Philanthropy Age 5 by Philanthropy Age

DEDICATED TO THOUGHTFUL GIVING

www.PhilanthropyAge.com

Issue 05

Middle East, North Africa and South Asia

May – July 2014

How to be good Your guide to intelligent giving With a helping hand from… Sheikha Jawaher Al Qasimi Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair Fadi Ghandour Muna AbuSulayman Ahmad Ashkar Andrew MacLeod

Art sale raises funds to aid refugee crisis Arabic masterpiece auctioned at Christieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in Dubai Proceeds of special lot donated by Philanthropy Age to UNHCR

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Philanthropy Age Publishing Director Salem Al Shaikh with Houssam Chahin of UNHCR; Ali Omar Ermes; Syrian members of the Philanthropy Age team with UNHCR representatives

A painting by acclaimed Arabic artist Ali Omar Ermes has raised $195,750 in a charity art auction in Dubai, with a significant proportion of the proceeds set to aid refugees fleeing the ongoing conflict in Syria. Funds from the sale of the artwork, which was donated by Philanthropy Age in conjunction with Ermes, and sold by Christie’s auction house in March, will be passed to the UN refugee agency UNHCR. The anticipated $80,000 donation will be used to provide essential aid to the more than 2.5 million people that have escaped the bloodshed in Syria. “The team at Philanthropy Age simply wants to help make a difference. Thanks to the generosity of Ali Omar Ermes, we can, and there is no worthier cause than the Syrian refugee crisis,” said Leonard Stall, Editor-In-Chief of the magazine.

The painting is a depiction of the Sixth Ode from the seven highly respected Arabic poems known as the Al-Mu’allaqāt Al Saba. Considered to be among the finest pieces of early Arabic poetry, each describes aspects of cultural, social and political life. Often when a poem was judged to be exceptional, it would be intricately and delicately embroidered on the finest silk cloth and hung at the Ka’ba as a sign of its importance. March marked the third anniversary of the Syria conflict, which has seen some 9 million residents driven from their homes and a further 2.5 million flee across borders to neighbouring countries. Lebanon alone now houses some 974,000 refugees, according to UNHCR figures. According to the UN, Syrians have now replaced Afghans as the world’s largest refugee population. “Syria is now the biggest humanitarian and peace and security crisis facing the world, with violence reaching unthinkable levels,” UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said in March. “Only a political solution will end the nightmare of the Syrian people. All should reflect on the long and growing list of horrors taking place in Syria every day. The effects and threats of this conflict will only grow and spread.”

CONTENTS

In this issue...

REGULARS 08 10 12 14 72 76 79

Need to know

Hearts and minds The Middle East must do more for Syria’s displaced millions, says Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi

Opening up Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair on why it’s time for Gulf philanthropists to step out of the shadows and inspire a new era of smart giving

Talking about a revolution Aramex co-founder Fadi Ghandour on the fresh tide of entrepreneurial disruption set to sweep the Arab world

The Moment Global Eye Guest Column One Day Trends The Next Step

Social entrepreneurs

Growth prospects All social start-ups need investment to realise their true potential. So how best to attract the eyes of would-be backers?

Net profit On the remote hillsides of southeastern Bangladesh, the struggle against malaria is yielding extraordinary results

Pure intentions We visit India, where they’re reinventing the toilet and doing away with the scourge of poor sanitation

CONTENTS

TB in Chittagongâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slums

World Hunger exhibition

An educated mind

Saudi humanitarian Muna AbuSulayman tells us that deep pockets are only part of what makes a good philanthropist, and that giving well is a learning curve in itself Life in the Zaatari camp

72 5

CONTRIBUTORS

With our thanks to...

Ahmad Ashkar

Ahmad Ashkar is the founder and CEO of the Hult Prize Foundation, which was named by former US president Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine as one of the top five ideas changing the world. In this issue, he offers a few words of advice for the next generation of Arab youth.

Bahr Karim

A freelance photographer based in the UAE, Bahr Karim has contributed to titles including Harper’s Bazaar and Arabian Business. For this issue he took the portraits of social entrepreneurs and activists including Fadi Ghandour, Muna Abu Sulayman and Najla Al Midfa.

Andrew MacLeod

Andrew MacLeod is the author of ‘A Life Half Lived’, which makes the case for development investment rather than development aid, and is based on his experience as a former senior official with the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In this issue, he calls for new partnerships between the aid and philanthropic industries, and private corporations.

Saiful Huq Omi

A photographer and documentarian based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saiful Huq Omi has contributed to titles including Newsweek, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Guardian, and The Economist. For this issue, he explored the forest villages of Rangamati and the slums of Chittagong, recording the everyday lives of those born into extreme hardship and poverty.

Hana Robinson

Hana Robinson is a UKbased illustrator whose work adorns everything from advertising billboards to book covers, including editions of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and the Philip Pullman bestseller ‘Northern Lights’. In this issue she brings an artist’s eye to the plight of those for whom fresh water is a rare privilege.

EDITOR’S LETTER

Philanthropy Age is published by Touchline FZ-LLC The publishers regret that they cannot accept liability for errors or omissions contained in the publication, for whatever reason, however caused. The opinions and views contained in this publication are not necessarily those of the publishers. The publishers take no responsibility for the goods and services advertised. All materials are protected by copyright. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photography or storage in any medium by electronic means) without the written permission of the copyright owner, except as may be permitted by applicable laws.

Touchline FZ-LLC 4th Floor, Pink building, twofour54 media zone, Khalifa Park PO Box 77826, Abu Dhabi, UAE Tel: +971 (0)2 234 4598 www.touchline.ae www.philanthropyage.com Editorial Team: CEO, Editor-In-Chief Leonard Stall leonard@touchline.ae

Managing Editor Andrew White andrew@touchline.ae

Editor & Web Editor Joanne Bladd joanne@touchline.ae

Senior Editor Stuart Matthews stuart@touchline.ae

Assistant Editor Adrienne Cernigoi adrienne@touchline.ae

Arabic Editor Fawaz Jarrah fawaz@touchline.ae

Translation Zaineb Bouftas

Publishing Director Salem AlShaikh

COO Waleed Gubara waleed@touchline.ae

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Digital Design Director Matt Walker

Digital Publisher Shaun McGuckian

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Office Manager Linda Musco Touchline FZ LLC Studio Ahmad Marei; Anas Ahmad Albounni; Michel Al Asmar; Qaiser Nawaz; Sam Birouty

Contributors: Ahmad Ashkar; Chris Assig; Pete Guest; Bahr Karim; Andrew MacLeod; Saiful Huq Omi; Hana Robinson; Jason Simmons Images: Getty Images; UNHCR; Executive Office of HH Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi; AltCity; Souk el Tayeb; Glowork; WFP; Alexandria Trust; Hult Prize Foundation ISSN: 2306-0328 Distributed by: GLS Media Services Printed by: Emirates Printing Press, Dubai

The gift of good advice This issue is all about good advice. Some of the people we speak to have between them amassed decades of experience in the spheres of business, and social and economic development. They have enjoyed huge success in an era of unprecedented economic growth, not just financially but in terms of reaching out to those left behind by this tide of prosperity. Others, such as the young social entrepreneurs David Munir Nabti and Khalid AlKhudairi, are just starting out. They have a lifetime of setbacks ahead of them; a lifetime of progress, too. So what do these two groups, at disparate ends of the career curve, have in common? Effective philanthropy is all about two major organs, the heart and the brain. The former provides us with the passion to try and make a difference, the strength to endure when threatened with failure, and the resolve to have another go when all seems futile. The latter, if engaged properly, ensures improvement with every new iteration. We cannot function without either, and it is only when they are harnessed to the same end, that we can begin to achieve our full potential: in business, in love, in life. Young and old, those who have contributed their insight to this issue have successfully yoked their hearts and their minds to the betterment of society as a whole. While there’s no best way to make a difference – and no single man, woman or organisation has all the answers – it never hurts to be wise to the experiences of others. You don’t want a lecture, and they’re not here to give you one, but wouldn’t you like to hear what they’ve learned? Andrew White Editor, Philanthropy Age

The publishers seek to broaden the knowledge and understanding of good philanthropy and do not seek to promote the interests of any one individual, organisation or agenda. Individuals and organisations are featured solely according to the merits of their philanthropic endeavours. Go interactive with Philanthropy Age and Blippar. Just follow these simple instructions on pages 2, 29, and 57: (You can download the Blippar application for free from the Apple App store and Google Play)

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NEED TO KNOW

Nine things you should know... 1

Syria’s new danger

2 As if the relentless savagery of war was not burden enough for the people of Syria. In April a UN agency described the eruption of polio in the country as perhaps “the most challenging outbreak in the history of polio eradication”. Close to 40 cases have been reported in the stricken Arab state, which had been polio-free since 1995, and there are fears that the virus is spreading across the region: the first case has been identified in neighbouring Iraq, in a six-month-old unvaccinated child in Baghdad.

Do something about it. The WHO and Unicef are working to contain the virus: since October last year more than 22 million children in seven countries – Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Palestine – have been innoculated as part of the largest vaccination campaign in the history of the Middle East. Can you help?

“We have between seven and nine million internally displaced, but aid for only four million” Khaled Erksoussi, of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, on the plight of civilians stranded in the war-torn country

NEED TO KNOW

$100

“And whatever you do of good, Allah indeed knows it well” The Quran 2:215

million

Jobs in Jordan: the World Bank has extended a $250m loan to promote job creation, accountability and transparency in the Arab world’s second-smallest country. Is it time for social entrepreneurs to step up and drive employment growth?

The amount donated by Kuwait to the UNHCR in April, to support Syrian refugees

5 Government giving. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the UAE gave $5bn in development aid in 2013, up 375 per cent on 2012. As a percentage of gross national income, that’s the highest in the world. Who will top the charts in 2014?

Love him or hate him, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made the biggest ever donation by someone under 30, giving $990m to a charity in California. Why don’t we try to beat that in 2014?

In 1950, per capita renewable water resources in the Middle East and North Africa were four times greater than they are today. We’re living in the most water scarce region in the world – and it’s only likely to get worse

THE MOMENT

Friday, January 31st, 2014

Yarmouk’s sea of souls I

t is a tableau of misery, the congregation of a community blessed only with misfortune. It is a Friday morning, and as billions of Muslims around the world gather to pray and to spend time with family and friends, the people of the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus can think only of the ones they have lost, and have yet to lose. Stretching towards and beyond the horizon, it is a sea of souls each faced with an intolerable present and an uncertain future. More than 18,000 Palestinian refugees and an unknown number of Syrians live in Yarmouk, located on the outskirts of the Syrian capital. The camp has been blockaded since last July, amputated from the outside world by a bloody conflict now in its fourth year. In this image, which was released by the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, thousands of desperate residents clamour for food parcels being distributed by aid workers – the first the agency had been able to deliver in more than two weeks of incalculable human suffering. n

THE MOMENT

GLOBAL EYE

Health in the Arab world: prevention and not just cure Public health in the Arab world is in a state of flux. Rapid modernisation has seen lifestyle-related illnesses oust infectious diseases as the region’s primary killers, with heart disease and stroke now the region’s leading causes of death. While depressive disorders are also on the rise, Arab men and women – even in war-torn states – are living longer than ever.

he findings come from a series of papers published in medical journal The Lancet, which track the leading causes of death in the Arab world between 1990 and 2010. The result is a snapshot of public health in 22 states, revealing an epidemiological shift driven by cultural and economic changes. The diagnosis is far from uniform. In low-income states such as Yemen and Somalia, where poverty and unrest have hindered the spread of modern healthcare, infectious diseases remain the primary killers. In wealthier

nations, traffic-related injuries have soared, becoming a leading cause of death. High levels of inequality in North African economies, meanwhile, have created a double burden, leaving medical systems battling both malnutrition and obesity. Such changes demand a new regime of prevention and not just cure. Without improved awareness, the Arab world faces a ticking bomb: a population living longer than ever, but battling an explosion of lifestylerelated diseases. It is a burden the region cannot afford to ignore.

Living longer Life expectancy has risen in all Arab states since 1990, the data shows, though progress remains patchy. The wealthy GCC states lead the field, with the region’s poorer relatives – Yemen and Somalia – lagging behind. Yemeni men have one of the shortest lifespans in the Arab region, at 65.5 years, lagging a global average of 70 years. Syrian women scored the biggest increase during the study period, with average life expectancy leaping from 73.5 years to 80.2 years. A gain, sadly, that may diminish in the wake of Syria’s bloody civil war. In Iraq, prolonged unrest has taken its toll on lifespan. Both men and women saw just a one-year rise in life expectancy between 1990 and 2010.

Life expectancy at birth UAE 77 years Bahrain 76 years Saudi Arabia 75 years Egypt 71 years Morocco 70 years Iraq 69 years Yemen 63 years Somalia 54 years * Source: World Bank (latest data from 2011)

GLOBAL EYE

Familiar killers Across the Arab world, the health gap mirrors the wealth gap. In rich states, a blend of modern medicine, better education and access to vaccines has slashed the number of deaths from infectious diseases. In low-income states such as Yemen and Somalia, the leading killers have remained unchanged in 20 years, a reflection of failing healthcare systems.

*Source: The State of Health in the Arab world, 1990-2010: an analysis, The Lancet. Percentages reflect the contribution of the disease to premature deaths.

Top causes of death in lowincome states Respiratory infections 12.2%

Diarrhoea 16.8%

Congenital anomalies 4.8%

1990

Respiratory infections 14.7%

Congenital anomalies 4.2%

Malaria 5.6%

Malaria 7%

Malnutrition 4.8%

Pre-term birth complications 4.9%

Dark days A sobering rise in depression has taken hold in middle-income Arab states since 1990, with major depressive disorders named as the fourth most common cause of early death in 2010. North Africa seems particularly afflicted, where it placed second in the rankings in middle-income Algeria, Libya, Syria and Palestine. Lebanon and Tunisia hardly fared better, with depressive disorders the third biggest cause of early death. While most health changes examined by the study were consistent with global patterns, the prevalence of major depression and anxiety is more pervasive in Arab countries than it is worldwide. The reason may lie in the region’s youthful demographics: major depressive disorders disproportionately affect young adults, compared to other age groups.

A dangerous road

Depression as a cause of premature death High-income countries

6.9%

4.9% Middle-income countries

2010

Diarrhoea 10.2%

Cultural changes and rising incomes have brought fresh risks. Road injuries topped the list of early killers in the wealthy economies of the region, causing 8.4 per cent of all early deaths in 2010. The highest burden of injuries is carried by the 15-49 age group. Reported road traffic fatalities, 2010

4.1%

Qatar 228 (97% male) Population 1.8 million UAE 826 (89% male) Population 7.5 million Oman 820 (85% male) Population 2.8 million

2.7%

Saudi Arabia 6,596 (86% male) Population 27.4 million Bahrain 75 (83% male) Population 1.3 million 1990

2010

*Source: The State of Health in the Arab world, 1990-2010: an analysis, The Lancet. Percentages reflect the contribution of the disease to premature deaths.

Kuwait 374 (84% male) Population 2.7 million

*Source: World Health Organisation

GUEST COLUMN

From idea to impact An expert on social impact, entrepreneurship, innovation and the start-up ecosystem, Ahmad Ashkar has a few words of advice for the next generation of Arab youth rabs were the original entrepreneurs. We invented products and services that revolutionised thinking in science, maths, astronomy and technology. We reimagined medical care and research, and pioneered the study of social sciences and human behaviour. Innovation was what we did best, and the influence of our invention rippled across the seas and oceans, changing forever the way the world worked. We were champions of impact, pushing ideas and agendas that would make the planet a better place. So what happened? Today, the Middle East as a whole has less patents than Belgium or Finland. Some time ago, we lost our compass and began focusing on things less important: money, social status, and baseless pedigree. We became copycats instead of innovators, and it is only now that we are returning to our Arab roots and the relentless pursuit of impact through innovation. Across Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and the Gulf, the emergence of social

About the writer Ahmad Ashkar is the founder and CEO of the Hult Prize Foundation, which was named by former US president Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine as one of the top five ideas changing the world. Since founding the Hult Prize in 2009, he has led the growth of the initiative into the world’s largest millennial start-up movement for social good, with established offices in six countries around the globe

enterprise has empowered us to pave our own path towards self-preservation and equal opportunity with shared prosperity. The new generation of Arab youth can and will change the world, as long as they remember a few salient points: Dare to imagine. The Arab Spring showed us that it only takes one dream, one stand and one opportunity to mobilise millions. We must push the boundaries of what is possible in the pursuit of impact. In turn, we must value failure as an opportunity to adopt positive lessons. We must not fear failure, nor shrink from those who dare to be bold. Mohammed Ashour, an Egyptian, dared to imagine in 2012. His inspiration came from our Arab lineage’s consumption of locusts, and from proven data that showed more than 2.5 billion people globally consume insects as part of their regular diet. Mohammad and his team developed an idea to commercialise protein and nutrient-rich insects as an affordable food source. Today, Aspire Food Group – a Hult Prize winner and start-up – is one of the largest commercial insect manufacturers in the world, providing food security to 25 million people through an array of products and services ranging from packaging and distribution, to insect by-products such as soluble powders and additives. Harness the power of the crowd. We are better connected, informed and equipped than any of the generations before us. Utilise networks, digital communities and ICT to connect with your peers from across the Arab world and beyond to share ideas, inspire one another and

“The emergence of social enterprise has empowered us to pave our own path towards self-preservation”

GUEST COLUMN

to make imagination real. The use of the crowd to unlock ideas and solutions to the region’s toughest social issues is certainly the fastest and most efficient means to a breakthrough. Take, for example, our Hult Prize, which brings together more than 10,000 participants each year from 150 countries who collectively contribute 1.4 million man-hours to solving some of the world’s most pressing social challenges, including improving access to affordable healthcare, food, water, energy, housing and education. Crowd sourcing will not only provide an abundance of new ideas and ventures, the journey itself will enfranchise a wide array of stakeholders who will begin to see and believe in the objectives at hand. The crowd will spawn an ecosystem that entrepreneurs can leverage to mitigate risk and propagate success. Reverse engineer and keep it simple. All great ideas and start-ups begin with identifying a major pain point in society, and work backwards from there to create a market-based solution. Ask critical questions: why doesn’t access to the benefit exist, or why is it so expensive? Then begin thinking about basic principles: who is currently paying for it, and why? Once these simple questions are answered, begin thinking about how to alleviate the pain points and bottlenecks found within your research. Look to the private sector for subsidies that can make your offering affordable, and don’t underestimate the sector’s interest in getting involved: top of the agenda at every Fortune 100 company is tapping into the billion-plus potential customers that currently inhabit urban slums, the world’s fastest-growing human habitat. It’s all about incentive. Take one of our start-ups, m.Paani, which uses a major telecoms provider as a subsidy source to bring clean water into slums outside Mumbai. The creative rebate programme gives the corporate partner access to a new market in exchange for a fee that is used to fund the delivery of

social benefit. The net cost ABOVE The annual Hult Prize, worth $1m to the winners, is to the corporation is less a partnership between Hult than that of procuring and International Business School maintaining the customers and the Clinton Global Initiative on its own: a simple yet elegant business model that creates a win for the beneficiary, corporation and social entrepreneur leading to sustained growth, spread and scale. Design for impact. In the future, it won’t be about giving away a percentage of your bottom line to the poor. Companies will instead be designed for impact: with the sale of a product or service, will come a by-product of positive social impact somewhere across the value chain of the company’s offering. The Coca-Cola Company is a good example of a worldwide player in this space. It is building an ecosystem-based approach to social impact, redesigning its entire supply chain to manufacture positive change. Unilever, meanwhile, is switching from using petroleum products to those made with

biofuels, so that it can incorporate impact into the lifecycle of its products. Because of the state sector’s high visibility within the private sector in most Middle East countries, governments have the unique opportunity to be leaders in this vision and create a new culture where social impact is weaved into the DNA of a company. After all, isn’t it a government’s responsibility to look after its people? We created the Hult Prize as a platform for our peers to leverage, and for the next generation of youth to learn from. We have inspired hundreds of thousands of young thinkers around the world, and helped to redefine the boundaries of what is and isn’t possible when it comes to solving the world’s most pressing social challenges. And as long as Arab youth continue to dream, then we can usher in a new era in the Middle East, where access to a life of shared prosperity and opportunity does not depend on the predisposition of any race, culture or creed. n

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Sheikha Jawaher:

hearts and minds As an Eminent Advocate for the UN’s refugee agency, Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi is championing the cause of victims of conflict from Palestine to Somalia. She tells us that the Middle East must do more for Syria’s displaced millions, and recalls the lessons she has learned over three decades of giving

he atmosphere at Sheikha Jawaher’s cool, elegant offices near the Sharjah seafront is somewhat reflective of the nature of her philanthropic activities: there is an air of calm purposefulness to proceedings, staff going about their business in a quietly efficient manner, crisscrossing the octagonal floorspace in busy strides. Their employer is Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi, wife of the Ruler of Sharjah and chairperson of the Supreme Council of Family Affairs, founded to enhance the role of the family within the emirate, and encourage family giving according to Islamic principles. She is also a fast-emerging icon of philanthropy in the Gulf region, one who has spent more than three decades addressing social and humanitarian issues across the Arab world, particularly those concerning women and children.

Most recently, Sheikha Jawaher has turned her efforts to the plight of displaced Syrians, and in May 2013 she was appointed as the UN refugee agency’s first Eminent Advocate for Refugee Children. She has used this opportunity to campaign tirelessly for the rights of millions of young people driven from their homes, and garnered global attention from the UAE to the US. “Now that we have raised awareness, I hope to translate this into concrete results on the ground,” she says, speaking as one who already has experience of making a tangible difference where it’s needed most. In June last year, she founded the Big Heart UAE Campaign, which is committed to raising funds for Syrians now enduring a fourth year of bloodshed. “My biggest concern was that it felt like the people of Syria had been forgotten,” she recalls. “I started the Big Heart

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Campaign because I knew ABOVE AND RIGHT On a number of occasions, Sheikha Jawaher that the 2 million Syrian has ventured out into the field to refugees are not just a meet the young children whose headline or a statistic. They lives she is hoping to change will still be homeless after you change the channel, and they will still be hungry and traumatised after you turn the newspaper page.” According to the latest available figures, the campaign has so far raised more than AED54m ($14.7m) in donations. It has provided immediate relief in the form of food and basic shelter to more than half a million refugees, healthcare to more than 250,000, and put a roof over the heads of tens of thousands of displaced Syrians in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Syria itself. When the harsh winter of 2013 started to bite, the campaign rallied UAE residents behind its ‘Warm Hearts’ initiative, corralling donations and gifts to provide clothing and blankets to refugees battling sub-zero temperatures in the camps. This

“Our region is not taking full responsibility for solving its own problems. Syrian refugees are our brothers and sisters”

was just one phase of the campaign’s evolution: Sheikha Jawaher’s approach to philanthropy is a pragmatic one and one that is unafraid to look for gaps in support and then provide whatever help is needed to plug those gaps. “If we didn’t act fast, entire families would have been at the mercy of brutal frost and snow,” she insists. “There was no time for delay; it was as simple as that.” Soon after her appointment as an Eminent Advocate for the UNHCR, Sheikha Jawaher visited a refugee camp outside Beirut, and then in February this year she travelled to the Zaatari camp in Jordan, home to some 106,000 refugees. These trips were vital to understanding first-hand the needs of the refugees, she says. The direction of the campaign has been guided by such experiences and by listening to Syrians themselves; Sheikha Jawaher is a firm believer in empowering people to help themselves, and this spirit underpins the third phase of the campaign, which is focused on education as a pathway not just

to employment, but tolerance and peace. “[Providing] education was always our big dream,” she explains. “We needed to focus on more urgent interventions like life-saving medical treatment before embracing more long-term goals. Now we can look long-term.” Today the campaign concentrates on raising funds to pay for teachers, increasing access to schools, and buying books. For example, it encourages donations of AED50 ($14) for a school bag or AED70 ($19) for a ‘back-to-school’ kit for one of the 1 million young Syrians now forced to live outside the war-torn country of their birth. She does not hold back on the scale of the problems faced by this displaced generation, and urges her fellow philanthropists and compatriots to do more. “Without doubt the biggest weakness is that our region is not taking full responsibility for solving its own problems,” she insists. “Syrian refugees are our brothers and sisters: we speak the same language and share the same culture. Charity begins at

PHILANTHROPY AGE

home, so why are we not taking the lead?” Her hope for the region rests on the young, not just in educating refugee children, but teaching more privileged youth that giving is a responsibility from which they should not shirk. Philanthropy is a state of mind that parents should instil in their children early on, she says. “You can never convince your child to help other children thousands of miles away if they have never seen you help the people right there in your own community.” The Big Heart Campaign is addressing this issue head-on, inspiring schoolchildren in the UAE through its Young Philanthropists programme. “We need to engage with young children and youth to ensure they understand their duty towards others, so that they create solutions and participate in making a better society,” says Sheikha Jawaher. Involving young people in helping those less fortunate is a theme that has resonated throughout Sheikha Jawaher’s own philanthropic journey. She opened the first chapter of the Girl Guides in the UAE in 1973, and still supports youth initiatives across the country, including her Children and Girls’ Centres and the Sharjah Business Women Council, which has co-founded an education fund for orphans. In 2006, her energies extended outside the Gulf when she founded B’hibak Ya Libnan, ‘I love Lebanon’, a campaign which raised AED23m ($6.3m) for 10 Lebanese charities. Another initiative, Salam Ya Seghar, raised more than AED80m ($21.8m) to provide healthcare, remedial classes and school meals for Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza, and job opportunities for their mothers. In 2012, Sheikha Jawaher contributed a further $1m towards UNHCRfunded projects for displaced women and children in Somalia. The breadth of projects she has taken on over the years might daunt a less determined individual, yet Sheikha Jawaher insists that it is from being so engaged that she draws her strength. “The more you give, the more you have left,” she says. “I have a

“We need to engage with young children and youth to ensure they understand their duty towards others”

supportive family that gave ABOVE According to the UN’s refugee agency, more than 2.5 me courage and taught me million Syrians have fled the that it is never enough to country in search of safety, simply have sympathy for many of them children others. Actions speak louder than words.” This is not to say that she has always got it right first time. “In the early days, my first instinct was to try and help everyone,” she recalls. “But there was always another suffering woman or child who I couldn’t reach. I learned that it’s better to focus our contributions on one target at a time so that we make a meaningful difference to their lives. “Choosing who to help, is one of the most difficult decisions. But if we lift up some segments of the population, we transform them into humanitarians who in turn lift up the people we can’t reach.” Just as Sheikha Jawaher has learned that you can’t help everyone at the same time, she has also grown to appreciate the value of collaboration with other organisations, in order to make the best of

scant resources. Furthermore, experience has reinforced her steadfast belief that empowerment through education and skills development, is the surest way to longterm and sustainable development. “When we empowered women entrepreneurs in Palestine [through Salam Ya Seghar], we indirectly empowered their families because now the mothers could afford to educate their children,” she says. “And on and on the cycle continues. “One thing that has changed is that I no longer see our work as just charity, because charity implies that it’s just a one-time aid package to address immediate needs,” she adds. “I see it more as an investment in our society and our future.” It is an attitude that has earned Sheikha Jawaher the respect of her peers in humanitarian circles, and beyond. “I am always humbled when other philanthropists say I have inspired them,” she smiles, “and if they inspire a new wave of volunteers and humanitarians, then it’s a great start.” n

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Opening up Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair has for decades supported a series of humanitarian and development initiatives. Now, he says, it’s time for Gulf philanthropists to step out of the shadows and inspire a new era of intelligent giving BY Andrew White ime is a hugely valuable commodity to Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair. The seasoned banker is in Dubai for just a few hours; having spent much of the previous month out of the country, he must soon depart for foreign shores once again. For a few minutes, however, he allows himself to reflect on the life cycle of the modern-day Gulf citizen. “At first it’s college, and then straight away you have to establish yourself in business, so you’re not thinking about philanthropy, because unless you’re successful then you won’t have any money to give,” he says. “If you are then successful, you’re still not able to think about giving because you are overloaded with work. “It only comes when you have achieved and overachieved, that you look back at the age of 60 or 70, and realise that in all that time, you have done nothing for your community,” he continues. “Then you rush into doing something and when you rush into doing something, you make mistakes. “Really, if we could plan it, this impulse should come at the age of 30 or 40. Now is

the time for a generational change: if ours was the era of building phenomenal wealth, then it is up to our children to think about giving back. You don’t have to donate a big sum of money, but you can do something that shows that your heart and soul is invested in doing good.” Al Ghurair himself never accepted overwork as an excuse not to invest in good deeds. The CEO of Mashreq, one of the UAE’s leading commercial banks, he also helps to manage his family’s diverse holdings in real estate, foodstuffs, cement, contracting, publishing, and petrochemicals, among other sectors. The former Speaker of the House of the UAE Federal National Council, the country’s legislative body, Al Ghurair is also chairman of the Family Business Network GCC, a regional association of leading family business members. Furthermore, he has for decades acted as a quiet but committed philanthropist. He sits on the board of the Emirates Foundation for Youth Development, an integrated national initiative founded by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown

Prince of Abu Dhabi. He has also donated millions of dollars of his own money to a host of humanitarian initiatives: tokens from UNESCO and Unicef, among others, are tucked inconspicuously among the plethora of banking trophies accumulated by Mashreq over the years. His priorities lie in two areas: improving education across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region, and providing greater opportunities for women to earn and to contribute to the growth of developing economies. To these ends, he has channelled monies into a series of education initiatives, most notably through the Citizens Foundation, one of the largest non-profits in Pakistan. He has also engaged with PlaNet Finance, a microfinance initiative that – among many other projects – has equipped women in Palestine to manufacture a range of foodstuffs now available on supermarket shelves across the region. “You cannot overspend in raising education across our region,” he insists firmly. “We can look at different levels of education for educating girls, women, boys and men,

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“Leaders should come together and say: we want people to talk. It’s not about personal pride; it’s about inspiring others” bringing them to high school level and then taking them all the way to college. An educated individual can support a bigger family. “[The Palestinian initiative] is economically empowering and it also helps to preserve the culture of the region,” he continues. “I don’t have to dislocate a woman from her village; she doesn’t have to come to the big city. You stay where you are and look after your parents and kids, meanwhile here is the money for you to start a business at your small village level.” That accolades earned through his personal endeavours are not front-andcentre of Mashreq’s trophy cabinet, speaks to Al Ghurair’s reticence to showcase his achievements in the field of philanthropy. He is dutiful in his adherence to his faith, and in particular the notion that one should give without fanfare or expectation of personal glory. This does, however, raise a dilemma: without speaking openly, how might one motivate others to become engaged in giving? “As Muslims we follow a philosophy of giving without talking: the aim is not to become popular, or be known as someone who gives,” he explains. “I have seen donations where the name isn’t even on the cheque; it’s from a ‘well-wisher’. “This is a good philosophy, but it also raises a problem,” he continues, carefully. “We are perhaps at a time where somebody

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“If ours was the era of building phenomenal wealth, then it is up to our children to think about giving back”

should change this culture, and talk about what they do so that they encourage others to come forward and get involved. Political, religious and business leaders should come together and say: ‘We want people to talk, it is good to talk, you are not walking against the culture’. It’s not about personal pride; it’s about inspiring others.” A benefit of this approach, Al Ghurair insists, would be to bring the philanthropic sector out into the open, thereby submitting it to the same scrutiny afforded other multibillion-dollar industries. “I want a system

where a donor can track his money: where is it going, who is benefitting and who is the ultimate beneficiary?” he says. “That kind of visibility will inspire people, and encourage them to come forward because they will know how their money is going to be spent. They will know that a specific region, tribe or even family benefitted and that will give them satisfaction. For many people it’s a black box: they

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Al Ghurair has funded education projects in Pakistan; The volunteer model of Médecins Sans Frontières is one he believes should be replicated in the Middle East; Al Ghurair has also donated to microfinance initiatives for Palestinian women

WELFARE ASSOCIATION Welfare Association is a non-profit organization established in Geneva, Switzerland in 1983 to support sustainable development and provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians. An independent development organization without political, partisan or factional affiliation; driven by the values of national commitment, independence and professionalism. Its scope of activities covers West Bank (including Jerusalem), Gaza Strip, 1948 Area, and Palestinian communities in Lebanon.

These programs help in improving the lives of more than one million Palestinians every year: • OLD CITY OF JERUSALEM REVITALIZATION • EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT • GAZA ORPHANS’ SERVICES • COMMUNITY BASED REHABILITATION • YOUTH EMPLOYMENT SERVICES • HUMANITARIAN RELIEF PROGRAM • FOOD SECURITY • THE PALESTINIAN MUSEUM

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Grooming to give “You should always try to raise your children to give. During Ramadan, I train every day and I train hard. People ask: ‘how can you do that? You don’t drink water, or eat anything’. Yet we grew up on this, it’s nothing new for us. We have learned how to do this since we were six years old. We got used to it over time and now we are adults we can fast in the winter or the summer with no problem, because it’s how we were brought up. Likewise, you have to groom people to give from a young age. “When I helped to build a school in Pakistan, my goal was to visit and to take my kids and to show them: here is where the boys and girls used to study under a tree, and now they are able to study in these classrooms. It’s a trip that has never taken place, sadly, as I have not had the time. But I hope that one day we will make it and that one day my children, if it is not too late, will see the difference this work has made.” donate, and they don’t know where the money goes.” One of Al Ghurair’s greatest disappointments is watching money be frittered away on administration and other overhead costs. He recalls making a donation to one charity, only to see 50 per cent of the cash disappear into a black hole marked “logistics”; “It was so sad, as I knew that half of the money did not reach where I intended it to reach,” he recalls with a wince. Typically of a born businessman, Al Ghurair is unwilling to accept such disappointment without at least proposing an alternative industry model that might make better use of his – and others’ – funds in future. “[Within a non-profit organisation] the donor can provide the skeleton management, but the other 85 or 90 per cent of the employees should be volunteers, and this is

“I want a system where a donor can track his money: where is it going and who is the ultimate beneficiary?”

where we need experts,” he says. “We need doctors, we need lawyers, we need bankers, and we need businessmen and teachers and university professors. We need them all to donate their time, so that critical strategic thinking can come from these people. “I’m calling for a solution where we should not really spend more than 10 or 15 per cent of the donated amount, on employees,” he continues. “The rest should come from volunteers who believe in this philosophy and say ‘I don’t need that paycheque’. People have to come in and donate their time and their energy and their skill. They have to do this because they believe in making a difference, and it’s those people that will turn the project into a success.” By way of example, Al Ghurair cites Médecins Sans Frontières, the Frenchfounded NGO and Nobel Peace Prize laureate best known for its projects in war-torn regions, and developing countries fighting endemic diseases. “These people donate their time and all they need is somebody to pay for the logistics,” he notes. “These professionals will leave their businesses behind for some weeks of the year, they will do the operations and look after

the patients. This is a genuine approach.” While retirement from the fast-paced world of banking and finance is not currently on his agenda, Al Ghurair does intend to spend more time on philanthropy when he eventually steps back from Mashreq and his numerous other business concerns. In the meantime, he hopes to establish an entity to champion the culture of expert volunteerism that he believes could change giving in the Gulf for good. “We’ll set up an efficient organisation, a foundation with people who will put their heart and soul into their efforts,” he insists. “We will support them with funding but we won’t recruit people who are only interested in the paycheque. They will focus on education, and empowering women economically, and they will explore public-private partnerships that act across a range of issues. “Now, because of the wealth of the nation and its economy, from which I have benefited, I can give a lot more than I might once have been able to,” he adds. “There are many people around the world who do these things just to make more money, or to brag about it. I don’t want to do that; I want to work from the heart.” n

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Talking about a revolution Aramex cofounder Fadi Ghandour is today a leading backer of young Arab entrepreneurs, lending his capital and expertise to start-ups and urging a reinvention of the corporate blueprint. Rather than tunnel-vision capitalism, where the business of business is profit, and nothing else, he describes a model where social returns are as valuable as financial returns BY Joanne Bladd

n December 2010, on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Mohammed Bouazizi lit a fire that would rage across the Arab world. The fruit seller’s act of self-immolation, a desperate response to the confiscation of his unlicensed cart, ignited an uprising that spilled from Tunisia, to Egypt, to Libya, and continues to burn today. His actions struck a chord with millions of young, downtrodden Arabs, grappling with poverty and joblessness. Today, says Fadi Ghandour, those same factors are set to drive a fresh tide of entrepreneurial disruption and social activism across the Middle East. “At its core this – the Arab youth uprising – is an economic story,” he says.

“When you don’t feel economically engaged, when you have no stake in the stability of your society, you will rebel. Bouazizi was the first entrepreneur-rebel.” Ghandour is on the frontline of this revolution. He is best known as the co-founder of Aramex, a business he grew from scratch into a $1.3bn logistics giant, and the first company in the Arab world to list on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, his targets are smaller but no less important. Over the last decade, he has become a leading backer of young Arab entrepreneurs, lending his capital and expertise to start-ups. This is no petty cash: he has staked millions of dollars, both through the $40m fund, Mena Venture

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Investments, he launched with Arif Naqfi, the founder of Abraaj Group, and in his own right into the start-up scene. Ghandour has kept his Midas touch: he was the first backer of Maktoob, an Arabic-language web portal that was sold to Yahoo in 2009 for a reported $164m. Ghandour stepped down as chief executive of Aramex in 2012 – though he remains its vice-chairman – placing a fresh focus on his philanthropic activities. To give a smattering of his current titles: he is the chairman of Wamda, a web platform dedicated to all things start-up, and founder of Ruwwad for Development, which fosters youth activism in poor communities through scholarships and other schemes. He sits on the boards of Endeavor Global, a nonprofit that pairs entrepreneurs with seasoned business experts, and Injaz Al-Arab, an organisation that aims to kit students out with entrepreneurial and leadership skills. He also lends his clout to the Jordan-based start-up accelerator Oasis500 and the American University of Beirut, among others. It does, he says mildly, keep him busy. “His work will go down in our region’s history,” says Habib Haddad, CEO of Wamda. “Not just in terms of him being the face of entrepreneurship, but by his putting his money where his mouth is through investment, and by always having an open door for young people. His impact has been incredible.” Start-ups are part of a broader conversation about the ties between private business and society that has been gathering pace since the onset of the Arab Spring. The turmoil threw the region’s mass youth unemployment and economic inequality into sharp focus, and made clear that governments had neither the cash, nor the capacity to fix these problems alone. Entrepreneurship has been touted as an antidote to this mix, but it needs the backing of a dynamic private sector – and not all are on board. “Companies still aren’t doing enough,” says Ghandour. “The idea that they are

“If every word spoken about start-up capital in the region translated into funding, we’d have the biggest funds in the world” only responsible for their own commercial success is, in my view, crazy. If we look at the countries that were responsible for the uprisings, the private sector was hammered. It’s in its interest to give more – of its capital, its knowledge and its capabilities.” Ghandour is lobbying for a reinvention of the corporate blueprint. Rather than tunnel-vision capitalism – where the business of business is profit, and nothing else – he sees a model where social returns are as crucial as the financial motive. This is disruption of a high order, and it banks on the buy-in of companies. Many of the stated goals of the Arab Spring – job creation, stability and better living conditions – will stall without vibrant, private sector-driven economies. “This is not about CSR. This is about the company as a living organism that affects society around it,” he says. “The affluence of a company is tied to the affluence of the community it lives in, and vice versa. If we don’t take that view, we risk sacrificing longterm success just to gain a quick profit. “The demand for change may have quieted down now, but anyone who assumes this has been resolved does so at their peril,” he continues. “The questions are the same: how does wealth trickle down? How do we get our youth to become job creators, to feel the affluence of society?” This is not idle criticism: Ghandour practices what he preaches. Corporate activism is entwined into the Aramex business model. The firm has a long-standing

track record of aiding in disaster relief, in education and employment schemes, in sports and youth development and – unsurprisingly – support for entrepreneurs. It also has a policy of buying small; if it can sign up an SME as a supplier over a bigger player, it will. “People ask me what is the difference between Aramex and its multibillion-dollar competitors. I always say it’s our corporate culture, because anybody can sell what we sell,” Ghandour says. “The private sector has a job to do here. Governments can’t drive reform alone, the safety net of social welfare doesn’t stretch that far. Will it cost us? Yes. But it’s an investment that will pay off in the future.” Much depends on exporting this idea of conscious capitalism to the next generation. Ghandour, a Jordanian national, traces his own activist roots back to his upbringing, which played out against the background of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Politics were a daily point of discussion and there was, he recalls, “a clear sense of social justice and duty. A sense that something must change in this region”. He has sought to mimic this with Ruwwad, which gifts scholarships to university hopefuls, usually at a cost of around $2,000 to $3,000 per student per year. In exchange, they are expected to find volunteering opportunities in their local communities, a trade-off of sweat equity for cash. “This is not charity. They have to earn their money,” says Ghandour. “They get an education, but they also learn that this is a two-way street.” Get it right, he asserts, and these graduates could be harbingers of a coming business revolution, where profit and social returns are deeply interdependent. “This is how you create activist citizens, by not waiting for the government to tackle social problems. They have a sense of ownership and responsibility for their own communities, for their neighbours.” Still, it is a long game. The revolution may have swelled the ranks of Arab entrepreneurs, but start-ups still face

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Ruwwad is a non-profit community empowerment organization that helps disadvantaged communities overcome marginalization through youth activism, civic engagement and education. www.ruwwad.jo

EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES IN EGYPT, JORDAN, LEBANON AND PALESTINE

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Two-thirds of young people in the MENA region think that people of their generation are more likely to be entrepreneurs than those in previous generations

an uphill struggle to survive. Financing is an ongoing battle, with investors still favouring tangible asset classes such as property and industry over the risky odds of a start-up. In the post-Maktoob flush, there have been few notable exits and none with the same headline-grabbing appeal. The competition is only set to grow: according to a survey of 3,500 youth in 16 Arab states, published in April, two-thirds of respondents believe people of their generation are more likely to start a business than previous generations. To date, Mena Venture Investments has put money into more than 60 companies. The fund’s sweet spot is, says Ghandour, “somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000, and always as a minority investor” – but such funds remain scarce. “If every word spoken about start-up capital in the region translated

into funding, we’d have ABOVE Ghandour grew Jordanbased logistics start-up Aramex the biggest funds in the into a $1.3bn giant, and the first world,” he asserts ruefully. firm from the Arab world to list “The reality is that venture on the Nasdaq stock exchange capital, early-stage capital, seed capital, is still in the tens of millions of dollars. We need so much more.” In oil-rich Arab economies, some governments have sought to offset the shortfall by launching state-backed funds, a tactic that could have its own drawbacks. “I worry about government money coming into this space, because the last thing you want to give entrepreneurs is a safety net,” he says. “There will come a day when the government can’t afford further handouts. Part of being an entrepreneur is standing on your own two feet, and creating alternative wealth outside of the state.” By any measure, these are big-picture

problems, but Ghandour’s formula is simple. On the thorny topic of impact, a political hot potato that can consume some businesspeople-turned-philanthropists, he is relaxed. “I think the jury is out,” he says. “My measure of impact is that you are addressing a pain in society, with clear commitment of continuation. That’s impact as far as I’m concerned.” For would-be social activists, his advice is equally direct. “Take what you do and extend it to society. It’s not about having a huge budget. Be a mentor; take on interns. If you’re a big company, devote 10 to 15 per cent of your procurement to SMEs. This is your community and you know the challenges as well as anyone else. “I don’t want to complicate it,” he continues. “It’s not about changing the world. It’s about changing your corner of it. That’s social activism – and it works.” n

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Start me up Social enterprise – applying business tenets to a social mission – is an evolving concept with few defined parameters. We speak to a handful of social entrepreneurs for whom it’s all about the double-bottom line: generating revenue that allows them to keep on creating long-term social value

David Munir Nabti COMPANY: AltCity FOUNDED: 2011

INTERVIEWS BY Adrienne Cernigoi

s AltCity’s CEO or ‘mayor’, David Munir Nabti presides over an Alternative City of entrepreneurs, innovators and start-up enthusiasts who convene at Beirut’s only socially-focused start-up hub. “One of the most common complaints in the region and Lebanon is that people who are trying to do innovative, entrepreneurial things don’t have a community of like-minded people to share with or support as work partners,” he says. With up to 60 people a day using AltCity’s café alone, the hub provides rooms for events, meetings and workshops at discounted rates for entrepreneurs who pay anything from $20 a month for café membership, to $200 a month for a locker, internet access and desk from which to work from 9am to midnight. Events and membership fees generate income for AltCity, with grants supporting the rest of their work. Around 20 people use AltCity as their primary workspace on a daily basis, people who otherwise would not have the infrastructure to run their business. “We try to provide a good, solid place for people to work that has consistent internet and electricity,” notes Nabti. “Which is difficult for us because those things are challenging here.” AltCity has held more than 700 start-up support programmes since 2011, helping businesses to become more competitive regionally or globally. Providing support

services to any business starting out in Lebanon is a valuable contribution, says Nabti, because of the lack of job opportunities and subsequent brain drain. “Beyond that, we provide additional support to those start-ups that have a social impact. We help with legal registration, business development and connect people to investors or possible funders,” he explains. And it doesn’t stop at helping businesses to get off the ground – social enterprises that are scaling up often need different support services, he explains. “Frequently there are issues around internal governance and management,” says Nabti. “Accounting can be done very simply at the small stage – using Excel or online spreadsheets – but when you start scaling-up and preparing for investment or loans, you need a more robust method for monitoring finance and cash flow.” Now, AltCity is looking beyond Lebanon at partnerships between start-up hubs across the region, to boost learning and draw on particular strengths in each country. Nabti believes AltCity’s services would be just as valuable in Dubai and Doha as in Beirut or Cairo. “We see great opportunity for social impact start-ups coming out of Egypt, but there is less in terms of financial resources than in Qatar, for example,” he explains. “But in Dubai or Qatar, they also need the creative and business development support.”

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Curt Rhodes

COMPANY: Questscope FOUNDED: 1988 urt Rhodes knows a little about the challenges facing young people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Since arriving in the region more than three decades ago, the veteran social entrepreneur has helped more than 200,000 school dropouts and disadvantaged youth in MENA find educational opportunities and a place in society, through alternative schooling and youth engagement programmes. “When I withdrew from my academic responsibilities [in 1981] I couldn’t find an organisation that I wanted to work for, so I founded Questscope,” explains Rhodes. “Our motto is putting the last, first. I want to join people in their journey to make their own lives better.” Questscope has worked with many partners to fund its youth and education programmes, from the Jordanian Ministry of Education and UN agencies to private benefactors. The organisation takes a slice – from 10 to 25 per cent – of the project’s

funding as its revenue, to keep Questscope sustainable as a social business. Speaking the same language as investors, however, is a challenge for social entrepreneurs when all they want to do is start solving a societal problem, says Rhodes. “A good social entrepreneur generally needs a good translator. Social entrepreneurs look at a concrete wall and think, ‘There needs to be a hole in that wall’ and then push their heads through it. Not everyone is willing to push their head through a wall. I work harder at each stage to attract people by the evidence of success. The biggest underlying factor is that investors are looking to benefit too; you need to pull them into a conversation.” Based in Amman, Jordan, Rhodes and his 41 staff now work across the region, including with youth in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Since 2004, his dedicated team have given 10,000 Jordanian school dropouts a second chance to reach end of secondary school-level education.

Rhodes sounds a warning about the scale of the education crisis ahead that will have an impact on employment and social inclusion, particularly in Syria. “Social entrepreneurs can survive; we can create enough of a business to do a nice project. But the scale of what has to be addressed is way beyond the capacity of any one group of 10 or 100 people,” he explains. Rhodes advocates collaboration and a fresh approach to solutions as the only way to foster the social returns necessary in the region. “It’s like Arab Idol with entrepreneurship – competing to win a little slice of the pie for that problem. It’s the wrong atmosphere for social entrepreneurship; it has got to be inclusive, not competitive,” he says. “If social, high impact investors don’t have the breadth of vision that matches the size of the issue, then we will continue to do tiny little things. The thinking and awareness of scale needs to be different. What worked for the 20th century won’t work for the 21st century.”

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Khalid Al-Khudairi COMPANY: Glowork FOUNDED: 2011

ew took Khalid Al-Khudairi seriously when he announced that he planned to launch a website that would help women find jobs in Saudi Arabia. Three years later and it is the former KPMG man – and the 11,000 women he has so far helped to find employment – who are having the last laugh. His company, Glowork, now has a database of more than 1 million women and is endeavouring to bridge the yawning gap between highly educated females, and the labour market. “The most important thing for me was getting the employers on board,” explains Al-Khudairi. From 30 companies in the first few months, General Electric, Shell, IBM and Cisco are now among the 180 firms hiring Saudi women through Glowork. Last year Glowork secured investment worth $16m from Saudi telco SAS Holding. Al-Khudairi says that he and his fellow founder, Jamal Al-Mansour, turned down several approaches before accepting the SAS deal. Other would-be suitors were not the right fit, he explains, with one wanting to make Glowork a purely for-profit business. “I am totally against charging the end-user, our job seekers. We don’t charge the women, that would kill the social aspect of it.”

Yet making a profit is still an integral part of this social enterprise. Glowork gets SR5,000 ($1,333) per hire from companies and a further SR2,800 ($745) from the Ministry of Labour, an ultimate saving for the government which spends $10bn a year on the unemployed. “We incur a lot of fees as an organisation. We went from three employees to over 35 and we expect to hire another 40 by the end of the year. We couldn’t do this if we weren’t generating proper revenue,” Al-Khudairi notes. The SAS deal gave the investor a 51 per cent stake, but the social vision is a fundamental pillar of the agreement, says Al-Khudairi. “You have to make sure you keep to your vision. For me, that is: how many women am I going to get into the labour market this year? This is the ultimate goal, not the financial one.” Al-Khudairi advises other budding social entrepreneurs to think long-term, and to think big from day one. “My definition of an entrepreneur is someone who looks at a gap in the market and tries to fill it,” he suggests. “A social entrepreneur, on the other hand, is someone who looks at an obstacle in the market, and makes it into an opportunity.”

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Kamal Mouzawak COMPANY: Souk el Tayeb FOUNDED: 2004

t started small, with just 10 farmers selling their produce at a garden show in Lebanon. Ten years later, the small seed of a social enterprise has grown into Souk el Tayeb, which helps around 100 stakeholders – farmers, families and cooperatives – to combine food and farming, generating income for producers and preserving the dignity and cuisine of Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Tayeb, meaning good, tasty or good-hearted in Arabic, is the brainchild of Kamal Mouzawak (left), himself a farmer’s son. The organisation has evolved from its early roots as a place for rural producers to reach a bigger, urban consumer market, to a human development project. There are weekly markets, food festivals, a shop and a restaurant. “It was never a planned expansion,”

says Mouzawak. “We started asking farmers to do more and better in terms of food quality, taste or packaging. This is when we really understood the importance of capacity building.” Souk el Tayeb generates income from the $25 fee that each farmer pays per day for his or her stand at a weekly farmers’ market, a fee that has remained unchanged in 10 years. This covers the cost of the market and some of the organisation’s capacity building efforts, which include workshops open to all members, and one-on-one consultancies to tackle farmers’ specific problems. Guidance is given either by a member of the Souk el Tayeb team, or an outside consultant, and donors such as the ILO and UNHCR, make up the rest of the programme’s funding. The initiative has expanded to train women

from Palestine, Syria, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and Cameroon, so that they may cook and sell their traditional dishes in Lebanon. “We are a people-to-people project and enhancing people’s skills is the most important part,” says Mouzawak. “That’s the difference between being a supermarket and a development partner. For us, capacity building is at the core of what we do.” As well as increasing economic returns for the farmers by selling more of their produce, Mouzawak notes there are social returns too in terms of boosting self-esteem. “It is important for producers to be in direct contact with, and recognised by, consumers. It’s about understanding that they are as important to society as anyone else, not at the bottom of the social pyramid.”

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Najla Al Midfa COMPANY: Khayarat FOUNDED: 2014

fter stints at Shell, Google and McKinsey & Company, Najla Al Midfa decided in autumn last year that she was ready to take the plunge into social entrepreneurship. There are just 20,000 Emiratis employed in the private sector out of a possible 4 million jobs in the UAE, Al Midfa says, and with 30,000 unemployed Emiratis she recognised a gap that needed to be bridged. She has since established Khayarat, an online platform dedicated to raising awareness of non-government job opportunities among promising, young Emirati graduates, and to training those young people in the skills they need to work and succeed in the private sector. Still in the pilot phase of her business, training 10 Emirati students, Al Midfa hopes to launch fully this coming summer. Leaving a well paid, senior job was a difficult decision. Al Midfa’s family, too, was sceptical. “I found myself having to justify my position over

and over again,” she says. “It’s a social enterprise – not a business you can physically see, like a restaurant – and for them it’s a noble cause, but they said ‘Why don’t you do it on the side? Don’t leave your job for it’. But I kept thinking to myself, if not me, then who?” With her parents on board, Al Midfa has already recognised the need to adapt her initial business plan to overcome unforeseen hurdles. “My initial thought was that it would be supported by venture philanthropy or CSR,” she explains. “But actually it’s about talent acquisition and management. So I moved from there to wanting to do it as a for-profit business.” Investment in social businesses has lagged behind funding for purely for-profit enterprises, says Al Midfa, although it is only in the last five years that people in the region have started to even consider entrepreneurship as a viable career option. From her perspective, while early stage investment is available to entrepreneurs in

the region, growth capital is harder to come by. The commercial viability of the enterprise is important for sustainability. “I’m hoping that companies will pay to have a page on the platform knowing that it will attract a lot of Emirati eyeballs,” says Al Midfa. Fees from multinational companies will form the primary income stream; students will not pay. Khayarat will provide ‘soft skills’ services such as help writing CVs, preparing for interviews and, importantly, helping students engage their parents on the realities of working in the private sector: for example, late nights or foreign travel. Running the business on her own is tough. “It helps to have a team,” notes Al Midfa. “I have friends I can brainstorm with, but it’s different if you have a full-time co-founder with complementary skills who can add value.” And she has a warning for potential start-ups: “You have to be obsessed by the idea. It’s only when you start the journey that you realise how difficult it is.” n

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Growth prospects All start-ups need investment to step up to the next level and truly realise their potential. How might budding social entrepreneurs best go about making their project an attractive proposition to would-be backers? BYâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; Peter Guest

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Hollywood stars Michelle Rodriguez (ABOVE) and Eva Longoria (ABOVE RIGHT) with Palestyle bags

aving spent several years working for Proctor & Gamble, the multinational giant that produces consumer goods ranging from beauty creams to dog food, Zeina Abou Chaaban was ready for a change. “I knew traditional business was not going to be fulfilling,” she recalls. “I wasn’t happy, and I knew that I wanted to take a step and have a direct impact on the world around me.” Chabaan looked at the traditional NGO sector, but on the advice of her mother decided to look for a way to use her experience in business, and pursue her desire for social impact inside a for-profit business. In 2009 a visit to the Al Biqaa refugee camp in Jordan, which houses 80,000 displaced

Palestinians, opened her eyes. “I was inspired by the refugee women, with such love for their heritage and their skills. Despite the difficult situation they are living in, they are trying to offer a better life for their children,” she says. It was the spark she needed. Using her own seed capital, she started a company, Palestyle, which provides jobs to embroiderers from the refugee camps in crafting leather goods that are now sold in high-end department stores, including Bloomingdales and House of Fraser. A portion of the profits also goes to support social projects to help disenfranchised refugee communities. It has been a successful few years, and the products have started to make the kind

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of impact that luxury brands dream of, appearing on the arms of Hollywood stars including Eva Longoria and Lily Cole. Now, she is looking for the right investor to help the company expand, hoping to tap a small but growing community of social and impact investors, and in doing so prove her business model. “This is the challenge of the social business,” she says. “You have to succeed on a financial level, and at the same time you have to show your social impact, without the one jeopardising the other.”

Zeina Abou Chaaban used her own capital to found Palestyle; now she is looking for investors

“You have to succeed on a financial level, and at the same time you have to show your social impact, without the one jeopardising the other”

According to investors, mentors and entrepreneurs themselves, the mistake that most social start-ups make is not focusing enough on their financials. Although social enterprises and the wider impact investing sector are often pitched as a blend of financial and social returns, the first concern of most investors is usually the sustainability of the business. Ankur Shah, who heads overall sector strategies for the Acumen Fund in Dubai, says this is fundamental to the entire notion of impact investing, which works to complement traditional philanthropy and bring for-profit financing into the social space. “We see that investing [money] is more effective than giving the money away, because the company that we invest in, theoretically, will be sustainable and will not need additional infusions of philanthropic capital in the future,” he explains. “More than that, they will go out and leverage commercial capital as time goes by, giving a considerable amount of leverage for the philanthropic dollar.” At Acumen, Shah looks at two types of company: those with innovative business models that are yet to fully prove themselves, and those who have validated their approach but need financing to grow. The former requires a more venture capital-type approach, whereas the latter necessitates closer examination of an existing company. “Our view is that it is important for us to prove that the unit economics are proven before the business expands,” Shah says. “Let’s say we have a chain of primary healthcare clinics that are based in slums. Each clinic needs to generate profits, such that the sum of the profits of all of the clinics will pay for the corporate overhead.” Management quality is equally important, Shah says, and founders need to demonstrate a close fit with the fund’s values and mission, as well as “grit, integrity and skillset”. Of course, impact matters, and Acumen will look in detail at a company’s social profile, determining the breadth and depth of its impact, and the mechanism it employs to achieve it. Again, the fund is looking for

something more than just a donation-based model. “There has got to be some sort of innovation that breaks some kind of constraint that is pre-existing,” Shah says. A good pitch, he argues, incorporates numbers that demonstrate which sections of society the company will impact, what critical services it will provide to how many people, and what growth plans are in place. “We made an investment in a vocational training company, whose pitch was to train informal sector workers who did not have formal contracts, and were being paid on a daily, weekly or seasonal basis,” he cites by way of example. “The first order impact was the number of people they trained, the second order impact was the quality of training, which means the incremental improvement in skill level, along with the incremental wage increase of that worker.” There are data challenges in measuring and calculating the metrics, he admits, “and we don’t expect early stage companies to have solved these things,” however they are an indication of the rigour of thought that the industry expects. “We don’t necessarily expect all of this to be figured out up front,” he clarifies. “We see

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Antisocial Enterprises

ABOVE A good pitch incorporates numbers that demonstrate which sections of society a company will impact successfully

it as concentric circles. You need to hit all the headlines first, so that we’re interested in the business, and then the headlines need to stand up to scrutiny and due diligence.” The red flags for investors, he adds, are basically a failure to address these key criteria. “There’s not enough impact, or the impact is half-hearted. The impact has not been thought through or doesn’t reach low-income consumers. The financial viability has not been thought through, the operating expenses are way too high, there’s no plan to break even and there are reckless plans to expand the business. Management is looking for cheap money rather than trying to prove a point, or not really thinking about it commercially enough, or not doing anything really innovative.” The laundry list of requirements sounds fairly daunting – all the more so when it

is added to the traditional problems that start-ups in emerging economies can experience, such as finding talented staff and accessing markets. Successful start-up ‘scenes’ tend to boast a well-developed ecosystem of mentors, investors, recruiters and fellow founders that extends well beyond just the venture capital industry. “At the end of the day, regardless of what country you’re in, the network that an entrepreneur can build around him or herself has arguably the biggest role to play in advancing your company from stage one to stage two to stage three, et cetera. That’s not limited to a network of investors, but a network of knowledge and a network of mentors,” says Jamil Wyne, a research associate at Wamda, an Amman-based platform for entrepreneurs in the MENA region. “There is a general consensus that

The history of social entrepreneurship is littered with examples of ideas that failed to capture the imaginations of the moneymen. In many cases, this is simply because those pitching failed to understand the fundamentals vital to their would-be investors. One UAE-based angel investor, who declined to be named, says that all too often, entrepreneurs’ priorities are askew. “The costs weren’t there at all,” he recalls of one recent pitch. “Why? Because they wanted to spend a lot of marketing and PR money.” The nascent social enterprise ecosystem, with its professional institutional investors and communities of mutually-supportive entrepreneurs and mentors, is clearly starting to grow, and the players within it are trying to keep up the positivity and momentum that will enable it to enter the business and investment mainstream. However, away from the backslapping of conferences, and when the microphones are turned off, investors, mentors and entrepreneurs are quick to express their exasperation with one another. “You see people going to investors with no pilots, no proof of anything, business models where it’s all working capital, where they’re paying themselves a big salary,” one professional mentor tells Philanthropy Age. “They haven’t even worked out their profits.” Entrepreneurs do not always have the utmost respect for their investors’ assessments, either. According to one experienced start-up founder, who is now working in the social enterprise space in the Gulf, a number of the young entrepreneurs he has come across are “making it up as they go along” – an attitude that won’t wash with those who hold the purse strings.

PHILANTHROPY AGE

“Entrepreneurs who are driven by the social mission sometimes think and feel that because of that social mission, people will be nice on their financials” ABOVE Vocational training for informal workers can be a significant source of social impact; it changes lives, and can boost the bottom line too

something’s forming, but it’s at an early stage,” he continues. “We have more incubators, we have more investors than before... you have formal and informal gatherings where people are meeting and sharing ideas.” Although there are marked differences between countries across the region, Wyne cautions that venture capital is limited when it comes to purely for-profit entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This translates into an even tighter supply for social entrepreneurs: despite the hype, and despite a well-established tradition of philanthropic giving across the region, he says investors are not yet fully sensitised to the impact investing and social capital sectors. “You have a very, very small population of investors that are actually thinking about social enterprise... The institutional support is minimal,” Wyne cautions. “I also think that the maturity level of many of these social entrepreneurs isn’t yet at the point where

an investor would want to step in. “I think there’s just a grey area around it. If you look at other parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, India, even the US as well, it’s much easier for people to convey this point of fusing for-profit and social returns. I think that is a practice that really hasn’t come to fruition [in MENA] just yet.” Not everyone agrees entirely that the amount of available funding is the central issue. Medea Nocentini, who mentors and consults with social enterprises through C3 – Consult and Coach for a Cause – in Dubai, says that while investor networks are still fairly new, there is still a sizeable amount of capital around. “Everybody complains about the lack of funding, but the funding is there,” she insists. “People are going to the US to invest, so it’s not that people don’t have the money or they don’t want to invest the money in entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship. It’s more that there is a phase before

reaching that level that entrepreneurs need to go through.” In many ways, C3 is a social enterprise itself. After looking for volunteer opportunities in the UAE, Nocentini began helping out at a couple of fledgling social enterprises, offering pro bono consulting time. By the end of 2011, enough friends and friendsof-friends had become interested that the group could hold networking events, “as a fun thing to do”. Today C3 has a database of around 800 entrepreneurs and volunteers from the corporate world, and has taken 20 enterprises to scale. C3 events have gone from four or five people in a room to hundreds filling conference suites – a bellwether for the growth in the industry. And even though it all began as a simple volunteer programme, Nocentini is forthright about the hard business logic that underpins successful social entrepreneurs. “The challenge that a social entrepreneur is going to go through is building a solid story on pilots, past performance data on the financial side of things and the social side of things, in a data-driven way,” she says. “Entrepreneurs who are driven by the social mission sometimes think and feel that because of that social mission, people will be nice on their financials. And then they go in front of investors...” n

PHILANTHROPY AGE

An educated mind Deep pockets are only part of what makes a good philanthropist, says Saudi humanitarian Muna AbuSulayman; giving well is a learning curve in itself

BY Joanne Bladd n Jeddah’s largest mall, an eclectic cluster of start-ups are clamouring for attention and sales. Kiosks pitched in prime retail space tout everything from handmade clothing to catering services, hoping to snare the attention of some of the mall’s thousands of daily customers. These ventures are the work of Saudi entrepreneurs, each eager to catapult their ideas from small-time concerns into fully-fledged businesses, capable of turning a profit. They have six weeks to prove that they can. All are part of the Dollani to the Souq, or ‘show me the market’ scheme, the brainchild of Saudi philanthropist and media personality Muna AbuSulayman. Would-be entrepreneurs are whisked through a crash course in running a business, before netting a six-week spot in one of the kingdom’s largest malls at a fraction of the usual cost. By the end of this stint on the front line of retail, each can expect to know whether their enterprise will sink or swim. “About 40 per cent will drop out within three weeks,” says AbuSulayman. “Not everyone has what it takes to be an entrepreneur. But this is a low-risk way for Saudis to trial their business model, understand their price point, and see how they need to refine their idea.”

“It’s not about frittering away large sums of money. That’s the easy part. The question to ask is: will my giving still matter in five or 10 years?”

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The scheme, a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s largest mall operator, Arabian Centres, already has more than 500 graduates under its belt. In the next 10 years, AbuSulayman hopes to see it cultivating start-ups across the entire Middle East, helping to make a dent in a youth unemployment rate that hovers at 25 per cent. “I think there’s a gap in the market,” she says. “There are lots of training courses but very few low-risk practical schemes. I’m seeing really bright, young Saudis trying to make this work, and that could be replicated across the Arab world.” AbuSulayman knows her market. Propelled to fame on the all-female talk show Kalam Nawaem, her eight-year spell as a co-host turned her into a household name and a poster girl for modern Saudi women. She remains a high-profile figure and one of the region’s biggest hitters on Twitter – but it would be a mistake to see AbuSulayman as simply a media darling. For more than a decade she’s beaten the drum for strategic philanthropy, first through the Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation and later with her own consultancy, Directions. Her CV is substantial. In 2007, AbuSulayman was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF), ranked alongside such trailblazers as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and the co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. In the same year, she became Saudi Arabia’s first female goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Development Programme. Today, she lends her clout to a clutch of agencies, ranging from the Qatar-based social initiative Silatech, to the Muslim Women’s Fund, taking aim at some of the most intractable problems facing the Arab world today.

“I’ve had to educate myself,” she says. “I’m constantly asking what could be done differently or more effectively to maximise impact. Innovative philanthropy is a work in progress, and it’s not just about spending money. It’s about leveraging influence and encouraging change.” AbuSulayman caught the wave of impact-led giving early. She cut her teeth as founding secretary-general of the Alwaleed Foundation, learning swiftly to parlay its annual SR100m ($16.1m) budget and political muscle into effective philanthropy. A former academic – AbuSulayman began her career as a university lecturer – she applied the same rigour here, seeking to secure the biggest bang for the Saudibased foundation’s bucks. “It was a shift towards thinking of philanthropy like a business, with a specific end goal. It was a process of trial and error,” she recalls. “It’s not about frittering away large sums of money. That’s the easy part. You could give away $100m a day to good causes. But you have to think about how the world is changing and the question to ask is: ‘Will my giving still matter in five or 10 years?’” The organisation honed in on three strands: Islam and the West, female empowerment and community development, with additional funds set aside for aid for natural disasters; a shift from the scattergun approach to giving often associated with local foundations. Under her steer, it also broke with the regional trend of doling out chunks of money to charitable causes, instead favouring the use of strategic endowments to drive progress in its areas of interest. Among the projects the foundation backed are centres for

“Whether it’s youth unemployment or eradicating malaria, we need people to step up and say: this problem is my responsibility”

Islamic studies in world-class universities, including Cambridge and Harvard, formed to foster dialogue and cultural bonds between East and West. “These are endowments that will create the next generation of enlightened leaders, maybe not now, but in 20 years time,” says AbuSulayman. “The idea was to use funding to create a legacy, one that will continue to impact lives over the long-term. I think that’s a strong basis for effective giving.” Her own approach to philanthropy was shaped significantly by her ties to the WEF, where she brushed shoulders with some of the leading thinkers of the day. An early meeting with Esther Duflo, co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, whose radical thinking on global poverty has caught the attention of politicians and philanthropists, prompted one of the foundation’s first grants, a $300,000 pledge

PHILANTHROPY AGE

“The more focused your goal, the easier it is to give efficiently and well, and to track the results”

to the Deworm the World Initiative. “She was very clear on how deworming programmes were among the most effective and cheapest ways to ensure children in Africa attended school. So we supported that,” says AbuSulayman. “Davos in many ways was a masterclass. I was able to hear from the best of the best, people on the cutting-edge of research, and that helped me enormously in understanding the worlds of philanthropy and NGOs. Not enough philanthropists make giving decisions based on data.” Today, the mother-of-two has come full circle by leveraging these lessons in her own business. Directions Consulting both launches and advises others on philanthropic and CSR ventures, capitalising on AbuSulayman’s expertise and widespread industry contacts. What it is not, she says firmly, is a platform for vanity projects,

designed to generate ABOVE Muna AbuSulayman is a household name and a poster girl column inches rather than for modern Saudi women. She concrete results. is also a fierce advocate of high“I don’t do PR-led CSR,” impact strategic philanthropy she says. “We live with that kind of work all the time, where it is about buzz for a specific company or individual. If you want to get things done, you have to leave your ego out of it. I prefer to get things done.” AbuSulayman is critical of parts of the region’s charitable infrastructure, which she says play to self-interest rather than impact. She has clear advice for would-be philanthropists: educate yourself, identify a clear goal, and tailor your giving accordingly. “The key is to understand what you want to accomplish,” she says. “The more focused your goal, the easier it is to give efficiently and well, and to track the results. Everyone wants to do good – the question

is what kind of good, and why? That moment of evaluation is vital.” This sort of analysis doesn’t come easy, and perhaps explains why innovative giving has yet to truly find its feet in the Arab world. Hampered by a tradition of discrete charity, the region also lacks a ‘Bill Gates’ figure, able to spotlight the sometimes show-stopping results of catalytic philanthropy, as opposed to hit-and-miss cash handouts. For AbuSulayman, much will depend on the next generation’s ability to roll up their sleeves and take charge of critical social issues. “As of now, I don’t think philanthropists see themselves as solvers of major issues, but as participants in the solution. We haven’t reached the point yet where they are taking personal responsibility. Whether it’s youth unemployment or eradicating malaria, we need people to step up and say: ‘This problem is my responsibility.’” The region in many ways remains in flux in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, which brought its civil and economic woes into sharp focus. The timing may be right for the emergence of a fresh take on philanthropy, one geared towards driving social change on a broad scale. “We will get there,” insists AbuSulayman. “I think the next generation of philanthropists, those who think globally and are better exposed, will be the ones to step up to the plate. I’d like to see a multitude of people look strategically at impact, focus their efforts and see what they can achieve in one specific area. If we can get that right, I believe it will lead to real change.” n

PHILANTHROPY AGE

FOUR EXPERTS SHARE THEIR INSIGHTS ON THE LONG,

REWARDING ROAD TO CATALYTIC PHILANTHROPY ...or at least a little bit better!

PHILANTHROPY AGE

STARTING OUT

Rebecca Eastmond

Head of Philanthropic Services at JP Morgan Private Bank verybody gives, whether it’s to a person on the street or to a member of your own family. We’re about moving from basic charity to philanthropy: our belief is that you can achieve significantly greater results with the money that you give away, if you engage not just your heart, but also your brain. When you’re starting out as a philanthropist, we’ll talk to you about what you care about. What have you done in the past that you think worked or really made a difference? Or we’ll ask you about the things that make you angry in the world, and the injustices that make you think ‘something should be done about this’. Those things are often the things that, if you boil it down, you would most like to correct. It’s a question that you might not ordinarily ask yourself: what makes you mad? Do some initial thinking but don’t spend forever on research. There are shortcuts: one is to convene an afternoon and sit with a group of experts and other funders for a few hours, to get a very quick tutorial. Or go and meet some other donors who are working in the same field who can tell you about their experiences, what works and what hasn’t worked, to see what resonates. There’s an inward learning phase, and then a quick and dirty research phase. Some people

INTERVIEWS BY Andrew White

can do a lot more thinking and spend a lot more time and be okay about it, but the thing that often helps many people is to then learn by doing. Deciding whether to set up a foundation or not usually comes down to how much money you’re looking to set aside for philanthropy. At about $2m it makes sense to consider forming some kind of structure, and then we advise people to look seriously at setting up a charitable foundation structure once they are up to around $10m. There are a number of reasons why you might want to set up a foundation. One is psychological: you want to earmark this pot of capital for philanthropy. You may add to it or take away from it, but from a management and psychological point of view that money, once it’s in the foundation, you can’t take it back. It’s in there for you and for your family, for charitable purposes. In addition, setting money aside into a foundation can act as a really great way of bringing people together around the family, structuring a family enterprise around supporting the community. Many families in the Middle East are dealing with wealth and business transition, and see philanthropy as an integral part of what they’re doing. Structuring the philanthropy can be important as a way of keeping engaged the family members who won’t be involved in the business. Sometimes it’s a way of helping grandchildren understand the value of money, and teaching them the family values. Not everybody can work in the business – you certainly can’t do it when you’re 14 years old – but you might be able to sit in an advisory capacity or on a junior board of a family foundation. You may wish to set up a foundation structure for tax reasons depending upon what jurisdiction you are in: it might be tax-efficient to give profit or income to a charitable structure, and that structure

might also act as a holding vehicle while you decide how you want to disburse the funds. Finding the right jurisdiction is so important: as well as tax considerations, you need somewhere that allows international giving and is open to giving across borders. You should also think about right-sizing your management team. I’ve worked with a couple of Middle East families who set up small boards, with trusted family office advisors on them, alongside a few key family members, perhaps five individuals in total. This small group makes decision-making much easier, and you can then have an advisory board of experts who can add their knowledge to your activities. It helps to keep costs down, too: if you have a board and an advisory board they don’t need an office. They’re volunteering and they’re meeting every now and then, to help you, so they can do that at your business office or even at your home. Most of the early-stage family foundations I work with don’t have full-time staff. They might have a part-time researcher, but they’re not running a full-time office for the foundation. Pretty early on it becomes

Many families in the Middle East are dealing with wealth transition, and see philanthropy as an integral part of this cheaper to run a foundation than to run another structure: you’ve got filing, you’ve got admin spend in terms of producing accounts and an annual report. That’s not a great deal and you may even be able to get someone to do it in the office. The thing to do is actually get started, and once you are giving and you’re involved with something, you will find that the pleasure and the benefit you will get back from it as an individual, makes you want to do more. Try something. Get going.

PHILANTHROPY AGE

DEMANDING RESULTS

Francois Debiesse

Former CEO of BNP Paribas Wealth Management, and a senior advisor on philanthropy at the bank

LEARNING FROM OTHERS

Gillian Arthur

Director of the Sanne Philanthropic Foundation, a non-profit organisation created to give guidance to donors

defining the most important objectives of your philanthropy: what do you expect, and what will you ask of the beneficiary, the person in charge of the project? Defining objectives and measuring the way you approach these objectives is important for the investor, by which I mean the philanthropist, and for the beneficiary – the association or NGO in charge of building the project. Your methods of evaluation will depend on the type of project you are funding. How do you measure the result of an investment in culture? If the objective is to restore a monument, then of course the objective is finishing the restoration. But if your idea is to support creative artists, it is much more difficult to have a precise mathematical approach to results, and so you will need to be more qualitative in your approach. It can sometimes be easier if you are addressing specific social challenges: if the idea is to enable more children to go to school, then you can count the numbers of children

what data they have available, what lessons they’ve learned. After all, philanthropy is trial and error – you could argue that nothing is ever a failure, because if you then use that learning as you go through the next iteration, then that helps you. Do a scan of what’s out there. Who’s doing what, and what’s working? If you are looking for an NGO or association through which to channel your funding, then ask around: who’s got the expertise, who’s got the experience, the track record… and who’s really trying? There are a lot of charities out there, when you ask them what they are planning for the future, the next stage, they don’t have an answer. It’s business as usual. I think that there is little substitute for data. That data may not be as robust as it is in the

ealth has changed: 20, 30 or 50 years ago most wealthy people had inherited their money and they had an obligation to transmit that money to their children. Of course generosity was present, but it was in the form of traditional charity. Now most wealthy people in the world are aged between 50 and 60, are more and more often female, and have built their wealth through their professional life. They have all this money, and face the same existential question: what to do with it? Today most clients consider philanthropy as an investment, not a donation. Of course they do not expect any financial result from this investment, but they want a social impact. When you have been a successful entrepreneur all your life, you have in mind that you have to optimise your investments, and the day you stop being an entrepreneur and become a philanthropist, you still have that mindset; it doesn’t change. The starting point of this evaluation is

f you take the more intractable social issues that the world is trying to sort out, if they weren’t so difficult then we would probably have solved them by now. However many people are still underinvested in understanding the issue they’re trying to tackle. What do you really know about it? There are lots of people out there who have been working on these issues long and hard. So what’s gone before, and what’s the current thinking? You might choose to challenge that thinking, but you need to know what it is first. To quote a past director of the Rockefeller Foundation, “Money is a feeble offering without the study behind it which will make its expenditure effective”. Take a look at other funders, and ask

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enrolled at the end of the year, and you have your answer. For me it’s very clear: philanthropy can’t be simply a question of money. If the philanthropist just gives money it will be very, very difficult to ensure the best efficiency of this investment, and to make sure that this money is well utilised. However, at the same time, the philanthropist can’t become the guy in charge of the project; it has to stay in the hands of the beneficiary. That’s why you need a dialogue, a platform for interaction between the two stakeholders. It’s striking how often you see non-profit organisations that are doing great things, but are insufficiently aware of financial and economic realities. The donor, therefore, can drive financial efficiency, particularly because in most cases, the donor will have experience of managing these considerations. At the same time, the donor has to accept that it is not his or her own project, and that there are limits to their involvement.

for-profit world, there may be many strands and you have to make a judgment call, but there needs to be constant questioning: does this intervention make sense? Writing a one-off cheque drives me bananas because it might not achieve very much. You’ve got to set out to make a difference with this money. You can define what that difference is and how ambitious that difference is, but it’s not just about writing cheques. Fortunately, there is now more data than ever before available among the funding community. We go to donor meetings and there are sessions on failures, which is terrific because if you don’t admit that something didn’t work, then you can’t move on. Failure isn’t necessarily a negative; it’s a sign that you’re trying.

THE NEXT LEVEL

Jennifer Alcorn

Senior Program Officer for Private Donor Engagement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

on’t think that you can go out and do it completely on your own. You want to be aligned with a range of partners that are working in the same space, and you want to be part of a global community that’s working towards something, because then your voice is amplified. We’ve found that the more you can bring groups of people together, the more influence you’ll have on government aid dollars around the world, and the more influence you’ll have on sources of funding. What’s so amazing about the Gulf is that people are so generous, but the culture has been that you give with one hand, but then turn your head because you don’t want to embarrass the recipient; you want them to be empowered. It’s a beautiful idea but nowadays it really helps to put your name and your dollars against something that gets attention. Whether or not you’re looking for media attention, your dollars speak when you put them on the table. There’s a sea change going on in the Gulf among some very sophisticated philanthropists, where they are meshing the region’s historic culture of giving, with impactful catalytic philanthropy. By aligning with other partners, you’re doing that automatically.

Every individual’s philanthropic portfolio should have a mixture of types of investment, and you should work out how much you want to give to each type of philanthropy. Scalable, sustainable philanthropy is where you’re going to get the highest impact, and so that should account for around 50 per cent of your portfolio. There’s real value in giving to something that you believe in, and that answers an immediate need and may not have scale attached to it, so the next 25 per cent should go towards those things where you know it’s the right thing to do and you just do it. Take the earthquake in Pakistan or the tsunami in Indonesia; those were examples where funding was needed but it wasn’t scalable because it was emergency relief. The final 25 per cent should be reserved for risks. Like a venture capitalist, park that capital on the off chance that a risk might pay off. You might help create a new drug or get a vaccine through trials; you might change the world. It could become scalable and the chances are it will move into your 50 per cent when it is ready to be delivered, At some point, you’re going to need to leverage governments and the private sector in order to maximise your impact. As an individual philanthropist I don’t know that you should go to a government and pitch a programme. Instead, invest in a grantee whose work you trust and believe in - the chances are that they will have relationships with governments. With the private sector, the most important conversation you will have is up top before any money changes hands. The power of the philanthropist is to say ‘Ok, I will make this investment, but then you need to make sure that the product will get into the hands of those who need it, at a price they can afford’. The corporate must adhere to strict rules and costings, otherwise we might as well just make a business investment and make a return on it. In this case, the return is that these interventions are going to get to those who need them. That’s real leverage. n

EXPERT COLUMN

The fallacy of foreign aid Investment – not aid – is needed if we are to eradicate poverty in the world’s poorest countries, argues Andrew MacLeod

oreign aid is a thorny issue. Economic strain has seen a number of rich countries reshuffle their aid priorities in recent years, raising fears of a decline in funds to developing nations. The result has been a spike in calls to governments to increase their donations, hinged on the idea that large handouts can remedy poverty and set poor countries on the path to economic growth. There is little doubt foreign aid has a role to play in stabilising fragile countries, and has done much good in delivering emergency relief to millions around the world. But is it really best placed to drive economic development? Will doubling aid help those in greatest need? Or is the way the world looks at aid and philanthropy simply wrong?

About the writer Andrew MacLeod is a board member of Cornerstone Capital, an advisor to Australia’s Gane Energy and the UK-based Critical Resource, and a former general manager of Rio Tinto. He is the author of ‘A Life Half Lived’, which makes the case for development investment rather than development aid, and is based on his experience as a former senior official with the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross

I have seen first-hand that it is. Consider this: if you track capital flows from OECD to non-OECD economies, you will see that about 53 per cent of funding flows through the private sector. Just under a third – 30 per cent – is generated by remittances, and around 17 per cent comes from foreign aid and philanthropy. If the goal is to lift the world out of poverty, why then do we think of aid and philanthropy as major players in the process, when they contribute the smallest quantum? Efforts to double aid, the smallest pool of cash, would be better spent on driving private investment using aid and philanthropic funding to change the development trajectories of poor countries. The end game of development should be people gaining sustainable employment, with companies large and small paying tax to a responsible government, which in turn uses that tax to pay for hospitals, schools and other critical infrastructure. If we consider that to be the ultimate objective,

“Efforts to double aid, the smallest pool of cash, would be better spent on driving private investment using aid and philanthropic funding to change the development trajectories of poor countries”

EXPERT COLUMN

all development interventions should hinge on bringing economies and people closer to that end point. Ask yourself this: which organisation is more likely to lead to long-term sustainable employment, a private sector company investing in an economy, or an aid organisation giving away resources in that economy? Only employment can lift people out of poverty in a sustainable fashion. Aid and philanthropy cannot. Aid and philanthropy can, however, assist in the process, if funding is focused on helping to improve the investment climate. I have been part of the aid and development industry for nearly two decades, first as a worker with the International Red Cross in Bosnia and Rwanda, and later with the UN in Pakistan, the Philippines and other locations. I have seen with my own eyes the deep failings of aid. More recently, I have observed how multinational firms can impact less developed economies in my

role as an advisor to blue chips such as Rio Tinto and others. As importantly, companies can generate real value for their bottom line. This value is a reflection of the so-called community risk discount rate, which is calculated as follows. Resource and other companies put a price on their assets by looking at the future revenue an asset will bring, and discounting the cost of holding money, sovereign risk and community risk factors. They also deduct the estimated future costs required to earn that revenue. The result is the asset’s net present value. If a company can genuinely lower that risk, then the value of the asset – which is that declared in public listings – will be raised. Conversely community risk can reduce value and, in extreme circumstances, is one factor that can destroy the total value of an asset.

ABOVE If we are to overcome poverty, then private sector players need to be incentivised to change the development trajectories of poor nations

Community impact programmes, therefore – those that measurably work, as opposed to marketing spin – can tackle risk, protect the value of assets and improve the lives of employees. In Mozambique, BHP Billiton, the world’s largest miner, ran an antimalaria campaign that slashed adult malaria infections from 92 per cent to 5.6 per cent. In the process, it cut absenteeism in its workforce and improved productivity by an amount higher than the cost of the programme. In other words, the antimalaria drive was profitable. I am not arguing for an end to aid and philanthropy, or for the private sector to take control of all capital flows. I argue for new and genuine partnerships between the aid and philanthropic industries, and private corporations. Huge aid flows alone have done little to eradicate poverty and improve employment prospects in poor nations, suggesting it is not how much money is spent, but how it is spent that will count. Wouldn’t philanthropic or aid money be better spent in a programme with measurable indicators linked to outcomes? Wouldn’t we be better with development investment, rather than development aid? n

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Malaria in Bangladesh:

Net profit BY Andrew White

ife in the hills of Rangamati District is a series of ups and downs. In this forested corner of southeastern Bangladesh, women tend crops in the valleys while men chop timber on the steep slopes of each peak. They sleep in low-slung mud huts or raised wooden shacks buttressed precariously into the hillsides. They eke out a living in the hot, humid summer and cool dry winter, retreating indoors upon the tumultuous onset of monsoon season, which runs from June to October and leaves vast swathes of land underwater. It is a mid-March afternoon at Rangamati General Hospital, and aside from a handful of patients dozing fitfully on narrow cots, all is quiet. Outside the office of civil surgeon Dr Mostafizur Rahman, a Qu’ranic quote is painted carefully onto a whitewashed wall. ‘If you save one life,’ it reads, ‘you have saved mankind’. Over the past few years, Dr Rahman and his team have saved many lives. They have been aided in their efforts by a string of organisations, among them BRAC, the

“A few years ago, in every family and in every household, you would get malaria”

world’s largest NGO, and The Global Fund, an international financing institution whose support has enabled the country’s Ministry of Health – alongside others – to subdue a disease that once raged across the district. “A few years ago in these hills, in every family and in every household you would get malaria cases, and the hospital was full,” he says. “Now most people cannot point to a malaria case in their family in the last two years. It is reducing and reducing, even in the areas, 80 per cent of the district, that are very hard to reach.” Rangamati is a malaria ‘hot zone’, a belt of land across which the bite of a mosquito might occasion in fevered, painful death for any of the district’s 600,000 inhabitants. As recently as 2009, close to 19,000 cases were reported and 143 people lost their lives to a killer that will never be eradicated entirely, but has since been becalmed to a remarkable extent. BRAC, which was founded in Bangladesh and is now active in 11 countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, has channelled Global Fund monies into a multi-tiered

PHILANTHROPY AGE

assault that resulted in just 7,976 malaria cases and two deaths in 2013. Akhi Chakma was bitten by an infected mosquito in 2010. Now 14, she recalls three days of high temperatures, sweats, chills and vomiting. More fondly, she remembers the face of the BRAC community health worker who came to Sapchhari Joutha Khamar, her tiny village of 275 souls, a scattering of latticework huts on a densely wooded hillside. Provided with antimalarial drugs, Akhi made a full recovery and now sleeps under two insecticidal bednets that just about cover her, her mother, father and brother. “In the past we were worried because if you don’t have treatment, you can die,” says Akhi’s mother, Kalindi. “Now we know the symptoms and if we see them we know we can get drugs and survive.” The efforts of community health workers, and their unpaid colleagues, community health volunteers, are invaluable in stymying the spread of the disease. Currently, 375 workers and volunteers divide the district between them, providing a patchwork quilt of coverage and bringing much-needed assistance to households where the average monthly income rarely rises above 7,000 Bangladeshi taka ($90). Bednets may prevent potential victims from being bitten, but education brings awareness of the threat that mosquitos pose, and quick treatment separates the unfortunate, from the dead. “We train them how to spot the symptoms, and then how to administer a test for malaria,” says Dr Rahman. “After the test it takes about 15 minutes to get confirmation – there is no need for a microscope and one drop of blood is all we require. In this manner we are able to identify the cases, so we can treat them straight away. After that, patients only need six doses of drugs over three days and they will be okay.” Like all those who live in the surrounding

7,976 The number of malaria cases reported in Rangamati District in 2013, down from almost 19,000 in 2009

villages, Molina Chakma is ABOVE Akhi Chakma was 10 years old when she contracted named for the tribe into malaria; she survived and now which she was born. As a sleeps under two bednets with community health volunher parents and brother teer, her mornings are spent travelling between 116 households, handing out warnings, advice and much-needed medicines. Her elder sister was a volunteer before she married

and moved away; now Molina has inherited that mantle and conducts tests for malaria and tuberculosis – another focus of The Global Fund. “I had a dream to be a doctor but it was not possible,” she says. “Now I can still consult with people and help them through my work as a volunteer. People welcome me and trust me, which I think is a benefit

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of being from within the local community.” Her colleague Diana Chakma received 17 days’ training at a BRAC centre in nearby Chittagong in order to qualify as a community health worker covering five villages. Now the 28-year-old carries the benefit of that knowledge along with a bag packed full with laminated pictures of mosquitos and other assorted teaching

aids. She uses the images TOP Treating ordinary bednets with insecticide can keep to illustrate how mosquitos mosquitos at bay; ABOVE spread the disease, and she A community health worker gives instruction on how to outlines the threat of malaria to use bednets, as well as keep the villagers of Khamar Para homes clean and as insectfree as possible. “If there is a fever I test the patient, and if the diagnosis is positive then I will check

their weight and give out medicine accordingly,” she explains. “If there is a severe case, then the message is to go to hospital, otherwise I will come back to them in three days to check on their progress. People are learning about mosquitos and nets, and I feel proud because people respect us and the work we are doing.” The consequences of that work have so far been dramatic, and yet there is no sense that the battle against malaria – of which there were an estimated 207 million cases globally in 2012 – has been won. Rather Diana, Molina and their colleagues are bracing themselves against the onset of monsoon season, during which cases usually soar. When the rains come down, it is not unusual for healthcare staff to brave the floodwaters in small wooden canoes; malaria does not rest, and so neither can those committed to its suppression. Any interruption in the supply of bednets or depletion in the stock of available medicines can have catastrophic consequences: when malaria comes back, it comes back with a vengeance, as immunity tends to drop during quiet periods. Human nature, too, keeps the workers in the woods on their guard: sectarian violence, which flared most recently in 2012, represents another danger despite a conspicuous military presence in the area. The Global Fund corrals the handful of multinationals that manufacture highquality bednets, ordering millions at a time – a model that has so far helped to lower the price of each unit from $5 to $3.80. However the Bangladeshi government wants every household in the country’s five malaria-endemic districts to have access to two bednets; in this hard-to-reach area, not all households yet have access to one. The struggle goes on, the line between failure and success as thin as the mesh that acts as a barrier between sickness and health in the hills of Rangamati. n

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Breath of life The slums of Chittagong are teeming with life, families squeezed into single-room tenements, traders salvaging what they can from piles of others’ discarded rubbish, dogs and chickens scavenging for food in open sewers. They are also home to some of the most virulent strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) on the planet. TB can run like wildfire through these closely packed communities, and it’s only thanks to the tireless efforts of organisations such as BRAC and The Global Fund, that this contagious – and in many cases fatal – disease is prevented from decimating the city’s poorest residents.

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CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHTâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; An estimated 1.8 million people in Chittagong live in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slums; Taramina, 55, was diagnosed with multi-drugresistant TB nine months ago, and faces another 15 months of treatment before he will be cured of the infection; Rehena Begum, 35, grew up in the slums and now works as a health volunteer, covering 220 households and earning money by diagnosing TB cases and administering medicines; Much-needed drugs are dispensed at a clinic, or taken into the slums for patients who cannot make the journey

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFTâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; Kohinor Begum, 25, works at a garment factory and was diagnosed with TB five months ago. Medicines have allowed her to keep her job and continue to support her family; A free clinic located in a garment factory and sponsored by BRAC and The Global Fund; In rural tracts of Rangamati, outside Chittagong, a folding table and a simple test is all that is needed to catch TB cases; Many of Chittagongâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s factories produce clothes for high-end Western brands. The closelypacked environment is ripe for the spread of TB

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Pure intentions Children all over the world are dying for lack of basic sanitation. That’s why philanthropists, non-profits and innovators are breaking the toilet taboo to improve hygiene and save lives BY Adrienne Cernigoi ike many 15-year-old schoolgirls, Arushi and Akanksha talk over each other excitedly as they discuss their after-school club. Nevertheless, not many neatly turned out teenagers in perfectly pressed beige suits and immaculate white shirts, would chatter so passionately about visiting Delhi’s slums, cleaning toilets and six-stage hand-washing techniques. The girls, along with other students from five schools around New Delhi, visit their city’s slums once a month to run music and dance programmes raising awareness around the issue of sanitation. Every week, the Sanitation Club at Sulabh School meets to impress on its young advocates the message of hygiene management, lessons they take back to their own schools. “I first started going to the club three years ago,” explains Akanksha. “Before, students didn’t want to talk about it. They thought it was a dirty subject and they felt ashamed. Now the students take the initiative with sanitation activities and talk about it with each other.” Talking about this sensitive, but most basic, of issues matters hugely. Worldwide, 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation – that is, they are using shared facilities or toilets that don’t meet minimum hygiene standards. Worse, more than 1 billion of these people have no toilet at all, forcing them to answer nature’s call in the open, according to a recent joint UNICEF

and World Health Organisation (WHO) study. Children are dying to go to the toilet. Diarrhoeal diseases are the second biggest cause of death among children under five-years-old globally, according to UNICEF, and UN Water estimates 80 per cent of diseases in developing countries are caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. “More people die as a result of unsafe sanitation than HIV/AIDS plus TB plus malaria,” says Brian Arbogast, director of water, sanitation and hygiene at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “It’s a huge killer.” The Gates Foundation is taking one approach to tackling the problem: challenging researchers to come up with a reinvented toilet that can operate without the substantial infrastructure investments that will come too late for the poorest people in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, where the situation is most acute. The foundation’s

2.5

billion

The number of people worldwide without safe and hygienic sanitation

challenge sits alongside community hygiene drives, increasing access to toilets, and efforts to treat the resulting waste, that aim to flush away the scourge of poor sanitation. Doing one’s business is a very private affair, but when there is no toilet the consequences of going in the open – or open defecation – can affect the whole community’s health. If human waste is not adequately separated from human contact, treated, transported and disposed, it can contaminate the environment, says Bruce Gordon, coordinator of the WHO’s water, sanitation, hygiene and health department. This can lead to malnutrition, stunting and impeded cognitive development. The issue is particularly urgent in India. There, more than 50 per cent of the population are still affected by the practice and households are cramped together even in rural areas, says Jan Willem Rosenboom, senior water, sanitation and hygiene programme officer with the Gates Foundation. “If we don’t solve the problem in India, we don’t solve the problem globally,” he warns. This has led to the rise of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in countries such as India, Bangladesh and Vietnam, where the community works together to become open defecation-free and win rewards for doing so. “They get quite serious about shaming individual members,” says Gordon. “Vietnam is the top country in terms of reducing

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Toilets for all Dr Bindeshwar Pathak has been working to bring sanitation and dignity to India’s poor since 1970. His own attempt to reinvent the toilet started when he designed a two-pit latrine toilet in 1969 that combines just 2 litres of water – compared to the standard 10 litres of a regular flush toilet – with a honeycomb pit structure that uses soil’s natural micro-organisms to convert human waste to pathogen-free compost. Dr Pathak’s Sulabh International Social Service Organisation has itself sold 1.3 million low-cost, low-tech toilets in India. The different models available, ranging from $50 to $1,000, are on display outside his homage to the humble lavatory – Sulabh International’s Museum of Toilets in New Delhi. The government, he says, has installed another 1.5 million toilets of the same design in urban areas and 56 million in rural areas across the country; there is no patent on his design. “I wanted to fulfil the dreams of Mahatma Ghandi,” says Dr Pathak of the inspiration behind the toilet: to solve the twin problems of open defecation and the emptying of waste pits by lowercaste Indians – so-called ‘untouchables’. Now, there are five large Sulabh-designed public toilets in Afghanistan and his design has reached Africa, including Ethiopia, Uganda and Burkina Faso. “If you give [poor Indians] technology of $300, $500, they cannot afford it,” says Dr Pathak. “Technological development will take 10 to 20 years to get established.” Until then, they have Sulabh.

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open defecation. They went from 40 per cent of the population in 1990, to 3 per cent in 2011.” The demand for improved sanitation is there, says Rosenboom, particularly as there are multiple personal benefits to having a toilet of one’s own. “It’s a huge women’s issue,” says Gary White, co-founder of Water.org, a non-profit that offers water and sanitation loans for the poor. Without a toilet, women often wait until dark to go near railway tracks or riverbanks. “[Women] take out loans in a big way for toilets. There’s a huge payback in terms of personal safety, dignity and health.” There is an economic spur, too. “In India alone, the estimates are that over $50bn a year is lost from inadequate sanitation,” says Christopher Elias, the Gates Foundation’s president of global development. The main value is in time saved and averted healthcare costs, explains Gordon. Apart from women spending time finding a safe place to relieve themselves, chronic diarrhoeal diseases leave the poor susceptible to other illnesses that erode their ability to work their way out of poverty. “We know that for every $1 spent on sanitation we get a $5.50 return by keeping people healthy and productive,” he says. So where are the lavatories? One hurdle is encouraging households to invest in facilities. Unlike access to mains utility water, a toilet offers fewer direct financial returns for the family, says White at Water.org. One of the Gates Foundation’s grantees, global health non-profit Population Services International, has been working to meet that challenge since 2012 in the north-eastern Indian state of Bihar. Often, the inconvenience and perceived cost put people off. The

“There’s a huge payback in terms of personal safety, dignity and health”

project has created a one-stop shop where households can purchase materials for a toilet – a concrete structure with a metal roof – in the $90 to $120 price range. Still in its pilot phase, the project has reached 300 households in two districts of Bihar, and plans to reach 500,000 households by the end of 2016. The project has worked to find a private, low-cost and no-odour model that households would aspire to own. The aspirational element helps spur uptake among neighbours, says Rosenboom at the Gates Foundation. Not that building toilets is in itself enough: making the waste from toilets safe is an expensive but essential business. “For every dollar it costs to bring water to your tap, it costs $5 to treat once you’ve flushed it,” says Richard Connor, lead author of the UN’s World Water Development Report 2014. “Energy is the largest expense for water treatment.” This is where the Gates Foundation’s ‘Reinvent the Toilet Challenge’ comes in. The flush system remains essentially unchanged since its invention in 1596 by Elizabethan author John Harington. In 2011, the foundation tasked researchers from all over the world to come up with an affordable toilet that can operate without being connected to mains water, electricity or sewer systems, and which costs $0.05 per user, per day. Since then, 16 organisations have received grants to develop designs, prove the science and build prototypes, some of which were on display at the first Reinvent the Toilet Fair 2012 in Seattle, US. The innovative designs included using solar power, intense heat and dehydration techniques to kill pathogens and produce electricity or biological charcoal. In March this year global grantees from as far afield as the US and Africa met in New Delhi to review progress. “The reinvented toilets we’re seeing now prove that their process will absolutely make what comes out of a toilet safe to handle and typically be of value, as a soil amendment or fertiliser,” says Arbogast at the Gates Foundation. There is still a way to go, he admits, in

Thinking out of the box Painted in the pink, red and blue hues of an Indian lorry, Professor Michael Hoffmann’s prototype toilet on display at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair 2014 has come on leaps and bounds since its first outing in 2012. The front of the container is an ordinary-looking toilet; but at the back, an electrochemical system, powered by solar energy, generates chlorine to safely convert the waste into re-useable water and electricity. “I had been thinking about application possibilities for the technology for some time,” says Hoffmann, whose team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) developed the toilet. “When the Gates [Foundation] call came up, I thought here’s a match.” Taking less than a year to develop the initial design at a cost of around $60,000, Caltech has worked in between the two fairs to link more processes together and increase capacity. The current prototype caters for 40 to 80 people a day and Hoffmann believes the price can be reduced to $1,500 per toilet by simplifying the parts. Current estimates are for $0.05 to $0.11 per user per day, depending on how often components need replacing. The Caltech toilet is on its way to Mahatma Ghandi University in Kerala for 12 months of field tests, with one already in place in Ahmedabad, western India. “We’ll find out what fails quite quickly,” says Hoffmann. “In the interim, we’re going to build the next generation of prototypes.”

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

“We know that for every $1 spent on sanitation we get a $5.50 return by keeping people healthy and productive”

Automatic for the people Eram Scientific Solutions was one of six grant recipients at this year’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge for India, winning a share of the $2m pot put up jointly by the Gates Foundation and the Indian Department of Biotechnology. Their e-Toilet pay-per-use cubicle uses automatic sensors to clean the toilet after each person, keeping public facilities clean for everyone, and uses just 5 litres of water per flush. The $6,000 solar-powered unit can be used by 130 users a day, each paying a coin – of any value – to access the toilet. To treat the waste, Eram currently has tie-ups with two biodigestion technology firms and is planning partnerships with Caltech and Duke University in the US. The grant will pay for more field trials in a suburban slum in India.

“We run 400 machines in around 10 states across India,” explains Midhu SV, R&D project manager at Eram. The units – first installed three years ago near public places, such as bus stands, railway stations and schools – initially received a lukewarm reception of just 10 users a day. “We have toilets now installed at one government hospital where they are the only sanitation option. There, it has around 150 to 160 users per day.” Each e-Toilet is monitored centrally and a service engineer is dispatched if it breaks down. Still, there are many prejudices to overcome. “It’s the poo business, nobody wanted to come into that business,” says Midhu. “But this has changed. Many people are now interested in working with us. Sanitation is very important in a country like India.”

terms of affordability, making the facilities energy-neutral and sustainable. As with mobile phones, costs will drop as the toilets get smaller and achieve unit scale. In 2013, the foundation launched country-specific programmes in India and China – the two countries facing the biggest sanitation challenges – for local innovators to develop next-generation toilets. Philanthropy and the private sector have an important role to play in stimulating innovative, low-cost solutions and service delivery, says Elias at the Gates Foundation. “[Global bathroom brand] Roca provided a low-cost squat toilet pan, an innovation they drove, to pair up with [one of our grantee’s] processing units,” says Arbogast. “As we start to talk to companies, we can show them all the technological risk we’ve taken out for them and get them excited about being pioneers in this new industry.” By helping to reinvent the toilet, the Gates Foundation hopes to accelerate progress towards Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Seven, which is to halve the population without sustainable access to basic sanitation by 2015. At current rates, this won’t be achieved until 2026. “Even the MDG target for sanitation, which is focused on access to a toilet, isn’t really adequate,” says Elias. “What we need are comprehensive sanitation solutions.” In the search for those solutions, world-class research institutes and New Delhi schoolgirls alike are determined to change the course of sanitation forever. n

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Hope against hunger The World Food Programme (WFP) is the food assistance branch of the United Nations, and the world’s largest humanitarian organisation addressing hunger and promoting food security. Each year it reaches more than 90 million people in 80 countries, enabling tens of millions to be healthy and lead active lives, thanks to donations from governments, corporates and private individuals.

WFP/Shehzad Noorani

A contribution from Saudi Arabia, one of the WFP’s biggest supporters, has enabled the Rome-based organisation to display a series of 39 images taken by world-class photographers from around the globe. The exhibition, entitled ‘Eliminating Hunger in our Lifetimes’, has so far toured New York, Geneva, Vienna and Rome. It offers an inspiring glimpse into the lives of those for whom a proper meal is a privilege, not a right. It also begs the question: why, in the second decade of the 21st century, are there still hundreds of millions of people going hungry every day?

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842

million

People globally do not have enough to eat

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3.1

Children under five die each year as a result of poor nutrition

WFP/Rein Skullerud

WFP/Olivier Chassot

WFP/Rein Skullerud

million

WFP/Chu Cancan

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WFP/Rein Skullerud

14.3% 1 6 out of

Children in developing countries is underweight

WFP/Micah Albert

WFP/Shehzad Noorani

Of the population of developing countries is undernourished

ONE DAY

“I saw the need of

the refugees and I wanted to help” The Zaatari refugee camp houses more than 100,000 people. Despite difficult conditions, the Jordanian Health Aid Society (JHAS) tends to the everyday health and medical needs of these Syrian refugees. Dr Mutsem, a GP in JHAS’ medical clinic in Zaatari, describes a typical day at work

y day starts at 7am when I begin the drive from my home in Amman to the medical clinic in the Zaatari refugee camp, in time for the 9am shift. The day starts with a 15-minute handover from the night shift; the medical director briefs the team on what has happened overnight and any news in the camp from the WHO or UNHCR. After that, the real work starts. We are all Jordanian: four other doctors, eight nurses and me. After six years’ medical training and four years in the Jordanian public health sector, I joined the JHAS clinic in Zaatari 16 months ago. I am Jordanian, Syria is our neighbour; I saw the human-

itarian need of the Syrian refugees and I wanted to help. There was absolutely no question I wanted to work in the camp. As a general practitioner (GP) I spend most of the seven-hour shift in the clinic. One after another, it’s a non-stop roster of between 40 and 50 patients a day out of a total of the 200 or so refugees that visit the medical centre daily. The nurses are really the front line in our team – they assess the patients, write up their medical histories and do routine check-ups. Then it is up to me to examine, prescribe and treat the patient. One by one, I work my way through the waiting room that teems full of people all

needing our attention. The most common health problems that I see are the same as with any other community: respiratory problems, eye issues and seasonal illnesses like asthma or flu. It’s a regular doctor’s job and a humanitarian job at the same time, meeting the needs of refugees suddenly displaced from their homes. On top of the usual illnesses, we try to help parents whose whole families are living in tents, or in the row upon row of containers that stretch far into the distance, to understand issues around hygiene and protecting against other communicable diseases. We try and get out of the clinic

ONE DAY

to run educational health campaigns in the camp and go into the schools and give pupils and teachers advice on hygiene and staying healthy. There are so many stories from all the people I treat in the clinic, but the one which really sticks in my mind is of a baby girl who, at five months old, came into the clinic last April weighing just 4kg. When her mother brought her in she was crying over and over and could not be consoled. She had a cleft palate – an opening in the roof of her mouth – that meant she could not take in her mother’s milk properly. Every time her mother tried to feed her, she would be sick. As a GP I could not do anything for her, she needed surgery. But at that time, we were almost overwhelmed by the unexpectedly large influx of refugees who arrived in Jordan that spring – there were more than 170,000 in the camp according to UNHCR – and it almost caused the health system to collapse. All I could do was start looking for someone who could help; it was hard then to find people who treat such cases. Fortunately, [the medical charity] Operation Smile is in Jordan and I was able to get her the operation she needed. I also linked the girl to another organisation who provided the nutrition she was lacking. A year on, and I saw the girl just weeks ago. She is well – playing and smiling. I didn’t treat her directly, but in finding the right people and the right organisations for her condition,

I was able to help make her life better and that makes me proud. Not everything, unfortunately, has such a happy ending. Staff shortages mean that we are being pushed to see more and more patients a day – I see around 50 people, but there is enough work and so few resources that it could really be anything up to 70 or 80 refugees a day. Finding enough doctors or nurses to work in the refugee camps, and especially in Zaatari, is a huge challenge. Sometimes, too, we are faced with cases that really need specialist care and medication or further examination to get to the root of the problem, but with our limited resources we can’t help these people, which is absolutely frustrating. I think the most important way in which I can assist the refugees is by helping them prevent diseases in the first place, or at least monitor and catch illnesses early on through primary healthcare. The familiar white UNHCR tents are so close, all jumbled in together. Here, bad hygiene conditions spread diseases quicker and the stigma attached to health problems like scabies means that people are reluctant to come to

the clinic. The tents are full of insects and lice and cases are on the rise, so we are trying very hard to do more hygiene campaigns and increase awareness. As a doctor, I worry all the time about everything, but communicable diseases are a huge problem. At the end of last year, [we were part of] a polio vaccination campaign in the camp with 90 to 95 per cent coverage. When it comes to polio, we’re talking about national health – the health of the refugee community in the camp and that of the host community, in Jordan. Thankfully, we haven’t had any cases but we have staff at the camp’s entrance to look for signs. After what seems like a long day, my shift ends at 4pm and I reach home about two hours later. At the end of each day I am absolutely exhausted and I just look forward to a hot shower. I could go and work in a private clinic in Amman and work the hours I want, but when I think of how I am helping people who suffer so much, in that moment I know exactly why I am doing what I do, and I am happy. n

ABOVE The Zaatari refugee camp was opened in July 2012 and has since swollen to become the fourth-largest city in Jordan by population

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Salah Khalil Born in Cairo, Salah Khalil is founder of the Alexandria Trust, a Londonbased foundation that is Arab-founded and funded, dedicated to improving education in the Middle East. Underpinning the work is Khalil’s aim to create a new era of philanthropy in the Arab world – ‘catalytic philanthropy to support a stepchange in education’

Why have you chosen to focus on education? I am interested in things that can make a difference. I am not interested in things that are fashionable, or in things that are driven by vanity. I am just interested in things that can make a difference to the population of the Arab world. The reason I focus on education is that it is the one thing that nobody can take away from you. If you are armed with a good education, you can have independent, critical thinking and you can make your own life choices independently. You can become a valued contributor to society.

What are the key projects being run by the Alexandria Trust at the moment? The first project aims to have an impact on, and restore the excellence in, learning and culture in the Arab region through a chronicle of higher education, called Al-Fanar, the Arabic word for lighthouse. That’s all about ‘Public Voice’, the thrust of the project, and making unheard voices in education heard by all the stakeholders, the wider community in the Arab region, and the world. So it’s creating links and a very healthy and progressive debate, and posing one question: why don’t we have world-class education in the Arab world? Universities are one of the fundamental building blocks of society, but in many countries in the region they are weak. Al-Fanar will be a place where universities in the region can connect, but it will be much more than a magazine for professors covering news and analysis. It will be a forum for educational debate and the exchange of ideas among a much wider audience. And it will also encourage Arab journalists with an interest in writing about education, to do so. The second thing we do is work with Ministers of Education from around the region. This is called ‘Policy Fast Track’, and is trying to bring the top international experts in education to ministries to facilitate the transfer and exchange of knowledge and information. A vast amount of knowledge and experience exists on developments and innovation around education in the region and beyond, from curriculum development to how a country

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

“We only work on projects that have a demonstrable need, and ones that have a route to sustainability within three to five years so that they are not a constant drain on our limited resources” can action a transformation programme around education, but it is often inaccessible to education ministers and their ministries. We give advice on strategy, and then support, experience and knowledge, which we hope to share across ministries in different countries. Ministries can learn from each other, and from outside the Arab world. The third and final project is by far the most ambitious and that is looking to translate 5,600 seminal works across 14 humanities, arts and social science disciplines, at the moment from English to Arabic. Why English to Arabic? I want to be very clear about this: I am an Arab and can afford to tell what the truth is. Look at the global rankings of universities. Among the top 20 there are no Arab universities. Among the top 100, there are no Arab universities. Among the top 500, there are may be four or five that have recently joined the list. That’s why we are analysing what the top ten institutions are reading and studying, and trying to bring that vital knowledge to the Arab world with the ‘Translate’ initiative. The board of the trust is also keen to translate material from Arabic to English in due course, but my own personal view is that I would focus all of our resources on English to Arabic for the moment, because we are behind, and we need to catch up. Today only a fraction of seminal texts in the social sciences and humanities written in English, or other foreign languages, have ever been translated into Arabic, just as many classical Arabic texts have not been translated into other languages.

We seek partnerships with organisations experienced in translation with a view to achieving a step change in the volume of translated texts and in their wide dissemination across the region, in print and also online.

Your work is all about partnerships, and requires partners. Are they coming forward? The philosophy of our work is all about partnerships, looking out for those who want to create a bias towards this objective. We work with everyone we can. Are governments listening? When you can talk to them, yes. I have talked to a number of Ministers of Education, and they seem to be very eager to receive help. The Ministers of Education in Libya, in Tunisia, although education in terms of what is going on in these and other Arab countries is only gaining limited attention at the moment. Some governments are unstable, and there are security issues, social issues and so on. So what we do is open a conversation, and they are very willing to have that. We are just starting the journey, but there seems to be an interest from governments and international aid organisations. Are we successful yet? I would say no, we’re not; we’re just trying a number of things. But we are open to cooperation on any project, although we don’t want to repeat the work of others. We only work on projects that have a demonstrable need, and ones that have a route to sustainability within three to five years so that they are not a constant drain on our limited

resources. And, we only work on projects that have transformational impact. We incubate these projects, and nudge them forward to do what they need to do, hopefully outside the Alexandria Trust.

You have strong views on philanthropy in the region. My view is that there is no philanthropy in the Arab world. I come from the critics’ side, not from the apologists’ side. Yes there is a lot of effort, by a lot of people, but at best you could say this is charity as opposed to philanthropy. Zakat is intrinsic in the religion, about taking a part of your wealth and giving it back to the poor, but that is not quite the same as philanthropy, and I think that is confused. The latest report from [private bank] Coutts makes this very clear. It reported the number of people who gave over $1m. Even if you take the total number of those giving, and compare it to a percentage of the wealth those people have, it’s actually a very, very small amount. It is probably to do with how many generations have seen this wealth. When you reach a certain point in a family legacy there comes a generation that wants to take a new step. My belief is that there is a cadre of Arabs under the very wealthy – the ‘get stuff done Arabs’ – who are very well educated and I think they are easier to convince about giving than perhaps is the case with the top tier. Do they give a large percentage of their wealth as yet? No, I don’t think so. They have worked very hard to get to where they are, and they may be just about to retire or enjoy life, but they could play a very important role for coming generations. I hope we can inspire that important generation of Arab philanthropists to support education. We are searching very hard for supporters. In terms of our support my guess is that institutions will come to support before individuals, institutions led by exceptional individuals, visionaries. They are the ones that are going to say, ‘let’s think about this together’. n

TRENDS

Arab youth trade politics for business, as Spring hopes ebb Y

region, found a decline in those seeking to secure prized government jobs over working for the private sector or starting their own company. In the six GCC states, just 43 per cent of respondents said they preferred a public sector post, down from 64 per cent in 2012, the Arab Youth Survey found. In non-Gulf states, such as Palestine, Egypt and Jordan, there was a slight rise in appetite for private sector jobs. Some 31 per cent of respondents said they would favour a non-government role, up from 28 per cent in 2013.

oung Arabs are turning their attention to the private sector as faith that the region’s uprisings will drive political change fades, a survey in 16 countries has found. Youth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region also cited the threat of unemployment and rising living costs as their chief concerns, reflecting doubts that the civil unrest of recent years will translate into better lives for ordinary citizens. The survey of 3,500 people aged 18 to 24, residing in 16 countries in the MENA

Around two-thirds of young Arabs – 67 per cent – think that people of their generation are more likely to start businesses than previous generations, the survey, published in April, revealed. The findings expose a sharp decline in confidence among youth that the political unrest seen in recent years will lead to positive change for Arab citizens. Just over half of respondents – 54 per cent – believe the uprisings that toppled leaders in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia have improved the fortunes of the Arab world, a steep drop from 70 per cent in 2013 and 72 per cent in 2012. Faith in the long-term potential of the Arab Spring has also ebbed, 58 per cent of respondents agreeing with the statement ‘As a result of the uprising, I feel I will be better off in five years’, down from 74 per cent in 2013. Tellingly, the number of young Arabs citing civil unrest as the biggest obstacle facing the Middle East has jumped from 44 per cent in 2012 to 55 per cent.

‘As a result of the uprising, I feel I will be better off in five years’

Top concerns among Arab youth

2012

Rising cost of living

2013

2014

2011 57% 2012 63% 2013 62% 2014 63% Unemployment 2011 42% Strongly Agree

Strongly Disagree

Don’t Know

2012 44% 2013 44% 2014 49%

What are the biggest obstacles facing the Middle East?

Opportunities for women 2011 40% 2012 43% 2013 43% 2014 49%

Civil unrest 55%

Lack of democracy 38%

Threat of terrorism Lack of strong leadership 30% 30%

TRENDS

-20%

-11%

Netherlands $5,435 million

WHO sounds global alarm over polio

Greece $305 million

France $11,376 million

Canada $4,911 million

+37%

Foreign aid: biggest decreases

Portugal $484 million

+375%

UAE $5,091 million

+30%

Japan $11,786 million

+28%

Turkey $3,276 million

+27%

UK $17,881 million

Iceland $35 million

Foreign aid: biggest increases

-10%

-8%

T -6%

Foreign aid reaches record high in 2013 D

evelopment aid from rich countries to some of the world’s poorest hit a record high last year, spurred by substantial spending increases from the UK and the UAE. The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said member states doled out $134.8bn in aid in 2013, marking a 6 per cent rise following two years of cuts to aid budgets, a trend that the agency described as “heartening”. The gain was driven in part by the UAE, whose aid donations soared by 375.5 per cent last year, largely because of support extended to Egypt in the wake of its political unrest. The Gulf state spent 1.25 per cent of its gross national income (GNI) as aid in 2013, more than any OECD donor. The UK also increased aid by nearly a third, for the first time meeting an international target to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI as aid. Iceland’s aid spending rose by more than 27 per cent in 2013, and Japan’s by

36.6 per cent. Funding from Norway and Italy jumped by more than 10 per cent. In all, 17 of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee’s member states bolstered their overseas aid in 2013, while 11 cut it back. The biggest falls were seen in Portugal (-20.4 per cent), Canada (-11.4 per cent) and France (-9.8 per cent). “It is heartening to see governments increasing their development aid budgets again, despite the financial constraints they are currently facing,” said OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría. “However, assistance to some of the neediest countries continues to fall, which is a serious concern,” he added. Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa was $26.2bn in 2013, a decrease of 4 per cent in real terms from the previous year. Furthermore, aid to the African continent fell by 5.6 per cent to $28.9bn. Net aid in real terms rose by 1.2 per cent to subSaharan Africa, but fell by 0.9 per cent to the continent as a whole.

he spread of polio to previously virus-free countries is a global health emergency, the World Health Organisation said in May, with the number of cases worldwide rising from 223 in 2012 to 417 last year. Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon pose the greatest risk of exporting the paralysing virus to other countries and all residents should show proof of vaccination before they are allowed to travel, the Geneva-based agency said. It’s only the second time the WHO has declared a global public health emergency in its history, following the 2009 influenza pandemic. Polio has staged a comeback amid conflicts in Pakistan, Syria and elsewhere that have disrupted vaccination efforts and spurred refugee movement across Asia. The disease has since been found in Iraq, Syria and Israel, and has been documented in sewerage in Palestine and Egypt. Pakistan’s failure to tackle the spread of polio is under particular scrutiny, with the country accounting for more than a fifth of the 417 cases seen in 2013. Afghanistan and Nigeria, the only other countries with endemic polio, saw cases fall by more than half last year. The disease’s spread, if not halted, “could result in failure to eradicate globally one of the world’s most serious, vaccine-preventable diseases,” Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s assistant director general for polio, emergencies and country collaboration, was quoted as telling media in Geneva. “The consequences of further international spread are particularly acute today given the large number of polio-free but conflicttorn and fragile states which have severely compromised routine immunisation services.” A multibillion-dollar eradication campaign had limited polio to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. The WHO claims eradicating polio would save up to $50bn over the next 20 years.

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THE NEXT STEP

You can always make a difference… The stories featured on these pages are just a starting point. Many of the organisations we focus on are saving and changing lives on a daily basis, but they need support to survive. If you want to learn more about the issues, or get busy solving them, then don’t hesitate to get in touch and take the next step on your own philanthropic journey

Suffering Syria Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi is the UN refugee agency’s first Eminent Advocate for Refugee Children. As the crisis in Syria unfolds and millions are forced to flee, take a look at www.unhcr.org and see what you might be able to do to ease their terrible suffering.

A triple threat The Global Fund (www.theglobalfund.org) is committed to fighting on three fronts, investing money to suppress the spread of tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS around the world. Every dollar really does make a difference in the battle against these three killers; when was the last time you saved a life?

The urban challenge The world’s largest NGO, BRAC (www.brac. net) was founded in Bangladesh but now changes lives in 11 countries across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Urban slums are the world’s fastest-growing human habitat, so why not help BRAC and its partners bring a little light to those who live in poverty?

Cleaning up India Eram Scientific Solutions (www.eramscientific.com) is among a host of R&D social enterprises hoping to overcome the challenges posed by inadequate sanitation in India. Its pay-per-use toilets have been met with a positive response, bringing good health and renewed dignity to some of the world’s poorest.

Mouths to feed Saudi Arabia is one of The World Food Programme’s (www.wfp.org) biggest backers. Nevertheless, the food assistance agency – which reaches 90 million people a year in 80 countries – could do with more support from private individuals who believe that no human being should go hungry.

Jordan’s emergency The Jordanian Health Aid Society (www. jordanhealthaid.org) is a local non-profit dedicated to tending to the medical needs of those with nowhere else to turn. In 2014, they are at the sharp end of the influx of refugees from Syria, and any donations will go a long way to saving lives.

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Key events this quarter Sarajevo

New York May 20-21

May 29-30

New York

Beirut

This year’s European Foundation Centre AGM will focus on the creation of sustainable economies in the Western Balkans and wider Europe. In its 25th year, the event hopes to attract 500 foundations and foreign donors keen to play a key role in the future of the region.

The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual summit draws together top execs and philanthropists to tackle social challenges while driving economic performance. Its 2014 theme, ‘What Counts?’, will examine links between business and social impact.

The Triple Bottom Line Investing Conference will convene more than 300 finance, social entrepreneur and impact investment professionals. This year’s two-day event will focus on trends in sustainable investment and urban infrastructure.

Takaful 2014 hopes to encourage interaction between academics and practitioners in the fields of philanthropy and civic engagement in the Arab world. This year delegates will discuss how research can be applied to the region’s rapidly changing economies and societies.

May 15-17

June 4-6

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Coming up

Next quarter

Washington DC

Singapore

Jeddah

The Council on Foundations’ Philanthropy Exchange will combine its 2014 annual and family conferences. This year’s event is expected to attract 1,300 participants worldwide from family, corporate and community foundations to network and discuss the latest strategies in philanthropy.

Impact Forum 2014, ‘From Niche to Mass’, will focus on the key issues in growing the social finance sector from public, private and philanthropic perspectives. This annual event draws together more than 1,000 delegates from 50 countries.

The Islamic Development Bank is celebrating its 40th anniversary. During this three-day event it will bring together business and thought leaders to highlight the organisation’s many achievements in more than 50 countries across the Islamic world.

June 8-10

June 12-13

June 24-26

July 22-25 International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) 11th International Conference, Muenster July 29 – August 1 Aspen Action Forum, Colorado August 31 – September 5 World Water Week, Stockholm September 2-5 SOCAP 14, San Francisco September 15-20 23rd IAVE World Volunteer Conference, Brisbane September 28-30 World Economic Forum on Europe, MENA and Eurasia, Istanbul October 23-26 Social Venture Network 2014 Fall Conference, Greenwich (Connecticut)

PHILANTHROPY AGE

In the next issue… Following the money t’s one of the most common complaints heard among donors both present and prospective: if I give, then how can I make sure that my money really is reaching those for whom it was intended? Talking about transparency is one thing, but only the most optimistic – or blinkered – could argue successfully that the majority of charitable and philanthropic organisations in the region are anything but opaque. In our next issue, we do the work for you. We follow the cash from the moment it leaves a donor’s wallet to the moment it changes a life forever. As good intentions transform into noble deeds, and the generosity of one human being alleviates the suffering of another thousands of miles away, we keep a close eye on exactly how that donation translates into action. Only the most transparent initiatives and organisations need apply: we’ll be watching, every step of the way. n

PHILANTHROPY AGE