of real vision, of real focus.
He said that Colombia, like so many countries around the world, is seeing tremendous economic growth — 6 or 8 percent, huge proliferation of wealth; and at the
same time, it’s the third most unequal country in the world today. He said, “So,
we have a choice in front of us: In the future will we become like Costa Rica or
will we become like Haiti?” And I think that’s a choice that many countries are
starting to look at. How do we take this wealth, and how do we use it to innovate,
to extend to meet the poor.
A second reason that I worry is really to Laila [Iskandar]’s point. Laila was so
colorful and illustrative when she talked about some of the issues facing lowincome people in Egypt. I was thinking about her words and thinking that what
she’s really talking about is the fact that it’s too easy, and when you think about
impact investing to think that markets work for the poor. They don’t because
the poor don’t function — they don’t live — in a market system. They function
and live in a political economy. In other words, everybody has their hands in
the economy in which the poor live, whether it’s the charities or the predatory
marketers or the religious leaders or the tribal chiefs or the slumlords or the
governments. There are lots of different individuals, institutions and organizations that are vested in the status quo. So, making markets work for low-income
people means navigating a whole labyrinth that takes time, it takes money and
it takes expertise and networks.
Jane talked about this 10 years ago, and one of the things that Elizabeth also
mentioned that gives me optimism is how much experimentation and innovation
we’re seeing. Just in the past five or six years, you’ve seen more than 200 impact
funds come onto the scene, looking for ways to work between government and
the markets to find real solutions to social problems. Around it we’re starting to
see innovators — GIIN [Global Impact Investing Network] and ANDE [Aspen
Network of Development Entrepreneurs] — that are looking at building the scaffolding, the metrics, looking at new standards for the sector. None of that would
be possible without funding from some of our foundations that are in this room.
At the same time, we’re seeing big reports now starting to herald the entry of the
impact-investing sector. J. P. Morgan in its 2011 report talked about $3.8 billion in
impact investing that would be invested just this year. What that brings to mind
is what Jed [Emerson] and Elizabeth talked about, as well: What are we talking
about when we talk about impact investing?
When I look at it, I see using investment tools not as an end in and of themselves
but as a means to solve big social problems, particularly those that are impacting
the very poor where markets refuse to go and governments have failed. I frankly
think that the number is much smaller.And we’ve got to look at that number and
really understand what that means.
I also see that the funds that are coming in tend to be on the right side of the
spectrum of capital, really looking for commercially viable opportunities, those
places where they can find investments that will both make money and serve
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From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing
That’s why seeing these trends over the past 10 years, particularly the past five
years, and also learning what we’ve learned at Acumen Fund is why we decided to
collaborate with the Monitor Group in coming out with this report. I’m pointing
over here to Ashish Karamchandani from the Monitor Group, who worked with
Harvey Koh and Robert Katz from the Acumen Fund, who spent literally years
looking at our own portfolio — successes as well as failures — as well as what’s
going on in the industry.They came up with many of the same conclusions: that
we’re seeing too little early-stage grant financing as well as philanthropy-based
patient capital, so we’re not building the kind of pipeline that we really need
to enable the social impact that investors who are looking for larger financial
returns want to make.
When I look at our own investing history, we’ve invested about $75 million in 69
companies. I had no idea that only two of them have not taken grant capital.And
in looking also at the portfolio, I started to think about how we define success.
It becomes a really important conversation inside the impact-investing fields
because too often our metrics are still based on,“What are your financial returns?”
And if you’re not getting them, well, you’re clearly not a good investor, rather than,
“Are you using the tools that we have at our disposal to create sustainable, profitable companies that are solving problems where government and markets have
failed historically, that are enabling the poor to have more access?” Then I look
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at this group of companies and at A to Z, which is a bed-net company that has
8,000 employees and makes 30 million bed nets per year. It needed grants to get
going. It works with public systems. 1298 emergency services ambulances has
5,000 employees. They took a million people to the hospital last year. It needed
grants to get started.
There’s a real role for the philanthropist to play in this field, as is there a role
for the early-stage philanthropy-backed impact funds and patient capital funds.
Monitor looks at this spectrum of capital that goes from blueprint to validate to
prepare to scale, and the blueprint part of the evolution is all about grants, family
and friends; and it’s in that next phase, the validate and prepare phase, which is
really the pioneering gap. Can we move these disruptive innovations from idea
into action into business model into prepared investments that more traditional
capital can go into? Because if we can, we really do have the opportunity to use
the best of the private markets with the best of public intervention — to use
private innovation and help solve some of our toughest, most intractable public
problems.
I thought it might be useful to give an example of one of the investments that
we’ve been lucky to be involved with — Manoj Sinha, who is one of the founders
of Husk Power Systems, is in the room today — but it means going to Bihar, India,
with me.
Bihar is an extraordinary place. It’s certainly a place where the political economy
for the poor functions or dysfunctions. It’s a state of 90 million people. The
average per capita income is $200. It’s known as highly corrupt, with very little
infrastructure and real political instability. It’s one of the epicenters for Naxalites,
or the Maoist activists from Nepal. It’s also a place where a number of years ago
the government declared 65 million of its residents economically impossible to
reach with electricity by traditional means, consigning its citizens to kerosene,
which is expensive. It’s dirty. It’s polluting, and it’s also dangerous.This is a village
that completely burned down after a single hurricane lamp tipped over and
caught the village on fire. But like so many in this room who believe in entrepreneurs, who believe in the power of markets, they found us Gyanesh [Pandey]
and Manoj and their two partners.
I’ve been thinking a lot about words, and I think if there is a single word that
entrepreneurs like better than any others, it’s the word impossible. So when they
read about this sense of impossibility, they decided that they single-handedly
were going to try to solve the energy crisis in Bihar. They called Acumen, actually, and we said, “Great idea. Can’t really help.” But they started talking to one
another — that talk lasted for three years. In the first year, Manoj and Gyanesh
spent their own money.They liquidated their 401(k) plans.They did what it took
to experiment and fail — detropha, solar — until they came upon rice husk, which
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is taken from the rice plants, heated, liquefied, turned into a gas and turned into
electricity, which many experts said was too unstable, not possible to do. Once
they had two plants up and running, they got to the next stage.
If there’s a single hero on the funding side of this story, it’s not an impact investor.
The single hero on the funding side of this story is the Shell Foundation. Kurt
Hoffman and Chris West are two men to really follow and learn from because
they came in not only with their philanthropy but also with milestone-driven
benchmarks for how they would try to get this idea company- and investmentready.They came in with all the skills that a corporation can borrow.
Mark Kramer, I don’t know if you’re here, but the article about FSG in Forbes
this week I found so interesting because they said that corporations need to use
their philanthropy and their CSR [corporate social responsibility] money more
effectively for these kinds of interventions.And that’s what Shell did:They helped
rebuild the plants, essentially making them more efficient, less polluting. They
realized that there was huge eagerness in the rural areas for people to get jobs
as technicians and as money collectors, but the truth is in rural Bihar you’ve got
a very low literacy rate — no training whatsoever — so they had to create Husk
University just to train people so that they could hire them. At that point they
had nine plants, and the company was ready for patient capital, although it still
needed more grant financing from the Shell Foundation — almost $2 million
more — and a lot more technical assistance, particularly around health and safety.
That’s when the patient capital providers came in.
Thinking about the difference between the philanthropy-backed investors versus
ones looking higher at social return, we had to think very long term, very high
risk.We often tease at the Acumen Fund that our sweet spot of the market is the
high-risk, low-financial-return spot. We knew that Husk Power needed to reach
500 or 600 plants just to break even, but we thought that this was so important
for rural India and for the world that it was worth our philanthropic capital to
be made on an investment basis. Many people have said, “Why didn’t you still
put grants in then?”The reason not to put grants but to put in patient capital at
that part of the company’s evolution is because now you have a signal:You have
a signal to the market that this company is getting investment-ready. You have a
signal to the entrepreneurs that new discipline, new rigor is needed so that you
can get ready for investment. And you have a signal to yourselves that you are
in this, that you are married, that you are going to build this as partners. That’s
the real power.
Now we’re scaling together: 200,000 people have energy in rural India; with 75
plants, the company is on a growth trajectory. It’s now raising another round of
more-traditional capital. It has been extraordinary to see, of course, people having
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light and being able to work later; and we haven’t even started to measure the
positive externalities of young people being able to study later and people being
able to work longer.
But the thing that I keep thinking about is why we need this sector and why we
need to build and cultivate it and make sure that we don’t create a bubble with
outmoded expectations because at the end of the day this story is about dignity:
to go into these villages in the past, which I’ve been doing for many, many years,
and see blackness; to not see your hand is to not see dignity; and to recognize
that for the first time, not only in a family’s life but in all the generations of all
of their ancestors’ lives, people can turn on a switch and light up their homes.
India now has a story of how government can work with the private sector and
create change for its poorest citizens. But when you look at both the capital
strategy and the evolution of this company, it is long, it is hard, it is messy and
the financial returns for the investor are a long time coming.Yet it is so critical if
we’re serious about standing with the poor and building a world where people
really have energy access in a way that matters.
We’ve seen the same thing happen in other industries such as drip irrigation — IDE [International Development Enterprises] in the United States and
IDE in India.Amitabha Sadangi spent more than seven years experimenting with
grant financing to build a drip irrigation system that met the farmers’ needs, that
would increase their productivity two to three times, that would enable them
to repay after a single harvest. It seemed perfect, but one of the things that we
learned when we invested patient capital to create a for-profit company that
would allow for exports and the bringing in of more capital is that farmers are
the most risk-averse community on the planet — and for good reason because
they have so much to lose.
The Gates Foundation came in, in this case, to prepare not only the company
but the whole market: $15 million for marketing, for awareness, for improving
the technology. Now you see many copycat companies, lots of different drip
irrigation experiments going on because you’ve got a platform of so many more
hundreds of thousands of farmers willing to make the decision to buy because
of this connection in the preparation stage of business development that the
Gates Foundation brought in.
Someone asked before what are the easier or harder sectors to work in. Frankly,
they’re all hard to work in, but I would say that where you see impact investing
move fastest is in energy and agriculture. If you really want hard, unless you’re
working with public system sectors, it’s water and health care.
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Water is one of the most difficult because it’s one of the most political. It’s one of
the most corrupt, and it’s one of the biggest — 1.5 billion have no access. When
WaterHealth went into India in 2004, nobody was happy. The elite said, “Water.
How dare you try to make money off the backs of the poor?”The government said,
“We’ll bring the water, thank you very much.” And the poor said,“God will bring
the water for free, so why should we pay?” A lot of time, experimentation and a
lot of failures, and $70 million later and a mix of capital, and 4 million people in
India have access to clean drinking water on a regular basis.
Yet while it’s at the scaling stage, there’s still a role for smart grant capital if
we want to innovate. In this case WaterHealth was interested in taking the
model to West Africa, but West Africa tends to have smaller villages. You need
800 households in a village to get the sustainability required for WaterHealth’s
model. So, here’s another case where Diageo, Coke Foundation [Coca-Cola
Africa Foundation] and the IFC [International Finance Corporation] put in grant
financing — $6 million into this for-profit company so that they could take care
of the capital costs of putting these plants to work in West Africa. Just in the past
year, 42 million liters of water have been delivered in these villages, and my dream
is that in the next few years we will, again, not only validate but show government that there is a model where government can partner with a private-sector
company to enable it to reach all of its citizens with affordable, clean drinking
water. And this, to me, is so much of the promise, but it’s not as black-and-white
as impact investing over here and grants and the public sector over there.
My father often tells me that getting old is not for sissies. I would say that working
in this business, while it is the most rewarding work on the planet, it also is not for
sissies, yet it needs all of us; because of the political economy, because of the realities of what people go through, we need a different orientation. I think Elizabeth
mentioned it when she said we need to put our egos aside and do a better job of
really sharing our successes and our failures, of taking the steps to go into those
areas that are some of the hardest areas in which to go and of recognizing that
every single source of capital and every kind of activist is needed to create the
kind of world that we can dare create and, I would dare say, must create.
If I have a few wishes and challenges for the different players among us, it
would start with government, with the agencies. It was thrilling to hear OPIC
and IDB and others talking earlier, and I think we as a country are really lucky to
have Elizabeth at OPIC and to have Raj Shah at USAID. We’re starting to see real
creativity in the way that these leaders are thinking about using government for
guarantees to release commercial bank lending for working capital, which sounds
like it should be easy and for some reason is not. We need it to help build the
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infrastructure, and we’re seeing AID working on metrics and working with ANDE
and others inside the sector. We need it to build, to really back these early-stage
grants and seed funds, as Jayant Singh called them before.
We’re actually working with another potential government agency in Europe
with an idea of a 10- to 15-year patient capital fund backed by government
funding at the end of which will be evaluated not based on a pure returns basis
but rather “Are we getting the capital back, and are we meeting certain social
impact returns?” If the answer is yes, the government will put in more money à
la the social bonds business, and it’s this kind of creativity that we need.
If there’s one challenge for government, it is that they need to think longer term,
not shorter term, and to build systems that others can take long into the future
rather than doing direct investment.
When I think about the grantmakers and look around the room, I realize that
we’ve also seen incredible creativity and real innovation.Without the Rockefeller
Foundation, Acumen never would have been seeded. They took a $5 million
bet — first one. But they’ve also worked on metrics, and they’ve worked on
supporting the GIIN. They’ve done a lot to move the sector forward. Omidyar
came forward with using grants and investment capital simultaneously.The Skoll
Foundation has identified social entrepreneurs all around the world and brought
that forward as a force.And the Gates Foundation continues to push on the edges
at a large scale, certainly in thinking about vaccines, but at a small scale as well.
For foundations my challenge is this: philanthropy should be the greatest and
most tolerant risk capital that we have in the world — it should be flexible — but
ironically so often we see our philanthropy taking the least amount of risk.We’re
more willing to put our financial assets into really risky endeavors.That’s got to
change. It goes back as well to this idea of ego: that sometimes for philanthropy
to come in and take that first loss so you can bring in other impact investors to
back philanthropy-based funds even though it’s early-stage and others may come
in to make money, the dirty secret is, I’m not seeing a lot of people making money
in this field.The real metric that we all need to be looking at is:Are we changing
lives? Are we changing policies? Are we changing systems so that the poor, those
who’ve been excluded, can have more opportunity?
For the impact investors, my challenge, my dream, is that we do a better job articulating who we are as individual funds and as a community. Where do we stand?
What is our definition of success? What kind of capital are we raising? What is
our time horizon? This is so we can start to not only articulate but segment and
differentiate a field that is in such need of greater clarity because it’s not an easy
field to understand in the best of senses; many can opt in and call themselves
impact investors, but we need to do a better job of articulating the different
places where capital is needed.
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Some of the best conversations I’ve had over the past few months have been
with Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, who runs IGNIA. IGNIA is a decidedly for-profit
fund that is looking for more commercial opportunities in Latin America focused
in the same sector areas that Acumen is.Acumen is playing a different role.We’re
the early-stage innovators. We’re looking for the kind of disruption that many
people are talking about so that long term we can help build a pipeline for the
IGNIAs of this world. We need both. We need all of us, and that is my wish there.
I’d like to end with a story because I’ve been thinking about it over these past
couple of days, hearing so many of you. It takes place in North Uganda, Gulu — a
part of the world made famous by the infamous Joseph Kony video that reached
100 million people and brought to young people around the world the notion
that this guy existed. Certainly he’s been in the lives of all of us who have
worked in East Africa since 1986, and what we saw was the power of social
media — another tool that we have for people to raise awareness, for young
people to want to get involved, to talk about a part of the world that they haven’t
talked about. What we saw was real energy toward policymakers, and I find it
compelling that we’re starting to see action. What we didn’t see — and this is
where the humanitarians felt so frustrated — was how much work, how much
energy it takes to build and rebuild, to create rebirth in post-conflict situations
like Gulu.At one point 1.4 million people had been pushed off their land 25 years
ago, so now they’re coming back with no money, no skills and certainly no trust,
which is the hardest currency and the most important that we have.
Enter onto the scene Bruce Robertson, this wonderful South African entrepreneur,
who decides that he wants to take his cotton-ginning business into Gulu because
North Uganda is known for the black cotton soil, where you just put seeds in the
ground and you watch things grow. But he knew that he was coming into a very
difficult situation. He needed patient capital; Acumen and Root Capital collaborated with him. And he needed grant financing; Danida from Denmark came in
with $800,000 in grants so that he could pay a lot of the costs up front — training,
inputs, community building, important certification of the cotton first as organic,
then as fair trade.And today 50,000 farmers now are being aggregated, if you will,
to provide cotton to the gin, which is now standing for 8 percent of Uganda’s
total cotton take. Those farmers are making on average 130 percent of average
wages. What I really see is rebirth. What I see is possibility — but only because
of this combination of entrepreneurship and patient capital. Later term we’re
going to see more impact capital and really smart grantmaking from, in this case,
a government agency.
My friend Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights lawyer, says,“The opposite of poverty
is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” If I have learned one thing in
the past quarter century doing this work, and certainly in the past 11 years with
Acumen, it is that justice is so much more difficult than generosity. But if we are
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From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing
going to create the world that we are capable of creating and truly extend that
fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every human being
on the planet, we have no choice but to go for justice, and that means bringing
the best of ourselves — our brains and our skills and our connections and our
capital — and recognizing that investment is just a means. It is not an end in itself.
We should judge our success based on the world we are building in which all
of our children, wherever they are born — in any country, in any slum, in any
rural area — can actually dream. It has got to be a dream that is hard-edged but
that is truly forged in love. That’s where it starts and that’s where it ends, and
what thrills me is that I get to be in this sector. I get to work with people I have
learned from, I have adored, I continue to learn from and I intend to work with
for the rest of my life.
Thank you very much.
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Tuesday, April 17
Hossam Bahgat, Founder and Director, Egyptian Initiative for
Personal Rights
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Founder, Ibn Khaldun Center for Development
Studies and the Arab Organization for Human Rights
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim, Founding Director, John D. Gerhart
Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement
The New Egypt and the Core
Responsibilities of Governance
Moderator: Jane Wales
Jane Wales
Good evening.
Yesterday we began the exploration of a new social contract by talking about the
role for government.This morning we talked about the role for the private sector,
and we’re going to devote the evening to talking about the role for people — for
citizens, for courageous citizens, for imaginative citizens, for principled citizens
and for tenacious citizens.We’re going to focus on Egypt, one of the oldest countries in the world. I think it’s had the same capital and pretty much the same
borders since 3000 BC. It has historically been a center for learning, a center for
trade. As you know, it’s now got about 80 million citizens, 60 percent of whom
are under the age of 30, and it’s in one heck of a neighborhood. When its citizens took to Tahrir Square for 18 days last January, it ended in the resignation of
President [Hosni] Mubarak.
(From Left to Right) Hossam Bahgat, Bassem Youssef, Jane Wales,
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim and Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Joining us for a conversation about Egypt then and Egypt today are two Dr.
Ibrahims. Saad Ibrahim is a political sociologist. He’s the founder of the [Ibn
Khaldun] Center for Development Studies. He was arrested three times during
the Mubarak regime. He was in prison for about three years. He ultimately was
exiled, and he returned after Mubarak resigned. He got on the plane and went
back to Cairo.
His wife, Barbara, is a sociologist. Barbara Ibrahim is the founder of the [John
D. Gerhart] Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at the American
University in Cairo. She worked at the Population Council before that and the
Ford Foundation before that. During Tahrir Square she wore a sandwich board
with a likeness, a photograph, of her husband since he couldn’t be there.
Our third panelist is from the next generation: Hossam Bahgat. Hossam is founder
and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which employs research,
advocacy and litigation in defense of human rights. He played a prominent role in
the 18-day revolution in Tahrir Square that led to President Mubarak’s resignation.
I want to start with you, Hossam.When the president announced his resignation,
did you figure the job was at least half done?
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Hossam Bahgat
No. I mean, of course, we did wake up the next day, February 12, 2011, thinking
that this was the first day of the rest of our lives, thinking that we woke up in the
new Egypt and that everything was going to be different. But we were under no
illusions that the job was done or even half done. We knew that it was going to
be a lot of hard work, but we were wrong when we thought that afterward we
were going to be busy rebuilding democratic institutions that had been undermined for 30 years under Mubarak, trying to establish the truth of what happened
under Mubarak and deal with the crimes of the past and get compensation for
victims and, of course, manage the transition in terms of the most immediate
political transition.
Then we discovered that we were effectively living in an arrested revolution, that
the members of the military council [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces]
that was appointed by Mubarak and then unseated Mubarak and replaced him
were very much of the Mubarak cloth. We realized that what we were busy
with months after Mubarak had been unseated was not dealing with the past or
working for the future. It was really being under siege in the present moment
and being overwhelmed by a fresh wave of violations and abuse: shooting of
protestors and harassment of activists and censorship of the media. It was with
such impunity — the same impunity for police and security personnel, the same
impunity for sectarian violence that we were familiar with under Mubarak — and
that’s where the disappointment came from.
The disappointment was not that it’s been really hard for the past 15 months
and we’ve been working very long days, and it’s not that we have yet to embrace
the new Egypt. The disappointment comes from the fact that the most difficult
part of this transition is that it hasn’t started, that we unseated Mubarak and
felt this extraordinary power. I used to hear my US friends talk about the night
when Obama was elected and the results were announced — how they felt that
anything else is achievable, anything else is now within hand, that this is such
a huge accomplishment that any other challenge is going to be surmountable.
I’m not American. I did not feel that, but I know what we felt when we unseated
a dictator after 30 years in power by 18 days of mostly peaceful protests that
mesmerized the world.That sense of achievement that we felt — we felt that we
are the generation that made it and that we lived the most important moment
in history before our eyes.
We wanted to work hard afterward. We did not want to rest after that, but
we did not want to be dealing with new killings, new arrests and new unfair
trials — 12,000 civilians being tried summarily before military courts, and journalists being summoned for questioning for criticizing the army. I mean, that’s
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unfortunate, to say the least, to find ourselves busy and completely overwhelmed
with this when there is so much energy that could go into rebuilding institutions
and dealing with the legacy of the past.
Jane Wales
Saad, the military has had a prominent role in political life in Egypt since [President
Gamal Abdel] Nasser came in. Number one, how have they consolidated power
over time? And, number two, are you hopeful that they will indeed cede power and
cede all the economic privileges that have come with that power?
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
It’s really a very good question.We are not sure, but we are hopeful that they have
seen the writing on the wall. We are hopeful that the very people who staged a
glorious revolution will always be ready to challenge them and to throw them
out if they linger beyond the deadline that was set for them — that is at the end
of the month of May. So, I have confidence in our young people, in the Egyptian
people, to be able to stand ready to do whatever it takes to pressure the military.
There are, of course, complications because there is another challenge that’s
facing especially the young secular-minded people:There is the military on one
hand, and there is the Islamists on the other hand, and it’s a very tough choice.
Whom are you going to fight first? Both of them are not necessarily your worst
minister democrats — they are far from it — and yet they are part of the reality.
That is where the challenge has to be managed with utmost care and finesse: to
get them out of the way and to give the revolution back to the young people
who staged it and who unfortunately — and this is where I feel a bit, shall we
say, angry, at the young people, like Hossam’s generation — left the square on
February 12 before accomplishing all seven goals that they set out in the first
18 days. Having left the square gave the chance to both the Supreme Council,
which we call SCAF, and the Muslim Brothers to hijack their revolution. Now the
challenge is to restore that revolution to its rightful owners and makers — that
young generation.That is a big challenge, and I hope that we can mobilize enough
to restore the revolution to the young people, to the future, to the idealists like
Hossam and younger generation.
Jane Wales
Hossam, we use the phrase “youth movement” as though it were something
coherent with a clear structure, a very clear political agenda, the capacity to
organize and run for election, but it was all a lot more spontaneous than that,
was it not? Was there a choice but to turn to the military council at that moment?
Were there others to step in?
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Hossam Bahgat
No. I mean, of course there are different narratives now emerging about what
took place during the 18 days and who really was there and who deserves the
credit. Obviously, no one group, or one leader, decided to leave the square on
February 12 because no one during the 18 days decided anything. It was this
amazing collective, organic movement driven by the sheer psychological power
of anger and hope at the same time.
I remember on the last day that Mubarak had in power, there was a group who
decided to split out of Tahrir Square and march to the presidential palace where
Mubarak lived, for the first time, you know, since we had started the protests. No
one was deciding where to go and no one said,“No, no, we’re staying here today”
or “Let’s all go to the presidential palace.” But some people went there, and it
turned out that when they arrived the military put their guns down and some say
turned them away — and that was the moment when Mubarak got the message
and decided to get on the plane.
That’s just one example of how spontaneous everything was happening, and
of course there were people trying to organize, trying to form coalitions. There
were also the older generation that immediately self-appointed themselves to
something called the Committee of the Wise in order to…
Jane Wales
That’s a great title!
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Didn’t last very long.
Hossam Bahgat
It did not last very long.
Jane Wales
It’s the Committee of the Wise and Short Lived.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Exactly!
Hossam Bahgat
Yes. They actually called themselves Wise Men because there wasn’t a single
woman there. Of course their plan for the transition was that, you know, young
people cannot be trusted with the future of this country, so they need the
wisdom of the older generation to tell them what the way forward should be
like. You know: “You are too idealistic to know that governance is complicated,
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so we recommend that Mubarak hand over power to his vice president” — who
for 20 years was his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, and of course his torturer
in chief, and that’s why it was a very short lived.
There were some moments like these when people were trying to intervene
and chart a way forward out of the impasse, and I have to say that when we first
went down on the streets our expectation was that we were going to get killed.
Obviously, we’re going unarmed to face Mubarak’s sheer brutality; and then a
couple of days later, when we were able to occupy the square and the different
squares around the country, we felt, He’s just got to leave. He’s the next [Zine El
Abidine] Ben Ali [former president of Tunisia]. We kept looking at our watches
and thinking, He has to leave now. As days went by and he did not leave, we got
into the mode of basically waiting and seriously not knowing what was going to
happen; and it was very easy to look around the square and feel that no halfway
political resolution is going to send these people home.
And, of course, as you correctly point out, this was an incredibly diverse group,
and I’m one of those who feel that this was not a youth revolution. It was
definitely not a Facebook revolution, and it was certainly also not a secular
revolution. I mean, the call for the people to go out on the streets on January 25
was by nonreligious activist groups, but as early as January 28, when we really
confronted and defeated Mubarak’s police, the Muslim Brotherhood were there
with us, and they were on the front row, defying orders from their leadership
not to go down.They still went down, and then they were with us on the square.
I am a human rights advocate, so I believe in full gender equality, religious equality,
protection of privacy and civil liberties et cetera — and that puts me in a position
where I oppose and challenge the political Islamist movement a lot. But at the
same time, I don’t think one can put Islamists on par with the military in terms
of their human rights records. They don’t have blood on their hands, whereas
Egypt’s military have massacred many of our colleagues before our eyes and many
protestors since they unseated Mubarak from power.
At the same time, there is a certain appeal in engaging in a culture war — in
depicting what is happening in Egypt now as a fight about Egypt’s identity, a
fight between secularists and Islamists, fundamentalists and progressive-minded
or secular-minded. I think the real challenge is to find a way in which we can
all learn how to live together because we, for the first time, are engaging in a
debate about the role of religion in politics without the heavy-handed mediation of an oppressive authority, and we have been putting off this debate for
eight decades now. Finally, we are having this debate, and we have to come to
terms with the fact that the Islamists are not going to disappear just because we
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wish them to disappear, and we are not going anywhere because the Islamists
are taking over government. Our challenge as a human rights community is to
establish consensus around the core minimum of civil rights and human rights
and fundamental freedoms that everyone should agree upon regardless of which
party has majority in Parliament or has formed the government.
Jane Wales
Saad, you have written a lot on the question of the role of Islam in governance
and democracy. How should we be thinking about Islam? Yesterday I asked Tony
Blair that same question in part because I think a lot of Americans mistakenly
equate this to the Iranian revolution.You know they’ll sort of say,“Gosh. It’s going
to be just like the Iranian revolution.” It strikes me that that’s a very unlikely
model for Egypt. But help us understand what the role of Islam can and will
likely be in politics.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Islam comes in many colors, many sizes, many versions. Egyptian Islam is different
from Saudi Islam, from Afghani Islam, from Pakistani Islam. Egyptians pride themselves on having a moderate Islam. Islam has been always moderate in Egypt,
never really too extreme. We have had a few extremes here and there, but that
was always the exception.
Personally, as a secularist, as a civil society advocate, I have no fear of Muslims.
They were with me in prison. I have fought with them. It is always a fight of equals.
And even though they now have a greater number of followers, I can reason with
them. My center — the Ibn Khaldun Center — is located exactly 100 meters from
the Muslim Brothers headquarters in a plateau in Cairo. And the relationship so
far has been correct and cordial. As I said, some of them were with me in prison,
and at one time we had a common enemy: the Mubarak regime.At other times we
had rivalry and competition, and I think the only thing we are now working for is
to protect that pluralism — that they have a place. And they should have a place.
After all, they’re part and parcel of Egyptian society; they have a constituency, and
they have been on the scene. I’m talking now not about Islam but Islamists — the
Muslim Brothers, for example.They have been on the scene since 1928, so they
are part of modern Egypt.They have had their ups and downs. Sometimes their
following was in the millions and sometimes it has contracted to a few hundred
thousand, but they have always been there.
What I am hoping for, personally as a democrat, is for them to evolve into Muslim
democrats, à la Turkey, not à la Iran, but à la Turkey.
Jane Wales
À la Turkey — that’s what I was going to ask.
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Saad Eddin Ibrahim
That is an important point that we would like, and they have been talking about
that for a number of years. In fact, some of their spokesmen have made movement
in that direction — not all of them, but some, or at least the ones who were with
me in prison; they could see that point, and in fact they invited the prime minister
of Turkey almost a year ago, Mr. [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, to exchange notes. It
is true they received him in the airport as a hero, a triumphant hero. However,
when he told them a few things they did not like, they were not in his farewell
party at the airport.They left him to travel by himself. It shows that give-and-take,
that dialectic, and it was not lost on the Egyptian public.They received the man
as a hero and then they left him to leave the country as a very lonely man.Then
they began to explain themselves:“Well, you know, he traveled unexpectedly. He
had something, and we could not organize the farewell party for him.” But they
were on the defensive.
The point is, there is now dynamics and discourse among all the parties, including
the Islamists, and we have discovered that besides the Muslim Brothers there are
at least two other constituents in Egypt that also claim an Islamic agenda. One of
them is called the Salafis. The other group is the Sufis. In fact, the biggest of the
three are the Sufis. They are in the millions. The Sufis probably have anywhere
from 7 to 9 million followers; followed by the Salafis — about 3.5 million; and
then the Muslim Brothers, who are only 750,000 actually, but very tough, very
well-organized and well-trained.
So, you have these three constituencies. You don’t have an Islamic or Islamist
camp that is unified; it is diversified, and that is healthy because Islamists are
learning how to be pluralists among themselves as well — just like the liberals,
just like the radicals, like other seculars.That is a healthy sign and, again, it helps
us push them in the direction of the so-called Muslim democrats.
Jane Wales
Barbara, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis were the two biggest vote
getters for the Parliament.What do you anticipate the climate will be for religious
freedom? The Copts didn’t get any seats. Do you expect the future of Egypt to
be a future of religious freedom, or do you have worries in that regard? I know
that’s something you work on a lot also.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Jane, you know the definition of a pessimist is someone married to an optimist
for a long time. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but sometimes one has
to temper one’s spouse, and I am concerned. It is very easy among a population
that has never practiced democracy or citizenship or had access to enough information to make informed political decisions to use religion to say,“Vote for me.
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You’re voting for God. You’re voting for Heaven. You’re voting for the Path.” And
that is what happened in our parliamentary election, and I’m quite sure it is what
will be happening — it certainly happened in our referendum in March. Egyptians
are very smart people who see through artifice rather quickly, but there will be
a period of time in which this is a powerful electoral argument.
The other problem — and this touches on philanthropy, the area dear to so many
of our hearts — is that we don’t yet have a developed sense of how to separate
politics from social service and social good. People are buying votes right and
left, and no one is calling them on it.You can get a kilo of meat from the Muslim
Brothers if you vote the right way the next week; and until we have a little bit
more maturity about that, it’s going to be very difficult to find out what is really
in the hearts and minds of Egyptians and who they really want to lead them.
On the issue of religious freedom, I think it’s going to be a process that will take
some time. If you have repressed movements that wanted to use religion as a
basis for reform and modernization and moving forward, if you’ve repressed a
movement for 80 years as we did in Egypt, you have to expect that when they
have their moment in the sun, they are going to overdo this newfound sense
of power and freedom and they’re going to want to impose exactly the way
that things were imposed upon them. We are already seeing prosecution for
blasphemy and things — not just in Egypt but also in Tunisia, which is actually
on a much more hopeful path.We have a judiciary in which there is penetration
from these organizations.
So, I’m long-run optimistic. I think Egyptians’ sense of fairness, their survival
over many millennia, has been because they’ve had a live-and-let-live mentality.
Certainly, there was an era — it probably ended in the fifties — in which you could
go to school and not know whether your classmates were Christian or Muslim
because it simply wasn’t an issue. But the regime played on these sentiments and
pitted people against each other, and our state security played a particularly dirty
game in that regard. So, we’re going to have to work through all of these things.
I think what we need from our friends around the world is to fasten your seatbelts and not overreact to one court outcome or one incident or one highly
publicized event and to understand that these are processes, as Hossam has said,
and we’re at the very beginning of it.
Copts are an essential part of Egyptian life. And when there was a particularly
ugly incident in Maspero, which I’m sure many of you were following, in which
a number of nonviolent Christian protestors were killed after the revolution,
my staff, who work on civic engagement and philanthropy issues, dropped
everything and went to the morgues, went to be with these families, Muslim
and Christian. We spent two days in my small center in the American University
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in Cairo, talking about how we would respond, what we do differently to make
sure that this could not ever happen again. And that was just one small place. It
was happening all over the country.
Hossam Bahgat
Killed by the military, just to clarify.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Right! Plain-clothes military people. So, that gives me hope. If you look beyond
Cairo and the politics of the headlines, in every single small town and village
there are youth groups and people’s groups that are solving local problems, that
feel the revolution is alive and well. If we are able to shine a spotlight on them
and their innovative ideas and reach out to them and build those bridges, I think
we have a counterweight to the closed, backward-looking forces that Saad was
describing.
Jane Wales
Yet the law is still on the books that says if a civil society organization comes
together, it needs to be licensed by the government; and if it is to receive outside
funds, those funds need to go through the government. What are the chances?
Do you expect that law to be overturned in the weeks and the months to come?
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
It’s going to be a fight. I would like to hear Hossam’s view on this because he’s
been working very closely on it.
I am hopeful that forces within the Muslim Brotherhood that were repressed for
all those decades will join forces with us in saying that you cannot criminalize
people gathering to address their own issues voluntarily and you cannot close
out the rest of the world.
Jane Wales
In fact, Saad was charged with receiving external money.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Yes — from the European Union to make a documentary encouraging women to
vote.That earned him a seven-year prison sentence repeatedly. But this new law
is particularly draconian because external donors would not be able to have a
relationship with an Egyptian NGO. Everything would be channeled through the
government. So, we’re calling this the “nationalization of the civil society sector,”
and I think it’s beginning to resonate across this political spectrum that it’s not
bad just for secular groups. It’s bad for everyone.
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Jane Wales
And the emergency law put in place after Sadat was assassinated — that’s still
in place.
Hossam Bahgat
That’s still in place, although the military further expanded it — not just beyond
what it was under Mubarak but beyond what it was when the emergency law
was issued under Nasser in the 1950s.
Jane Wales
Tell us about the law.
Hossam Bahgat
It’s stopping, searching, arresting and detaining without a judicial warrant:
detention for being a threat to public security or for engaging in thuggery or for
violating the freedom to work, i.e., organizing a labor strike.And of course it still
operates a system of state security emergency courts that violate the fair-trial
rights and do not allow the right of appeal.
Now we’re heading toward the elapse of the two-year state of emergency that
was last renewed by Mubarak in 2010. In May or June of this year, it will be
yet another fight to see whether SCAF — the Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces — will extend it and how Parliament is going to approve or disapprove
of that move or challenge it.
This and the NGO law and many other laws that discriminate on account of religion or that restrict civil liberties or that enshrine social injustice and economic
injustice into our system of governance — that’s all part of the Mubarak legacy
that we have not been able to untangle, to understand, to get the truth about or
to deconstruct and try to clean up. And that’s where Egypt is sharply different
from Tunisia.
If you go to Tunisia, you will hear all the revolutionaries complaining as well,
but they all know that they are on the right track. Immediately after they
unseated their president, they set up something called the High Commission
for the Fulfillment of the Goals of the Revolution; that body self-mandated itself
to passing an essential package of laws that were necessary for a transition to
succeed. They issued a political parties law, an associations/NGO law, a media
law, an elections law — just a small number of laws that were not necessarily
responding to a pressing need today; but they decided that without cleaning up
this mess that we inherited from the Ben Ali regime, that transition can never
succeed.
The opposite of that is what happened in Egypt. We had even more repressive
laws issued by our military generals compared with the laws that we had under
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Mubarak; and the laws that were passed under Mubarak have not been liberalized, with the exception probably of the political parties law in order to legalize
all these political parties that were working underground — like the Muslim
Brotherhood and others — which was essential, of course, for the transition to
have any legitimacy. But the problem is we have army generals who not only are
Mubarak’s generals that were appointed by him but who are willing to be even
more ruthless than he was because they saw what happened to Mubarak and
they are determined to not allow this to happen to themselves. So, they are not
on a reform path. They’re definitely not on a revolutionary path, and they have
betrayed people’s trust in them as de-politicized custodians who will just fill the
vacuum of power until we have real elections.
I just want to say one thing about religious freedom. In the last elections, we
had more Christians elected to Parliament than we had under Mubarak by 600
percent. We had six Coptic Christian members of Parliament who were elected
by popular vote. That would have been unimaginable under Mubarak. Really,
under Mubarak the number of Christians that were elected was zero, with the
exception of one minister who is now, of course, in exile in London, having been
sentenced for financial corruption because he was a minister.The elections were
rigged in his favor, not because he was Christian. Any other Christian lawmaker
was appointed by the president. So, six compared with 500 is embarrassing, but
it’s 600 percent more than under Mubarak, and it’s people who actually went
and cast their vote and sent Christian members to Parliament, and Christians
represent 10 percent of the population. The moment you allow some oxygen
into the country, it leads to this debate that Dr. Saad is talking about across the
board. It leads to a debate in society, and it leads to some improvements and some
mistakes but also to a discussion of why these mistakes were made.
Now, having a democratic government is definitely not going to be the end
of the story. What we keep saying in our discourse is that this revolution was
about establishing a democratic regime but also about fighting for a democratic
society — and that would mean gender equality, religious equality, pluralism and
diversity in addition to the regular holding of elections.
Jane Wales
So, Saad, I’m going to bring you back into the conversation.The presidential elections are happening next month. There used to be a saying that any young man
in Egypt could grow up to be president if his last name were Mubarak. When
you got on your plane to come here, it looked like the top contenders were the
Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate and Mr. Suleiman, the intelligence chief under
Mubarak. They’re both now disqualified along with eight others. What do you
expect to occur? Who’s going to emerge? What does this mean for Amr Moussa,
for example?
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Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Unfortunately, that is what is likely to happen.Amr Moussa now is leading in the
polls, the public opinion.
And seeing young people there in the square — they were managing the square
better than Egypt was ever managed. People were taking care of the garbage, of
the electricity, of first aid, medical needs. Food was abundant. I don’t know where
it came from.And everybody was sharing with everybody. It was like, shall we say,
the republic, Plato’s republic — a very ideal scene in Tahrir Square. I was hoping
that it would last, but like all utopias it did not last. But it really gave me the sense
that our young people who staged that revolution are capable of running the
country, of running the region. I hope they will have the opportunity and the
good sense of our own voters to put them back in charge.
Jane Wales
This is the former head of the Arab League.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
He is a former foreign minister of Egypt, 10 years under Mubarak, and then
another 10 years as a secretary general of the Arab League. So he is well-versed
in foreign affairs, both as an Egyptian and as an Arab secretary general, and he
is 76 years old.
I have been arguing in my writing in my weekly column, in a series I’ve called “40
Under 40,” advocating that 40 percent of all elected offices be for young people
under the age of 40, meaning in their thirties and their twenties. Even though I
would not qualify (I’m 73 years old), I feel truly that I will feel safe for my children
and my grandchildren if young people are in charge — the young people of Egypt,
the young people of Tunisia, the young people of the region who are responsible
for the so-called Arab Spring.They will make mistakes, definitely, but I think that
making mistakes is a human right.
A human right? A human right! They’re entitled! They’re entitled because they
took the risk of staging that revolution.They should be in charge. I keep reminding
everybody that after the French Revolution, for the first 18 years France was ruled
by people under the age of 40. In Egypt itself, Nasser was 35 years old when he
staged his revolution. So, let us trust. Let us trust young people. I feel safer with
young people than with the elderly like Amr Moussa, but, unfortunately, that is
what the polls are saying now — that he will most likely be the winner.
Hopefully, he will choose a vice president who is younger, like in his thirties, one
of the revolutionaries from Tahrir Square; and believe me these people have seen
and they are very capable. They managed Tahrir Square. I was here in America
when the revolution broke out, but I traveled the second week, upon summoning
by my wife, who addressed Tahrir Square. She would be too modest to say that,
but she addressed the million people in Tahrir Square, and from that podium she
called me in New Jersey and commanded me to come back. So, I came back and
she took me directly to the square, and it was worth it, a moment that doesn’t
come often in one’s lifetime.
Jane Wales
Yes.
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Jane Wales
I do want to point out that the garbage was picked up by the children in the
association that Laila Iskandar made possible. So, thank you, Laila, for that.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Jane, could I?
Jane Wales
Barbara.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
I think the dilemma of leadership in Egypt is one that will, if it doesn’t already,
resonate in a lot of other places in the world. I’ve watched an evolution over the
past 15 months in how young revolutionaries think about putting themselves
forward as leaders.
In the beginning it was one of the principles of the revolution that it was a lateral,
networked, collective action; and immediately after the 18 days when the military started wanting to hold these councils and invite people, the young people
resisted putting forward representatives. They felt it had been such a poisoned
leadership principle that had guided the country for so many years — that it was
always one man and he had to be a certain age and he had to have certain military
credentials — that they went way too far the other way and lost an opportunity
for their voices to be heard. They were not forming parties, and they were not
contesting parliamentary elections for legitimate reasons.They were fighting the
military on the street, and they were protesting military trials and the fact that
not one single murderer of protestors has yet been brought to justice, but 12,000
protestors have faced military trials and are now behind bars.
So, it was not illegitimate, what they chose, but what I’m hearing in the past six
or seven months is very different.They’re saying,“How can we prepare ourselves
to be an effective prime minister? Give us a crash course.” And they’re very
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sophisticated about it. They say,“We know we could go to the Kennedy School
at Harvard and we could take two years and we could come back prepared, but
we want to do this in Egypt and we want to do it contextualized with our issues
and our problems.” So, they’re coming to us at the university and saying,“Can you
help us prepare ourselves for leadership?”
So, there’s been an evolution, but I think we are entering a period in history in
which leadership has to change. It will be more lateral. It will be about hubs in
networks, as I was discussing with a colleague of mine before dinner; and we all
need to grapple with how we support Saad’s younger generation to take their
place and to do it effectively.
Jane Wales
Let me talk about some of the issues that await the next political leadership
because some of the features of Egyptian life that probably contributed to the
revolution still fester. I mean, take the economic situation where you had great
economic growth. You had 5 percent growth under Mubarak, but it wasn’t
broad-based. Most people didn’t feel it.There was very high unemployment, high
interest rates and high food prices, and now you’ve got more freedom, somewhat,
but even fewer jobs.What are the chances that the economic crisis could prolong
the political crisis?
Hossam Bahgat
The slogan that was in the invitation for people to go to the streets on January 25
and was echoed much during the 18 days was, “Bread, freedom, human dignity,”
which rhymes in Arabic. And it starts with bread.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
That’s a great chant.
Hossam Bahgat
Yes. This was a brilliant slogan in how it really captured the essence of human
rights and not making any distinction between political liberties, civil liberties
and the social justice aspect of it. It was as much about bread as it was about
freedom.This revolution was as much about social justice — social injustice and
economic injustice — as it was a revolt against dictatorship and the restriction
of liberties. Now, of course, after we unseated Mubarak, we are still living under
exactly the same economic policies that were engineered and executed by
Mubarak.
Jane Wales
The New Egypt and the Core Responsibilities of Governance
Hossam Bahgat
Growth is down, and the government, the SCAF [Supreme Council of the Armed
Forces], is refusing to introduce any systemic changes to the economic problems that they inherited from Mubarak, and they are continuing the same unfair
subsidies — energy subsidies for large industries and factories. They are not
introducing social protection measures.They are not introducing tax reforms, and
they are turning to foreign borrowing mostly to just carry themselves through
the transition phases. It’s very shortsighted.
Jane Wales
And public spending is way up, isn’t it?
Hossam Bahgat
They are not increasing social spending, unfortunately. I mean, they are keeping
a cap on it. They are also introducing a shrinking budget in the aftermath of
the revolution, which is unreal, where expectations are at the highest level in
history, obviously.
The flip side is that the economic hardship in particular is the most-effective
means of communicating to the people how little has changed since Mubarak left.
And it is exactly the continuing policies of social injustice and economic deprivation that will make it impossible for the current Mubarak regime that is still in
place to remain in place. I am one of the people who feel that the fact that Amr
Moussa is even running for president after the revolution is an insult to me and,
of course, to my colleagues who died for Mubarak to go. Moussa was someone
who served Mubarak as foreign minister for 10 years, did not ever criticize
Mubarak for anything and then served, was appointed by Mubarak, for 10 years
as secretary general of the Arab League. He did absolutely nothing to challenge
the Arab autocrats around the region, and he was part of Mubarak’s clique. The
fact that he’s going to be Mubarak-lite, or an improvement on Mubarak, is really
unfitting after everything that we have been through over the past 15 months.
My hope is that even if he is elected — and a lot can change between now and
election day since campaigning has not officially started yet — he will be hesitant to introduce any real change in the regime, especially on the social justice
front and on the overhaul of the security apparatus, the subjecting the military
to democratic oversight, scrutinizing the military budget and bringing military
business under the rule of law, dealing with crimes of the past and establishing
the truth also about what happened in the past. It’s precisely because he is the
son of this system, the product of this system, that he’s not going to introduce
much change to what he inherited, and that’s why he is going to fail.
Except growth is down, in fact. Way down.
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We believe that this regime, established in 1952 after the fall of the monarchy, is
in its last year or two. We believe that eventually the sheer psychological power
of anger and hope that we saw in Tahrir and around the country last year is going
to come back; blame will be cast where it really belongs. I believe that, yes, people
can vote on the basis of identity, can fall victims to religious polemics during
elections, but they are also, as Barbara said, incredibly smart.
There was a recent poll by the Al-Ahram Centre. A representative sample was
asked who they voted for in the last parliamentary elections; and of those who
voted for the two majority parties and are now disappointed three months after
the elections, the percentage is 80 percent: 80 percent of those that voted for
the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis are now
disappointed at the conduct of their own lawmakers. That information would
have been impossible to get, of course, under Mubarak. But it also would have
been impossible for us to dispel the myth that even if a voter casts a vote on the
basis of religion, it doesn’t mean a carte blanche. It doesn’t mean that this representative in Parliament will always have my support.These are people who voted
for Islamists and who in three months alone have already started expressing
dissatisfaction with the conduct of their members of Parliament.
Jane Wales
I guess my question is, wasn’t that in a sense inevitable? That is to say, that the
expectation is so high after the experience of Tahrir Square that anyone they
would have voted in would be a disappointment?
Hossam Bahgat
Yes, and that’s what’s fantastic about bringing the Islamists to power because,
for once, they get to actually be held accountable for their positions. They have
been the most prominent political actor throughout the region and in Egypt for
decades, but it has been too comfortable in the seat of the victim and the martyr
and the subject of persecution, and now suddenly they actually have to answer
questions: Do you think Egypt should accept a loan from the IMF [International
Money Fund]? What do you think of the economic program that the government
is submitting to the IMF in order to get the loan? How do we fix the health insurance system so that it covers the other 50 percent of the population that is not
covered right now? How do you feel about 20 percent of public spending going
into energy subsidies for large industries at the rate of 400 percent of the public
spending on health? How do you fix this?
These are the right questions that should be asked.And the Muslim Brotherhood
is not only failing at answering them but failing even at appointing a constituent
assembly to draft the new constitution, and this failure is happening on live TV,
literally. It’s a miracle, really, that you walk the streets of Cairo during the day past
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tea shops and barber shops and vegetable stores, and people are watching live
coverage of Parliament. Everyone is watching the live coverage of parliamentary
sessions during the day, and they are seeing how the Muslim Brotherhood is not
only not creative in terms of proposing solutions but is also obstructing real
change and really enjoying power in an unhealthful way.They then immediately
cast the blame where it belongs, and I think the same would apply to Amr Moussa.
Jane Wales
Who’s going to be at the head of the table for the drafting of the new constitution?
Hossam Bahgat
This was a great success of the minority, the nonreligious minority. They were
able to delegitimize the Constituent Assembly that was monopolized by the
Brothers and then they went to court; the court nullified the composition of the
Constituent Assembly, and basically the ball is back in the court of Parliament.
But it was a great example of minority parties joining each other, withdrawing
together from the Constituent Assembly but also reaching out to their constituencies and mobilizing protests and using the media strategically in a way that
forced the majority to admit that they mishandled the process even before the
court had nullified the Constituent Assembly.
Right now there is no other choice but for all the different political parties to
come to the table and agree on objective criteria for how to elect a body or
appoint a body that is truly representative, that can work in a transparent manner,
that could enjoy credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of the people and therefore could then produce a constitution that could be called democratic.We have
drafted an initiative for such objective criteria and are now collecting signatures
and endorsements for them. I believe that this was a very hard lesson for the
majority to learn, but I think they have learned it.
Jane Wales
Barbara, I want to ask you about recent events when it comes to civil society
organizations. There was a lot of play in the American press when there was
the indictment of the leader of the National Democratic Institute and the
International Republican Institute.All their papers were confiscated.And it wasn’t
just those two organizations; there were Egyptian organizations with Egyptian
NGOs. What we don’t read about is: What happened to the Egyptian NGOs? If
those papers reveal a relationship with Egyptian NGOs, are they harmed by it?
This is… It’s hard for us to get beneath the headline of those two institutions.
Barbara Lethem Ibrahim
Again, this is a replay of the old scenarios under the Mubarak regime. You criminalize and penalize a few civil society organizations because you know it will
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intimidate everyone else, and that is exactly what is happening. We’re honored
here tonight to have with us two Egyptians who were leaders in Freedom House,
employees who were establishing the office and helping Egyptians learn how
to practice campaigning and how to be democrats, and they’ve paid a very high
price for that.We don’t know how this case will be resolved. It is still in the courts.
Technically each of these organizations, and in fact most NGOs that operate now
in Egypt, was in violation of the law because the old Mubarak law made it virtually
impossible to register to do democracy promotion, made it virtually impossible
to take foreign funding without going through a lot of hoops and probably being
denied. So, on the assurances of Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other
governing bodies over the past 18 months, these organizations were operating
to reach out and assist Egyptians to realize their democratic desires.
So, the case is in the courts. My expectation is that it will go away quietly. I hope
it will. But in a way the damage has already been done because civil society
now feels threatened rather than empowered by this revolution. They know
that the army can be an even more ruthless opponent to people’s power than
the Mubarak regime, so organizations have not taken foreign funding. At least
three consortia of international donors that were planning to come to Egypt
to learn about the post-revolutionary needs and to support our reform process
have decided not to come because of what’s going on, until these legal issues
are resolved. So, it’s done harm.There’s no doubt about that. But I think it’s also
increasing resolve. Hossam’s organization is partnering now with dozens of
others that are pushing back, pushing back in the courts, pushing back with
petitions and exposing what has been happening.
I wanted to talk about civil society’s role with economic reform because it’s
so essential and it’s a place where there really is a role, I think, for a lot of the
people in this room and the social investing community all over the world. We
have nine or 10 proposals on the table that could make a huge and immediate
difference in the lives of poor people in Egypt if our legislators would give these
proposals a chance. One of them has been developed over the past 10 years.
It will be familiar to many of you, based on [Hernando] de Soto’s ideas about
titling informal property and informal businesses, and it relates very much to
what we’ve been hearing from Laila about the plight of the informal sector.The
numbers are there.We know that it would unleash potentially 4 billion Egyptian
pounds over the next few years if we gave people title to their property and
to their businesses. And that is not taking money from one place and putting it
somewhere else.That is creating value and stimulating the economy. Our fear is
that, coming out of these religious traditions in which charitable giving was the
norm and the way in which a lot of political support was built, subsidy will be
the quick win for the legislators; they will simply increase hand-outs, and we all
know the kinds of negative effects that can have on the economy.
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Another piloted and tested idea that we need a lot of support on is the idea of
conditioned cash transfers for poor families that enable them not to worry about
where meals will come from over a two-year period so that they can work on
getting kids in school, having health care for their children and enabling one or
two adult family members to be ready for livelihood.These ideas are ready to go.
We need investors. We need promoters. We need partners with us to make sure
that these proposals see the light of day.
Jane Wales
I have one last question of you, Hossam: Is there a Syrian “Hossam” and are you
in touch with him or her?
Hossam Bahgat
This is a very difficult topic. For a long while in Egypt, we were almost successful
in blocking out Syria because of how bad things were in Egypt; and many of us
feel very guilty about this, but we were picking up the bodies of our colleagues
from the streets, as well. To think that it’s been 13 months now and more than
9,000 people have been killed… You know in Egypt we lost around 1,000 people
during the 18 days, and that’s nine times the tragedy.
There are incredible and incredibly brave people in Syria. We hear about three
or four arrests every day, and the community of activists that are targeted in
Syria are not just the professional human rights defenders but people who get
arrested because they give a sound bite on Al Jazeera or they are using their
mobile phones to film violence and send it to news agencies as proof that the
truth is not being respected by the Assad regime.
We have a colleague in Bahrain who has this famous quote: “The Arab governments have succeeded in one thing, which is turning their entire populations
into activists and journalists.” So, it is not just one person in Bahrain or in Syria
or in Egypt, as much as the international media keeps looking for the one person
behind the protests to try to profile. When we say that this movement that is
really running across the region is leaderless, we really mean it. It is leaderless in
a very positive sense. Of course, there is a flip side to it in terms of the decision
making and the forward-looking planning, but the positive side of it is that every
single person is really an activist, a journalist and, of course, a target, unfortunately.
Jane Wales
Thank you.
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Tuesday, April 17
Bassem Youssef, Host, The Bassem Youssef Show
Jane Wales
A Talk by Bassem Youssef
By way of a quick introduction, Dr. Bassem Youssef is a heart surgeon in real life,
in his original life, and he would volunteer as a physician to help the people in
Tahrir Square. He was so taken aback by the large gulf between the reality he
witnessed first-hand and what he saw reported on television that he chose to run
his own mock newscast from Tahrir Square, and next thing you know he has a
regular show. I want to welcome Egypt’s Jon Stewart to join us.
Bassem Youssef
What’s up, DC? Wrong crowd. Okay.
Welcome to a special Egyptian night at the Global Philanthropy Forum. Kebab
will be served in a while, followed by baklava, maybe some belly dancing if
you’re lucky.
Thank you for having me here. My name is Bassem Youssef, and I am the host of
a show called The Show, or the program, The Program. And this is the story of
my program,The Program on TV. It started on the Internet as The Bassem Youssef
Show.
It all started in a room in my apartment: one table, one camera, bad hair and a
banner behind me made of a collage of Tahrir photos that cost $100.All that in a
spare room in my apartment where we used to dry our laundry.
Bassem Youssef
It all actually started watching TV in my apartment. I started watching the revolution on TV. I wasn’t one of those people who went to Tahrir on the twenty-fifth
of January, neither was I one of the people who clashed with the security forces
in the famous Battle of the Bridge of Kasr El Nil. Like many others I went there
much later. I went there, actually, on the twenty-ninth because so many people
didn’t understand what was going on there.
I didn’t know what was happening then, but I knew it was something good. For
the first time in my life, those dark-suited men with their clubs and their guns
and their tear gas were pushed back and overcome by massive numbers of
people just wanting to reach the square. To give you a reference of how things
were before January 25, this was what we saw before the twenty-fifth: a ratio of
two-to-one security forces to protestors. But this is what we saw after: 100,000
people poured in, and no force could actually hold them back.
Since then I went more frequently, until I saw on TV the Battle of the Camels and
the Horses, and I went with the other fellow doctors to care for the wounded
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in Tahrir Square. The attacks kept going until 3:00 AM that morning, where the
army forces stayed neutral. Then I went frequently until the stepping down of
[President Hosni] Mubarak.
Up to the end of the 18 days, I thought the country was having multiple-personality
disorder:There was the revolutionary personality in the square and there was TV.
Only when I went back home to watch TV would I realize that this is no revolution; it was a conspiracy carried out by the CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency],
Mossad, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah all together, and of course I think Kermit
the Frog too. Well, if they knew him, they would have incriminated him as well!
We were so proud of our revolution not being a reason to rise against the regime
but rather for uniting all of these enemies for the first time in history.World peace
was finally at hand!
All day long, TV was swamped by calls of people crying, howling, giving eyewitness accounts of really terrifying incidents. One of those calls described a detailed
attack on a famous department store and screaming that there where dead bodies
lying in the streets and people shooting everywhere. That store was across the
street from me; needless to say, that was absolute nonsense.
We had people giving “eye-witness accounts” of undercover agents giving out 50
euros and KFC meals. So, they would actually bribe people to stay in the square.
The business at KFC just spiked after the revolution.
Of course, if you were watching TV, you would find that the square was filled with
people who are drug addicts, jihadists and Mossad operatives, and there were
even people there having group sex and orgies.There were, of course, spies, CIA
agents and obscene homosexual sex parties. I kid you not! Those were actually
the reports we had on TV.
But you know what was even better? People believed.
For 18 days the main message of the media was to make the whole country
believe that this is no revolution but a conspiracy carried out by the world’s most
notorious nemeses, all together, under cover of the international Freemasons
movement.
If there is one word to describe the state-run media and even some of the
private channels run by the pro-regime businessmen, if there is only one word
to describe that, it would be: Fox News? Yes.Yes, the “fear factor” was just out of
this world.They actually accused Obama of being behind everything.That was a
Sean Hannity dream coming true.
Still, people stood their ground, and at the end came the happy ending of
Mubarak stepping down and their regime fell. Oh, yes, right! Yes, it fell.
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Then came the honeymoon. Everyone was falling head over heels for the revolution. And the same people who were crying tears over Mubarak were hailing
the revolution and wondering how it made absolute sense to get rid of Mubarak
after 30 years.
This is when I started the show in my apartment. In March, one month after the
revolution, I started to document what happened in the media at that time.The
material was already there, but what I did is connect it in a kind of a show similar
to that guy — yes, Jon Stewart — but of course with very, very modest and humble
abilities.As I said, a desk, a banner behind me and only one camera. I didn’t wear
really good suits at that time.
So, the 18 days provided a gold mine of material to make fun of.We had an actor
claiming he saw drugs and full sexual relationship — he actually described it as
“full sexual relationship,” not partial (I don’t know what is the difference) but full
sexual relationship in Tahrir.
We had a singer, a very famous pop singer who was claiming that he arrested
foreign spies trolling next to his house and he was asking every Egyptian to arrest
and hand over any foreigners they see on the street. Well, two side notes: First
of all, the prime income of Egypt is tourism, so he actually ruined tourism for us
for the next 10 years; and, two, the foreigners he arrested were Swiss Islamists,
according to him. He described like two Swiss Islamists that he actually arrested.
People were dying in the square, right? And we had an actress complaining about
the shortage of supplies — that even her two-year-old nephew couldn’t find pizza
and was missing out on eating lamb chops. So obviously we were having fun with all of this. We had celebrities calling in,
suggesting innovative ways to end the sit-in in Tahrir, one suggesting a siege until
they all die of hunger, another suggesting that a tank go in and shoot a round
of warning shots. How can you do warning shots with a tank? That was lovely. I
mean, we were having so much fun.
Another caller suggested that the whole square should just be burned down. For
those people who are familiar with the Burning Man festival, we relate.Yes.
So, when that started I hoped for only about 10,000 hits on my YouTube channel,
but after a few episodes we had 5 million views, just on the first seven or eight
episodes on the internet. And that is a record by Egyptian and Arab standards.
Then I found myself negotiating with major TV channels and even setting my own
price. At that time I was packing my bags because I had just been accepted to a
fellowship program in pediatric heart surgery in Cleveland, and I had to choose.
Should I go to Cleveland or should I stay? I know that many of you don’t think
that Cleveland is a very attractive option, but, you know, for us it’s actually not so
bad. I really had so many concerns.Would I be able to continue writing this on a
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regular basis, two or three times a week? Will the events enable me to have that
much fun and that much material to write? Will people get fed up with this kind
of programming, especially since the mood has changed? Everyone got together
and were celebrating the beginning of a new era — even the slaves of the old
regime renounced it and came to their senses — but amid all these celebrations,
the slaves had a new master: the army leaders, the ones who were kind enough
not to crush the protestors.
Suddenly a new Mubarak was created. As long as there are slaves, a master is
always needed. Gradually it turned from our revolution to their revolution,
according to them, of course. The people who were constructing all kinds of
conspiracy theories about Hamas, Mossad, CIA, Hezbollah and others came back
with the same theories, but this time in the context that it was a great revolution; thank God that the military council protected us from its side effects. And
people still believed.
A phenomenal shift in the media happened when many of the elitist
media — people who used to criticize radical religious figures and were persecuted by the military and the police — all came together for the first time to
demonize everybody who took an active part in this revolution and maybe
even who had a history of standing against the Mubarak regime. All these foes
suddenly joined in some sort of a unified front. Now the accusation that we used
to hear — that you are against the regime — is not as effective as it used to be.
There has to be a new accusation: for example, that you are an anarchist who
wants to destroy the fabric of the society.
Among the other accusations are that you are a traitor who wants to destroy
the armed forces and the country or you are a godless, elitist liberal who wants
to destroy religion. Even the sports anchors chipped in after each soccer riot,
explaining to people that this is a global conspiracy that aims to destabilize the
country.
So, to give you an idea of what our media looked like, imagine Glenn Beck as his
crazy self and then clone him again into a man of the cloth, and then clone him
again as a sports anchor.That’s exactly our media right now.
Obviously the gold mine of the 18 days just kept on giving. The magnitude of
hypocrisy, misconceptions and deceit that we have seen throughout the year
was unmatched.The difference between what happened in this year and the 18
days of the revolution was that we had a virtual happy ending on the eleventh
of February. But during this year, the body count was rising with each clash with
the protestors.
The army used to apologize at first, but then the tone was, well, you know, they
had it coming.
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It was so hard to keep the sarcastic and funny tone while we had these tragedies
happening in the street, but we still came out three times a week, not just to make
people laugh but to expose the amount of lies injected into media and politics.
What started as five-minute webisodes making fun of pizza-eating children turned
into one of the most-viewed programs in Egypt. On YouTube alone, we now have
around 60 million views.
Our 20-minute satirical show has had a significant effect on how people view
media and politics, maybe even more than the hours-on-end talk shows that
people are used to each night. Now, every time I log on to YouTube I find more
and more young people starting their own shows on YouTube. In their own
rooms with one camera. Many of them pay tribute to our show as the one that
inspired them, and that’s what gives me hope.
Social media now is such a powerful tool in Egypt. Two years ago we viewed
Twitter and Facebook only as a tool to pick up chicks (maybe still so). Now
every single political statement is scrutinized, satirized and torn to pieces on the
internet. Facebook,Twitter and YouTube became the new media.They are so fast
that the veteran anchors who used to be the main and only source of information
and opinion are always two steps behind the new social media.
And this gives me hope. The mainstream media — the state-run media and the
businessmen’s media — can spread their lies and distort the truth, but now there
is the resistance.
Now those youths on the internet attack the government and even the Islamist
majority in the Parliament. We are not passive recipients to news anymore. And
if anything came out of this revolution, it is that people watch parliamentary
sessions more than Turkish soap operas.
“Parliament: coming to you every night at 8:00 from Sunday to Thursday.”What’s
your timing here for primetime? So, this is exactly it. People get together and
see parliamentary sessions and they actually can see every mistake, and they
scrutinize and they criticize everything. They are under so much surveillance
now from the public.That’s amazing. Parliamentary sessions were never actually
viewed by people before.
When we started this over a year ago, we were a YouTube partner who managed
YouTube accounts. My show was our first attempt at an independent production,
and it’s considered not just the highest-viewed show on YouTube but also the first
successful conversion from internet to TV. Many examples will follow soon, not
just from our company but from the many others that followed and are following
in our footsteps. Citizen journalism and amateur entertainment on YouTube are
now fertile ground for TV-scouting eyes.
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A Talk by Bassem Youssef
We have signed the first season for $500,000 for 100 episodes. Now we are
negotiating for a second season to be the first political satire show in the Arab
world with a real live audience for over $4 million. So, philanthropists, if you
have any… Since we are in the philanthropy forum, if you can spare a couple
of million? Okay?
Among the many setbacks of this revolution, this comes as good news for me, not
because we have increased our worth eight times but because we can see the
difference we made in the media from a room with one camera.
There have been delays and setbacks in the course of this revolution, but a
revolution is not an event, it is a process. And it is changing Egypt not from the
head of the regime but from its grass roots. No one can fool us again, even if you
have the military, the media and even a pretentious facade of religion on your
side. There are a million eyes watching your every step. We will not be taken as
obedient, passive, frightened subjects anymore. The voice now belongs to the
people, the media belongs to the people and the power belongs to the people.
Despite what you hear about the military manipulating the country or the rise
of radical Islamic movements, I still see hope.We will not be oppressed anymore
because after a year of freely expressing yourself in the most creative ways, we
can withstand the shortage of gas, money and food but we cannot let anyone
or anything take our voice again. And that is the real revolution. We have found
our voice.
Thank you very much.
My bank account number will be at the door if you want to chip in, or I can just
go around with a plate for any extra change.Thank you.
Jane Wales
Let me just close by saying, I think we’ve learned from at least two generations
that a revolution takes wisdom, it takes courage, it takes tenacity and it takes
humor. But building a new Egypt also takes friends. So, I urge you to applaud, to
celebrate and to stand by the men and the women on this stage.
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Wednesday, April 18
Special Address: Anthony Lake, Executive Director, UNICEF
Caroline Anstey, Managing Director, The World Bank
Luis Ubiñas, President, Ford Foundation
Moderator: Jane Wales
Jane Wales
How to Do What We Do — Only Better:
The Role for Evidence
Good morning.Thanks for being up bright and early. I know we kept you up late
with conversations about Egypt last night. I invite you to take your seats.
Good morning. We’ve spent the past two days talking about the social contract,
the ways in which it’s been frayed, the ways in which it’s been undermined
and the ways in which we can craft a very new social contract. We began with
a conversation about the roles for national governments. We moved on to a
conversation about roles for the private sector and private-sector mechanisms.
We talked about the social and philanthropic sectors and, of course, last night
we talked about the citizen sector and its importance.
We’re joined this morning by Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF [United
Nations Children’s Fund]. Here the conversation will be about the importance
of knowledge, the importance of learning, the importance of each sector, each
party to the social contract being engaged in continuous learning.
(From Left to Right) Caroline Anstey and Luis Ubiñas
Tony Lake has been in public service for 45 years. I was lucky enough to work
with him in the State Department on the national security staff. He was national
security adviser. He was head of policy plans at State years ago. He was the
president’s special envoy in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Haiti.And starting in the 1970s,
he was director of the International Volunteer Services. I hope you’ll join me in
welcoming Anthony Lake.
Anthony Lake
I’m going to be talking a little bit about technology, and already you’re sensing
just how good I am at it.
Thank you, Jane, very much for inviting me to be here. I had already heard from
my wife [Julie Katzman], who was here yesterday, about how much energy
there is in the room; she was very excited to have taken part, and I am, too. As
I look around, I can already see one change in the face of philanthropy: I can
see the change in your faces since I took part in 2004. Once philanthropy was
the domain primarily of older people, those who had done well in their careers
and had built foundations and bequeathed their legacies.And now they’ve been
joined by a much younger demographic, younger people.
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It’s true and it’s great: people in mid-career with as much creativity as they have
capital; people with innovative solutions to serious global challenges; entrepreneurs who want to invest in their social issues and achieve results — which is
all that matters; team players who recognize that success can often come from
partnerships; people like so many of you. There’s never been a better time or a
greater need for the ideas and the energy of philanthropists.
Contemporary snapshots of the world — I’m not telling you anything new — show
troubled economies, decreasing aid budgets for the most part, natural disasters,
manmade conflicts — I’ve just been in the Sahel — water shortages and rising
food prices. The pace of progress toward the Millennium Development Goals,
which, as you recall, were our eight promises to children for a better life, is far
too slow for too many children. For example, 180 million children under the age
of five throughout the developing world are stunted. More than 3,000 children
under five die every day as a result of diarrhea — that’s over a million children
every year. I saw last week how children are already dying from severe acute
malnutrition in western Chad, and up to 1.5 million children across the Sahel are
now facing, over the coming lean season, the possibility — the probability — of
severe acute malnutrition, which means that they will be in imminent danger
of dying.
That crisis, by the way, is not appearing in our headlines. It’s barely being covered
at all, and it is probably going to affect three times as many children as we saw in
Somalia last year. I think all of us have to do everything we can to end the global
indifference to this crisis. It will be upon us over the coming months.
The scale of all these development issues is daunting, and the current economic
landscape makes them all the more challenging, as governments in the north
cut aid, as governments in the south are also facing budget crises and as the old
distinctions between donors on the one hand and recipients on the other is
eroding as middle-income countries become in effect both.
As I thought about today’s meeting, I wondered to what extent current events
had affected philanthropy worldwide. It wouldn’t be unreasonable, I thought,
if philanthropists were following the lead of governments and scaling back
resources for development and for humanitarian efforts, and then I read Jane’s
interview in last month’s Forbes magazine. I read it for its style as well as its
substance. It was excellent.“Whether the market is up, down or flat,” she said,“the
commitment to making a positive difference does not seem to flag. If anything,
donors’ desire for efficacy and willingness to learn from and leverage others
grows when portfolios shrink.”
How to Do What We Do — Only Better: The Role for Evidence
First, that’s a wonderful statement about common humanity. And, second, how
reassuring it must be for those in need that despite economic downturns philanthropists continue to extend the lifeline.
I was also struck in her interview by our shared sense of purpose because much
of what concerns philanthropists like you concerns agencies like UNICEF; namely,
as the continuing fiscal crisis forces all of us to tighten our belts and reduce our
budgets, how can we be ever more efficient and innovative with those precious
resources that we have?
There are many ways to do this. One, and I think this will surprise you, is through
an equity approach, focusing on reaching the most disadvantaged children.You
might think that I’m simply making a moral argument, and it is a moral argument,
but it is also a compelling argument, we believe, for greater cost-effectiveness.
This is why UNICEF over the past two years has been refocusing the work of all
of our 151 country offices around the world on equity.
Second, we can do this through innovations, which are enabling our equity focus
by cutting the costs of getting the service to those who are the most in need in
the hardest-to-reach areas.
Let me take a few moments to tell you what prompted our focus on equity.
Two years ago as the global community celebrated declining poverty rates as
measured through national averages, we also saw that growing disparities within
many countries meant that millions of children were being left behind — children
in neglected urban as well as rural communities, children living with disabilities,
children from ethnic minorities, girls, the most impoverished, the hardest to reach,
the forgotten children.
We analyzed 26 countries where the national under-five mortality rate had
declined by 10 percent or more since 1990. In 18 of those 26, the gap between
child mortality rates in the richest quintile and the poorest quintiles had either
grown or remained unchanged; and in 10 of those 18 countries, this disparity
between the rich and the poor, literally an issue of life and death, had grown by
10 percent. That is simply wrong. It made me mad when I read it. On this fundamental issue, the gap between the richest and the poorest children was growing.
Average statistical successes were disguising moral failures. Our studies show that
compared with children in the richest quintile, the poorest children are twice as
likely to die before their fifth birthday, nearly three times as likely to be underweight, twice as likely to be stunted and less likely to attend primary school or
to benefit from malaria interventions. It’s difficult to think of a greater injustice.
This morality gap was partly the result of longstanding development philosophy,
to be blunt, a school of thought that said it would be nice to focus on those in
need — you can almost hear John Lennon singing Imagine if we would only
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do that — but it was just not cost-effective. It would be too expensive and too
difficult to reach into these hardest-to-reach communities, so let’s pick the lowesthanging fruit, and if we do that and concentrate where we can get at the least
expense, we’ll speed up progress toward the Millennium Development Goals.
Well, that was then. Now innovations and new technologies mean that services
can be extended to the poor more effectively and inexpensively than ever before;
and where the needs are greatest, by definition the results are greatest.The same
vaccine program in an area with a lot of disease is going to save more lives than
one in an area with less disease.
So we decided to rigorously test the conventional wisdom. We undertook an
extensive modeling exercise to determine the cost-effectiveness of an equityfocused strategy to reduce under-five mortality. The results were so stunning to
me — this was after I’d asked for the study and I’d been at UNICEF for only a
month or two — that I asked for the exercise to be rerun. I thought maybe they
were just trying to please a new boss.Then when they came back with more or
less the same results in a slightly more sophisticated form, I brought in a second
team of outside experts to try to tear it apart. To my great relief, after a day of
trying to do so, they applauded.
Far from costing more, we learned that an equity-focused approach is actually
more cost-effective than our current approach. In fact, in those countries with the
highest burden of under-five mortality and the worst poverty, for every million
dollars (or euros or whatever) invested in the equity strategy, you save up to 60
percent — six zero percent — more children’s lives per dollar. Stunning!
The conclusion? That a pro-equity strategy is not only right in principle, it’s right
in practice.And I might add that the Lancet and the New York Times and others
wrote approving articles about it.This is great news for our approach, and, best of
all, of course, it’s great news for children. I’m pleased to tell you that in the wider
UN family, many other agencies are emphasizing an equity approach, as well.
One of the most persuasive examples of value for money I could give you is
stunting. Stunting. It’s the third time I’ve mentioned it now in these remarks,
but I wonder how many of you actually know what it is. I won’t ask, but when
I mentioned it at a meeting of hundreds of medical experts last year here in
Washington, I saw large numbers of puzzled faces, so I asked for a show of hands;
about half of the audience of these experts raised their hands, and I suspect some
of them were lying, in fact. I think it’s the most underappreciated development
issue that we face.
Stunting is the outcome of chronic deficiency in nutrition during the first 1,000
days of a child’s life, including pregnancy and up to the age of two.The damage
it causes to a child’s development is irreversible — irreversible, cannot be fixed.
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A stunted child is inches shorter than he or she could have been. But this is not
simply an issue of height. Chronic malnutrition makes that child more vulnerable
to disease. A stunted child is five times more likely to die from diarrhea than a
nonstunted child, and — most important — a stunted child will never reach full
cognitive capacity, never be able to learn as much or to earn as much. When a
stunted child enters the workforce as an adult, their diminished physical and
cognitive development can reduce their earning capacity by as much as 22
percent.What a tragedy! What a dreadful affliction for any child. I don’t know of
a greater inequity than robbing a child even in the womb of his or her potential
to lead a full life. There are 180 million children under the age of five who are
stunted around the developing world today — 180 million.That’s about the same
as the combined populations of Italy and France and the United Kingdom.
It’s too late now for those 180 million children, but it’s not too late for millions
and millions of others. It could be prevented simply and at very little expense
through micronutrients such as vitamin A, zinc, iron supplements and iodized
salt as well as community nutrition programs emphasizing breastfeeding and
good child-feeding practices. And the price of preventing stunting in the first
1,000 days of a child’s life? About $15 or $20 per child — $15 or $20 to enable
the full development of a child’s brain, to help a little boy or girl make the most
of opportunities throughout life.That is a price tag we can and we must afford.
In 2008 eight of the world’s leading economists in the so-called Copenhagen
Consensus recommended priorities for confronting the top 10 global challenges.
They ranked providing young children with micronutrients the number one
most cost-effective way to advance global welfare.That’s why UNICEF is working
with our partners in government and other UN agencies as well as throughout
civil society, academia and the private sector to help focus greater attention on
undernutrition and address stunting urgently. In doing so we’re using a number
of approaches, from the most basic — like gathering villagers together, drawing
diagrams in the sand and talking about the link between poor sanitation and
stunting — to the most innovative: exploring with the private sector how new
micronutrient or vitamin powders or spreads might complement foods for
infants to accelerate their growth during that first 1,000 days, or using rapid SMS
[short message service] texting, as we’re doing in many different areas, to help
community health workers report on the nutrition situation in far-flung communities. Innovations like these are at the heart of our equity strategy.They enable
us to reach more effectively the hardest-to-reach children most cost-effectively.
I am pleased to tell you that some of our innovative work is being recognized
internationally. Last year UNICEF was selected as a Devex Top Development
Innovator based on polls of thousands of global development professionals.And
TIME magazine just named our Digital Drum, which is a rugged, solar-powered
computer kiosk (which I just saw in a slum of Uganda) for use by rural children
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and urban communities; they labeled it one of the best inventions of 2011.
Innovation — that’s something that UN agencies are not often accused of. In
truth, while I was pleased by these honors, I’m not sure that we have yet earned
them, but we’re working to.
Most of our innovation is not based on invention but on repurposing existing
technology, largely, of course, from the private sector. Take mobile phones for
example: Our kids may use them to talk, to text, to play Angry Birds (I hope
not right now), and UNICEF is using them also to eliminate mother-to-child
transmission of HIV. Early administration of antiretroviral drugs to HIV-infected
pregnant mothers and their infants can virtually eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV.The challenge at the heart of it is how to identify, test and provide
medicines to pregnant women and babies in a timely and effective manner. For
young children who are infected with HIV, it’s critical that they be diagnosed and
treated immediately. This is a race against time. Without treatment an estimated
30 percent of HIV-infected infants will die within one year of age and 50 percent
will die within two years, but diagnosis is still a lengthy and painstaking process.
In one community in Zambia, it took 66 days for an infant’s blood sample to travel
to the lab for testing and for the results to be returned to the health worker — 66
days when every day counts!
Project Mwana, a pilot project supported by UNICEF with our local partners in
Zambia, and a similar project in Malawi use rapid SMS to speed up the process of
infant diagnosis. By sending test results directly to health workers and community
clinics on their mobile phones, precious time and precious lives can be saved.
This same technology can be used to remind women in remote locations to
come in for their lifesaving appointments with clinics that may be a few miles
or kilometers away.
Since we piloted the program, it is delivering 30 percent more results, with a
50 percent decrease in turnaround time. With their governments we hope to
take project Mwana to scale in both countries very soon through our network
of local partners.
Innovation is not only about repurposing innovative products. It’s about developing innovative partnerships. One of the most important things that we can
do is collaborate with private companies as they develop new products and
they keep us in mind. In the case of a product like a vaccine, we work with
partners such as the Gates Foundation, the GAVI Alliance and the World Health
Organization to identify need and lower prices.These partnerships drive a more
competitive market, which helps more countries afford vital health supplies and
strengthens the supply chain to meet greater demand.
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The lessons we’ve learned from this work are the impetus for the UN secretary general’s new Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and
Children, on which we serve as a vice-chair. It’s going to examine both the
crucial barriers and the problems like pricing that limit access to affordable
and effective health supplies — very simple ones such as oral rehydration salts
and zinc to treat diarrhea and antibiotics to treat pneumonia, the two biggest
killers of children.There’s nothing new about these commodities.They’re cheap.
They’re simple products. We know that they save lives. There is no reason why
everyone shouldn’t have access to them. The job of the commissioners will be
to determine why they are not reaching everyone and to advocate for solutions
to extend their reach. Their recommendations will inform the discussion at the
Child Survival Call to Action in Washington in June and the Family Planning
Summit in London in July.
UNICEF’s longstanding relationships with governments and local partners, as
well as years of experience in the field, will help turn these recommendations,
we believe, into results because results are all that matter. Period. Everything we
do at UNICEF is aimed at exactly that: achieving results in children’s lives. So,
we must always, every day, work at being more efficient out of respect for our
partner governments, for our donors, for the public whose taxes and contributions support us but most of all for the children because every dollar or euro
wasted could have been a vaccine to save a child or a schoolbook to open a
world of knowledge.
I know my time is nearly up, so I’ll sum up in four words, almost: equity, innovations, partnerships and results — all for the children who need us most, those
who inspire us ever more to be as creative and efficient and as cost-effective as
possible.That is our promise to them, and that is a promise we try to keep.
Jane Wales
Tony, thank you so much.You couldn’t have said more clearly that learning saves
lives, particularly if institutions adapt — and for the rest of the morning we’ll be
focusing on that kind of adaptation.
Tell me how you gained beneficiary feedback? How did the crowds tell you what
works, what services delivered and whether they worked by national governments or by UNICEF?
Anthony Lake
This is a tremendously important issue and one, I think, that all of us find very
frustrating because if you are going to manage for results, you have to be able
to know what those results are in something much closer to real time than we
do now.
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I was struck at the General Assembly Summit on the MDGs [Millennium
Development Goals] my first September in office as I listened to all the speeches
and even had my own:They were all based on data that was two years old because
it takes at least two years to track the results in terms of infant mortality or girls’
education or whatever. I’m not supposed to use military allusions anymore, but if
we were fighting a battle and we were deciding which hill to attack and we were
doing it based on two-year-old intelligence, we’d attack the wrong hill.
So, we set out to invent a new way to analyze the results we were getting, especially in our innovative programs, so that we could manage more effectively. It’s
always going to take two years to look at the final results, but we’ve invented
a system that we’re now putting into place in which we measure the progress
on bottlenecks. For example, even if we can’t measure infant mortality trends
in less than two years, we can measure much more quickly how many vaccines
are getting out and what coverage there is. So, now all of our offices around the
world, every six months in chosen districts that are indicative of the situation in
other parts of the country, are measuring how we’re doing on the bottlenecks.
What’s fascinating to me is that the study that showed that it is cost-effective to
concentrate on the hardest-to-reach communities where the needs are greatest
also showed that the biggest barriers to progress are not — as I had always
thought and I’ll bet almost everybody in this room usually thought — How do we
get more supplies out, more bed nets, more vaccines, et cetera? It turns out that
the biggest bottlenecks are on the demand side — the capacity of poor people in
these communities to take advantage of the supplies, whether it’s because they
face the barriers of school fees, or because pregnant women can’t make it the
10 kilometers to a clinic.
So, one of our main emphases now is to do things or to support things that
we didn’t invent but are using, such as cash-transfer programs, adapting them
to Africa from Mexico, or campaigning for an end to school user fees, et cetera.
Now what we’re looking at is, rather than a static analysis of every six months
with a feedback loop, we’ll have dashboards to see how we’re doing on all the
bottlenecks, to look at the dynamics between the supply-side bottlenecks and
the demand-side because as you increase demand, if you get rid of health care
fees, you’re greatly increasing the pressure on the supply side and you have to
anticipate that so that you don’t have stock-outs.This is all fascinating.
I’m a little dismayed, though, because I was just in Uganda, as I was mentioning
just before we came in here, and over the past year we’ve been putting in place
this system of monitoring every six months, which was kind of a breakthrough;
but in Uganda over recent months, our office there has invented something
called U-report or U-reporters. Working through the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts,
which are very large organizations in Uganda, I met with their leaders a week ago;
they are signing up young people through cell phones to become U-reporters. It
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started just months ago. It’s growing so fast that they had to keep changing my
briefing notes before I got there. It was 70,000 three weeks before I went. It was
107,000 when I left.These are young people around Uganda reporting probably
twice a week on questions that we put to them, including in the farthest-flung
communities, and then we collate the results and provide them to the Ministry
of Health, the Ministry of Education, whatever.
As I was leaving they did a question on breastfeeding. They had within one day
70,000 reports from all around the country, showing that there was a lag in breastfeeding practices in some of the better-off provinces, to our surprise, rather than
some of the poorest, which is of great interest, of course, to the health ministry,
to us and to others.
Maybe we’re going to be doing things faster than every six months now, if we
can get the wrinkles out and make sure it doesn’t become political.We could ask
questions that would get us thrown out of the country, but using this will greatly
speed up our ability to analyze how we’re doing on bottlenecks.
Jane Wales
U-reports, in one way, assess their performance.
Anthony Lake
Right.
Jane Wales
And assess the performance of national government…
Anthony Lake
Of course.
Jane Wales
…as to whether they’ve provided the services needed in an effective way. Do the
governments welcome U-reports?
Tony Lake
This was my biggest concern about our effort on monitoring bottlenecks
because — and this is a key point — I’ve become increasingly offended by the
way that everybody in the business claims all the results for their own institution. Whether we’re working on this at UNICEF or whether it’s NGOs or other
UN agencies or whatever: “What are your results?” “Well, we’ve cut under-five
mortality by two-thirds since 1990.”As if we had done that alone! Of course, we
were a part of that, but we didn’t do it, and there is no regression analysis good
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enough to figure out exactly who did how much in these results. But there is
no question that the most important partners in all of this are the governments,
either in a positive sense or a negative sense.
So, I was very concerned that if governments knew that we were doing this new
thing, being out there monitoring for results much more quickly, they would
think that we’re going to be embarrassing them. But I have found in conversations
with government leaders as I travel that if I emphasize that these are communal
results that we’re measuring, you can’t tell who is to blame for how much. I
emphasize that we need to know this for the effectiveness of their programs even
more importantly than ours, and we want to monitor with them. So far I’ve had
probably 30 conversations with different governments, and every one of them
has said,“Count us in. We want to do it with you.”
Jane Wales
Excellent. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, we are out of time. Please join me in
thanking Anthony Lake.
We are going to stay with these themes of how you can have a learning institution that increases its impact, so I’m going to invite to the stage Caroline Anstey
and Luis Ubiñas.
Caroline is managing director of the World Bank. She’s held many positions
within the World Bank. She was chief of staff. She was director for the Caribbean.
She did media relations, and she was originally brought in, I think, by Jim
Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank.
Luis Ubiñas is president of the Ford Foundation. He comes to the philanthropic
sector from McKinsey in San Francisco, and he’s taking some of the disciplines
that are part of private-sector activity and applying them to the Ford Foundation
to achieve maximum results.
We’ll start with Caroline. Welcome.
Caroline Anstey
Thank you.Thank you very much, Jane. It’s a pleasure to be here with all of you
and a great pleasure to share a panel with Luis.
I want to start by setting the context and talking a little bit about the changing
world that we find ourselves in and what that means for an institution like the
World Bank and for all of us in this room.
Let’s cast our minds back to 1944 — some of us are more able to do that than
others because I think it’s quite a young audience — when the institution of the
World Bank and the IMF were founded. Really, apart from some of you here who
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have a long and distinguished history that predates that, the World Bank was the
only development bank — reconstruction bank — in town at that time. There
were no vertical funds. There were no multilateral development banks [MDBs].
There were some foundations and very distinguished ones, but private-capital
flows were also small. In the 1950s the World Bank set up its private-sector
arm, the International Finance Corporation. There were still no vertical funds
and no MDBs, and private-capital flows were small. In the 1960s we set up our
International Development Association, the fund for the 79 poorest countries.
Still, by and large, the bank was the only international multilateral development
body in town.
But when we look at today, we see a very different world: very-large-scale private
flows still flowing with some ups and downs, some volatility from the crisis, very
large NGOs, not-for-profit foundation flows, a whole series of vertical funds, the
Gates Foundation, the Global Fund and multilateral development banks and
others, regional development banks, covering every region in the world. So, it’s
a very different, much more competitive world where cooperation remains a
challenge, I think, for all of us.
The world has changed in other very fundamental ways, as well. In 1944, back
when we were created, developed countries — rich countries, industrial countries, whatever you want to call them — contributed 80 percent of global growth.
Today developing countries are the engines of the global economy, providing
two-thirds of global growth. And today in the wake of the financial crisis, first in
the United States and now in Europe, it’s often not the US and Europe that are
being looked to as development models. It’s Indian railways in Africa. It’s conditional cash transfer programs based on the experience of Brazil or Mexico now
being replicated in 33 countries across the world and even at one time being
replicated in New York. Tunisia is looking not to -Western Europe or the US for
its model but to see how Indonesia made the transition from dictatorship to
democracy, or it’s looking to Poland to see how they made that transition.
So, what does this changing world mean for development — many more actors,
different models, much more south-south interaction? I think first it means we
need to recognize that development is no longer north to south, west to east,
top to bottom. It’s a much flatter world, where people will take their examples
from where they see them, not from power relationships or old power hierarchies of the past.
Second, it’s a world where there is no one size fits all.We know that.We’re beyond
blueprints or consensus from whatever part of the world they came from. It’s
what works on the ground and what can be designed to fit the local political
economy.
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Third, it means that the World Bank is no longer a monopoly. the World Bank no
longer has the answers, if it ever did; now it has to work and it has to partner and
it has to see itself in a very different way.
At the same time, our experience of what actually matters to development has
also changed.The bank is a nonpolitical organization. It’s written in our Articles
of Agreement, but much depends on how you define politics and how you define
economics and how you define development.
I remember some years ago — and I see Jan [Piercy] in the room here — when
we were told that corruption was a political issue. We couldn’t get involved in
corruption.We now know — and we’ve known for some years — that corruption
is a development issue. It’s central to our remit, so we focus on corruption. We
were told that gender was a political issue and so we couldn’t be involved in
gender. We now know that gender is a deeply economic and development issue.
Gender equality is smart economics, so it’s central to our remit.We were told that
transparency was a political issue and so not legitimate for the World Bank. We
know that transparency is central to good development outcomes, and now we
will not lend any budget support to any country that doesn’t have a transparent
budget. And, more recently, social accountability: some see it as political. Some
see giving citizens a voice as political. Some see in the wake of the Arab Spring
that that kind of citizen participation in development is political and threatening.
We believe it’s central to development outcomes.
So, how have we changed to accommodate this new world? I think openness is
absolutely critical. If you’re part of a global network of development knowledge,
if you’re a player with others, you have to share your findings and you have to
look to others to also come up with development solutions. So, we’ve opened
all of our data, as you probably know.We used to have it pretty much closed.We
used to charge for it. It’s now open. And I see today in Time magazine that Hans
Rosling has been heralded as one of the stars of 2012, and I think we all owe him
a great debt for his work on the power of openness.
So, we have an open data initiative.We just adopted an open access policy for all
of our knowledge under a creative commons. I think we’re the first international
institution to do that. It means that all of our work can be taken, reused, mashed,
and even reused commercially by anyone else so long as they give an initial
citation to the bank. It means we have to be much more open to development
solutions. Tony was talking about some of the innovation. I think what we’re
trying to do is not just release the data but design the apps that go with the data.
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So, we did a lot of work on the global poverty indicator of a dollar a day, recently
changed to $1.25 per day as the poverty line, based on household surveys. We
are now releasing the app, which allows anyone to do a household survey. So,
putting that potential and that power in the hands of local peoples is important.
We have to be much more accountable for results, so we now have an annual
scorecard of the results we want to see; it’s public, and we will measure ourselves
by it. We have to be more accountable to the public and to clients and to beneficiaries, so we now have a freedom of information policy based on the US and the
Indian FOIAs [Freedom of Information Acts], and we have an annual results report.
We have to be much more interactive if we’re going to find development solutions and measure results. Like UNICEF we’re looking at how we can build in
beneficiary feedback to all our programs. It can be high-tech — SMS messaging. I
was just in Kenya, where more than 80 percent of the population has cell phones
and over 60 percent are paying all their bills through cell phones.We can use that
technology. It can be relatively low-tech. Recall the famous example in Uganda,
where the local school budget was just put on the door of the school and the
parents were able to say, “Well, excuse me, this budget says we were meant to
be budgeted for two teachers but we have only one.” It can be a fantastic check
on fraud and corruption.
And we have to bring in more of the public — the beneficiaries — into our results
measurement, so we have to design indicators; but we also have to have publics
saying:“The textbooks didn’t arrive.”“The road is a road to nowhere.”“The child
wasn’t immunized.”“The health worker didn’t turn up.”That beneficiary feedback
is in real time, and we’re trying to match that with geo-mapping of all our projects.
I was just in Kenya, looking at community-driven development projects. The
local project managers went around to all the projects, using handheld GPS
[global positioning system] devices on motorbikes, and geo-mapped every single
project; then local beneficiaries can start to upload their information to those
sites.The idea in my mind is to move to what I call “B supervision” — beneficiary
supervision — of all our projects, not just government supervision, not just bank
supervision but beneficiary supervision. And we need to bring in and build
the capacity of local beneficiaries to do this, so later today we’re launching a
global partnership for social accountability. We’ve long supported civil society,
but we’ve tended to do it either through our actual projects or though trust
funds.This will be the first time in the history of the bank that we are using net
income — $20 million — to start off as seed capital for this fund to build capacity
to do social accountability in those countries that want it, where there is a need
for it. And the type of things I’m talking about are citizen scorecards on the
delivery of public services.
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What all this amounts to is a new way of looking at development as a public space,
where the bank can be a convener or connector and can facilitate some of the
collection of data, the disclosure of data and the disclosure of results — but in
a global partnership where development is no longer the province of the ivory
tower, or the ivory institution, or academe or the expert. Development is about
what happens on the ground with real people, and we need to move to evidence,
not ideology; evidence, not national flags on projects; evidence that will allow
feedback loops to improve everything we do with a quicker turnaround, as Tony
said, than with traditional data collection.
I think this is an extraordinary time because what we’re really talking about
is democratizing development. We haven’t solved all the problems. Every day
we see new potential. We’ve done “hackathons” with groups. Random Hacks of
Kindness has been a fantastic partner for us. We’re doing crowd-sourced citizen
mapping to try to allow citizens to say where local help points are, where water
access is, where schools are. In many of these countries, these maps simply don’t
exist; governments themselves don’t know where all these facilities are. So, I
think it’s a great time to be doing development. It’s a time when all of our old,
traditional approaches are being challenged — and should be challenged — and
the bank looks forward to working with all of you. We have some very exciting
partnerships with the foundation sector to help drive this new democratized
development.
Thank you very much.
Jane Wales
Thank you, Caroline.
I can’t help but observe what’s most striking to me about your comments. I think
the World Bank has always been a learning institution, but you’re describing the
client differently. The client is the individual beneficiary rather than the nation
state.That’s a fundamental change.
Luis Ubiñas.
Luis Ubiñas
Let me start by saying the crowd doesn’t actually look that young to me. When
Tony was saying there seems to be a new face in the audience, I was thinking I
can picture who he means.Thank you.
I don’t want the comments just made about the World Bank to go without note. I
think we have seen in President [Robert] Zoellick’s leadership, and the leadership
of this management team, a revolution at the bank in terms of its transformation,
in terms of its openness, in terms of its willingness to be held accountable for
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results. And I just want to thank Caroline and the entire team, who are undoubtedly going to undergo some level of change with the new president coming,
because we have seen a kind of leadership that is exceptionally rare on the
global stage. So, thank you.
I’m going to be there later today, so I wanted to be nice. Maybe I can have a better
lunch or something.
I want to begin by taking a moment to thank Jane for organizing today’s events.
I know you’re at the back end of the Conference. These events are a tribute to
how the Forum plays such a vital role in the philanthropic community, not only
in bringing so many of us together under one roof but also in helping enhance
the strategic nature of our work. Lots of what I’m going to talk about is how we
create results-driven, strategic organizations in philanthropy. I want to thank Jane
and the rest of her team at the forum.Thank you, Jane.
Just know that that was your audience who was hesitant to applaud.
Today’s session on the role of evidence in strategic grantmaking is particularly
timely for all of us and absolutely relevant to our work at the Ford Foundation.
Quite simply, we believe that both persistence and a willingness to countenance failure are required to chart bold solutions to complex social problems.
If you want to make progress, you have to take risks and you have to be willing
to fail. But at the same time, this entrepreneurial approach must be balanced
by a strategy that ensures that you’re achieving the results you seek. If risk is
our mandate — and it is: we’re risk capital; we’re the venture capital of social
change — then accountability for results has to be our guide.
It’s important to understand the times in which we are working. In the midst
of this fundamental, profound and ongoing economic crisis (there is no hint
it’s over — remember that), the need for accountability has never been more
important. We have a moral imperative to be highly disciplined in managing
our resources to ensure that they’re being utilized to maximize their potential,
to maximize their results. In this environment more than ever, outcomes matter,
results matter — and they matter most to the people we are meant to serve, the
people who are engaged day to day in the struggle to make this world a better
place. For the philanthropic community, it is perhaps the single most pressing
challenge we face: accountability for results in the context of the ambiguity of
the problems we deal with every day.
Now the question for us at Ford — the question for all of us here — is how we
embed into our work a culture that maintains this laser-like focus on results.This
really matters. How we as philanthropic leaders define, promote and reinforce a
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commitment to a results culture, a culture that infuses all elements of our organizations, can profoundly influence whether our collective mission to make a
difference in people’s lives succeeds.
At Ford we’ve worked hard to embed a results-based culture in all of our work
and to cultivate an environment that rewards and prizes accountability. For us
this means, first and foremost, an institution-wide commitment to clearly defining
objectives pursued with strategic clarity, substantial resources and agreed-upon
methods. How on earth are you going to measure anything, evaluate anything,
learn about anything, if you don’t have clarity about what it is you’re trying
to accomplish — if you don’t have an institutional strategy? It means dynamic
resource allocation, accepting the principle that results drive resource allocation.
Resources aren’t a birthright. Program officers don’t get equal resources. Issues
don’t get equal resources. Resources are earned.
It means delineating roles and responsibilities to ensure accountability. How do
we know who’s succeeding and who’s failing if we don’t know who’s supposed
to do what? It means implementing this results-focused culture across the entire
organization. The fact that you’re not in a program doesn’t mean you get a free
pass, operations and endowments, everyone. If you work at one of our places, you
have to hold the same level of accountability.As Tony said, and I think very powerfully,“There are people dying.They rely on us.They’re children.They’re mothers.”
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it means active listening. We talk about
this in a complicated way. We’ve had several examples of how technology has
transformed the capacity to listen, the capacity to gather data, the capacity to
hear. Let’s start with a thing we all do.At Ford we’re always trying to ask ourselves,
What are we hearing from outside the organization? Most importantly, What
are we hearing outside of philanthropy, outside of meetings like this in the
communities in which we’re meant to work? Good, old-fashioned listening, feet
on the street, boots on the ground — you go in there and you pay attention. I
spend an enormous amount of my time doing that. It matters.
But outside voices can take other forms, as well. Are the people we are hiring
bringing in new skills, new perspectives and new knowledge? Are we nurturing a
robust network of people whom we can rely on for advice and counsel — seasoned,
experienced, deeply knowledgeable people like Tony Lake, who can help us by
serving as sounding boards? Are we finding ways to get broad-based input using
digital tools in real time? I can’t tell you the number of experiments we have
around the world, where people are giving us cell phone–based input, web-based
input, huge amounts of content — real-time input and guidance on how an election is going and how a human rights violation challenge might be going — all
the time, in real time, with real partners. It’s incredible, and it’s easy to do now.
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Listening to and learning to maximize results isn’t easy. It’s just as hard as building
that kind of results-based culture. When we rebuilt the foundation’s strategy in
2008, we engaged more than 4,000 grantees and other experts, and we believe
that every one of them played a role in reshaping and revitalizing our work.
Many of you here, in fact, were part of that effort. When we hired nearly 100
new program staff members over the past three years, we looked for people
who would bring new ways of working, new models for leadership — again, to
bring lessons to us.
I have to say that a culture focused on results — a culture that begs for input,
guidance and outside knowledge — isn’t always comfortable. It has many of the
stresses of the marketplace. It demands effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover,
the cultural transformation often required to build a results-focused culture, a
learning culture, especially at a large institution like the ones many of you work
in, is undeniably hard work.The transition to a results-driven culture, an accountability-centered culture, requires tenacity — but the rewards are significant and
hold the promise of making our work and its outcomes more successful and
enduring. I can’t take the lessons we heard a second ago from UNICEF more
seriously.There are people whose lives depend on our ability to use every scrap
of resource we now have.
So that’s the challenge.That’s the challenge for us.That’s the conversation we’re
about to have.
Thank you.
Jane Wales
Thank you, Luis.Thank you.
I’m going to open with you, Luis. In fact, Luis has just authored an article on evaluation and accountability in SSIR — Stanford Social Innovation Review — with
other members of the Aspen Philanthropy Group.
When you think about the fundamental purpose of evaluation to inform the foundation’s decision making, to inform the grantees’ decision making, what about
the question of field-wide knowledge — what about spreading that knowledge
well beyond that grantee/grantor relationship?
Luis Ubiñas
I don’t see the requirement to let’s call it “proselytize” for the best of our work
as just linked to evaluation. I think it is the day-to-day responsibility of my team,
of philanthropy in general, to take what they’re learning in real time, not in periodic evaluation but real time, and fight for it — and fight for it — because our
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job is to drive change. Our job is to make a difference in people’s lives, and that
doesn’t happen, it isn’t denominated, in a half decade or every three years. It’s
denominated in minutes, as we just heard.
And when we learn something — and we learn something all the time — about
how to bring conditional cash transfers to a new country in a way that is driven
by the relationship between two senior leaders, lo and behold, a little bit of travel
money can make a difference that could never have been made with facts and
figures.We need to let people know that because maybe that instance where the
head of South Africa’s social service provision organization and the head of the
Peruvian social service support organization who hadn’t met taught each other
a lot. Very little investment but, you know, maybe we should be doing more of
that. Learning, even in trivial examples, needs to be shared constantly, not just in
moments of evaluation.
Jane Wales
So it’s a continuous feedback loop plus a continuation of sharing.
Luis Ubiñas
It’s continuous sharing above all else. It’s literally taking everything you know in
an open-source world. In an open-source world, it’s taking everything you know
and arguing for it and putting it out there — not in the media, where it makes
you feel good because you got in the New York Times.
Jane Wales
And not just your website.
Luis Ubiñas
That’s irrelevant. It is literally in the day-to-day relationship-based work of
working with the World Bank, of working with USAID, of working with embassies in different places, working with DFID [Department for International
Development], working with other philanthropies.
Jane Wales
Caroline, I was most struck by your conversation about sharing data. If you’re
sharing the data that you gathered, if UNDP [United Nations Development
Programme] is also a part of that, if various bilateral aid agencies are a part of
that and if foundations are a part of that, you could up the impact of it all. I have
a nerdy question: Is the software in place? Do your datasets speak the same
language? Do you even have the same concept of geography? And how are those
barriers overcome?
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Caroline Anstey
I think we’ve tried working with all those across the UN system and OECD
[Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] and others to
make sure we’re pooling all of our data and we’re doing it in a similar way. We
have a product called the World Development Indicators, which brings together
everybody’s indicators.
I think in some areas we’re still very challenged. Aid flows is a really critical part
of data sharing — to know what exactly is giving money — and there we’ve all
just signed up to an international aid transparency initiative, so we will try to
do that; but sometimes the not-for-profit sector is outside of that, and we still
have a lot of work to do. A lot of governments find it hard to themselves know
what aid is coming in to their country. I used to work on Haiti, and I remember
the Haitian government felt that they really had no idea what was coming in;
and as you know, there is fantastic work being done by civil society and foundations in Haiti.You have pockets of real success amid an ocean of devastation. So,
unless the government knows what’s coming in, it doesn’t know where to put
its resources to offset gaps in perhaps private funding. So, we have to do more
work on that: sharing the data and identifying the data gaps. This is where we
can all work with others and with government statistical offices to try to fill in
gaps. It is a fact that we’re all making judgments on Africa every day — on Africa’s
development strategy — without always having, as Tony said, up-to-date indicators.
On the question of results, we really need these very strong feedback loops, and
here I think we have to be able to try different randomized approaches. I’m
thinking of the case in Zambia for some of the HIV/AIDS work. They looked at
different ways of delivering the drugs, and they found that there was a problem
with some of the drugs being stuck in storage and not getting out to the local
community health workers, so they tried different approaches in different parts
of the country and they found a solution because of different ways of doing it.
They found a way of stocking the warehouses and then shipping out the drugs
that worked very well, and then they scaled that up countrywide.
If you look at the way the Chinese have done development, it’s very interesting.
China has brought more people out of poverty than any other country as a
percentage, not just as a total amount, and in fact, it has been China’s povertyreducing efforts that have really enabled the world to reach the first Millennium
Development Goal. They pilot approaches before they spread it nationwide. Of
course, they have a huge nation to spread it across, but that idea of trying to use
different approaches — see what works, scale it up and then integrate — impacts
evaluation in how you design new projects. It’s very important and a growing
area.
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I wanted to make one point about admitting to failure. I think this is the hardest
thing for anyone, and it’s harder if you’re a small institution. It’s even hard for
the bank, and we’re not small. If you’re a small foundation, a small institution that
really depends on one or two or three funders, it’s very difficult to say,“Actually,
we failed in these five areas…” because your funding stream may be cut off. I
think that is the biggest challenge we all have: to explain that development is
about risk. If it weren’t, poverty would have been solved years ago. And I loved
the way you talked about venture capital for what works and for success. All
venture capitalists, or venture development-ists, put it like that: you’re going to
have failure, and so we have to be able to work with that, but it is damn hard!
Jane Wales
Now, of course, a venture capitalist is not accountable to any political process,
where it’s quite hard. If USAID says, “Here are our five whopping failures,” that
could be a cut in the budget. Often a consideration that we all have to bear in
mind is that the accountability is different according to what kind of institution
you’re in.
Luis, what do we know? You’re talking about a culture shift within an institution,
within the Ford Foundation.The Ford Foundation also tries to achieve normative
shifts in the outside world. It’s worked on human rights for years. It has worked
in very tough areas where you have to start by changing minds — or where one
of your goals is to change minds.What do we know about how a culture changes?
What does it take, no matter what the setting?
Luis Ubiñas
This is something we’ve been asking ourselves about a lot in the context of a
new initiative we’re launching called Girls Not Brides, which is trying to stem
the rampant early marriage of young girls, girls as young as 8, 10, 11. There are
10 million of them per year — girls married prematurely like this. And if you
imagine 200 million in a generation, two and a half generations alive, that’s 500
million girls sent into these premature marriages that cut off their educational
and economic opportunities. How many of these children living on $1.25 a day
are the children of those girls? And what is really the root cause of that poverty?
We understand that to tackle that problem we first and foremost have to answer a
cultural question: How do we make it culturally unacceptable? It turns out that in
the 1970s the rate of early marriage in Brazil and in Mexico was almost as high as
it is in some of the worst places extant today in Africa and in some parts of India.
We looked at how they succeeded in bringing those early-marriage rates down to
negligible numbers; and, by the way, in the process they changed the economic
trajectories of their countries, changed the population growth trajectories of
their countries and changed the poverty dynamics in their countries. It took
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in those countries the confluence, the combination, the partnership of media,
traditional commercial media (Globo in Brazil, for example), the church — the
Catholic Church in Mexico, absolutely central — and then also government
programs like conditional cash transfer programs that linked the retention of
a girl in a home and in a school to individual aid programs. It took that kind of
public voice to say, “It’s just not okay.” “It’s not okay” from the pulpit. “It’s not
okay” on the telenovela.“It’s not okay” in terms of government policy.That kind
of multidimensional, public-private, even religious-sector effort is what’s required
to achieve cultural change.
Human rights is no different. I spent a lot of time talking to, among other people,
one of the original founders of Human Rights Watch, and he said, “We had to
establish a dialogue that said it wasn’t okay. We had to establish a dialogue that
said, ‘I know that’s happening in Eritrea. I know that’s happening in northern
Nigeria.’” (We all remember that.) “But it’s not okay; and we, even though we’re
not of that country, have the right to intervene in defense of the individual and in
defense of the fellow human not necessarily the fellow citizen.”We take that for
granted now.That’s a given in our culture now. Nearly everywhere that’s a given.
That’s because they understood that from all elements of society that message
needed to be delivered, and it became part of a cultural norm.
Jane Wales
Caroline, Bob Zoellick addressed this group a couple of nights ago, and one of
the striking things he said and that you’ve reiterated is that the bank supports
civil society institutions themselves.You’ve got this accountability project where
you’re in essence going around your bosses — governments — and going directly
to their populations to ask them to keep account of their governments’ actions.
Is this welcomed by the governments?
Caroline Anstey
I think the answer is both yes and no.
First of all, we’ve done a lot with civil society through our traditional operations.
For example, when I was the country director for Haiti, the Haitian government
was having its first-ever public transparent budget, and we, as part of that grant,
helped build the capacity of a civil society group to monitor that transparency.
The government was fine with that, and the money came out of the grant. And
as I say, we’ve had trust funds. So, we’ve been actually doing about $53 million a
year to civil society through our regular operations.
What is different about this is that we’re using net income, and the net income is
the money we make from the interest rate that’s charged on lending to middleincome countries. We’re using $20 million of that.
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We are going to do this social accountability in countries where the government
wants to be a partner, and I think this is important because there are a lot of
organizations beginning to do social accountability now.What is different about
the bank — and what beneficiaries are saying to us and what civil society is saying
to us — is that the bank has that triangular relationship with government, with
the development and with the civil society.
So, civil society often wants to have a partnership with government to do it.This
isn’t a question of doing it despite government.This is a question of working to
build capacity so that citizens in countries can monitor service delivery with
scorecards. It’s one of the big things that we will fund. It’s being done in India in
many regions to make sure:Was the water delivered? Was the garbage picked up?
Does the sanitation work? Many governments recognize that that kind of citizen
feedback, which makes government accountable, is very important.The famous
case is in the Philippines, where they have a website called Check My School; it’s
a partnership between the Ministry of Education and civil society so that parents
will report on the quality of the education, of the textbooks. And they use that.
So, I wouldn’t see this as either/or. I see this as a recognition that the citizen
voice — and especially the beneficiary voice — is important for development
outcomes.That was why I started saying some people can see that as a political
issue. We think it’s actually a development effectiveness issue and so it should
be part of the bank’s remit.
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title
Wednesday, April 18
Barbara P. Bush, CEO and Co-founder, Global Health Corps
William Campbell, Senior Advisor, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Neeraj Mistry, Managing Director, Global Network for Neglected
Tropical Diseases, Sabin Vaccine Institute
Moderator: Jeff Richardson, Vice President, Global Health Access,
Abbott Fund
Scaling Solutions
in Global Health Delivery
Jeff Richardson
Good morning. Over the past few days, we’ve heard stories of the evolving roles
and responsibilities of the public, private and social sectors in providing basic
services throughout the world as well as institutions and organizations holding
them to account. We have focused on education, the environment, conflict and
finance. Before the break we heard how to think about and evaluate our impact
in these areas. Now we turn to health and focus on tested interventions that truly
work to bring health care the last mile, overcoming persistent bottlenecks and
improving the health and the well-being of those we serve.
We have three distinct speakers in this session. I have the honor to have worked
with some of these people for some years, so I’m privileged to be with them on
the same panel for what I think will be a very exciting discussion.
Neeraj Mistry
Barbara Bush is the CEO and co-founder of the Global Health Corps, an organization that recruits, trains and supports young people working in global health and
provides opportunities for young professionals from diverse programs to work
on the front lines of the fight for global health equity in yearlong fellowship
programs. I met Barbara about five years ago.We were at Stanford at a FACE AIDS
meeting that was tied in with Paul Farmer doing some fundraising out there for
Partners in Health. I was surrounded by all these young, energetic, enthusiastic
people who wanted to change the world, and Barbara was one of them. At that
point she had told me she had this idea in mind, and they were pulling it together;
just a few months later, the Global Health Corps started. I mention this context
because Barbara has not only done a great job with the Global Health Corps, and
she’s going to tell you a lot more about that in a few minutes, but she’s also been
an inspiration to a lot of other young people doing work in the space.
We also support a group called GlobeMed, which is headquartered at Northwestern
and is now on 50 campuses throughout the United States. FACE AIDS is on more
than 200 campuses across the US, raising money for Partners in Health but also
raising awareness about AIDS. So, Barbara not only represents the Global Health
Corps but really this young generation of people who are committed to making
a difference in the global health space.We saw some of them with the Vodafone
winners as well, who also represent this new generation, so it’s very exciting to
have her with us today.
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Bill Campbell is a senior advisor for the chairman for JPMorgan Chase, where
he was most recently chairman of Chase Card Services, the nation’s secondlargest credit card organization. Bill is also a huge supporter of the END Fund,
whose mission is to reduce the prevalence of NTDs [neglected tropical diseases]
through the mobilization of private resources. Bill is uniquely positioned to make
the NTD case beyond the global health context and place it in the larger social
and development context. Like Barbara and Neeraj, I’m inspired and impressed
by Bill’s personal journey into the global health arena; it’s a compelling story
of how one person can make a difference, and we’re going to hear a lot more
about that shortly.
Last but not least, Neeraj Mistry is a medical doctor and also the managing
director of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases and also the
Sabin Vaccine Institute, where he focuses on advocacy and resource mobilization efforts, creatively bringing like-minded groups and individuals together for
the common purpose of controlling and eliminating neglected tropical diseases.
I worked with Neeraj for seven years at the very front end of putting together
the Global Business Coalition [GBC] against HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB. Now
it’s called GBCHealth, and there are several hundred companies from diverse
backgrounds, not just health care focused — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, DHL and Standard
Chartered Bank. It’s a really broad sector of companies that are committed to
making a difference in the global health arena.And Neeraj wasn’t just on the staff
there for seven years — he actually helped build the organization, and a large
part of his job was to show companies interested in this space at that time how
to work collaboratively, often leveraging one another’s resources to break down
financial and logistical barriers to have a measurable impact.This is exactly what
he’s doing today, so we’re very enthused to have him here, as well.
I’d like to start with you, Barbara, to give an overview of the challenges that you’re
facing and the opportunities that you’re providing for young people to make a
difference in the global health space.
Barbara P. Bush
Sounds good.Thanks.
As Jeff said, I met him a few years ago in 2008. I was a recent college graduate,
and I met him at a conference. It was essentially a conference for an organization called FACE AIDS, which was a student-mobilizing group. They and a lot of
other organizations over the past few years have really tried to mobilize young
people to get involved in global health issues. The ONE Campaign has done an
incredible job.There have been all these great advocacy organizations, and that’s
really exciting because over the past few years the number of college students
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interested in global health has grown enormously. Over the past five years, there
are 70 new majors in global health on college campuses, and this is all driven by
students’ desires to work on global health issues — and that’s really great!
But the reason that it’s not so great is I started meeting all these young people
who were really interested in global health, and they’d come up to me and say,
“I’m really interested. I’m graduating. I have no idea what I’m going to do. I’m not
a doctor. I’m not a nurse. How can I take this interest and move it into action?”
We started Global Health Corps to take advantage of the fact that so many young
people were interested in global health issues, and at the same time, as everyone
who works on global health knows, there’s a huge health care worker shortage.
So, we know how to treat and prevent the majority of diseases that exist in the
world, but we aren’t doing that. We started Global Health Corps to provide the
human capital necessary to really make a difference in global health.What we do
is mobilize outstanding recent college graduates to work for one year within an
existing nonprofit or government agency. They fill whatever gaps the organization has, and obviously they learn a tremendous amount from the opportunity.
Throughout the year we do a lot of training and professional development around
the fact that we know our fellows can make an impact in this year, but if they
can keep working on global health issues throughout their life they can really
move the needle in making a difference.
Over the past three years, we’ve had 126 fellows. We’re adding 90 new fellows
in two months, and for those 90 fellowship positions we received 8,000 applications. It shows that young people want to do this work. I think there are a million
reasons why, but particularly right now we’ve taken advantage of the fact that
there has been a large economic crisis and a lot of young people are rethinking
what they’re going to do with their careers. At the same time, the health care
debate in the United States has been going on, so the fact that this is front-of-mind
in young people is extremely exciting.
One thing that’s been really incredible for us to see when we partner with
organizations is that they’re working on health systems. They’re working on
health. They’re working on treatment. But they’re also working on systems, so
our partners have requested very nontraditional skill sets. They have doctors
and nurses, and oftentimes their doctors and nurses end up running the entire
organization.They end up being managers when they don’t want to be managers.
They want to be treating people.That’s why they got into health. So our partners
have requested fellows with business backgrounds, supply-chain backgrounds,
technology backgrounds, monitoring and evaluation backgrounds — it’s very
relevant to what the previous panel was about.
The reason why that’s really exciting is you can open up this field to people with
any skills; and instead of saying, “We want to retrain you to be a doctor,” we’re
saying, “Use your skills and experience to bring a different way of thinking to
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this field so that we can reach more people.” I mention this because we know
how to treat people, but we haven’t been doing it, and the more different ways
of thinking and the different skill sets we can get into global health, the more
likely we are to get different solutions.
We’ve been really lucky in that we’ve been able to partner. I mean, we had to
partner because we were new, and we realized that to make a bigger impact we
would need to partner. We’ve been able to partner with nonprofits now in the
United States, East Africa and southern Africa. Partners in Health was our first
partner, luckily, and then we grew to partner with 30 other nonprofits. Now we’ve
started working with government institutions, so ministries of health and also the
US government are about to roll out the Global Health Initiative.
Finally, we’ve been able to partner with business. The reason I mention this is
because when we started we thought of resources so much as just money. We
were trying to fundraise to do our work, and we realized that businesses have
unbelievable resources in that they have unbelievable knowledge in terms of
how to deal with systems.We’ve been working with Hewlett-Packard and a lot of
other organizations that have great supply-chain skill sets, and they are serving as
mentors to our fellows so that they can bring the same resources that they have,
in terms of knowledge and skill sets that are necessary, to get drugs to people, to
a different field where they can make a bigger impact.
It’s been pretty unbelievable to be working for a newer organization and with
young people who are all under 30, who have always thought of collaboration
rather than thinking of working in a siloed way — and it makes me really hopeful.
I’ve seen our fellows do unbelievable work, and in 10 years if they’re minister
of health in the country where they’re from, I think they’ll be approaching leadership in a very different way than what we’ve traditionally seen. We’re really
focused on building not only a health care workforce but also leaders who will
continue to make change in this space throughout their lives.
Jeff Richardson
Just a quick add-on: Paul Farmer calls Global Health Corps and GlobeMed and
FACE AIDS his retirement plan.
Barbara Bush
He does. That’s why we started, actually. Paul Farmer and Peter Piot, who is the
head of UNAIDS [Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS] and several
others — the more experienced people in the health field — made it very clear
that they have spent their whole lives working on these issues and they need to
know that other people will continue to move the needle on them, so to some
degree we are a retirement plan for a lot of people.
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Jeff Richardson
But in a very loving way.
Barbara P. Bush
In a very sweet way, exactly!
Jeff Richardson
The other thing, Barbara, that I think a lot of people are talking about is building
local capacity; it’s on almost everyone’s proposals. You’re actually doing something quite unique in your program. You’re not only having people from the
United States go over and work in places like Tanzania and Malawi and other
countries but you also have people in-country who are part of your program.You
might want to talk a little bit about that because you’re actually doing it. You’re
not just talking about it.
Barbara Bush
Yes, definitely! That is a key piece of our program that I left out.We’re working on
global health issues, so if we want to motivate young leaders to work on global
health, they have to be from around the world. Everywhere we work we have
one fellow from that country partnered with an international fellow. It’s always
a team model. Right now we have fellows from nine countries, so it really is a
global group of young people working on global health issues.
I think probably a lot of the power that we have is in our fellows from other
countries, where they will be in positions where they can have bigger influence:
They could be the minister of health in their country; they could be the minister
of finance in their country. It’s a fundamental shift. We talk about collaboration,
and we talk about building local capacity, but most models in the past have been
very western-centric: People from resource-rich settings going into resourcepoor countries with a solution that, unfortunately, we’ve learned hasn’t always
worked out.
One other piece of our model is that we have fellows working in the United
States. Obviously we don’t have perfect health care systems here, so two of our
fellows working in Boston have been implementing a community health worker
model that was perfected in Rwanda and Peru.They’re using best practices that
were learned from other models in other parts of the world and applying it to
the US.Anecdotally that type of dialogue among young people really focused on
best practices will also change the way that they approach this work throughout
their lives.
Jeff Richardson
Thank you, Barbara.
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Barbara P. Bush
Thanks.
Jeff Richardson
Bill.
William Campbell
Jeff.
Jeff Richardson
Welcome.
William Campbell
Thank you. I’m a little intimidated, you know. Jeff, you’re close enough to being a
suit that I’m okay with you, but Barbara here is too articulate, too well informed,
not to mention her killer shoes.
Barbara P. Bush
Thank you!
William Campbell
And you haven’t heard from Neeraj, but I know Neeraj’s message and it’s an
incredibly good one. And you haven’t heard his accent yet, which is almost as
killer as Barbara’s shoes.
Here you’ve got this boring banker stuck in the middle, and some of my message
some of you probably won’t like and probably won’t even necessarily agree with,
but I felt I had to talk about the topic of scaling, and I’m going to be a little bit
scathing. How am I qualified to speak about scaling in philanthropy, not-for-profit?
In some ways not at all.
I did do an economics degree. I did get an MBA, and I have 40-odd years now of
cost reduction, value engineering, re-engineering, economies of scale and productivity gains. I know all of the buzz words, and in a general sense I know what they
mean. I was thinking about it a lot last night, actually. I finally said, “Why is this
bothering me? Why am I going to go out and criticize large parts of an audience?”
And I said,“Well, it’s an important pursuit because, as my father used to say — he
was a contractor, and long before I went to business school he would talk about
getting bang for the buck. And if you reduce it to that language, it becomes a
pretty universal good. I think we all have to be focused on getting more bang for
the buck in whatever sector we’re in. I thought last night that having a banker
in today’s day and age extolling the virtues of anything is probably difficult, but I
decided I’d venture on because the bang for the buck is so important.
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I thought about it in my own personal experience, which I’m going to talk a
lot about in a couple of seconds, and Neeraj has heard me say this. I always talk
about my journey — that as I was winding down my for-profit career, I decided I
wanted to be an activist philanthropist. I didn’t want to give my money. I wanted
to follow it and try to use some of the skills that I’d acquired through my lifetime.
First of all, that’s harder to do than it should be, but when you reduce it to,“Hey,
I’m out here to try to get greater bang for our buck in the not-for-profit world,”
you know just in the same kind of way as I did throughout my career, and you
know we need to realize just how important this is to people.
One of the most disheartening things that I’ve heard about this sector was that
when economic chaos came in 2007 and 2008, this sector was still growing in
terms of numbers of NGOs — 1.5 million or something and still going up.That’s
not acceptable. That means you cannot possibly be getting more bang for your
buck. We need to think about these things. We need to think about how we get
economies of scale because philanthropists largely are going to have come from
the for-profit world, and they will not understand why it takes more to do more.
Productivity is part of our entire lifetime, and we want to see it here.
There’s another element of the failing grade in scaling that I think we all need to
think about: When we look at problem, we want to know that our extra money
is going to feed more kids, educate more kids, teach people who can teach
people, like Barbara’s talking about. We really rebel against the thought that is
going against more bureaucracy and more overhead.The incremental dollar is so
important to people, and in our business lives we think about what that incremental dollar is going to produce.
I interviewed somebody yesterday for a very senior job in our place, and she said
something that I loved to hear. She’s in the housing sector right now, and she
said,“In the housing sector right now, we’ve got to put dollar out against dollar
in, or we don’t even have a meeting.” We all need to introduce those kinds of
disciplines into what we’re doing.
So, with all of that, am I disheartened? Absolutely not! To the contrary, what you’re
all doing, what our family foundation is trying to do, is nothing but good — but
we do need to think about bang for buck. We need to think about individual
circumstances. We have to try to go from the micro basis, where we’re doing
wonderful things, to the macro basis, where it’s getting that efficiency and effectiveness that we’re talking about.
Our family’s own journey is fun, and I’ll try to capsulize it quickly. We have a
small family foundation. I have three daughters and a wife, and we were sitting
around doing one of our reviews. One of my daughters, who is active in the
not-for-profit sector, said,“I guess it’s all fine.We’re going to a lot of parties, and I
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guess those parties are on behalf of something good, but I thought that we put
this thing together for something a little bit more than that.” We all did a little
self-examination quickly, and our methodology for trying to find out how to get
real bang for our buck was we got onto an airplane and we flew over to Tanzania,
Kenya and Niger as a family. I like to say we took one day off to look at the animals;
the other 20 days we looked at the human condition.
And we looked at everything. We looked at hospitals and schools and churches
and microfinance — you name it.We saw both, obviously: the best and many, many
times the worst of conditions. We all cried at different times, which was really
interesting. We got focused and we started to see that there’s some very, very
low-cost interventions that can be made that can monumentally change people’s
lives. I often use this example because it’s not where we ended up, but I saw
cataract surgery being done for $35 against primarily diet-related eye problems.
And those kids will go from being a drain on society to being at least being selfsufficient, if not more, just because of that $35 intervention.
So, we became really focused on that.We would seek out low-cost interventions
requiring health objectives. The first one I won’t talk about, but if you grab me
in a corner, it’s a lovely sad story. Our first intervention was around fistula and
women’s health and some microfinance in Niger. It got caught up in the political
overthrow, and I managed to get an Irish architectural firm to do all the plans. I
keep those plans in my office to remind me that getting bang for your buck is
hard. Philanthropy is hard, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t good.
We left Niger, and in that process I met some of the people in this room in Global
Health — people like Neeraj — and discovered this wonderful intervention in
Rwanda against neglected tropical diseases. Neeraj will talk about them in some
detail. I met other wonderful philanthropists, particularly a group called Legatum
from New Zealand, private equity guys, a tremendous on-the-ground partnership.
They essentially did an intervention — 50 cents, changing boys’ and girls’ lives for
4 million kids in Rwanda in approximately a week. So, that’s become our cause
as a family. I’m active as chairman of something called the END Fund, which you
can ask more about.
But do think constantly — don’t think about it in those fancy business school
words that I used before because sometimes that’ll scare you away; think about
it as bang for the buck, and you’ll almost always do the right thing.You’ll measure
the right things.You’ll be accountable.You will understand whether what you’re
doing is scalable and projectable. All those things will come out if you’re philosophically in the right place.
Jeff Richardson
Thanks, Bill, and I like your term activist philanthropist. You’re definitely that.
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One of the recurring themes throughout the Conference and which has been
very welcoming to me to hear from everyone — no matter what level of success
they may have had — is that, as you said, philanthropy is hard. There’s a lot of
risk involved. And one of the things you said at the session this morning I think
bears repeating. You mentioned a quote from Bill Gates that you might want to
share — that it’s not just in our world, if you will, but in the business world as well.
William Campbell
That’s absolutely one of the things I was going to object to via the question
earlier, this question about accountability being different in this sector. Mistakes
happen in every sector. Basically you have to build a culture where mistakes are
heralded as opposed to in some way brought down. Gates is famous for talking
about mistakes, and I think every good culture has this in essence, this heraldry
for mistakes.A great thing that links directly with what Barbara was saying is that
young people are much more ready for a mistake-driven culture than we were. In
fact, they do loop constantly, so we need to introduce that at the senior levels as
well because at the junior levels it happens. We realize at the bank, for instance,
that we stand in the way of innovation. We’ve got lots of innovators working for
us, but we’ve got systems and processes and all kinds of stuff that stands in the
way of real innovation.
Jeff Richardson
Thank you.
Now, Neeraj, as I mentioned before, we were definitely building our house as we
lived in it at the GBC, and you were at the center of that. It took a lot of patience
and humility, and you bring those same qualities to your work now. We’d like to
hear more about what you’re doing.
Neeraj Mistry
Thanks, Jeff.
If my perspective comes across as schizophrenic, it’s because I’m a grant recipient at the moment. I also make grants. I fundraise and am involved in a bit of
programming. So I guess that’s a vantage point in being able to see something
from different perspectives at once.
What has been a pleasure in working with Bill is that, as someone who is raising
money for programs, I’m not looking for funders to write me a check and walk
away because I don’t have all the answers and neither do the implementers on
the ground. I don’t think anyone has all the answers, but this is something that we
have to figure out together, so going on the journey and including the donors or
partners makes a huge difference.Together we can figure it out, bringing different
competencies to the table.
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I’m going to dive in to this scale-up opportunity or discussion, and before I get
into neglected tropical diseases as a global health issue that needs scaling up, I
wanted to reflect on a few scale-up models that I thought were interesting to
bring up at this session.
We’ve all heard this over and over again: that you go to the most remote parts
of Africa and you find a can of the most popular carbonated beverage, and then
we’ve asked ourselves, Why can’t we get tablets or medications to these people if
we can get carbonated beverages there? I actually went through the exercise of
plotting down trucking routes where these deliveries were made and overlaying
a map of where hospitals were. It came down to the fact that these trucks stood
out in the hot African sun, and putting any form of medication on it wasn’t safe
as far as quality control goes, but the sentiment is really, really important.This is a
competency in logistics and distribution for which I as a doctor am not trained. I
think doctors might be the most logistically challenged people in many instances,
but we need to think about health and development in terms bigger than doctors
and drugs, and we need to bring these other competencies to the fore.
So, with that, I think there are two ways in which I look at scale-up. One is, if we
figure something out — we run a pilot or we do a program and we know how to
do it — we then take that and do it over and over and over and over again.We do
that 1 million times, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million times. A typical example of
this is HIV counseling and testing.When you sit in front of someone, counseling
them on HIV, you assess their risk profile — if they go to clubs, whether they’re
using condoms, what sort of risk-taking behavior they’re engaging in — and you
talk to them about it and talk to them about preventive measures. That’s what
the conventional model was.Then when we realized, Oh, my god.We’ve got to do
40, 50, 60 million counseling and testing sessions at a half hour per session.
Then you start thinking about the number of people required to do that. It gets
really huge.That’s when we started working with the media companies — Viacom
and MTV — to do public-service announcements and put billboards up to raise
awareness, to put HIV information out there and then accelerate that.
I think that’s interesting because it reflects a structural shift in the initial model to
actually take to scale. I like to use the analogy of making tea:You put one kettle
on for two people, but when you want to make tea for a thousand people or a
hundred people, you have to build an urn.That’s the more efficient way to do it,
and I think that’s an interesting way to look at scale.
The other example that worked really well was the “train the trainer” model.This
was essentially a viral multiplier effect that actually happened. I worked with
Standard Chartered Bank, which made a commitment to train 1 million people
on the “train the trainer” model and that was to spread messages about HIV as
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well. So if they would train one person, that person would find a group of 20
people and do a training. Each of those people would then go train another 20
people, and it would proceed like that.
I know this group is enamored by technology in terms of scale-up. They came
to us and they said,“How do we actually measure this, given that it’s just going
to spread like that?” We came up with an additional part of the training session:
When you start the session, you ask everyone to take out their mobile phone
to switch it off because you don’t want it to interrupt the half-hour session; at
the end of the session, you ask them to take out their phone, turn it on and text
their name to a number. All of a sudden, you had the names and the numbers of
people and you could send refresher messages on their training. That became
an interesting model.
Something like that also worked in an excellent program, which started off in
South Africa and now has gone to other parts of Africa. It’s called Mothers to
Mothers. Many of you may have heard of it. It’s using mothers who had gone
through prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission to start doing counseling
and spreading messages about it and essentially being part of the health care
delivery system.
One last analogy that I thought was fascinating when I heard a panel on scale-up
was a road. If you have to build a road between two places, you can’t do that incrementally.You can’t say,“I’ll build the first mile and then scale up.”You either have
a road connecting the two places or not. It’s not something that has any impact
incrementally, but in its entirety its scaled-up version actually makes a difference.
This leads me to neglected tropical diseases because in terms of an intervention
it’s quite similar to how we look at vaccination. And, yes, when we do a vaccine
for an individual or a child, it has a protective immunity for that child; but when
we do it to a population en masse, we elicit what is called a “herd immunity,” and
we protect the entire community. It’s similar with neglected tropical diseases.
There are 17 such diseases, and the seven most common ones account for 95
percent of the global burden. This affects 1.4 billion people around the world.
That means one in six people on this planet have one, two or up to seven
neglected tropical diseases. I grew up in South Africa, and I had worms growing
up when I played in the garden and ate sand; chances are you would get it. But
I had access to deworming medication. I think something else that will resonate with this group is a study that recently came out from Harvard. Michael
Kremer followed children over 20 years, and he found that those adults who
were dewormed as children as opposed to the control group had higher levels
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of education attainment and economic productivity compared with those who
were not.And this is a study from Harvard, so he controlled for lots of factors, and
this is a long-term social impact that we’re actually seeing.
Neglected tropical diseases are three worm infections; two blinding infections,
trachoma and onchocerciasis, also called river blindness; and then there’s
bilharzia, also known as schistosomiasis; and lymphatic filariasis, also known as
elephantiasis, and you may have seen images of those huge limbs.
The treatment for this is very interesting. The way we do it is called “mass drug
administration.” We go into communities, and we treat everyone in the community, so we don’t have to run diagnostics. Where we’ve mapped out that these
diseases are prevalent, we go and treat everyone. We treat them with one drug
or up to four drugs, depending on the number of diseases, and we only have to
do it once a year. When you’re treating people in the millions, when you treat
everyone, it kills the parasite in them, so they don’t put any of the eggs back
out into the environment, which means that there is no new reinfection. We’ve
seen that if we do this over five to seven years, we can actually eliminate some
of these diseases.Witness the fact that we’re sitting here in Washington, DC, and
these diseases aren’t prevalent, and neither is malaria, and DC for all intents is a
swamp that had all of these. And, I meant that literally, not figuratively.
William Campbell
That’s not a political statement?
Neeraj Mistry
No.That’s not a political statement. It is a testament to the fact that we can eliminate these diseases because we don’t have them here anymore.
Just one more note I want to add.When we look at health and development, we
start seeing a lot of complex pictures.Things are so interrelated. Often when we
try to address complex situations, we try to figure complex solutions for them,
and I think that’s where we often go wrong. I’ve been on a quest now to find
the simple solutions that have complex implications.
I’m sure many of you have donated blood. Think about how you felt after you
made a blood donation.You needed to lie down.They needed to give you cookies
and orange juice, and you took the afternoon off. Now imagine being in that
state all the time. If we give every kid a laptop or PhD-level teachers, if the kids
don’t go to school because they’re too lethargic, or they can’t concentrate on
their lessons, it doesn’t make a difference. If we do economic empowerment
opportunities or microfinance for women who are too tired or not functioning
at their optimal level, it doesn’t make a difference; worker productivity goes
down. Let’s give them all organic food to address hunger, but if the worms are
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eating the food, it’s not going to make as huge a difference. We’re starting to see
interactions with HIV and the presence of neglected tropical diseases. So, at just
50 cents per person per year, we think this is one of the best bangs for your buck
that you can actually get.
In terms of public-private partnerships, which is now the theme for development,
all the drugs are donated by the pharmaceutical industry, and these donations
have been going on for the past 25 years. I know people are cautious about
drug donations from pharma companies in terms of sustainability. For example,
someone’s committed 1 billion tablets to do deworming. We can’t absorb these
donations fast enough at the rate they’re giving them. So, this is a long-term
commitment requiring solid partnerships.We’ll get into how this particular type
of community can get involved in these large-scale projects.
Jeff Richardson
Great.
Neeraj Mistry
Thank you.
Jeff Richardson
Neeraj, you mentioned looking at the bigger picture and the implications; one of
the things, maybe harking back to your GBC days, is sometimes there’s a rush to
scale up, and not necessarily look at the longer view. I think of PMTCT [prevention of mother-to-child transmission] testing as an example of that. Some of you
older folks would remember the old Pogo cartoon that says that,“We have met
the enemy and he is us.” I think donors in many ways were putting a lot of pressure on test, test, test, test.And a lot of the very reputable, well-known NGOs had
tremendous testing numbers: “We tested 100,000 people last quarter, 250,000.”
Then you asked the simple question, “And then what happened?” The loss to
follow-up was sometimes 75 or 80 percent. So, I think the point you were making
earlier is also about quality, and I think, Bill, you touched on that, too. It’s really
about quality scale-up, not just scaling up to scale up. We’ve got to understand
that in that context it may be better to test fewer people and get that loss to
follow-up down to single digits.
Do either of you want to comment on the quality piece?
Neeraj Mistry
It’s a very important point, and I think there has been a lot of discussion around
evidence-based practices. When you decide on an intervention, what is the
evidence base behind it? I think not enough attention is paid to the implementation times or operational research that is offered.
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Let me give you an example:The female condom was thought to be a huge intervention, a women-empowered intervention to prevent HIV. They implemented
it in two countries. In one country it just took off.You actually had men coming
in and asking for it for their partners. In the other it didn’t take off at all. Same
intervention, same science, similar country profiles. So, they went back and tried
to figure out what the difference was. In one it was perceived as an erotic sexual
device, so that’s why people wanted it. This is where private-sector marketing
comes in.
But that’s exactly the point. It’s not just about getting the test numbers there; if
the time isn’t spent to actually go through that counseling, to take the test, then
follow-up is lost.We actually found that adherence and compliance to treatment
if someone was found positive were actually much better if there was proper
counseling done with the testing.
William Campbell
Yes, and I think the other part that we need to keep in mind is the new media,
particularly the social media; they are so powerful that if you get it right, you
can move quite quickly. If you get it wrong, you will get it wrong for a long time.
I think that the emphasis on quality, people would tell you, has always been there.
In today’s world it’s an absolute must-have before you start thinking about rolling
anything out.And I see no difference there between the for-profit and the not-forprofit sectors: Get it right, and then you have access to a lot of communications.
Talking about the power of the mobile phone in Africa, I mean, it’s colossal! Basic
banking and payments are now being done with a mobile phone, theoretically
one of the most secure things that you want to do.There are certain implementations already, but public health through the mobile phone is powerful.
Jeff Richardson
Thank you.
Barbara, one last question. One of my colleagues attended a panel discussion
recently. The minister of health from Haiti was there along with the Canadian
development minister, and the development minister asked the minister of
health from Haiti,“How can I help with training and retaining your health care
workers in Haiti?”And the Haitian minister responded,“Just stop recruiting them
to work in Canada.”
That’s an issue, and I’m not sure at your stage of development whether it’s not just
the training and the recruiting these young people but also the retention, especially in-country. Have you started to think about how that might be addressed?
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Barbara P. Bush
Definitely. One big thing about working in the nonprofit sector is you’re constantly
competing for salaries, and a lot of our fellows are coming from a private-sector
background, which is great. About 40 percent of our fellows — they’re all under
30 — were working in the private sector. They have very relevant skills. Neeraj
was mentioning supply-chain management skills. We’ve had a good number of
fellows who were doing supply-chain management for the Gap or doing it for
mobile phone companies in East Africa.They were working in a very stable position, getting a good salary, and they made a shift to work in the nonprofit sector
in the health field. I think they made the shift because they felt like they could
make a bigger impact in their country, but there are obviously a million other
opportunities that they could take after their fellowship where they could get
paid more, or end up living in other places and not, obviously, making such an
impact, and we’ve really started building out our programs to directly address
what our fellows do after.
We’ve talked a lot about scale, and I think one thought that we have around scale
is scale of influence. Our fellows can make an impact now, but if they end up
working in the UN and doing a nine-to-five job and not really trying to move the
needle and help, does that really matter? I mean, are they really trying to do as
much as they can? We’ve thought that it’s important for our fellows to be great
practitioners. If they’re doing supply-chain management, they need to do it as best
they can, but they also need to be great mobilizers.They need to understand how
policy works in their country so that they can bring others into this and use their
voice in a more elevated way. I say all this because that way we can see more skill.
There’s obviously immense competition for what our fellows and other young
people do after, and at the same time what’s exciting — and I think this happens
in the US and we see this a lot in the countries where we work that are postconflict — is our fellows want nothing more than to change their countries for
the better.They grew up in Rwanda or Burundi or Uganda during war, and they
feel like it’s their responsibility to change things.That is the most powerful driver
for them to stay in this field, and that’s why they’re doing this rather than trying
to find a better position in Canada.
But it’s hard, and with so many applications — 8,000 applications for 90 positions — we can find people who are driven by results and a bigger purpose in
life rather than just a paycheck.
Jeff Richardson
Thank you.
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Wednesday, April 18
Cindy McCain, Business Owner and Humanitarian
Moderator: Randy Newcomb, President and CEO, Humanity United
Randy Newcomb
When States Fail to Protect
My name is Randy Newcomb. I’m the CEO of Humanity United. We have a really
terrific section this afternoon as our final session, and I’ve been looking forward
to this all week. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, as well. It’s really a very exciting session
because we’re looking at the topic “when states fail to protect” and what the role
is for private philanthropy, which is a very, very interesting subject for us today.
It’s my great pleasure to welcome to the stage Cindy McCain. She’s one of our final
speakers on this new social contract that we’ve been talking about all week in
the emerging field of global philanthropy. Cindy is a businesswoman. She’s a very
ambitious philanthropist, as you’ll find out, and she’s the spouse, as we all know,
of US senator and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain of Arizona. Cindy also
sits on several boards, including CARE [Cooperative for American Remittances
to Europe]; HALO Trust, which is a very interesting de-mining effort; as well as
Operation Smile. I was doing the research and discovered that Operation Smile
was actually the first Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize winner, in 1996. So,
there’s a nice synergy here between Cindy’s role with Operation Smile and the
Hilton Humanitarian Prize.
So, would you please welcome Cindy as she comes to the stage? And we’ll begin
our conversation.
Cindy McCain
Thank you.
(From Left to Right) Randy Newcomb and Cindy McCain
Randy Newcomb
I think we probably all believe that we know Cindy McCain from her terrific role
in public service over the years, but I have to say I discovered two things about
Cindy that I was not aware of and that I think are very interesting.The first is that
I understand you’re a racecar driver.
Cindy McCain
Yes.
Randy Newcomb
And you are also an amateur pilot.
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Cindy McCain
I am, yes. I started pilot training years and years ago when my husband first
decided to run for the Senate because I was scared to fly and I thought, Well, I’ll
just go to ground school and figure this out and then I won’t be screaming
in the back of the airplanes. And I turned out not only liking it but getting my
license, buying an airplane and then going from there and flying him during his
first Senate race. It turned out to be a good thing for me.
When States Fail to Protect
what you are told by those telling you what they may need is not always right.
You see more, you hear more, you feel more, if you can taste it, feel it, touch it
yourself. So, I’m a big proponent of really being an active, integral part of what
you’re doing and being a boot on the ground at least for a short period.
Randy Newcomb
I thought it was interesting that in April 1994 — I don’t know if you were in
Goma…
Randy Newcomb
That’s outstanding. Let’s jump right in to some of the subject here. As I’ve had a
chance to look at your philanthropy and the work you’ve been doing for many,
many years, there’s a theme that draws out from your work. It seems that you
personally are pulled to some really tough, difficult neighborhoods around the
world. In fact, we were just talking over lunch, and Cindy is leaving the week
after next for northern Uganda, I believe, to do some work there. You have also
done quite a bit of work in Vietnam and Cambodia.You were in DRC [Democratic
Republic of the Congo] in 1994 during the genocide in Rwanda, and more
recently you were working on refugee issues in Somalia. I’m just curious: What
draws you to what are some pretty tough neighborhoods around the world?
Cindy McCain
I was.
Randy Newcomb
…and at that very time the genocide was taking place in Rwanda, and you were on
the front lines of supporting and providing medical care for refugees who were
coming across the border. I don’t think we could find a more germane example
of when states fail to protect.
Cindy McCain
Exactly.
Cindy McCain
Like all of you in here, it started with my having an experience years ago. It was a
personal experience with a friend, and it grew from there. I’ve found what drives
me and what brought me into this and into the tough zones. I was in the first Gulf
War right as it ended. We dropped into Kuwait when everything was still on fire.
To me the importance of doing that and the importance of being there to see
what was going on was what was driving me. I needed to be boots-on-the-ground
and I still do. I still find that the most important thing that I do is learning — not
only about the issue but about what really counts, not only with philanthropy
but the future of philanthropy. So that’s the ongoing drive that I have and that I
encourage people around me to do.And people who work for me say,“Can’t we
go to Paris or something? Can’t we go someplace fun?”And instead we head off
to Goma, which is much more exciting in my idea.
Randy Newcomb
Well, obviously you could easily contract this out, so it seems very important that
you’re there on a firsthand basis.
Randy Newcomb
And this was an example where you were providing and supporting medical care.
Cindy McCain
We were asked to go in. I had a medical team at that time, and we were asked
to go in and participate in helping the refugees who were coming across. Of
course what we found is like all of you have seen — it was not only something far
worse but unfathomable.And because the ground (not to be too graphic) is very
volcanic in the area that we were in in Goma, the refugees were coming directly
over the border. So many of them had cholera that they were literally dying on
the road, and the part that was so astounding for those of us working there was
that there was no place to put them. It was a cycle of illness and a cycle of life
that ended in an incredible scene, which is the reason I do what I do now. That
memory will be forever in my head, and the vision and the smell and the feeling
of helplessness that I had — even though I was there with a great deal of ability
to be part of the solution; I still couldn’t do enough — none of us could — so it
is the reason I do what I do. It really is.
Cindy McCain
I realize that not everyone can hop on an airplane and fly to Africa or Asia or
South America at the drop of a hat, but I do think it’s important as a philanthropist
to be on the ground at some point and to be extraordinarily involved because
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Randy Newcomb
If you travel in these zones, you really discover that there’s a lot lacking. It’s not as
if there aren’t resources that are sloshing around; you do see multilateral, bilateral
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When States Fail to Protect
development bank resources coming in. Since it is a sloshing of resources that
aren’t used too terribly effectively at times, what do you think is unique about
the private sector going after this in this setting? Obviously our resources are
diluted by these huge dollar amounts that are coming from the multilaterals, but
what’s unique on the philanthropic side?
opinion.” I always guide them to more of the human level than the government
level in this respect because I think that unless we can protect those who are
most vulnerable, we’re not going to be able to make any successes anywhere in
that region. And it’s bad, as you all know.You’re in the business.
Cindy McCain
Even beyond your philanthropic support is your support around election monitoring that I found so interesting. I often say that we’re never going to be able to
buy our way out of these problems and we shouldn’t think that the philanthropic
capital that we have is the only solution; there are other ways that perhaps can be
even more impactful. I can see that a part of a theme of your work for many, many
years has been election-monitoring activities. In fact, you were in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo prior to the elections in 2011. I believe you were there
with Ben at the same time.That’s not too bad of an assignment.
Randy Newcomb
You may not want to hear this, but I think that the private philanthropic dollar
is much more effective than the state financing and the government financing.
I’m not saying that we don’t need it because we do. We absolutely need states
and governments to be involved, but private philanthropists generally wind up
funding community-based organizations and organizations that really know what
they need from a very local level, so private funding is extraordinarily important.
When you’re talking about women and children’s issues particularly — democracy
projects, whatever you as a philanthropist are involved in — there’s no replacement for the private philanthropy efforts on behalf of countries around the world.
There’s no duplication for it. And it’s not only necessary but something that we
need to continue to thrive and grow with as much as we can.
Cindy McCain
No heavy lifting.
Randy Newcomb
Randy Newcomb
As we were preparing for today’s talk, there’s one interesting project we discovered that we co-fund.We know that we co-fund the Eastern Congo Initiative [ECI],
which is a very, very ambitious, terrific initiative. I know that you’ve been here
this week advocating on a white paper that ECI just recently released.
Cindy McCain
We did. Eastern Congo Initiative, which is the organization that was founded by
Ben Affleck, just released a white paper on the security-sector reforms/progress/
lack of progress in the Congo at the Woodrow Wilson Center on Monday. We
thought the event was just going to be pro forma and a press release deal, but it
almost turned into a fistfight in the room.
Randy Newcomb
Well, that would be fun to see.
Cindy McCain
It was really fun, but tensions are very deep. This is an understatement, but
tensions in any of the countries that have been conflict-ridden for so many years
are extraordinarily deep, and there’s really no set solution. But there’s one solution that I keep telling people who come to me that say,“What can I do in Africa?
Nobody can help in Africa. It’s just too big. It’s too overwhelming. I don’t want
to go there.” I tell them,“It’s bottom line; it’s all about women and children in my
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Tell us about what’s going on in post-elections.
Cindy McCain
First of all, I believe in democracy projects. This is not about party building, as
you know. It’s about freedom and democracy and the right for self-determination,
so any of the organizations that do this, I laud what you do because I think it’s a
phenomenal way to really have an impact in a region, particularly a region like
the Congo.
In the Congo there was no existence of free and fair elections. There was no
existence of anything. I will also say I’m disappointed in how the United States
smoothed over [Joseph] Kabila’s election after it was done because it was truly a
corrupt election.There was nothing free and fair about it, so I was disappointed
in that — but that’s for another discussion.The philanthropic efforts on the part
of the Carter Center, National Democratic Institute, International Republican
Institute and some of the others that were in there made at least an impact on
women candidates, which is something that we’re a big proponent of, but the
women candidates and the women participants in the process were extraordinarily important this time.
Randy Newcomb
In a moment I’d like to talk more about your work in Burma.You have a very long
history in Burma, and I want to dive into that in a moment. We’ve talked before
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about what you do when these emerging democracies don’t take the shape of
democracies that we’re accustomed to in our own states. How do you reflect on
that in terms of advancing this free and fair approach?
Cindy McCain
I know for all of you who do this, free and fair are the key words here.A democracy in another part of the world does not resemble a democracy here, but that’s
not what this is about. It’s about self-determination. So we aim to monitor, inform
and train people to give them guidance in how to self-determine and take control
of their own future. That’s what this is all about because it not only affects the
governance, but it affects, as you know, the youngest and most vulnerable of
all — and that’s the children.
When States Fail to Protect
a ground perspective, if that makes sense. When you see what I call a soft talk
about an issue or a human rights violation — governments that are letting this
happen — they see that we’re not firm on it, they hear that and it’s the light that
says,“It’s okay to keep doing this.”
The Congo’s a perfect example of that, with the rape and the child soldiering
and all of those things going on right now because there are very few people
standing up — and I’ll pose that to women’s organizations — and saying,“Enough!
Enough! We’re not going to stand for this anymore.We’re not going to do this as a
world philanthropy organization.” I’m not criticizing anybody, but you understand
what I’m trying to say? It’s extraordinarily important. If we don’t take a strong
stand as philanthropists in general, I just don’t know where we go.We can’t rely
on governments to do this.
Burma, Burma, gosh! Aren’t things exciting in Burma right now? I mean, this is
wonderful.We were talking with regard to human trafficking.As you know, Burma
is a source country, so now with what’s going on, philanthropists particularly are
going to have an extraordinary impact in that country on many issues, but on
human trafficking this will be a remarkable opportunity for people.
No, that’s right. When you look at the demographics out of this eastern Congo
region, which is along the Kivus, the demographics among women and girls who
have been raped are as high as 70 percent in those communities.
Randy Newcomb
Cindy McCain
I think you’re right. It’s very interesting to see what’s taking place there. I just
read that the Treasury Department is beginning to relax some sanctions, which
is opening a door for private engagement in a much more ambitious and aggressive way than we’ve been able to do in the past. I understand that you met Aung
San Suu Kyi.
I had a talk one day with a group of Congolese women, and we were just sitting
around the table talking about the rape issue, which is openly discussed there
as a way of life almost.This woman looked at her watch and she looked up and
she rolled her eyes and said,“I was raped about a month ago. I’m due again.”The
blood just drained out of me. As a world community, we can’t let this happen
anymore. We have to stand up and vocalize that this is wrong, and I don’t see
enough of that. I get in trouble. I get in trouble on Twitter. I get in trouble on
Facebook. I get in trouble all the time for going too far, but I don’t care. I really
think this is an important issue.
Cindy McCain
She was still under house arrest.
Randy Newcomb
Randy Newcomb
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Randy Newcomb
And you were rightfully critical of the military rulers during the 2008 campaign,
and you’ve been, if I can say it this way, very progressive on these human rights
violations that took place there. Can you unpack that a little bit more?
Let me say for all of us that we support your continuing to get in trouble. We
want you to get in trouble.
Cindy McCain
Cindy McCain
I get very frustrated. I don’t like to beat around the bush when it comes to human
rights violations. In fact I’m offended by organizations that soft-pedal something
that is a clear violation by saying, “Well, yes, there could be a future,” or change
the language in some way. I think if philanthropists as a whole don’t take a
strong stand on violations of what we believe is right — human rights violations,
human trafficking, landmines, whatever your interest is in — it’s not going to
help; the overall impact is the bad guys see we’re not firm on it. I look on it from
Tell my husband that!
Randy Newcomb
Well, we can have that conversation later.
Cindy McCain
I know. I’m teasing.
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Randy Newcomb
Cindy McCain
But, clearly we need those kinds of voices.
No. He’s in the conversation now, which is what this is all about.
Cindy McCain
Randy Newcomb
Yes. And you as individual philanthropists, as group philanthropists, you are
important players in this, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I know I’m preaching
to the choir, but I encourage anybody who wants to stand up and just say it
because no one else is. No one else is.
That’s right.
Cindy McCain
It’s wonderful.
Randy Newcomb
Randy Newcomb
We were just chatting here over lunch, and you indicated that you had just
decided the week after next you’re going to Uganda. I get the feeling that you’re
going to look at these refugee flows that are coming out of the Congo; you indicated to me that from your research this doesn’t look to be just a small flow of
refugees coming across.
Go with me here: You’re flying your airplane, and your mind starts to wander, if
you can do that in a plane — I’m assuming you can put it on autopilot. And you
think about your philanthropy. What are you the most proud of?
Cindy McCain
No. There were 15,000 over one weekend. In my experience, which is not that
extraordinary, that’s a large group in a short amount of time, so I can guess what’s
going on. I can pretty much figure it out, but I want to see it. I need to see what’s
going on and hear what’s happening because these are Congolese refugees who
are coming across the border now, so maybe they’ve honed in on [Joseph] Kony.
Who knows? And speaking of the Kony video…
Randy Newcomb
Good! Let’s go there.
Cindy McCain
Let’s go to the Kony video. I was one of the 2,000 who got the first zap of that,
and mind you I know it’s controversial. It’s controversial in how he portrayed it.
It was controversial in what the message was. But the bottom line is:Who in here
doesn’t know who Kony is now? And that’s remarkable. We’ve got a guy who’s
wanted by everybody in the world, and they’re going to get him. They’re going
to get this guy — and he’s bad! So, whether you agree or disagree with the video,
his name identification is what it’s all about; and this guy’s on the radar now, and
I think that’s wonderful.
Randy Newcomb
I think you’re right and, in disclosure, Humanity United was an early donor to
the Kony film project “Invisible Children.” And prior to this video, I don’t think
you would ever have found the story about Joseph Kony on the front page of
the Washington Post as it was yesterday.
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Cindy McCain
I was working with children years ago in Bangladesh, again, a medical team. I’d
been asked to go down with our team to visit a certain orphanage that was run
by Mother Theresa, and I didn’t go there to adopt. That was the furthest thing
from my mind. I had three little babies at home. I wound up being adopted by
two little Bangladeshi girls and I brought them back, but I hadn’t told my husband.
Like I said, adoption was never in the scope. These kids needed medical care. It
was serious. I knew I could get them out.
There was a point where the minister of health, who was a rough-looking and
tough-talking guy, was speaking in Hindi only, even though he was fluent in
English. He brought me in front of the entire health board there in Dhaka and said
to me,“Well, we can fix these children.” My daughter has a very severe cleft palate,
and the other one had a heart condition. And they looked at me and again said,
“We can fix these babies here. We can do this.” And for the love of God I do not
know where this came from, but I slammed my fist on the table and said,“Then,
by God, do it!” And this guy did not know what to do with me. He signed the
paperwork and said,“Please, take them. Go. Please.”And I stepped off an airplane
in Phoenix,Arizona, never having told my husband that I was coming home with
babies, number one; the one in my arms was the one with the cleft palate, our
daughter, and when he asked me where she was going, I said, “I thought she’d
go to our house.”And, he said,“Fine.”
He’s a great guy. He’s a really great guy! The other girl is with another family, and
they’re both 20 years old now and they both go to Arizona State University. So,
my proudest achievement would be my daughter.
Randy Newcomb
As it should be.
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Cindy McCain
Yes.
Randy Newcomb
So, you’re with a very friendly family here.The GPF community really is a family
in many respects, and we feel blessed in many ways to have you come and spend
a few minutes today.We have an opportunity with dear friends as well as people
who are really interested in not sitting on the sidelines, or, if we can draw from
Jed Emerson’s metaphor, sitting in the pond and just waiting to strike. This is a
group that really wants to make change happen. They wouldn’t be here if that
wasn’t the case.
Cindy McCain
I know.
Randy Newcomb
So, with this community, what would you say to a group of philanthropists who
are really looking to make an impact? What, from your experience, should we
be paying attention to?
Cindy McCain
The obvious answer is to follow your heart. I mean, I tell anybody who asks me
that. But I also say,“Stay firm; stay determined,” because there’s a lot of misinformation out there toward philanthropy. People will discourage you or perhaps push
you in another direction that maybe you didn’t want to focus on, so stay focused
and most importantly keep talking to each other. Your inner communication
and your ability to network in this arena are most important.We have a group of
people from around the world here, and what you can do together coming out
of this room and coming forward can top any government any place — and any
group of people. And the impact you will have will be lifelong. I wish I could
tell you from a business standpoint what to do or from just a global perspective
because I work all over the world. Each of you has your own areas and just never,
never, never give up because what you do is the most important thing you will
ever do in my opinion.
Randy Newcomb
That’s outstanding.This is a very determined philanthropist, folks. Please join me
in welcoming her and thanking her for her comments today.
Cindy McCain
Thank you.Thank you.
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Wednesday, April 18
Special Address: Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary, UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change
Introduced by Christine Morse, CEO, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation
Christine Morse
The Case of Climate Change
Good afternoon. My name is Christy Morse, and I lead the Margaret A. Cargill
philanthropy. During the past three days, we’ve considered various ways in which
the private sector, the government sector and our broad philanthropic sector are
working together, or at least sometimes working, in ways that intersect to shape a
new social contract. Perhaps more than any other issue, climate change is forcing
us to be bold and to think of new ways to work across sectors, across borders,
and to engage all stakeholders.
As many of you may know, Christiana Figueres was one of the early voices of
climate change. In the mid-1990s her efforts were focused on the active participation of Latin America in the UN Convention and setting the first climate change
policy instruments for that region. Now, as executive secretary of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, she is at the lead of international climate talks. In this role her work embodies the focus of many of our
discussions over the past three days.
Christiana Figueres
When considering the magnitude of climate change, she recognizes that responsibility cannot be borne by governments alone. In fact, she has delivered a
consistent message — perhaps you could call it a challenge — that the private
sector cannot afford to be risk averse and wait for the governments to singlehandedly take the lead for climate change. She is a champion of strategic
collaboration across sectors; specifically she has called upon the private sector
to take an increasingly central role. She has been aggressive about seeking out
business leaders, especially those who are champions of practices to reduce their
own company’s carbon footprints, and she isn’t hesitant to ask these leaders
to continue to apply their business and management skills to issues of climate
change beyond their own company.And she asks them to use their relationships
with political and government leaders to encourage them to make climate change
a top priority.
While Ms. Figueres is a champion of collaboration and action, she is equally
impatient with those, whether they are in government or the private sector, who
apparently believe that if they just wait long enough, someone else will come
up with a guaranteed risk-free solution. She sees the solutions coming — but
coming from the active collaboration of all of us, of all the sectors, each bringing
its unique perspective to the table and resources to bear.
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Her message has consistently been that it’s time to act, time to take risks, not
time to wait and talk. And she is a woman of action. She helped launch the UN’s
Momentum for Change Initiative, which is a platform to showcase public-private
partnerships around the world. Her aim is to demonstrate that strategic partnerships can lead to benefits for both people and our climate.
The most recent of the climate change conferences concluded at the end of 2011
in Durban, South Africa. That conference resulted in a renewed commitment
to the Kyoto Protocol and significant strides for a common vision on climate
change mitigation for the years to come. Ms. Figueres is now preparing for the
next conference this fall in Qatar. She joins us after completing her latest visit
to a frontline of climate change: She sailed the region of Antarctica with business leaders, policymakers and scientists to see the shifting Antarctic ice sheet
firsthand. Examining an iceberg at close quarters from a dinghy helped make
climate change very personal to her. Ms. Figueres, we are all anticipating that
your remarks today will help make climate change and the roles we can take in
addressing it a very personal and very compelling matter to us.
On behalf of all of us here at the Global Philanthropy Forum, I’m delighted you
are here today.Your experiences and your views can help us continue to assimilate information that we’ve been hearing these past three days.
Everyone, would you help me in welcoming the executive secretary of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Ms. Christiana Figueres.
Christiana Figueres
Thank you, Christine.
Thank you very much for that very warm welcome. I must say, my trip to
Antarctica — I don’t know if it made it very personal. It made it very cold because
I was challenged to do the polar plunge, and jumping into that water in your
bikini is not exactly what you want to do. But I did it and am all the stronger for it.
Before I jump into the cold water of talking to you today about climate change, I
want to thank Cindy [McCain]. I have never heard you speak. I have been touched,
impressed and motivated. Please, let’s thank her once again. It’s quite wonderful
to have women like that.
Ladies and gentlemen, amigos y amigas because I come from Costa Rica, dear
friends, thank you very much for this invitation to speak to you about climate
change, which may seem to you to be very far away from your experience; but
I have to say, the conversation that you’re having here these days about new
systems, new ways of doing things, a new contract — that is exactly what needs
to happen. It’s very, very clear that the old ways that we have been using just
simply haven’t had the results that we need on this planet.To give you three data
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points that we all know by heart:We still have 3 billion people living on less than
$2.50 a day, we still have 1 billion people with no access to clean water and we
still have 1.6 billion people with no access to electricity. If that is not a show of
no results, I don’t know what is.
And to make matters worse, climate change, which is here, is going to exacerbate
the suffering of those people in those statistics because they are the most vulnerable. On top of being vulnerable — on top of not being helped by whatever we
had invented and hasn’t really resolved the problem — now we are exacerbating
that human suffering. Just last month the World Meteorological Organization
came out and said (here we are yet again):“extreme weather conditions such as
intense droughts, intense flooding in East Africa, in Asia and even in this country
that thinks itself immune to climate change.” What’s with all these weird tornadoes? You can say what you want, but those are not normal! Okay? So, knowing
that these extreme weather events have a very high probability of becoming
much more severe as we go forward, knowing that climate change is the greatest
challenge that humanity has ever faced — the greatest challenge that humanity
has ever faced — what are we doing? What are we doing about it?
The fact is climate has the potential to wipe out — completely wipe out — all
of the advances that we’ve made in development in the past 20 to 30 years, let
alone the very important contributions that private philanthropy has made over
the past 20 or 30 years. So, are we going to let that happen? Because, apparently,
that’s where we are. We have greenhouse gas emissions still rising. We’re still
deforesting, and we are still putting money into completely unsustainable pathways.And we know that business as usual is simply not going to cut it.We know
that continuing with business as usual is going to put the human community and
the planet out of business. We know all of that.
So, where are we? Are we completely paralyzed? I’m a born optimist — I couldn’t
do this job if I weren’t — and I see, yes, we have huge clouds on top of us, but
there are silver linings. Where are those silver linings?
We are not starting from scratch, so let me just point out three areas in which I
recognize that we are making some progress. We are making some progress at
the national level, at the domestic level, with policies. Almost every country in
the world has some policies dealing with climate change, either on the mitigation
side or on the adaptation side; but all of them, due to their participation in the
climate convention and due to what they’re seeing in their own countries, are
now adopting policies.That’s the good news.
We have 16 countries and counting, soon to be 18 countries, with nationally
binding legislation dealing with their emissions controls — not in the United
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States, of course, but in 16 to 18 other countries. So, on the side of national policy,
we’re making a dent. At least we’re moving there somewhere. It’s not enough,
but we’re moving.
The second area that we’re moving in is investment.We’re living in a really, really
tough time for investment, but despite that Bloomberg has already announced
that we have reached the trillionth dollar invested in renewable energy around
the world in the financial situation that we’re in — the trillionth dollar already
in renewable energy.And last week’s data show that for the first time the United
States has actually invested more in clean technologies than China. China has
taken the lead in clean technologies now for quite a few years despite what the
US press says. For the first time, thank heavens, a race to the top seems to be
occurring here: The United States invested $48 billion into clean technologies
versus China’s $45 billion last year. So, on the investment side, I would say we’re
getting some movement.
The question, particularly in this country, is Are we also getting any movement
on the international policy side? I stand before you to say, believe it or not, states
are not failing on this. In fact, states are actually moving forward — or should I say
perhaps they’re crawling forward because from my perspective they should be
moving much faster; but we are at least moving in the right direction.
In that context let me give you a quick overview of what was done in Durban,
just for you to judge for yourself whether this is actually progress. There were
four key outcomes from the last climate negotiations in Durban.
Number one, all governments of the world agreed that there will be a second
commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol, which is the only legally binding
framework that the world has at this moment to control emissions.There will be
a second commitment period, meaning five to eight years of control of emissions
from a legally binding perspective; unfortunately, it’s only for 10 to 15 percent
of global emissions because it applies only to those industrialized countries that
will continue in the Kyoto Protocol. But that is a first step.
The second agreement out of Durban is that all industrialized countries, without
any exceptions — including the United States not being exempted — have a
pledge, not legally binding but a pledge, on what they’re going to do on mitigation, on bringing down their emissions from here to 2020.We have 48 developing
countries that don’t have historical responsibility but that have realized that it
is their interest to assume responsibility. So, we have all industrialized countries — and the sum total is 80 percent of global emissions — that actually have
at least some movement forward on what they’re intending to do with their
emissions. But this is only 80 percent, and it’s on a voluntary basis.
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The third agreement in Durban: Countries say, “Okay, good progress, but we
need more.”And these countries actually make an absolutely historic, watershed
agreement, which is that they agree to a process that will end up in a legally
binding treaty for all countries to participate in covering 100 percent of global
emissions by the year 2015. That gives them three years to negotiate basically
the economic structure that our children will all be living under because this
is about completely changing the economic, the productive, the consumption
structure that we’ve been used to. And to make that possible for the agreement,
they say, “You know what? We’re also going to agree on financial and technical
support that is going to go to developing countries to allow them to participate
in a meaningful way.”
What does this mean? It actually means two things: One, there is universal political will to act on climate change, and, two, there is one way that governments are
showing for the future — and that has been consistent throughout the history of
the climate convention — and that is, we are moving toward a low-carbon society
with high resilience, and that is absolutely clear. The direction has never been
questioned. It’s the pace and the scale.That is where governments are going, but
that is also where governments need help because they have set the direction,
but the impetus, mark my words, is not going to come from governments. The
impetus is going to come from the private sector, and that’s where you all come
in because the question then is, If that is what we need to do — if we have to
increase the pace and the scale of moving in the direction that governments
have set — then what should global philanthropy be funding and what should
we be looking at?
I would suggest that there are two big areas you might consider. One, in general,
is how you increase public awareness about these issues.The second is How do
you accelerate action on the ground?
Let me address the first, on increasing public awareness. What that means is
working with all of the stakeholders out there, with all of your groups independently, on what your specific interest is. I am going to be willing to say that,
independent of what you’re doing, there is a climate aspect to that because
there is no aspect of human life that is untouched by climate change. So, in that
sense, whenever you are funding, whatever groups you are funding, you should
increase the public awareness because we need the public to do two things.We
need them to create demand for more-sustainable products and more-sustainable
lifestyles because that’s the way the private sector is going to react; but we also
need the public to create the demand for more-decisive policy, for more-decisive
government action. So, increase public awareness to increase demand toward
responsibility.
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Then accelerate action on the ground. What does that mean? You probably have
some influence on what national governments do, but you probably have much
more influence on what communities do, on what state governments do. So,
work at the subnational level: work with the private sector, work with other local
NGOs, work across the board to really spread this message out.Work on the many
different sectors that are directly linked — on energy efficiency, on renewables,
on deforestation, on health and women issues, on transportation, on you name
it. Everything has a climate aspect. I am entreating you, when you make your
funding decisions, to put your climate change lens on and say, “In the face of
climate, how should we be making these decisions?” because it is very clear that
whatever you’re funding is affected by climate.
they’re saying,‘What did you do? What did you do?’And I would like all of us, you
and me, to be able to stand and say to those children, ‘We were the generation
that realized the consequences of what we were doing — because the generation before us had no idea. We are the generation that realized the consequences
of our actions, and we were also the generation that did something to turn it
around.”That part of the sentence we haven’t lived up to yet, so it is my invitation
that you join and be able to answer those children by saying, yes, you did stand
up and you did do it.
Philanthropy, in this country in particular but also in others, was able over the
past 20 to 30 years to mainstream corporate responsibility in business — and that
I must say is one of the most important things that you have done, to change the
way that business acts. In that same spirit, I would say the next challenge, taking
that one step up, is for philanthropy to make low carbon the business model for
both public and private action, and you can make that difference.
Thank you, Christiana, and thank you, Cindy McCain.
Let me end by saying we’re in a very challenging moment, very challenging. We
still have climate deniers. We still have vested interests that would like to see
no progress on these issues. We are still in the aftereffects of the financial crisis.
We are with respect to energy still trying to figure out what, if any, is the role of
nuclear going to be? We’re still trying to figure out where we as citizens put our
vote — wherever you may be a citizen — with respect to the leadership generation that is coming in many countries. So, we’re still trying to figure out all of
these things, and I hear many people tell me,“We can’t be aggressive on climate
because we’re still in the financial crisis or because we don’t know what to do
about nuclear or because the new leaders of 2013 haven’t been elected yet or,
or, or, or, or…”
I hear all of these very legitimate reasons. But from the perspective of your children and my children, all of what we hear is, frankly, simply a signal-to-noise-ratio
problem. It’s signal to noise. We’re not always going to be in this financial crisis.
We’re not always going to be in a political leadership crisis. We’re not always
going to be figuring this out. There are some things that are signals and that we
should be listening to, and there are other things that are currently noise, loud
noise, but from the perspective of our children, it’s noise! It is not signal.
I was asked a few days ago by a journalist, “What do you think about at night?
What wakes you up 2 o’clock in the morning?” And I said, “During the day I do
my thing; you know, I work with governments. My night job is to work with the
private sector because that’s not my mandate, but I do it anyway.After all of that,
I go home and I see the eyes of seven generations of children in front of us, and
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Thanks.
Jane Wales
One of you asked earlier of Luis Ubiñas whether evaluating advocacy campaigns
was the same as other things.And just to reinforce the two most recent talks — one
on civil conflict, one on climate change — they are two enormous forces that you
could argue we can’t affect. We can’t make a difference. We can’t end them. Not
so. Not so.
In the case of climate change, I recently met with a major foundation leader who
said, “We didn’t get a global agreement yet. Our grantees have failed. Abandon
the grantee. Abandon the cause.” Yet at the same time, academic institutions,
corporations and investors are investing in R&D on renewables, R&D on mitigation technologies. Companies are choosing to reduce their carbon footprint.
Individuals are changing their personal choices and their purchasing choices to
reflect a commitment to mitigating climate change, to reducing it. So, don’t tell
me that’s a failure. Don’t tell me that’s a failure. There’s been a normative shift,
and the policies will follow.
So, thank you to the two women who are working on problems that seem
completely insurmountable.They are not, and you are proof of it, so thank you.
If you leave with just one conclusion from our time together — other than
that we are very well fed — I hope it is that the social contract is dynamic. It’s
changing.You’re part of that change.You influence that change. It’s not just about
the governments and the governed, as you learned in your high school classes
and civics classes. It’s about all of us. Governments alone can’t solve the kinds
of problems we are looking at. Markets alone can’t solve the problems we are
looking at. Even ingenious citizen actors can’t solve the problems we’re looking
at. It takes us all. And sometimes it takes us all in combination, and sometimes it
takes us all in opposition. Either way, it takes us all.
So, whether you are supporting a courageous human rights activist, such as
the people we listened to last night, or someone who has forged a wonderful
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public-private partnership to eradicate a disease, or someone who has created
a social enterprise that’s providing goods and services and income-generating
opportunities for the poor — those are solutions.That’s part of its taking us all.
I was raised hearing lots of gratitude to Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Rockefeller — and I got to work in both of their foundations; we admire them
for having taken the charitable impulse and translated that into a whole field of
organized philanthropy. I’m not grateful to them so much for the institutions they
built, although I am, but for the questioning ethos they instilled in those institutions. Because what both of those men did was leave, as part of their legacy, no
strong string attached as to what the precise solutions are but simply the betterment of human kind. They wanted agile, adaptive institutions to be flexible to
respond to the needs of the time. That’s the legacy everybody in this room has
built upon.And that’s the legacy — that legacy of learning — for which I’m really
grateful and particularly grateful to you.
I’m grateful to each speaker of the past three days. It’s been extraordinary.
I’m grateful to every person in this room who got up early, stayed up late and
never stopped working — and that’s just what your normal life is like. You were
supposed to take a break here. I’m forever grateful to the staff team that did the
work. You’re going to have your chance for feedback when we send you the
surveys by e-mail about a nanosecond after you get on your plane, and we look
forward to seeing you next April in Silicon Valley. I think it’s April 15 to 17.
I ask that you join me in thanking — I’ll try to make sure they come into the
room — Sylvia Hacaj, who led the effort; Suzy Antounian; Naomi Mandelstein;
Sawako Sonoyama; Anne Calvert; Britt-Marie Alm; Ashlee Rea; Kerry King; Jordan
Welty; Josh Lease; Michele Dilworth; Nerve Macaspac; Rosalind Boone; Eva
Galanes-Rosenbaum, who keeps me in the right place; Heidi Young; Heidi
Moseson; Nina, Kathleen, Kevin, Eric, Tracey and the entire Fairmont Hotel staff.
So, thank you all! Thank you.
Thank you for the past three days together, and thank you for all you do. See you
next year!
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