PANEL: Social Entrepreneurs — The Next Generation of Smart Philanthropists
Special introduction:
Amir Dossal, Executive Director, United Nations Office for Partnerships
Master of Ceremonies:
Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor and New York bureau chief, The Economist
Panelists:
Eric Broyles, Chief Executive Officer, Megree
Akhtar Badshah, senior director, community affairs worldwide, Microsoft Corporation
Kamran Elahian, philanthropist, chairman and co-founder, Global Catalyst Partners
Robert Weiss, president and vice chair, X Prize Foundation
Dr. Paul Jhin, CEO, The Information and Technology Corps
Michael Landau, chairman, MAP International
Noella Coursaris Musunka, founder, Georges Malaika Foundation
Richard Samans, managing director of the World Economic Forum
Badr Jafar, CEO of Crescent Petroleum and founder of the Pearl Initiative
Panel summary by Mary Kate Nevin, World Policy Journal
After a special introduction by Amir Dossal, Matthew Bishop began the panel with a call for private-public partnerships. “Even Bill Gates, with all his money, realizes he cannot solve the problems he’s grappling with on his own,” he said. Philanthropists need to forge smart and efficient alliances that use everyone’s skills effectively to address the pressing problems of the world, while “the public has to understand what’s going on and be brought into the process as well.”
Noella Coursaris Munsaka addressed education initiatives in her home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Congo, after 20 years of war, is a challenge to work [with],” she acknowledged, but she also spoke to the importance of forging effective partnerships between and among sectors. It is key to have government involvement, private sector activity, and especially community initiatives in education and literacy projects. “If we work together more, I think we can achieve more goals over there and more goals sitting around the table like this,” said Munsaka.
Michael Landau then described MAP International’s creative solutions for infrastructure and education projects, especially in Uganda. Like the other panelists, he emphasized the importance of what he called “trilateral donor programs”—partnerships between governments, the private sector, and recipients. He put it bluntly: “it is not enough to have a partnership with [just] the government, because they don’t have money.” But government involvement is necessary, he allowed, to achieve anything “massively transformative.”
Richard Samans spoke to [the] “scale” of philanthropic initiatives. The existing paradigm for development aid, he explained, is essentially limited to straight lending from organizations such as the World Bank, or private sector assistance. But in many developing countries, the paltry income levels preclude the private sector from investing. This is where “the philanthropic community can have a catalytic effect” by helping either to get adequate resources in the hands of countries, or funding a process to focus the international community as an urgent priority for investment.
Akhtar Badshah, however, noted that he was “struggling” with the notion that an increase in scale is needed. “Scale is being reached in some ways in bringing about change.” He proposed another possibility—instead of striving to broaden their efforts, philanthropists should seek to find partnerships that might replicate successful programs.
“You don’t have to be Bill Gates” to make a difference, emphasized Kamran Elahian. He extolled the virtues of “microphilanthropy and nanophilanthropy,” or philanthropy on a small scale, and introduced the audience to the U Movement. Using technology, he hopes to get people involved in a movement towards philanthropic action, on any scale. One of these technologies will be “u-kis”, or wikis to promote the U Movement’s initiatives and offer beneficiaries the opportunity to provide direct feedback on how the projects are working. (Currently “u-kis” are still in beta form, but one can see some of them here.
“Repackaging capitalism” in the nonprofit sector is essential, Badr Jafar argued. Taking concepts from the profit realm and applying them to philanthropy, he advised creating “incentive-based partnerships” to embrace globalized issues. In order for the private sector to embrace corporate social responsibility, he added, they must start getting economic returns on their investments. Only then will we see firms voluntarily championing social and ecological returns in more than name only.
Robert Weiss spoke of the X Prize Foundation, which offers awards for innovators to create radical breakthroughs in areas like automobiles, lunar exploration, and human genome sequencing. The emphasis, he said, is “not what part of your dollar goes towards change, but how many times that dollar multiplies.” This vehicle of incentivized competition encourages people to present dramatic solutions to critical problems, he explained.
In the spirit of dramatic change, Dr. Paul Jhin described the 500/12 Initiative, a United Nations program that partners with computer companies, schools, universities, and international volunteer organizations like the Peace Corps to provide 500,000 computers to 10,000 schools, serving 33 million students in 60 countries by 2012. In doing so, the initiative looks to bridge the world’s digital divide and further the Millennium Development Goals.
And, on a humanizing note, entrepreneur Eric Broyles read Antwone Fisher’s poem “Who Will Cry?” to emphasize the “anonymity [of] human suffering” across the globe. His initiative, megree.com, seeks to remove this anonymity by showing how everyone in the world is connected. By displaying the “six degrees of separation” by which everyone in the world is networked, benefactors can see how they are personally and intimately connected to the recipients of their aid.