Robert Davies (1951-2007)

Robert Davies, CEO of IBLF, passed away on 18th August, leaving a strong organisation which will continue to grow and have global impact.

Robert was an exceptional social entrepreneur who worked throughout his life to create innovative solutions to intractable problems.

As Deputy Chief Executive of the UK-based Business in the Community, his attention was focused on urban regeneration, education and environmental issues in the UK. In 1990, with HRH The Prince of Wales, he created the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF), working closely with a number of leading CEOs of multi-national companies.

As one of the Prince’s Charities, IBLF is a not-for-profit organisation that promotes the active involvement of business working together with governments, international agencies and civil society organisations to promote sustainable development. IBLF programmes address a number of critical issues such human rights, transparency, post-conflict / post-disaster reconstruction, health, sustainable tourism, the digital divide and youth unemployment.

Under Robert’s leadership, IBLF has worked in more than 90 countries and is actively supported by over 100 of the world’s leading corporations. IBLF is widely acknowledged as a global leader in many areas of its work and will continue to build on the legacy of its remarkable founder.

“The best tribute we can pay to Robert is to continue to build on all he has achieved.”
Neville Isdell
Chairman, IBLF Board of Trustees
Chairman & CEO, The Coca-Cola Company

Robert requested that no flowers be sent but that those who wish to might consider making a donation to St John’s Hospice, London NW8 9NH. This was where he spent his last two weeks and was wonderfully cared for.

Read some tributes to Robert that are pouring in.

What a difference seven months makes: my blog issues

Over the past months since I’ve been writing my blog, I have picked up some regular issues: Problems of private equity and the growing public relations disaster that many of the firms have been getting into. The ‘resource curse’ and the coincidence of the worlds’ dwindling energy supplies being controlled increasingly by near faceless national oil companies and corrupt countries that neglect or politicise their poor. The need to respond to the business opportunities in ‘poor markets’ and to engage with social entrepreneurs and adopt affordable and appropriate technology suited to the needs of the low income 90% masses. The desperate challenge of youth in the Middle East and how economic development can strengthen these societies immune systems.

I didn’t set out to predict these issues would get hotter by the week, or that my utopian solutions in my naïve question “so what’s to be done?” would seem more relevant by the week. But that is what seems to have happened, and I want to share a few reflections on this. What a difference seven months makes!

I got my inspiration from a visit this week with a wonderful friend to MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, to see the amazing exhibition of the 40 year career of American sculptor Richard Serra. Richard is a minimalist artist on a mammoth scale after my own heart, building with 15 centimetre thick steel plates normally used for ships hulls. He is a master of constructing a unique relationship between the viewer, the industrial material, the environment and space, and leaving a challenging sense of new perspective. I first visited his work with Donna Redel in a New York Chelsea studio on an icy weekend some four years ago and was entranced by walking between the cliff-like plates of slightly rusting steel.

‘Sequence 2006’, his latest sculpture created for MOMA, comprises two massive, free-standing and perfectly balanced steel plate spirals. Like a walk in a twisting narrow canyon, a surreal Petra, it creates an amazing illusion of movement and churning perspective. Everyone was smiling. My aging Father encouraged me to see the beauty in industrial works and settings and would have loved it. I spent most of my school days in the shadow of a belching steel works in the industrial Midlands of the UK. I have learned the unexpected sharpens our senses. The ordinary, when shaped and illuminated in innovative ways, gives us new perspectives on what we take for granted in our daily lives and didn’t see before. Richard Serra inspired me to think of what I was trying to achieve with my blog in seeing in new ways, the possibilities in problems and challenges.

The Trouble with Private Equity

I sensed that the growing public relations disaster of the private equity business in Europe and the US had become mainstream thinking when the Financial Times and then the Economist started serializing the misery of an essential and talented financial services industry. They are so unused to public scrutiny that they had no concept of how to defend their buy-outs from a growing chorus of abuse by politicians, unions and the public. Drawing on our IBLF work, I had suggested a five point plan to win friends, explain their role and apply their immense talents and resources to financial literacy and enterprise, before it cut up as rough as it did. I had several emails from advisers in the industry, not wanting to be identified, but confirming the diagnosis.

The Resource Curse

It is widely accepted that richness in resources such as oil, gas and minerals can bring misery and mass poverty where governments are weak, self-serving and corrupt. Regrettably many of the world’s greatest oil reservoirs are in such locations, where national oil companies rather than international public companies control production. Our suggestion was that business needed to take a lead in transparency and development as the scenario would surely get worse and now was the critical time to work collectively on the resources curse. Well, the estimates have now got worse. In its starkest warning yet, the International Energy Agency said “oil looks extremely tight in five years time” and there are “prospects of even tighter natural gas markets at the turn of the decade”. Oil demand will grow at an annual rate of 2.2 per cent during the next five years, up from a previous estimate of 2 per cent, to reach 95.8m barrels a day in 2012. China, the Middle East and other emerging countries will lead the increase.

Business with ‘the other 90%’

Social enterprise was a theme of the IBLF annual summer meeting last week in London and we have pointed out how social entrepreneurs can be a vital ally of business, in addressing the opportunity of the base of the pyramid, where poor consumers in rural areas and the world’s two million slums have $5 trillion in purchasing power. Interest in partnerships as a business model seems to grow daily. At the IBLF CEO ‘Global Leadership for Sustainability’ dinner in New York this week, ICICI Bank CEO, KV Kamath, gave a perfect illustration of the theme of my blog posting ‘Design for the other 90’ by using affordable technology and leap-frogging into adapted high technology – a collapsible seat and bench, scanner, PC and biometric reader – to bring micro-finance in viable quantities to millions of poor rural consumers across India through partnerships with thousands of social entrepreneurs. Richard Edelman described this in his blog posting for 11th July ‘Two Suitcases’ as a “marriage of old and new India”. [Disclosure, ICICI Bank and Edelman are IBLF corporate partners]

The Gaza Tragedy

The tragedy of near civil war in Gaza and the West Bank underscored the risks of continued regional conflict and difficulties in addressing the economic development challenges of creating 80 million jobs for young people, when the political climate is not conducive. As sure as night follows day, the risks will consume us all in terms of conflict, instability, extremism and sustainability, if business does not play its part in economic engagement and enterprise in ways I proposed. It was, in my view, predictable that once the fighting ceased in Gaza, Hamas, with its roots as much in a mass welfare and self-help movement as in military operations, would start to organize the vital immune system of jobs, social work, housing and welfare so vitally needed elsewhere across this fractured region.

Last week we also celebrated the release of BBC Journalist, Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza, and the reawakening to the vital role of good journalism in keeping us informed of the risks and possibilities, as well as the facts and scope for accountability, through the fogs of politics and conflict. But we should also mourn the 105 journalists who didn’t make it and have been killed so far in this year, in countries in conflict and those that know better but simply don’t like transparency and free expression.

I’ve had a little pause from writing my weekly blog as I have focused every gram of my energy, if not my thinking, on our IBLF events in London and New York and the production of our annual review and materials, which I hope you will download off our website (www.iblf.org). I’m now back to ideas, observations and themes on how we can see the possibilities in development challenges. I am keen to hear your views on these issues.

Robert

Footnote: Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years runs to September 10th at MOMA, New York.

Technorati Tags: Middle East, Arabia, social enterprise, oil, gas, private equity, poverty, blogging

Private Equity plays Chicken : another personal word

Who performs for private equity?

I wrote my blog postings last March on the challenge of saving profile and reputation for the mega buy out Private Equity and hedge fund investors. I was imagining that rookie private equity off-track drivers would moderate their race of chicken once on our corporate freeways to think about their collective image problem transferring under Grand Prix rules. The public never knew half the story of the charming Barbarians at the gate before and their tax status on a world of low pay and cynicism. What can be done?

There was opportunity to explain their value, soften their approach, work together, talk to politicians and activist investors and win community support. I suggested five steps on the road to perception of corporate responsibility. I was firmly on their side and still am. Some like Ronnie Cohen and his former Apax colleagues are amongst my heroes in their bold contributions to society.

Yesterday according to the FT, Sir Ronald Cohen added to criticism of the industry by suggesting partners running “mega-funds” should pay more tax. Sir Ronald, founder of private equity giant Apax Partners and one-time chairman of the British Venture Capital Association, told the FT that treatment of the largest firms should be re-examined.

In a nod to the growing political campaign in Europe highlighted at the G8, in France, Germany and the UK, to curtail freedoms and taper relief provisions that enable some executives to pay tax at 10 per cent, Sir Ronald said the 10 per cent rate should be raised “to something more reasonable”. His comments come in a week that had seen private equity’s representatives roasted by British MPs at a UK Parliament Treasury select committee.

Meanwhile, in the US, Blackstone’s plans for a landmark stock market listing were said to be dealt a blow in the US Senate on Thursday night with proposed new laws that could impose higher taxes on private equity groups seeking to sell their shares to the public. The move marks the first concrete political challenge in the US to the booming private equity industry and could also derail potential public offerings by other large buy-out groups. It will resonate in Europe and the global playing field.

Are the buy out groups now shooting the messengers? The FT says the UK’s deepening political controversy over private equity image has intensified pressure on the industry trade body to overhaul its crisis-stricken leadership and structure amid signs of revolt by its members. Perhaps the chairman of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, did read my blog.

Wol Kolade, told the FT the industry should “rethink what we are doing and how we go about it.” After suffering a verbal mauling by MPs on the Commons’ Treasury committee’s inquiry into private equity on Tuesday, Mr Kolade said he had asked the BVCA’s beleaguered chief executive, Peter Linthwaite, to step down from a review of the industry body, due to report in October. He also removed private equity visionary Jeremy Hand, the vice-chairman, from the review but denied speculation that Mr Linthwaite had resigned.

US leaders Carlyle, KKR and TPG are very very fast and clever - with record deals. Even though in hot water in the US, coming under fire from States, workers and debt concerned investors, many are into responsible and ethical thinking and smart philanthropy. The trouble is they look like being on another planet from 2007 politics, public insecurity and attitude and wages. I do admire what Blackstone are trying to achieve and think they get it.

We are open for business in discussing our steps for action on seeing the possibilities for the societal role of private equity. In Europe, the industry is shooting their messengers following political onslaught and getting rid of their trade association spokesmen to line up behind the big industrial lobbies to protect their privileged tax breaks and status which sees their cleaners paying more tax and having less security.

I confessed to being shocked when I talked this through with FT commentators, friends and private equity leaders, and heard their agonized response when I met several of the leaders in Los Angeles in April – they were responsible as individuals not institutions, not as private institutions. They were the smartest men in the room.

There is great scope for partnering with social entrepreneurs and financial literacy. The five ideas suggested that action must be multi-track with a focus on business standards (transparency and responsibility), reputation (contribution to financial education and communities affected by business operations) and communication (engaging in a dialogue). I hoped that the UK review and the US Private Equity Council will still look at this. The industry leaders must still see the possibilities as an opportunity for engagement with the society in which they are now far more influential and exposed players.

Please let me have your views and comments.

Technorati Tags: private equity , responsible investment

World’s ghettos challenge our immune systems

Around the world over a billion people, who live on the edge of society and its opportunities, go to bed in overcrowded and deprived slums and shanties, and a larger number are disaffected from having a stake in society’s jobs, homes and safety nets. The phenomenon of prosperous communities living close to inner city, suburban or even rural mass communities of poor under-class is a definition and challenge of our urban age.

The gap is becoming explosive and the threats more immediate, and at least as expensive as most other environmental time-bombs, unless we engage in partnerships to empower local entrepreneurs and community leaders for self-help.

Ghettos are simmering everywhere in our midst from New York’s South Bronx , London’s East End to Paris’s bleak suburbs, in Gaza and Algeria and the regions vast refugee camps, or in the slums and shanties of Mexico City’s Neza-Chalco-Itza four million person barrio, Mumbai’s Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, and Johannesburg’s endless squatter camps. Nigeria and Kenya’s shanties defy description. They are also home to some of the most vibrant, entrepreneurial, generous and, in my personal experience, inspiring grass roots leadership struggling to see the possibilities of empowered self-help solutions.

These are the vote-less and tenure-less worlds of the informal economy, inter-generational deprivation, the drug trade, the garbage sorting, the shelters for the stateless, lawless and refugees, the incubators for epidemics and the radical shapers of young minds. The big difference from their timeless existence is that in 20 years they have grown rapidly – 30% in 20 years and set to double to two billion in another 20 - cannot be contained and threaten our fragile sustainability in a more global radicalising way.

I’ve spent some time recently learning about immune systems and their invisible, indispensable role in keeping disease and sickness at bay. I began to see a direct parallel with what stops the systemic breakdown and collapse of society when it is attacked by harmful and evil forces set to undermine it. There are conditions in which immune systems flourish and replenish and there are occasions they are blind to the enemy within, such as cancer cells. It is clear that immune systems can be nurtured, re-booted and re-focussed on performing their constant silent miracles of daily sustainability. But first we have to be more aware of them and their life-sustaining role.

Unless we engage in creating hope and possibility for the children of these fast growing ghettos, there is a certain and dangerous risk they will undermine the sustainability of our world through the collapse of our society’s immune systems. The destruction of our natural defence systems of livelihoods, family, property rights and civil rights is undermined by disaffection and alienation. Much can be done that is practical, achievable and possibly scalable, through partnerships between business and civil society.

The recording of history’s first ghetto may have been in sixteenth century Venice, where persecuted yet prosperous Jews were enclosed in a marginal site at Cannaregio, Sestiere to be kept from sight and mind yet co-existing behind curfew gates and isolated by canals. The Nazis perfected the ghastly model. Today, it means less educated and poverty stricken urban areas. To Arabs in North Africa, they were ‘mellah’, for Hispanics ‘barrios’ and in the US they even officially include trailer parks in the category. These enclaves on marginal land and decaying city sites are always defined by sub-standard or non-existent public infrastructure and services, lack of sanitation in the less developed world, yet symbiotic with the bigger society, they come to threaten, in terms of being a pool of cheap labour and scavenging.

New York Time columnist Bob Herbert described this well in a recent op ed ‘American Cities and the Great Divide’ , where 700,000 of New York City’s eight million residents are worth a million dollars or more, yet 25% of all families with children — that’s 1.5 million New Yorkers — are trying to make it on incomes that are below the federal poverty threshold. 185,000 of its children ages five or younger are poor, 18,000 are consigned to homeless shelters each night, and more than a million New Yorkers get food stamps, and another 700,000 are eligible but not receiving them. And then there is the Bronx, the poorest county in the USA within sight of Manhatten’s gleaming skyscrapers, and where IBLF has recently engaged in an economic development partnership .

“The streets that are paved with gold for some are covered with ash for many others. There are few better illustrations of the increasingly disturbing divide between rich and poor than New York City.” Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, 22 May 2007.

Europe witnessed the potential threat in its midst during the 20 nights of riots that rocked certain parts of the ‘banlieues’, namely the bleak outskirt, low-income housing projects occupied by a concentration of young unemployed North Africans, in Paris and across France’s towns and cities in October 2005. The wake-up call torched 9,000 cars and arrested 3,000 – it would have been far higher as most rioters were underage.

To imprison or to engage?

I learned from my own experiences in Apartheid South Africa, Northern Ireland and even my chilling memories of the Berlin Wall, that walls and policing are no solution beyond containing symptoms. A most disturbing example of a giant ghetto, created by short-term international blindness, coupled with elements of bankrupt and history-imprisoned leadership both sides of the divide, is Gaza and the West Bank with its surreal 500 check-points.

Walled in, left and ignored, the swelling ghettos of the billion poor and disaffected will consume us and render our comfortable life unsustainable. They threaten society’s immune system through lack of jobs, property and civil rights, undermining families and spreading disaffection instead of hope – the building blocks of our immune systems.

It is not quite so hopeless as we think. We can support social entrepreneurs and leaders empowering their communities in self-help strategies. You can find many scalable examples in my blog. There are examples of companies such as Cemex in Mexico and ICICI Bank in India engaging in market solutions to ghetto opportunities. [Disclosure: ICICI Bank is an IBLF corporate partner.]

We can reach out with training and enterprise opportunities in our value chains, building markets and adapting products. We can encourage all forms of cross-cultural, sporting and civic engagement. Womens’ groups have a key role to play as we are seeing in Algeria, where women may have emerged as Algeria’s most potent force for social change.

“Women, and the women’s movement, could be leading us to modernity,” Abdel Nasser Djabi, professor of sociology, University of Algiers.

Without engagement by the rich world, led by the business world, in opportunity and outreach and shaping business models to see this vast population as an economic opportunity and market rather than a focus for philanthropy, prayers and repression, our social defences simply will not hold. We must see the possibilities in strengthening our natural sustaining immune systems through engaging in practical action to bridge the divides with the communities in our midst and in our overseas markets. What do you think?

Photos:
Unless we engage with the cities of the disaffected our world will not be sustainable – Gaza City street scene

Nightly riots in France’s banlieues – news photo 2005

Youth in the ghettoes; resource, opportunity or problem – Refugee Camp Gaza

No stake; no responsibility – news photo South Africa squatter camp

Economic development provides the immune system of the world’s ghettoes, military solutions are the expensive and unsustainable alternative – seeing for ourselves in Gaza with UN protection.

Technorati Tags: ghettos, shanty towns, women and philanthropy

Design for the Other 90% - Problem or Opportunity?

There are amazing possibilities in alleviating poverty and stimulating development in design for the ‘other 90%’ people of our world. Simple and affordable technologies and distribution systems pioneered by social entrepreneurs can bring revolutionary and sustainable breakthroughs in meeting basic needs such as hunger, health and education. What can be done to scale appropriate technology, and how can business help rather than hinder?

Most design of labour saving machinery, health promotion, technology, tools for educational access and transport is for the rich top 10% of the world, who present a rich commercial market. Yet the other 90% - the four billion people who live in relative poverty – have a combined purchasing power that amounts to $5 trillion, according to the World Resources Institute. What is more, their livelihoods, security and health can be more sustainable through the application and market development of many low cost, appropriate technologies that can revolutionize their lives. What’s good for us, may simply not be at all good for them, as political correctness forces us to think.

The challenge is to stop paternalistic top-down aid from undermining the self-help capacity of the poor, enable them to access affordable design and technology and facilitate traditional market mechanisms that empower local people as entrepreneurs and distributors. There is a quiet revolution now going on, led by designers, architects, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, micro-finance intermediaries and socially committed small firms, that business can partner to make a massive potential impact on poverty and sustainability.

The possibilities are well illustrated by an excellent exhibition of 30 projects I visited a few days back in New York. ‘Design for the Other 90%’ exhibits at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum until 23 September. It is a bit deficient in the economics of the technologies, R&D and implementation, and some breakthrough technologies are absent such as cell-phones. But the exhibition encompasses a broad set of modern social and economic concerns that help, rather than exploit, poorer economies; minimize environmental impact; increase social inclusion; improve healthcare at all levels; and advance the quality and accessibility of education.

Each object on display tells a story – water purification, affordable energy and transport, food preparation, anti-malarial bed-nets, simple shelters and safe latrines - and provides a window through which we can observe this expanding field, applicable both to poor countries and poor communities in rich countries such as post hurricane Katrina New Orleans. In the main, they are all cost effective, affordable, locally maintainable and revenue-generating for local entrepreneurs, thus ensuring sustainability. Design for the Other 90% demonstrates how design can be a dynamic force in saving and transforming lives, at home and around the world.

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

I have long been fascinated by appropriate technology and remember well a pilgrimage in the early 1970’s to a gloomy Quaker Meeting House in London’s Euston Road to hear the late Fritz Schumacher , another hero and author of ‘Small is Beautiful’ . He was inspirational, but I would never have guessed how relevant his disruptive thoughts on economics, as if people mattered, would one day be to the world and my life. He founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now called Practical Action) and saw ‘intermediate technology’ as belonging between the capital-intensive advanced technologies of the ‘West’, driven by large scale production and profit, and the traditional subsistence technologies of developing countries, intended to build upon the existing skills, knowledge and cultural norms of women and men in developing countries, while increasing the efficiency and productivity of their enterprises or domestic activities, and sustain the local environment. Buddhist economics are not so mad in these circumstances.

“It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.”
Dr E F Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973

An influence on my own work, I co-founded an organisation in the 1980’s, National Energy Action (26 years old this week) to provide affordable access to low cost energy conservation measures, which accumulatively assisted 6 million UK low income households and created countless jobs. At IBLF we have engaged in some affordable access and appropriate technology programmes – in access to affordable IT through the IBLF Digital Partnership, rainwater-harvesting, solar access partnerships and post-tsunami recovery. Several of the Alcan Prize entrants are outstanding social entrepreneurs engaged in appropriate technology. Some of the Youth Business International projects have been engaged in affordable and appropriate technology such as the YBI Entrepreneur of the Year winner who developed a garbage collection service, Beta Bins Waste Management in Kenya. More recently, IBLF has been engaged in base of the pyramid business development and brokering investors and social entrepreneurs meeting basic needs.

Case for a new mind-set

What I have come to realise, is that all too many organisations and companies that profess concern for sustainable global development find it difficult to scale down their thinking to the part they can play in low cost affordable solutions that are replicable, sustainable and amenable to local people through grass roots empowered entrepreneurs. All too many think in the dimensions of top-down, high tech Olympic swimming pool scale solutions. A new breed of social entrepreneurs and young designers are challenging this, and offer great potential partners for companies. The influence of Design Corps founded by Bryan Bell, Development Alternatives, Architecture for Humanity and Design Like You Give a Damn are now gaining professional traction and a solid resource base in shelter, energy and community design.

In my view, all companies wishing to play a part in global development should be adopting appropriate design and technology partners as advisers. They can guide them into a virtuous circle to bring their immense reach, influence and logistical skills to solving the challenges of basic needs through sustainable market mechanisms.

For example, the exhibition points out how ‘of the world’s poor, 70% live in rural areas, and depend on agriculture as their main source of income. Designers have devised a variety of extremely low-cost micro-irrigation tools to extend the growing season for these small-scale farmers. The resulting increases in crop yield and income have proven to be one of the fastest and most effective ways for the rural poor to emerge from poverty. The simple human-powered treadle pump has had the most significant impact in the developing world: over two million treadle pumps installed worldwide have been cheaply manufactured and maintained’.

There is no shortage of projects and partners. Millions around the world, especially in rural Africa, live kilometers from a reliable source of clean water, leaving them vulnerable to cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. The Q Drum (see photo) is a durable container designed to roll easily, and can transport seventy-five liters of clean and potable water. Rolling the water in a cylindrical container, rather than lifting and carrying it, eases the burden of bringing water to those who need it. There are examples of water filters, low cost solar cookers, stoves that reduce impacts of life-threatening chest infections (2 million people a year, primarily children, die from inhaling cooking-fire smoke), and adapted bikes.

Fuel and power are needed for cooking, heating, lighting, communication, and income generation, yet more than 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity; and 2.4 billion people lack access to modern fuels for cooking and heating, relying instead on wood, dung, and crop residue. So increasing the availability of low cost renewable energy such as solar, bio-gas and more efficient stoves is primary to reducing poverty in the developing world. Companies need to partner experienced development organizations:

• KickStart is a non-profit organization founded in Kenya in 1991 by Nick Moon and Martin Fisher that develops and markets new technologies in Africa and has helped start over 50,000 local enterprises;
• International Development Enterprises (IDE) is an Indian not-for-profit enterprise that stimulates a sustainable and free market by creating demand for affordable technologies and ensuring a sustainable supply chain, in cooperation with the global family of IDE organizations – another Alcan Prize finalist.
• Grameen Shakti was founded in 1996 as one of the family member of Grameen family of companies for dealing with the renewable energy such as solar, wind and bio-gas and has installed over 65,000 Solar Home Systems in Bangladesh.
• SELCO India, the Solar Electric Light Company, provides infrastructure solutions to under-served households and businesses in India and rest of the developing world and has brought reliable, affordable, and environmentally sustainable electricity to 55,000 homes and businesses since 1995.
• Jaipur Foot has developed a low cost artificial limbs to assist the 10 million people in India suffering from locomotor disabilities on a scalable and sustainable business model.

Fast Company ‘Social Capitalist Award’ and collaboration from the International Finance Corporation Grass Roots Business Initiative. Social Investment funds are seeking them out such as Acumen Fund founded by Jaqueline Novogratz. An adventurous Acumen investment was, in affordable eyeglasses, developed by Scojo Foundation in India that trains Vision Entrepreneurs, independent distributors who earn a percentage of sales, on how to educate low-income communities on the benefits of reading glasses in a country where 250m Indians don’t have them, and distribute them effectively. They will soon reach 1.7M with affordable reading glasses.

Projects incorporating design and technology for the other 90% deserve our backing. Other than adopting partners like those mentioned business can venture fund social enterprises, engage their staff and ensure they have a grass roots enterprise arm to their operations in developing countries. Business leaders must see the possibilities in seeing the grass roots as a different opportunity that needs their backing for long term mutual sustainability.

Let me know your thoughts on how appropriate technology can serve the grass roots and what role you can play?

Photos:
Design for the Other 90% exhibits at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum displaying until 23 September.

Rolling water carrier - affordable technology can save time, reduce back-breaking work and improve health for the poor – simple ideas exceed capacity to develop sustainable financial models

Women villagers in rural Rajasthan, India assemble a solar cooker using mirrors and bicycle parts.

Quality of village life can be better and healthier than growing urban slums due to running water, power and light from affordable and sustainable solar – here in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains

Technorati Tags: appropriate technology, social enterprise, poverty

Why do I blog?

Thank you to those who commented on my blog on social entrepreneurship last week ‘Social Entrepreneurs Islands of Hope in Oceans of Social Need ‘. It was the largest response I have had since I started blogging in January. Clearly, social enterprise stirs a lot of passion and interest. I was thrilled that my blog readers found it stimulating and useful and also value the links in my blogs.

Yes, it does take some time for me and Jenny Harriott, who patiently edits and posts my blogs, to research. But it is a way of capitalising on my contact network and opening it to others that I am committed to do. Our lives are all too short not to share what and who we know so the world can profit and the journey to sustainability can be shortened.

I have tried to blog on some of the trends I see. Employees are mellowing in a rather threatening world and expecting better standards and global citizenship of their employers. Business leaders are rapidly recognising that responsible leadership can reduce risk and improve reputation. Consumers are shifting to a more organic and fair supply chain. Institutional investors are moving fast on sustainability issues. Professions are greening. Students and MBA graduates are looking for more than a good pay cheque.

Its all happening and converging far, far faster than even optimists like me would have ever predicted. The question is how to make an impact, learn faster and align business models and practices to the opportunities.

I try and pick issues from my experience that I consider fundamental to global and local sustainability. I have had more than enough personal reasons to listen more, respond with greater sensitivity and be gentler about the world and people around me. I could get more frustrated by seeing the immense possibilities everywhere, that so many leaders just don’t seem to get. My blog has been an extension of a maturing sixth sense. Thanks to my special friends for their enduring faith and encouragement, and those who connected with me at least for a while.

I had very positive feedback on social enterprise, digital divide and Arab youth employment. I know people read my two longer blogs on both Private Equity and the Trouble with Supermarkets – both making the case for leaders in those sectors to communicate better and realise that they have to engage more with society. Daily events since I posted those blogs have made the case even more strongly. I puzzle about why the leaders in those sectors are so slow to see the possibilities.

This weekend I was on Long Island, reflecting with Richard Edelman, a good friend who helped inspire my blogging. I’ve been posting my blog SeeingThePossibilities.com for 17 weeks now. I started because I wanted to share my observations from my restless IBLF life, and I wanted to use the fast growing social media to reach a wider network and also hear your feedback. Many more email me in response than actually comment on the blog – I wish more would post comments, and I’ve even recently set a question to stimulate that.

I am pleased that the readership is from the US West Coast to East Asia’s Pacific, that a third of my visitors are returners, and that some 200 regular weekly hits are increasing. I have tried to focus on the space between global development, sustainability, responsible business leadership and social enterprise, picking up a new theme each week from my travels or observations. I’m even more committed. Thanks, my friends, for sticking with me.

Robert

Technorati Tags: Blogging

Social Entrepreneurs Islands of Hope in Oceans of Social Need

At the heart of many of the world’s most innovative approaches to addressing poverty, illiteracy, hunger and thirst are visionary social entrepreneurs, devoting themselves to the bottom lines of empowerment, economic opportunity, sustainability and change. They may not yet be quoted on the Nasdaq, S&P and FTSE, but social entrepreneurs are beacons of hope in addressing the looming social crisis that could derail globalisation.

Why are social entrepreneurs so important for business and all too paternalistic and controlling governments? Why is their role so little recognised and belittled? And, how can we scale up the growth and impact of grass roots entrepreneurs to bring sustainable solutions to the most pressing social problems of countries and communities?

In my own professional journey, from tackling poverty and regeneration in British and American cities of the 1970’s, unemployment and economic development in the 1980’s and international development since the Berlin Wall collapsed to usher in globalisation in 1989, I have had one consistent experience. I observed that change and innovation is always led from the margins, often by angry and restless individuals who apply entrepreneurial skills to the problems, social challenges and injustices, even if they don’t recognise it as entrepreneurialism.

I saw it for myself in New York’s Bronx with the South Bronx Development Corporation radical self-help, in Derry Northern Ireland with the heroic human rights activist and community entrepreneur Paddy Docherty, in Liverpool, Pittsburg, Chicago (in the tradition of Saul Alinsky) and Berlin. It was explained to me by my heroine the late Jane Jacobs.

It wasn’t always called social enterprise then, more often community work with a quest for self-sufficiency and a need to fight the oppression of bureaucratic paternalism, dependency and official oppression. It was only for a brief period of rampant Welfarism, that some even now are trying hard to recreate in aid policy for the less developed world, that we seemed to forget that markets are and always have been the foundation of communities and sustainable prosperity.

Business has to engage in the challenges of poverty and strengthening local markets. In the long-run, its business model is not sustainable where dangerous divides grow between rich and poor, where business is a prosperous island in a ghetto. There is an opportunity here for business and many, like Alcan recognise this and want to support social enterprise. The question is how to be effective and who to partner with. [disclosure: Alcan Inc is a corporate partner of IBLF]

“….Think of a stretch limousine driving through an urban ghetto. Inside is the post-industrial world of western Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan and the emerging Pacific Rim.
Outside are all the rest….”
Martin Wolf, Columnist, Financial Times

This week in Zurich, Alcan and IBLF convened the finalists and winner in the Alcan Prize for Sustainability to share their experiences and ideas. Through the Alcan Prize, applicants and finalists over three years, IBLF has formed a unique network of several hundred NGOs engaged in partnerships for sustainability across the world. The Alcan Prize is the foremost global award for such organisations, awarding $1M to the winner and a series of grants for partnership training to finalists.

“Already committed to making sustainability real in our operations, we realized we could make it real in everything we do … including the external projects we support. We created the Alcan Prize for Sustainability to launch this new approach to community investment. It is a demonstration of our belief that no one sector, acting alone, can address the serious economic, social, and environmental challenges that face us today.……Alcan is stating our belief that civil society organizations on the ground can be instrumental partners, can be trusted in helping us know the most effective routes to truly sustainable communities.”
Dick Evans, President & CEO, Alcan Inc, speaking in Zurich 3 May.

Social Entrepreneurs are people who set up and run initiatives focussed on meeting social goals through more sustainable and entrepreneurial processes than voluntary organisations that live hand to mouth of donations. They often work with market mechanisms and self-generating economic activity.

They are innovative and transformational, focussing on change in their communities and countries. Many of their projects are reaching real scale and impact within communities over time, leveraging wider resources, engaging massive community involvement and bringing empowerment. They can often bring solutions to critical social problems that have defied governments and wasted public resources. Social enterprise can build sustainable solutions where patronising donor aid undermines community self-sufficiency.

Helen Loftin of Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) told me this week in Zurich how their research in Tanzania showed that when poor mothers purchased with some of their own resources insecticide treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria they used them 85% of the time, compared with only 30-40% use when they were distributed free as aid. 4,000 local retailers now sell nets into remote areas of Tanzania through sustainable distribution chains.

Social entrepreneurs are often treated with suspicion and dismissed by governments and officials as they are often challenging, less orthodox in their approach, empowering people as active participants rather than passive consumers. They are not easily controlled by governments and often threaten the status quo and political patronage.

Social enterprises across Latin America, Africa and South Asia are now providing low cost credit, water, healthcare, childcare and education for the poor where government is failing – building activist and engaged consumers and parents movements. There are examples in India, such as in the sprawling Dharavi Slums in Mumbai, the biggest in Asia, of lavatories and washing facilities being run as social enterprises maintained by small charges. There are many examples of social enterprises in housing and economic development in poor inner city communities of rich countries such as Britain and America.

Last year I visited the Jaipur Viraset Foundation, run by the long-determined Faith Singh, which is sponsoring cultural heritage and conservation programmes in downtown Jaipur in India in sustainable approaches to regeneration of poor communities and decaying historic infrastructure. It is also leading to a renaissance in crafts and conservation skills – it would be an ideal partner for tourism companies and major retailers.

The Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, founded by Bunker Roy (top picture) was last year’s winner of the $1million Alcan Prize and has enabled 750,000 poor people to have access to safe drinking water, educated 75,000 children in their solar-lit nightschools and 100,000 to have access to solar lighting.

The Naandi Foundation in Hyderabad India, another Alcan Prize finalist, provides a nourishing meal each day for more than half a million school children, enabling many girls to stay in school, and helped raise learning and attendance standards in over 3,000 schools, as well as providing microfinance and development.

In New York’s South Bronx, IBLF partner the Women’s Housing & Economic Development Organisation WHEDCO has focussed on key areas of matching local skill to local need and formed business strategies for self-employment for women. High on the list is training women to set up over 100 domestic and licensed child-minding businesses, and turning their flair for cooking into food businesses trained in their incubator.

Supporting social entrepreneurs

Increasingly, some farsighted organisations are now shining the spotlight on social entrepreneurs. Founded by Bill Drayton in 1980, US based Ashoka is one of the longest standing global associations of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs – “men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems”. Ashoka has elected over 1,800 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.

Canadian born eBay founder and movie producer Jeff Skoll formed the Skoll Foundation to support social entrepreneurs and set up the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, to advance the field of social entrepreneurship through world-class education, knowledge creation, and through brokering new and empowering connections.

His eBay partner Pierre Omidyar, and wife Pam set up the
Omidyar Network with a $200 million for-profit fund and a $200 million nonprofit to make investments to advance their mission of social enterprise. They believe “all individuals have the innate potential to make life better for themselves and their communities”. Certain conditions increase the likelihood for individuals to discover and act on that potential, and consequently improve the quality of their lives including access to information, resources and tools, the ability to connect to others with shared interests.

The New York based Acumen Fund founded by Jacqueline Novogratz is a global venture fund using entrepreneurial approaches to tackling problems of poverty. It provides access to capital and business expertise to enable social ventures in areas such as housing, water and health.

World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilda set up the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship to shine the light on good examples by providing opportunities and events that highlight social entrepreneurship as a key element to advance societies and address social problems in an innovative and effective manner.

The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy sponsored by the Sainsbury Family aim to reward and promote excellent local sustainable energy solutions in the UK and the developing world.

Lessons from the social entrepreneurs

There are many lessons to learn from their growth in activity, and learning is essential if they are to be scaled.

First, it is essential to recognise the role of the social entrepreneur as leaders, rather than merely providers of services. Individuals are essential to start-up and success if not long-term sustainability.

Empowerment of communities and consumers are at the heart of social enterprise and paternalism is the enemy of self reliance.

Social enterprises emerge as a process of spontaneity – the task of those trying to nurture it is to enable spontaneity and not stifle it. To provide opportunities in local services and markets and not let ‘universalism’ be the enemy of keeping social enterprise down. When Los Angeles stopped banning hawkers there was an explosion of self-employment and industry from people wanting to earn their own living.

Social entrepreneurs need access to funding and support to help them meet the challenge of incubation and growth, and escape the hand-to mouth aid approach.

Finally, much can be done to nurture social enterprise through enabling them to engage in markets and provide a wide range of services that states are failing to provide or provide effectively – in areas such as education, healthcare, water, garbage, energy and sanitation infrastructure and basic needs.

Q: I would love to hear how you see the possibilities of nurturing social enterprise across the world.

Technorati Tags: social entrepreneurs, social enterprise

America seeks a more effective philanthropy model

This week I was reminded how, out of the raw capitalist model of American enterprise, wealthy Americans are the most generous philanthropists on the planet. I was also reminded in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco how Americans want to be more effective philanthropists in a bigger global world, whose problems are spilling over onto their backyards and interests. A lot is to be more effective in their own country, beset by escalating education, health and crime problems, but a desire to be more effective overseas is also strongly emerging.

As a guest of the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles and the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, I was engaged in debates on how good projects can be scaled, on strategic and international philanthropy and engagement, and how new models of social investment could be linked to overseas business in countries, such as Vietnam. What keeps most philanthropists back from supporting causes beyond their backyards? How can philanthropy leverage real and sustainable change?

Milken was an eclectic gathering of 3,000 mainly rich West Coast professionals and expert panelists. It is refreshing as an organisation, in being open to work with others and give them free reign to demonstrate their expertise without trying to steal the credit for themselves. In a workshop in Beverly Hills, where I was a panelist for high net worth individuals, over one third of those present put their hands up when asked if they were setting up foundations. Money, it appears, was not the problem, but more lack of experience of how to spend it, let alone being strategic. Most giving is to religion (over $90bn), local education and health and their own backyards linked to their own personal experiences.

Less than two years ago and pre-Warren Buffet gift, charitable giving in the US was $260.3bn (that was 2.1% of GDP) of which individuals gave $199.1bn, corporates $13.8bn (then the fastest rising sector) and foundations gave $30bn. There’s $600-billion sitting in foundation endowments, according to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers. Americans send more than $70-billion a year to aid people in developing countries, more than three times as much as the federal government provides in overseas aid, according to a recent study by the Hudson Institute. Tony Lynch, of strategic fund-raising and investment advisors Odell Simms & Associates, notices a growing interest in strategic philanthropy and international engagement. (disclosure: OSA are strategic advisors to IBLF)

In my packed workshop, Doug Mellinger of Foundation Source , a leading US provider of outsourced support services for private foundations, characterized much charitable giving by private individuals and families in the USA as “spray and pray”. There is growing consensus that a more strategic approach is needed, greater personal engagement of the founders, consideration of how to leverage other sources and gear in greater non-cash support. The interest in my discussion was in how to form more successful partnerships working through intermediaries such as IBLF to assist engagement particularly helping risk-sharing in international projects, and how to ensure your giving has a sustainable effect rather than a short-term project that collapsed at the end of the grant.

Vietnam was one such country with growing US philanthropic interest, the subject of a workshop I moderated at Milken. There was a clear view that effective business models for doing business in Vietnam should incorporate social investment in partnership initiatives that support human resource development, water infrastructure and poverty alleviation. IBLF is working with the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Government to develop sustainability strategies for business in Vietnam, where the challenge was to integrate sustainability and social investment into their business models and also to support enterprise approaches to provision of health and education.

Alongside being a major offshore gas operator, BP was engaged in women’s development and microfinance partnerships in rural areas. Qualcomm was engaged in partnerships to improve IT access in Vietnamese further education institutions through its Wireless Reach programme. Coca-Cola was supporting youth development programmes throughout the country. The Vietnamese Footwear Partnership, initiated by IBLF with the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and supported by footwear companies Pentland, Nike, Addidas and others, has now raised social standards in 60% of Vietnamese factories, illustrating how business competitiveness and workforce benefited from improved social standards. Great examples were given by the East Meets West Foundation, which is engaged in extensive social investment programmes across Vietnam. (disclosure: BP, Qualcomm, Coca-Cola, and Pentland are IBLF corporate partners)

US leadership

There are some serious leadership gaps in the US right now when it comes to addressing world problems in positive ways, and The Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York fills a much exposed gap. It is a dynamic example of a machine to raise the profile of commitments made by individuals, companies and foundations to tackle world problems starting with poor communities in the USA. More a catalyst and cheer-leader than a policy analyst or enabler, it is action focussed and points to the power of individual leaders. In quite a few cases, it was brought along rich people who hadn’t thought out what or how to support in the past.

When I wrote my earlier blogs on private equity ‘Private Equity versus Public Trust’ on March 15 and 22, I argued the case for private equity leaders to address the challenges of reputation and engagement. So it was interesting this week to meet the heads of several private equity companies including Texas Pacific, Carlyle, Apax and a host of less well known. They are certainly the smartest guys in the room.

But I’m still left thinking how rarely has there been a business model where so much wealth and investment influence is moving around so fast with so little engagement in the values of the businesses in which they are engaged. They often lack the capacity and perceived need to engage in issues of corporate responsibility, even though companies perceive these issues as risks, if not opportunities. They see how those private equity companies going more public will need to engage more, but otherwise they are still below the radar. So it comes down to leadership and private values in business.

There have been a lot of high spots in my travels across America this week, not least a very special person singing Happy Birthday to me. But my chance encounter with Quincy Jones the American music impresario and record producer, in his Beverly Hills dream home established his place for me as a real hero amongst rich people engaging with society. More prominent than his shelves of gleaming ‘Grammys’ , other awards and his Oscar on the piano, was a reminder in rows of more modest humanitarian awards and memorabilia, that core to Quincy’s whole life has been helping others up, particularly black youth. Where many Stars follow their egos and the money a lot of Quincy has followed his heart and conscience as well over long, long periods.

Q: I would love to hear from you about how you see the role of high net worth people in our society, and whether more strategic philanthropy has some of the answers?

Technorati Tags: philanthropy, giving, fundraising, richest americans, private equity

Reawakening the digital development dream

Seven years ago at the height of the ‘dot-com’ boom there was constant chatter about the need to help poor communities and countries close the ‘digital divide’. Fast forward half a decade of exponential technological progress and UN conferences, and the digital divide between the world’s rich and poor is accelerating as much as other gaps in the unprecedented opportunities of globalization. What can be done that is scalable and sustainable?

We were right in grasping that access to IT could be transformational in development. Yet we failed miserably to grasp that diffusion of IT needed a sustainable model of affordable access for this to be a reality beyond much-hyped digital village and e.lab pilot projects.

In Africa, a model is now quietly being developed which could offer a sustainable and affordable solution for poor communities based on a global and local partnership. A breakthrough in IT access for education, health and enterprise is possible by linking the mass decommissioning of high quality IT in the rich business world, through responsible and locally managed refurbishment and deployment, plus essential training and capacity building.

The model needs to beat off skeptics, IT utopians and the forces of high pressure, short-term technology marketing to poor world governments who together simply don’t want to see practical partnership solutions as sexy. How can the poor have affordable access to technology to underpin their community development needs – and what role for business in building inclusive access to technology in their global markets?

In 2000, when digital divide projects and research studies were being announced every other day, IBLF looked at why so few of the projects appeared to be scalable and sustainable beyond a handful of small-scale pilots. There were exceptions, such as the 10,000 Cisco Systems Networking Academies in over 150 countries that had adopted a more financially sustainable and collaborative model with other business and education partners from the start. [disclosure: Cisco Systems is an IBLF Corporate Partner]

Most projects were driven more by the needs of the corporate sponsor for profile, particularly during the course of their marketing IT systems, hardware, software and consultancy to governments, or the desire to set up a prestige IT flag-ship project with first world kit, even if expensively non-replicable. We found none that met criteria of affordability, local sustainability, scalability and adaptability to poor local infrastructure.

IT access and connectivity have the capacity to transform educational and curriculum delivery, provide low cost access to education resources in schools without libraries and frequently absent teachers. Most importantly IT is amazingly motivational for poor yet eager youngsters. Healthcare, in which 70% of activity is data collection and processing even in poor countries, can be revolutionised. Not surprisingly, IT access is seen as an important priority to help deliver the UN Millennium Development Goals.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) , a person in a high-income country is over 22 times more likely to be an Internet user than one in a low-income nation. There are roughly one billion people in about 800,000 villages in developing countries without any kind of connection to computer.

In a collaboration between myself, Alexsis de Raadt-St James (then at MIT and now CEO of the Althea Foundation and a director of IBLF North America) and joined by Lyndall De Marco (then Education Director at the Pan Pacific hotel group in Singapore and now an Executive Director of IBLF) who operationalised the concept, with the pump-priming of the John Ryder Memorial Trust and Jan Dauman and inspired backing of Jim Wolfensohn (then World Bank President, from his Presidents Fund) who shared our quest for a partnership solution, we built the model of the Digital Partnership.

Through a pilot programme in South Africa that eventually provided access to IT and training to reach two million students, and health and community centres, and the deployment of almost 20,000 quality pre-used PCs from large financial services companies in Europe and America, we tested the Digital Partnership model. This was in the face of skeptics, who opposed recycling, multi-company collaboration and freedom from binding ties with single software or hardware vendors.

We were told we had to win the support of PC manufacturers. They were proving resistant to a secondary market developing in the face of possible loss of their short-term sales of new high spec equipment to education systems with meager and over-stretched budgets. Michael Dell , on one of my several pilgrimages to Roundrock, which was uniquely encouraging to find solutions, tipped us off that it was the customers, who were decommissioning and refreshing millions of good, fast and working yet near worthless PCs each year, who we needed to get onside. We did, and never looked back once we found a reliable and financially viable mechanism for mass procurement, shipping and refurbishment – resulting in the possibility of providing a PC for around $120 or less.

We were told that most poor schools lacked broadband or even electricity. That was correct – but in a poor country we found you can reach the majority of the poor within urban catchment areas and then still not meet the demand. It was vital to prepare the schools and community centres as enthusiastic partners, who saw the transformational potential of IT access for education and skill training. We set up networks of small regional training ‘resource and learning centres’ with leading wireless phone company Vodacom and other partners for teachers who had never touched a keyboard.

We were told that the ‘third world didn’t want cast-off computers’ but battled the prejudice and the aggressive undermining by some technology companies, fearful for their new quarterly sales targets. What they just didn’t get was that in most poor countries there is a chronic IT skills gap, and evidence that basic IT training and familiarity today accelerates demand for all their IT products and connectivity tomorrow through the ‘network effect’. Eventually, the South African Government led by an enthusiastic then Director General of Communications, Andile Ngcabe (now Chairman of Dimension Data Africa), even changed the law to facilitate partnerships that delivered affordable pre-used PCs and teacher training.

“Our first task is to close the digital gap that already exists between the developed and ourselves. We must also focus on such matters as affordability, the promotion of local content and local participation in the control and use of information and communication facilities.”
Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa

Price and value were critical to the model. The idea of recycling PCs and engaging business as corporate citizens and partners was attractive, even though facing opposition due to past abuse and ‘dumping’. But we felt it held the key to affordability of PCs capable of being used collectively by schools and communities. Personal ownership is a far off dream and low priority expense for most communities and countries where IBLF works in the developing world.

We could deliver hardware valued at over $600 for under $100 through a sustainable and viable model. And the supply was practically limitless if we could ensure the delivery model and quality. There is much talk of the cheap, under $100 PC, and the One Laptop Per Child and lower cost PCs, and we are supportive of all approaches, but we have yet to find a viable, scalable and realistically implementable and proven model for collective community use.

We have been impressed by Jordan’s lead in the Jordan Education Initiative to connect schools, inspired by the World Economic Forum and also significantly backed by Cisco Systems and others. But we are less convinced that it is easily replicable at affordable cost for companies or governments.

They told us that patronizing foreigners running projects were unwelcome. This was music to our ears, as our long-standing IBLF approach is to build locally driven partnerships, optimising the local value added and employment. We work through a social enterprise model in which local non-profit partners are facilitated by smart grass-roots based people with a vision and able to work across and between business, government, schools and local communities. This is the key to sustainability.

Making digital divide projects go mainstream

Does this work in even poorer communities and countries such as Ethiopia ? It’s one of Africa’s poorest countries of over 75 million people of whom almost two-thirds are illiterate, with less than 12,000 email addresses. IBLF is now working in other countries and with the Government of Ethiopia, World Bank, and a consortium of global corporate IT users and vendors to bring an affordable IT access model to Ethiopia. Linking into the Ethiopian Government’s broadband roll-out investment, the digital partnership will deliver access to thousands of PCs for education, community outreach and health across the country to help bring communities into the 21st century.

Most critically, it will be implemented through the training of unemployed graduates to be barefoot IT entrepreneurs – in refurbishment, training and back-up support. Uniquely in African, it has a built-in facility for refurbishment and end-of-life decommissioning, meeting the specifications of the 1992 Basel Convention on ‘generation, management, trans-boundary movements and disposal of hazardous and other e.wastes’. We think this will be a first for Africa which suffers from massive and dangerously toxic e.waste dumping.

According to UNEP, globally some 50 million tones of e.waste is dumped annually, a high proportion being discarded PCs!

Even in the poorest county in the USA – the New York’s South Bronx – which itself was confronted by an unaffordable digital divide in their housing and urban regeneration projects, the IBLF Digital Partnership built a partnership to provide a computer lab to support the self-employment efforts of the Women’s Housing and Economic development Corporation (WHEDCo).

Business is at the heart of the challenge of IT access, and has as much to gain as the public sector from a digitally literate world with growing markets and skilled workers. What is to be done to reawaken the digital development dream?

• The quest for affordability must be a top priority in connecting the poor world – which means pragmatic approaches, collective uses of technology and new ways of doing things rather than pressure to sell inappropriate top of range products. Increased demand will eventually drive markets and a thirst for higher spec hardware.

• Partnerships are the way forward – engaging multiple companies both users and manufacturers, partnering with the public sector - adopting social enterprise models to integrate programmes with communities in sustainable ways.

• It is essential that those in the ‘development business’ – aid agencies, NGOs and donors – see the transformational capacity of IT as an integral part of development and not some expensive luxury.

• Mindsets need to change to see the possibility of sustainability and meeting the critical public challenge of closing the digital divide as a vital spring for development – rather than social projects that are purely part of negotiations for supply contracts, marketing and public relations.

Q: I would like to hear from you - what you see of the possibilities of bringing affordable access to IT, and your ideas for scaling up these partnership initiatives. Please respond by hitting the ‘add comment’ tab.

Technorati Tags: digital-divide, africa development, social enterprise

Arab Youth Challenge for Business

The news is constantly full of negative stories from the Middle East and daily reports of conflict, stalled hopes, blind alleys and uncertain futures. Seen through the eyes of the global village of media and political leaders that may be the view. But nothing will change the prospects without economic hope. The good news from our experience is that the youthful majority of Arab citizens are far more pre-occupied with prospects for work than the politics or terror. If we are to build on this before the fuse burns down, business has a vital role and interest and its time to lead. What is the issue? What is to be done?

The simple facts are that the majority, some 60% of the Arab population in North Africa, the Gulf and Near East, is under the age of 24 and growing fast. Unemployment rates are amongst the highest in the developing world. Education, as very narrow as it often is, is highly prized - including for most girls. The Iraq tragedy, Sudan and other troubling episodes notwithstanding, these are generally intensely law-abiding disciplined communities.

In my multiple visits over many years to some offbeat and poorest communities I have never felt threatened. Enmeshed in the unfolding dilemmas of radicalisation, Palestinian-Israeli conflict and all its overspills, tackling the base problem of youth unemployment and underemployment is stalled.

“While youth make up 70% of our people, they make up 100% of our Future”
HM Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan

Some 100 million jobs will need to be created in some economically overregulated societies over the next 20 years, just to keep up with the employment needs of those graduating from schools, plus 20 million to mop up existing unemployment. Failure will be catastrophic, not least in it oiling the wheels of a small radical fundamentalist fringe with an investment in failure.

Young people also need better orientation for being more competitive - stressing life skills, vocational preparation, IT and self-employment. The schools need to be engaged in the real world. Jordan is showing the way. The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, with their small indigenous populations, have been able to buy better education futures.

This is not going to come from adding staff to Energy Ministries and already bloated public bureaucracies and state industries, where most educated young people still dream of an easy job for life. It’s not going to come from the international institutions – whether the well-meaning UN, G8, Europe and political leaders – even though a stable peace process will help. It’s going to come if at all from the private sector and growth in small firms and an enterprise culture.

In rather restricted information societies, not a great deal is known about the attitudes of Arab youth. But in an online survey of 1.4 million youth in 12 Arab nations last year by Amr Khaled, a charismatic preacher and founder of the Right Start Foundation, the overwhelming conclusion was that most young school leaders across the Arab world were worried, not so much about Palestine, Jihad or voting, but acutely about personal employment prospects (68%) - 88% didn’t think they would find a job. Many were interested in working for themselves or on their own projects (an astonishing 94%) but didn’t know (72%) where to turn for assistance and advice.

A Gallop survey of 22 predominantly Islamic countries carried out late last year indicated that the majority of women wanted equal employment rights.

Pioneering NGOs such as OneVoice and Peace Works, bringing students and young people together across the Palestian/Israeli fault-lines are finding overwhelming commitment by mainstream youth to peace processes and economic futures through co-existence. At a moving televised session at this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, ‘town meetings’ in the Palestinian West Bank and Israel demanded that leaders aligned themselves to coexistence and economic hope. IBLF’s own reconciliation project ‘Fertile Ground’ is promoting coexistence projects involving young Palestinians and Israelis. Our IBLF education partnerships workshops, held in a more hopeful Beirut a year ago, before the tragic invasion and bombing, revealed the immense energy and determination of school heads from different faiths and students to improve prospects through employer partnerships.

In all of this, business has a vital role to play through investment, sourcing, business development, training, mentoring, outreach and sponsorship – but most critically its leadership. In a way, like other great externalities that effect the sustainability of our planet of which I’ve written in my blog – climate change, water, rural poverty – business must find a way to engage. If you ask why and see how the escalating costs of security, military defence, energy, business risk, disruption and uncertainty will fall on business from leaving this tinderbox to others, the case for action and some imagination become clearer. The question is what practically can be done?

A ground-breaking review of good practice by business partnerships in key Arab countries ‘Business and Youth in the Arab World – Partnerships for Youth Employment and Enterprise Development’ is shortly to be published by IBLF, with regional partners and business supporters, undertaken by IBLF Associate, Imelda Dunlop. Over 20 good practice examples are analysed and a powerful case made for replication of things business does best in sustainable ways – work experience, training, business development, start up finance, logistics, marketing and enterprise.

We discovered that all too few leaders are aware that good practice even exists in the region, and tend to look outside to Europe and America for somewhat inappropriate CSR models. There is a reticence in appearing to ‘show off’ about good practice which is seen as self-serving. Our IBLF follow-up campaign aims to try and change that through scaling good practice.

For example, Saudi Arabia’s ALJ Group led by the visionary Mohammed Jameel, commenced a community service programme to create 110,000 job opportunities by 2010 aligned to their business competence. Cohorts of Saudi owner-taxi drivers have been trained and put in business, service workers and female entrepreneurs. [disclosure: ALJ Group is an IBLF Corporate Partner and Mohammed our deputy chairman]

Cisco Systems networking academies have trained over 7,500 students across the region. [disclosure: Cisco Systems is an IBLF Corporate Partner] Egypt’s Orascom have backed an innovative nurse training programmes, applying their business skills through their family foundation, to fill a vital skills gap. The Centennial Fund in Saudi Arabia, initiated through IBLF’s Youth Business International, is a consortia of 12 sponsors supporting youth business start-ups. INJAZ is a work experience and life skills programme operating across the region supported by over 160 companies that has assisted over 60,000 students. These seeds of hope from Morocco to Lebanon are wonderful starting points – the challenge is scale.

What to do to break the cycle of despair?

We must never forget that peace and security will help foster a climate for economic development. But the cycle has to be broken by hope. Wet ink on peace treaties will not do more than create the context for private sector and entrepreneurial driven growth to give hope to young Arabs. The endless regional academic talk-shops on the labour market, and grand conferences on ‘Arab renaissance’ and competitiveness must give way to practical action beyond philanthropy and ‘Zakat’ . The private sector both regionally and internationally must act in ways aligned to their business competences and resources, ensuring sustainable action through partnerships.

“There has never been a more defining moment than this for us to take action. The stakes are too high for corporations to remain bystanders in the process of development. As business leaders, we have the means, the leadership and access to powerful global networks that can transform the world.”
Fadi Ghandour, CEO, Aramex International

• work experience and life skills – companies can join together through partnerships with schools and higher education to offer life skills and work experience;
• training – companies can use their training skills and facilities to offer training opportunities;
• small enterprise – starts ups and small enterprises can be incubated, mentored and assisted to expand and new sourcing developed in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and North Africa;
• NGOs engaged in economic development partnerships can be directly supported and mentored, as suggested in the IBLF Business and Arab Youth resource book;
• dialogue – business associations and governments must be engaged in discussion on practical action that can be taken beyond policy discussion;
• sports – sport helps build teamwork, engagement and reduces disaffection and is vital in engaging young people and building confidence through a universal communication and development media.

Business leaders outside the region must ask themselves seriously what they can do through their supply chains, sourcing or outreach to support action for economic hope and grass roots coexistence. I would once have argued that there has to be a direct business case for action to be sustainable and effective. I’ve changed my mind, as now the greatest threats to our planet, including the risk of 100 million unemployed Arab youth, is a global issue and a key externality that business must address for long-term sustainability through practical risk-sharing partnerships. We need to see the possibilities of scaling practical actions that can be taken to build the foundations of greater sustainability in the Arab world.

PHOTO ON MY BLOG MASTHEAD
I’ve been asked about the photo on my blog masthead. It’s a photo I took in a bulldozed area at the Rafah refugee camp during a two day visit to Gaza from Israel in 2005. The picture is of local Palestinian and UN officials, our Gaza associate, Ghada, and one of our group. We were all wearing blue UN waistcoats to avoid accidental fire and seeing the possibilities that economic development and enterprise could seriously bring if political conditions allowed life to flourish.

Technorati Tags: youth unemployment, Arabia, Middle East