Terms Of Reference Podcast: Recent Episodes
Aidpreneur
The Terms of Reference Podcast delivers critical, insider information for top performance as a professional or organization in the social impact sector.
You cannot live in today's world without being witness to the power of networks. Networks are all around us and constantly influence us in ways both conscious and subconscious. Immediate family and close friends, global-reaching social networks, professional networks, passion networks... the list of all the networks you're connected to gos on and on and overlaps and intersects in ways that solve problems, create opportunities and catch us in moments of incredible serendipity.
So, as you might guess, networks are a powerful tool for the social sector. My guest for the 180th Terms of Reference Podcast, is exceedingly passionate about networks. Sara Farley is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of the Global Knowledge Initiative, an organization that builds purpose-driven networks to deliver innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
You're going to love this conversation about how networks can be leveraged to locate resources, enable collaboration, connect participants and, ultimately, find solutions to problems.
I take for granted that I can walk away from my microphone right now, head over to my kitchen and turn on my stove to boil water, bake a cake or cook myself a meal. And, I don't even think about the fact that I have hot water available on demand at any time of the day. I just turn on the tap and its there.
This is not the case for millions and millions of people throughout the world. In fact, there is a huge portion of the human population that still relies on burning wood, or charcoal, for cooking and cleaning. This dependence is a massive time suck away from other productive tasks and, as we've heard on other episodes, a considerable health risk.
My guest for the 179th Terms of Reference Podcast has a better idea that he hopes will end the use of charcoal. Dr. Sebastian Rodriguez-Sanchez is the CEO and Co-Founder of KopaGas, a technology solutions provider of Advanced Metering Infrastructure for energy utilities. KopaGas has developed and deployed the first commercial pay-as-you-cook platform for propane.
I'm positive you'll love this episode where Sebastian and I discuss why propane is a powerful replacement for charcoal, how he company sell and manages their smart meter system, what it takes for a family to make the change to gas and much more.
Even though we work on hundreds of different issues across a similarly diverse group of settings, I think the argument could be made that the work of the social sector is ultimately focused on creating a world where all humans have equal opportunity to flourish. This is at the base of what we’re doing with programing that seeks to improve financial systems, agricultural practices, environmental protections, health systems and education. And, one of the things we know, unequivocally, is that women have received the short end of the stick, almost no matter how you measure it.
Here’s the thing: marginalization of women doesn’t just happen in traditional development settings. It’s alive and well in the US, Europe… and, well, every other leading economy on the planet.
This is why I’m especially pleased to have Claire Wasserman as my guest for the 178th Terms of Reference Podcast. Claire is the founder of Ladies Get Paid - an organization focused, currently, on empowering women in the workplace.
As you’ll hear in the show, I found Claire when seeking to learn more about Red Bull Amaphiko, where she is the Deputy US editor. Red Bull Amaphiko is a is a collaborative platform for social entrepreneurs that is sponsored by the energy drink company of the same name. But our conversation quickly turns to how Ladies Get Paid was founded and has quickly expanded into a phenomenon of 10,000 women... and growing.
You're going to love this show where we talk about women rising up to get what they deserve, and how one woman has made the leap to be a leader in that movement.
If you're an ideas person, no matter what your field or expertise, there is nothing I can think of that is more attractive than a clear, tangible problem in need of a solution. As much as we hate to admit it in the social sector, these types of problems are not terribly common and they are almost never the lowest hanging fruit in a given situation.
But in those instances where clear problems in need of solutions are identified, the next most attractive thing to an innovator is funding to play with. I mean that in the most generous way of course, given that, at the end of the day, we don't just want to play, we want to find answers.
As I think you'll agree after listening to today's 177th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, my guest, Troy Etulain, has a job that seems quite a bit more play than work. He's the project director of FHI360s Mobile Solutions Technical Assistance and Research project, or mSTAR for short, and he's also the head of FHI's digital development unit.
While again, Troy doesn't just have funding to play with, he does oversee a mechanism that is built to identify clear problems and then take action to find potential solutions. We talk about wifi that covers 50 kilometers, financial technologies that are increasing inclusion, the new business models that are driving rural mobile network development, mapping the unconnected areas of the world... and much more.
The International Rescue Committee is a well known force in humanitarian aid. As the organization has continued to evolve since 1933, they have literally written the book, multiple times, on how to best serve those in need.
My guest for today's 176th Terms of Reference Podcast is Jodi Nelson who is IRC's Senior Vice President, Policy and Practice. Jodi has overall strategic and operational responsibility for IRC program technical units – including Research and Evaluation and Global Advocacy and Strategic Communications. And, for long time listeners, you already know all this as she was also a guest way back in 2014 on show number 33.
What I love about this conversation is its focus on how IRC is innovating through three specific lenses: First how do we get get enough of the right aid to the right people, second, how do we shift from planning the help the social sector delivers in terms of activities, to one of outcomes and finally, how do we ensure programming is designed based on the best available evidence rather than inertia and antidote?
Last week, we dove into an especially practical example of innovating to improve the plight of the agriculturalist. Or, more specifically, those who benefit from their yields. I'm happy that this week we have another agricultural innovation around water - but one that works in a very different way, solving a very different problem.
My guest for the 175th Terms of Reference Podcast is Sanjay Prasad. He's working in an area where there is abundant, but very intermittent water supplies. His innovation, delivered under the project name SPONGE, captures water from dew and fog and transfers it to the soil where it can keep plants thriving.
I hope you'll enjoy this episode where we talk about life in the Himalayas, how an exceedingly simple technology is changing agricultural practices and how his organization is ensuring women and marginalized groups are core beneficiaries of the programme.
One of the things I love most about hosting this podcast is the sheer range of ideas, aspirations and impact I've been lucky enough to listen to over the past three years. In some cases we've talked about a digital future that we can only just now begin to see coming into shape and in others, extremely practical how-did-we-solve-this-problem-today with nuts, bolts and duct tape... and of course everything in-between.
Today's show is one of those nuts and bolts conversation. For the 174th Terms of Reference Podcast I speak with Trupti Jain of Naireeta Services about BHUNGROO an unique application of Aquifer Storage and Recovery process for storm water management by enabling farmers to convert challenges like flood/water logging in monsoon and drought in summer into lifelong food security, rural livelihood and climate change mitigation opportunities.
I think you're going to enjoy this frank conversation about a service that has literally transformed the potential of the agricultural sector in india, Ghana and elsewhere, and, more importantly, the lives of thousands of farmers. We also discuss Trupi's journey as a woman in our sector and how that has helped to shape who she has become.
For most of us seeking to innovate in the social sector, solving existing problems in new ways is accomplished by bringing technologies or processes from other sectors to bear on the problems faced by the vulnerable. However, innovators are sometimes also true inventors - devising first of their kind solutions for today's most pressing problems.
In these cases, it is not uncommon for the inventor to seek protection for the unique intellectual property contained in their ideas. After all, what benefits those in need may also turn out to be something that is also extremely useful for those with greater levels of disposable income.
Patents are one type of protection that are recognized around the world and, assuming you have the financial and legal resources, enforceable. Enter the US Patent and Trademark Office. Since 2012, the USPTO has given awards to businesses, universities, and non-profits using patented technology to aid the less fortunate.
My guest for the 173rd Terms of Reference Podcast is Edward Elliot who manages the Patents for Humanity program. For those inventors out there, you're going to find this conversation extremely useful and potentially rewarding. For the rest of us Aidpreneurs, our conversation is a fun and surprising discussion about past awardees and the massive impact they've had on global issues.
Long ago, in the days of yore, when I was completing high school and looking to what was next, college was the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, as it turned out, following that path put me on a trajectory that would take 3 colleges, many majors and an embarrassing amount of tuition to finally spit me out the other side with a degree.
And, here's the kicker, like so many others, when I was newly minted, I still didn't really have a clue about how to engage with the problems I wanted to help solve. That took another 5 years to figure out... and is a story for another time.
So, long story short, whenever I hear about a new, innovative approach to higher education - especially one that engages students, rather than locking them into a system - I want to know more. My guest for the 172nd Terms of Reference Podcast, Eric Glustrom, is the CEO and President of Watson. Watson is a new university model tailored for next generation innovators, leaders, and social entrepreneurs. Eric tells us Watson protects the courage of the next generation so they can pioneer their education, trail blaze lives as innovators, and contribute to solving the toughest challenges facing the world.
I'm hoping you'll be as inspired as I was recording this interview with Eric and left with the hope that all of our institutions of higher education can become more learner driven.
For many years now - and its just crazy that I can say that about this podcast at this stage - I’ve been saying the social sector is filled with lots of very smart, well educated people who truly want to lift up others in pursuit of greater human flourishing.
Almost always, this is a fantastic thing, I mean, having intelligent, thoughtful people on your team is something we all wish for. But, at the same time, something I’ve also noticed over my career is that when we create teams with many highly intelligent, ambitious, motivated people… those teams often miss the forest for the trees.
Reports that could be 2 or 3 pages end up being 100 page tomes, people dive deep into their passions or niches and often have trouble seeing how their initiatives are interconnected with others and, as has been so often pointed out on just this show alone, we frequently forget to just listen to the very people and communities we’re trying to serve.
One area where this rings true is in the area of planning. We plan so we can measure. We plan so we can articulate the theory behind the change we expect to see. We plan because of budget cycles and resource allocations. We plan so much that sometimes - and no, I’m not kidding here - we forget to “do”. This partially why phrases often associated with places like silicon valley - things like innovation, iteration and fail fast - have become such buzzwords around the social sector.
So, what if it was your job to lead a US Government Agency that had to operate without a plan and literally embrace the unknown to achieve foreign policy objectives? For most of the people I know in our sector, this would be highly undesirable. Now, this isn’t a value statement, this is just common sense - most of us look for stability, predictability and minimal risk in what is otherwise a unique career choice.
But for people like Stephen Lennon, my guest for the 171st Terms of Reference Podcast, delivering positive outcomes in turbulent situations is his sweet spot. Stephen is the Director of the Office of Transition Initiatives for the US Government. OTI helps local partners advance peace and democracy by providing fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key political transition and stabilization needs.
If your like me - or really any shade of an Aidpreneur - you’re going to love this conversation about how OTI operates, how they innovate on the fly in situations across the globe and why sometimes not having a plan is the best plan of all.
When you think of innovation, you think about the future, right? At least, that's what I think about. My mind is usually filled with flying cars, holographic displays and a moneyless world. But, I know, that's just the super geek talking. Innovation is really about solving an old problem in a different way. But the reason I bring up the future is that, typically, when I speak to those interested in innovation they are focused on how we use new - sometimes yet-to-be-invented - technologies, processes and options to solve the issues at hand.
Today's guest for the 170th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, Muthoni Masinde, is also a future thinker. But she also remembers and knows how to honor the past. Her invention that we discuss on this episode - an innovation to detect drought - combines the latest in sensor and mobile technologies, with the indigenous knowledge of local farmers.
I'm sure you're going to love this episode where we talk about her invention (called ITIKI), but also about her path from Kenya to become an inventor and Head at the Department of Information Technology at the Central University of Technology in South Africa.
When I think of innovating for food, well, I have to admit I’m usually focused on how my family can make dinner something special. Finding a way out of the rut of eating the same food as my children is a pain. But I know, that you know, we’re not here to talk about how I can become an Iron Chef. And indeed, in today’s 168th Terms of Reference Podcast episode, we are here to explore how innovation can be applied to making sure people don’t go hungry. My guest for today’s show is Bernhard Kowatsch. He’s the Head of the Innovation Accelerator at the World Food Programme. The accelerator was launched in 2016 to identify, support and scale high potential solutions to hunger worldwide.
I know that I take for granted that I am able to perform financial transactions, around the world via a multitude of channels, essentially any time I want. In fact, only because of my lifestyle, my biggest headache comes from a banking system in the US that often flags my non-US transactions as suspect for fraud.
Today's episode is about how we can take a look at individuals and businesses on the other side of that coin (yes, another wonderful pun). I'm referring to the vast majority of people who operate exclusively with cash, are unbanked and have little of any real access to credit. These individuals are not included in the efficiencies and benefits of the digital economy, and the gap only gets more difficult to bridge as time presses on.
My guest for today's 167th Terms of Reference Podcast is Badal Malick. Nadal is the CEO of Catalyst, an organization focused on helping India's small businesses and low income consumers unlock the power of digital payments to gain access to broader financial services and create opportunities vital to their future prosperity.
This is a fantastic discussion about financial inclusion where we cover both the size and chicken-and-egg nature of the problem, the 4 part solution Catalyst is implementing, Why financial inclusion is a potential game changer for so many and much more.
Most social sector work, if not all of it at this stage, is driven by some type of results framework that is focused on outcomes. Unsurprisingly, when people (or a government or foundation) give you their money to do some good in the world - they want to know that it actually happens… or, as often happens, at least you gave it your best shot. Underpinning these frameworks are theories of change. In this paradigm, gaps in markets or social contexts are identified by the social actor and then the design programmes, products and services in an attempt to fill those gaps.
Now, for those of you who have been listening to this show for any amount of time, this is standard stuff and, as you know, we’re here to talk about how we break this system. So, on today’s 166th Terms of Reference Podcast, my guest is Alix Zwane. She and I explore an alternative to the theory of change approach - what she and her colleagues call being venture or entrepreneur driven. Alex is the CEO of the Global Innovation Fund, a $200 million fund that takes a venture capital approach to supporting entrepreneurs and the scaling of evidence-based innovation in global health and development.
This is an exciting discussion as we discuss the Fund’s current ventures and the criteria for those investments, how the Fund partners with the private sector, how you successfully exit from investments in social problem solvers and much more.
Its taken me a while to figure out how to introduce today’s topic. Not because its totally radical - but rather, because my brain is freaking out that its something I have to introduce in the year 2017. So, I’ve decided the best approach is just to dive right in:
Today’s topic is, essentially, freedom of the press.
Now, while I don’t spend my day to day life in the United States, I’m definitely an American. And something that is just a part of who I am is an understanding that we need freedom of speech and freedom of the press to ensure human flourishing. I think there’s a fairly decent consensus on this around the world.
As I’ve watched events unfold over the past year related to US politics, and how it has impacted individuals’ ability to distinguish between fact and fiction and, more importantly, destroyed people’s ability to have even the simplest conversations, I’m left wondering if Mike Judge didn’t have an amazing crystal ball when he made Idiocracy.
Now, I personally remain optimistic we’ll all come out of this moment in time better for it. But the fact that it feels like we’ve stumbled backwards into the 1940s in so many ways is heartbreaking.
My guest for today’s 165th Terms of Reference Podcast is Harlan Mandel. He’s the CEO of the Media Development Investment Fund of MDIF. Their work focuses on supporting independent media around the world and they do this through a variety of investment vehicles.
The work of MDIF has been transformative across the globe. I think today’s conversation is important because we talk about how an organization like MDIF supports freedom of the press, how they have evolved over the past 20 years - especially with the advent of digital everything, how events in the US are reverberating across the world, and much more.
How much money did your government spend in 2016? The Government of the United States spent over $3.5 trillion dollars. China threw down $2.8 trillion and the UK just over $1 trillion. Worldwide, governments spent a combined total of $22.7 trillion. My point here is that there is a ton of money being spent by governments around the globe to procure products and services.
It would be great to know where exactly all of that money goes, right? I mean, in most of the major economies out there, there is an expectation that the public should know what their hard earned taxes are funding. And, there are some big figures out there, usually represented in pie charts, that are relatively easy to access.
But what about specifics? Governments spend a great deal of money internally, for things like defense, but - especially in a place like the United States - governments rely on contractors for products and services. Everything from vaccines to uniforms. In order to find out what any individual contractor received for their work takes a massive amount of effort… and then the available information often is less than satisfying.
As you can imagine, this is unfortunately the beginning of the corruption game. But equally as important, it is also the beginning of the inefficiency game. Honestly, just thinking about the numbers involved gives me the willies, and how to crack this problem? Forget about it.
Luckily for us that’s exactly what my guest for the 164th Terms of Reference Podcast thinks about and works on all day. Gavin Hayman is the Executive Director of the Open Contracting Partnership - an organization that seeks to open up public contracting through disclosure, data and engagement so that the huge sums of money involved are spent honestly, fairly, and effectively. And, as the former Executive Director of Global Witness, Gavin knows a thing or two about how to uncover unsavory practices of government contractors.
You’re going to love this episode where Gavin and I talk about the origins of the Open Contracting Partnership, the size of the issues they are trying to tackle and how we all benefit when governments (and contractors) get it right. And, personally, I was surprised by some of Gavin’s examples - their just not from where you’d expect to find massive transparency… and I think you will be as well.
Today’s conversation has two themes that I think are important for our listeners. On one level, you’re going to hear about advocating on behalf of health sector innovators, but on another level you’re going to hear about what it takes to pivot a career and take on an entirely new role, in a new sector after almost a decade of dedicated service in another.
My guest for today’s 163rd Terms of Reference Podcast is Jamie Bay Nishi. For the past 9 years, Jamie was at DevEx, starting with member support and ending by leading the production of DevEx World. Only a few months ago, Jamie took over the leadership role at the Global Health Technologies Coalition - an advocacy organization in the health sector.
This is a story of serendipity. But as with all stories of serendipity, it has its foundation in a great deal of hard work, experience and personal investment. Today’s conversation is about finding comfort with being vulnerable, how you advocate in an environment that may not be receptive, how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly in order to communicate effectively with policy makers and, perhaps most importantly, what is possible for all of us in the social sector.
For as long as I’ve been in the social sector, there has been a consensus that those organizations who depend mostly on grant funding (whether from government or foundations or private donors) need to find better, and more sustainable ways to partner with the private sector, or more specifically, for-profit companies. The main reason behind this drive is the assumption that the for-profit world has resources and capabilities that can help socially focused programming achieve sustainability, inject innovative ideas and provide agility not typically found in the public sector.
You’d think after a few decades that this question could be answered - and we’d see a constant mash up of companies and charities. And, to be sure, we do have myriad examples of those partnerships playing out at this very moment. But there is definitely no silver bullet that has swept across the not-for-profit landscape and, I am of the opinion, that there are just some fundamental differences between companies that are solely profit driven, and organizations that are not, which must be negotiated on a case by case basis… or maybe even a person by person basis.
Sam Applebee, my guest for the 162nd Terms of Reference Podcast, sees the necessity for this negotiation and understanding between for profit firms and charities as an opportunity. That’s why he founded Super Global, a network of design, tech and data science companies that support and accelerate the impact of social actors.
I became aware of Super Global after Sam sent me an article he wrote on why why doing pro bono work might be the worst decision for profit companies can make. Intrigued, I had to learn more and I think this conversation goes straight to the heart of what this podcast is all about - how we’re seeking to break the mold of the social sector.
Over the next 45 minutes or so, Sam and I talk about the nuts and bolts of starting an initiative like Super Global, the key points of that negotiation between for profit services and the charities that seek them, and some of the sexy (and not so sexy) project that Super Global has attracted already.
According to the May 6th, 2017 issue of the Economist, data has officially displaced oil as the world’s most valuable resource. If you’re like me, the most surprising part of this declaration is that its taken until now for it to appear. Data drives the business models of most, if not all, of the world’s most valuable companies, governments rely upon data for safety and security issues and data availability is something so many of us take for granted when we’re driving from our homes to an unfamiliar destination.
As the world’s most valuable resource, you’d think that data would be locked in safes, or hidden from view or, basically, hoarded whenever possible. And you’d be correct. However, what we also know is that there is an absolutely mind boggling amount of data that is publicly accessible, or “open”, for anyone to access and use. And there is a powerful movement, which continues to gain popularity, that seeks to unlock, set free and make useful as much of the world’s data as possible.
My guest for the 161st Terms of Reference Podcast, Pavel Richter, sits at one of the focal points of open data movement. He is is the CEO of Open Knowledge International, a worldwide non-profit network of people passionate about openness, using technology to unlock information, and enabling people to take action on pressing social problems. And, Pavel is no newbie to open data, before joining OKI, Pavel was Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland for 5 years, and pioneered the internationally acclaimed Wikidata project which is now the fastest growing project for open structured data.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy our conversation, where we discuss topics such as what open data means, the ethics of open data, where open data “lives”, if open data used for “evil” and even how different cultures interpret what “open” means.
You’ve heard me lament more than a few times on this podcast about the fact that innovation in the social sector is often times synonymous with technology. We talk a lot about how phones and apps and data are accelerating change and opening up opportunities for those in need. And, of course, being something of a super geek, I admit I love these conversations.
But, I’m also aware of this narrow focus, and so, when I get a chance to highlight other forms of innovation, I pounce. The innovator I’m excited to introduce to you on today’s 160th Terms of Reference Podcast hasn’t created a new technology. Rather, his organization has recognized that prestige is its own type of economy for street kids. So much so, that as the opportunity to earn prestige has flourished through their programs, it has literally transformed the lives of tens of thousands of youth across latin America.
My guest is Kurt Shaw. He is the Executive Director of the Shine A Light foundation. Shine a Light teaches digital arts - think video, movie making, audio storytelling - to marginalized children all over Latin America. And, as you’ll hear in our discussion, their work has had serious, measurable impact on street kids in many different countries.
Perhaps the quality I enjoy the most about this conversation with Kurt is his humility and recognition that he and Shine a Light are facilitators that help to unlock potential, and the kids they work with are the real inspiration. So much so that their movies, art, comics, books and other productions have won several awards - locally and internationally.
The availability of continuous power - that is, the assumption that you can plug in an appliance, or flip a switch without wondering whether or not electrons will flow - is a hallmark of civilization. So much so, that a great deal of what holds up our global economy would not be possible without the assurance that we can keep the lights on (or at least turn them on) 24/7.
So, what do you do when the power goes out? Do you call your local utility? Do you investigate your community breaker box? Or perhaps you view it as a unexpected respite from the daily grind and simply relax.
In some parts of the world, utilities have moved to a system that utilizes “smart meters.” These devices not only allow the utility to control access to power, but they can also alert the utility when power stops. But smart meters are expensive and may not be a silver bullet, especially in emerging economies.
My guests for today’s 159th Terms of Reference Podcast, Noah Klugman and Jay Taneja, recognized the limitations of smart meters and have created a different approach to understanding when the power goes out, called Gridwatch. Gridwatch harnesses data captured by the sensors in mobile phones to recognize when a power failure has occurred and notify the local utility.
I think just talking bout how Gridwatch was born and what they’ve achieved over the past few years would be enough for today’s show. But amazingly, I think you’ll find real value in our conversation about the future of electrification and how a small start up with a high-value product, is now currently iterating that product to serve needs that have been identified by their users as even more important then getting the power back on.
I’d like to start today’s episode with a quick, informal poll. Ask yourself: as a social sector professional, do you regularly receive calls or emails from the people who you’re trying to help where they ask - with great anticipation - about when the next version of your project or programme will be released?
While this regularly happens for other sectors, like mobile phones, automobiles, and fashion, for the vast majority of us in the social sector, the answer to this question is, emphatically, no.
The disconnect that this question exposes is the foundation that Dennis Whittle, who is my guest for today’s 158th Terms of Reference Podcast, stumbled upon a few years back and which has now grown into a powerful collaborative effort to change how we help those in need.
Dennis is the Executive Director of Feedback Labs, an organization that aims to change the norms in development, aid, and philanthropic policy to be more responsive to the people that those policies aim to help. Before Feedback Labs, Dennis was the co-founder of the groundbreaking Global Giving platform.
This is an important conversation because after we talk about the origins of Feedback Labs, we get into how they are helping to flip the, generally, top-down approach of the social sector to one that is truly responsive to local needs. The organizations that make up Feedback Labs believe we’re now at a stage where you cannot NOT afford to get feedback from those you seek to help and Dennis beautifully relates common issues faced by organizations and governments in being adaptive.
So I invite you to sit back and enjoy this conversation with Dennis that looks to a future where feedback is not only the connected thing to do, but also the expected thing to do.
If there is any one question I get asked more than any other from professionals in the social sector, it is some variation of this: “How do I raise money for my organization, cause or program?” And, there is usually a quick follow up that goes something like, “and, how do I raise money sustainably?”
Fundraising, marketing, business development, sales… call it what you want… will always be the greatest problem for the social sector. The reason I know this is because it remains the greatest problem for any business, regardless of the sector. Getting individuals to part with their hard earned cash is never an easy prospect, whether your talking about a new pair of shoes, supporting Syrian refugees or anything in-between.
There are many good answers to this question, depending upon a number of variables, and there are actually a ton of fantastic success stories in the social sector.
But today’s episode is focused on crowdfunding and how this powerful platform can be used as a part of a successful strategy within the social sector.
My guest for the 157th Terms of Reference Podcast, Jason Best, is more than an expert on crowdfunding - he actually is one of the original authors of what eventually became the Jobs Act in the United States, a law that fundamentally changed the investment landscape by allowing crowdfunding for equity, or an ownership stake of a company. Jason is a Co-Founder of CrowdFund Capital Advisors and a Venture Partner at Vectr Ventures. He works with governments and policy makers about how to make online fundraising available, with financial technology innovators about how to create solutions that respond to opportunities created by new policies and regulations and with large institutions and corporations to understand the market shift brought about by crowdfunding.
This is an important episode where Jason and I talk about the 460 day campaign to get the Jobs Act signed into law, and how crowdfunding has fundamentally shifted how the social sector should think about fundraising now, and for the future.
A great deal of the actual “work” delivered in the social sector comes in the form of services. Of these services, the lowest hanging fruit is skill building, often known as capacity building. But there are, of course, many other flavors of services - everything from helping to draft policies and plans, to the know-how behind running a power grid, to mapping service centers for at-risk youth. My point here is that delivering services is a tried and tangible means for getting your hands dirty helping others.
While not new by any account, one of the more exciting areas of the social sectors is the delivery of products. I think product delivery is especially interesting for a number of reasons. The design and delivery of products offer the opportunity for true leapfrog moments, and the measurement of success of a product is extremely tangible. Finally, in most cases the evolution of a product, as it iterates and is improved over time, is again extremely tangible.
But, as we already know, designing, delivering and properly servicing products is a challenging prospect, even in the best of circumstances. When you also add the challenges associated with emerging economies and context, those challenges are multiplied. This is why I’m excited to have Krista Donalson as my guest for the 156th Terms of Reference Podcast. Krista is the CEO of D-Rev, an organization that designs and delivers medical technologies that close the quality healthcare gap for under-served populations.
As you’ve come to expect from our guests, Krista has been driving innovation in product design, engineering, and international development for more than 15 years. And, Her work has won her acclaim as one of Fast Company’s Co.Design 50 Designers Shaping the Future, a TED speaker, and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
You’re going to love this conversation about D-Rev’s origins, the choices made to focus their product lines and the challenges around finding high-quality suppliers and servicing. We also talk about my favorite aspect of their work - the never ending march towards making products that people are obsessed with.
As you may have noticed over the past few months, I’ve been talking more and more about the “social sector.” As I’m sure you’ll have assumed, this has been intentional on my part to begin to reach out beyond my comfort zone of humanitarian aid and international development to the wider community of social actors; people who consider themselves social entrepreneurs, philanthropists and even intrapreneurs who see opportunity within their existing companies and organization to make change that will both serve those in need, but also improve our prospects for human flourishing.
It is in this context that I’m excited to introduce you to Lev Gonick, the CEO of DigitalC. As you’ll hear in our conversation, Lev is passionate about how technology can be used as an enabling platform to bring change to legacy cities.
Now, like me, you may ask what exactly is a “legacy city”? Here’s how DigitalC frames it: Many communities that were built on a 20th century manufacturing base now face the challenge of transitioning to a digital economy. Communities everywhere need strategies and practical programming that support their transition.
So, again as you’ll hear just a minute, places like Cleveland, where Lev lives, were once the pinnacle of modern civilization, but now find themselves with realities that are more akin to sub-Saharan Africa in terms of individual outcomes, like infant mortality or higher education.
And, while it comes out clearly in our conversation, I don’t think we could have a better guest on the show to talk about the needs of legacy cities and how powerful solutions can be crafted. From 2001 to 2013, Lev was Chief Information Officer at Case Western Reserve University and his leadership helped create the Case Connection Zone, catalyze national initiatives such as US Ignite, (which was launched by the White House Office of Science and Technology Planning), and Gig.U. As you can imagine, this work has resulted in Lev being recognized and awarded for his achievements in numerous place.
I know you’re going to love this show about how Lev’s team is helping people in need from Cleveland to Morocco by helping to build new civic agendas, introducing new technologies and opening access to the promises of big data.
For as long as I have been a social sector professional, there has always been a desire to do more partnering with the “private sector.” And, by that I mean traditional, for profit or commercial enterprises like Coke, Toyota or Airbus. In fact, 14 years ago, the capstone project of my Masters degree at American University was, I’m not kidding, “The Role of The Private Sector in Conflict Resolution.” My point here is that this is not a new topic by any stretch.
No matter how you’d like to approach it, the reason why we don’t see more traditional investment in parts of the world where its necessary to send aid or development assistance can be boiled down to one word: risk. Money, or more specifically the individuals who control money, large and small amounts alike, do not like to place that money at risk of being lost. Unfortunately, the places where social sector actors choose to align there sights for action can readily be characterized along a scale of increasing risk.
But here’s the thing - the money, or again the individuals who control the money, are also constantly on the lookout for new opportunities that offer potentially high rates of return. And, funny enough, you guessed it, the places where those of us in the social sector live and work are also places that offer tremendous potential markets and high-return opportunities.
So what’s an investor to do?
Luckily, Joan Larrea has agreed to be my guest on today’s 154th Terms of Reference Podcast. Joan is the CEO of Convergence, an institution that connects, educates, and supports investors to execute blended finance transactions that increase private sector investment in emerging markets. Joan has 20 years of experience in emerging markets investing. She led the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation's efforts to partner with philanthropic and private investors, she was a managing director on the emerging markets team at Global Environment Fund and she began her career as an investment officer at International Finance Corporation.
This episode is a fantastic conversation about how Convergence is attempting to breath life into investments that would otherwise be too risky for the traditional private sector.
We not only discuss the three ways in which Convergence works, but we also touch on several of the deals they have helped bring to life. We also talk about the reasons why this type of investing can be so difficult for everyone involved and where that trepidation comes from.
Because I am something of a super geek, and what I like to think of as the new-old guard (I mean, I had a TRS-80 in my house growing up), when I hear the term "defragment," the first thing I think of is hard drives. Fortunately, for everyone's sake, that's not what we are here to talk about today. Instead on today's 153rd Terms of Reference Podcast, I speak with Jason Wendle. He is the Director of the Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab, which focuses on identifying more and better financial solutions for smallholders.
In our conversation, Jason and I discuss the continued fragmentation of the financial market seeking to serve small hold farmers and how the Lab and its many partners are working to connect the dots between the necessary trifecta of access to markets, knowledge, and finance. I'm sure you'll love this talk about the types of financial difficulties facing smallholder farmers, how fintech is starting to bridge the gap, but also how, ultimately it will also take a conscious evolution from traditional lenders to find true scale and sustainability.
How much do we really embrace failure in the social sector? I ask this question because, as someone who has been lucky enough to be a part of the evaluation revolution over the past decade, embracing failure at an institutional level still remains elusive. Organizations and individuals alike still remain reluctant to lay bare the shortcomings of their efforts for a number of reasons that go well beyond just the fear of losing donor funding or having a black mark on your CV.
Unfortunately, I’m not here today with a clear cut answer about how to embrace failure other than doing so ultimately requires the same focus and discipline that you would apply to any other skill. You must not specifically incorporate the recognition of failure into your planning and design, you must also be willing to practice it every day, ruthlessly.
The good news is that, like so many other things, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you can create this discipline and practice in your life, you’ll learn faster, be more adaptable and, perhaps most importantly, the successes you do achieve will be that much sweeter.
My guest for the 152nd Terms of Reference Podcast, Nithya Ramanathan, is someone who definitely embraces failure. So much so that the organization she co-founded, NexLeaf Analytics, recently published an article that enumerated the company’s failures for all the world to read about. Nexleaf focuses on how we can better use data to make a difference for those in need. More specifically, Nexleaf focuses on the use of low cost sensors to improve things like cold storage for vaccines or cookstoves for rural families, among many other applications.
But, as you’ll hear in just a few minutes, while data is important for Nexleaf, it isn’t the true driving force behind their work. And this is where Nithya underscores in our conversation about the need to embrace failure and to continue to evolve your programs, processes and even yourself.
One of my favorite things about data analysis is when trends emerge unexpectedly. So often, when sifting through data we find exactly what we’re looking for. But its those moments when we’re presented with something unusual that are the real special event. This holds for why I love the monitoring and evaluation process in the social sector. So often I start an assignment with a client with a “view” about what will result from the research, only to find that after weeks - or more often months - of living with the data, conversations and documentation, I see alternative views clearly displayed.
The trend I’m pleased has revealed itself to spark this editorial is disruption of the social sector. Somehow the universe conspired to allow me to have our past two guests on the show (Paula Kravitz and Chris Blattman), both of whom have specific views on how we can evolve the sector. Today’s guest is, happily, another voice whose decades of experience have lead to our conversation about yet another aspect of our work that is overdue for a rethink: the ever present silos we find everyday in our work.
Silos are everywhere - within organizations, across humanitarian responses, within countries accepting development assistance and even within our own minds about how our worldview and approaches to our work. This isn’t a new problem, and one I can personally attest is alive and well. So much so that the term “multi-sectoral initiative” is something donors are interested in hearing and a topic that was a key focus for a recent guest here on TOR - Patrick Fine, the CEO of FHI 360 as he talked about “integrated development.”
My guest for the 151st episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast is Tim France, Managing Director of Inis Communication. Tim came to his passion for communicate through the health sector, in which he holds a PhD and has worked for the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS and UNAIDS, the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, the Foundation du Présent, and the founding of Health & Development Networks.
I’m excited to bring you this conversation about a new tool developed by Inis, called SGD Insights, and how that becomes a platform for Tim and I to talk about the need for disrupting the social sector to break down our silos - and why this has never been more important
Professor Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago, at the Harris School of Public Policy, as well as a research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research, among many other things. He's a heavyweight in the world of understanding what works - and more importantly what doesn't - in aid and development.
As you'll hear on the show, Chris thinks he's a professor because he was a failed development professional. This is actually a lucky turn for the rest of us because he is a critical voice in the R&D department of the development and aid sector. In our discussion, you'll hear us discuss how research finds its way into practice and how we learned that microfinance doesn’t work to alleviate poverty. We also discuss why you can’t test programs and programming, but rather you have to test the assumptions those programs are built on, in order to find out what works. We round out our discussion on what the future of the social sector could look like over the next five years.
There is a beautiful simplicity to the commercial sector. Anyone can create products and services that satisfy a real or perceived need in whatever market(s) they want. Then, with the right marketing and (hopefully) added value from the "better mousetraps" people create, the business can realize a profit. And that, ultimately, is the measure of your success.
Unfortunately, finding the same simplicity in the social sector is difficult. While social enterprises, non profits and charities are on the constant lookout for, or purposeful invention of, products and services that satisfy real (or perceived) needs, rather than seeing profit as the end game, the social sector seeks an overall improved human condition. This presents something of a conundrum because we still have so much trouble, as a human community, agreeing about what improvement means.
I know there is a lot to unpack in this seemingly simple distinction. But, fortunately, that is exactly why I am so excited to introduce my guest for the 149th Terms of Reference Podcast. Paula Kravitz is a Strategic Advisor for the Social Progress Imperative - a Washington, DC based enterprise dedicated to redefining how the world measures and achieves social progress. Before SPI, Paula spent a decade at the Skoll Foundation where she directed and curated the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.
Said another way, Paula has been at the forefront of thinking on the social sector for the last 10 years. And, if I’m completely honest, as I hope comes out in our conversation, Paula is tapped into what is essentially the reason behind why I started Aidpreneur and this podcast in the first place - the need for a shake up of the social sector in order to redefine and align what it is we’re all trying to achieve as a collective body dedicated to human flourishing.
We’ve be fortunate enough to have guests on this show from across the entire spectrum of the social sector and from around the world. One of the common issues we’ve talked about is resource scarcity and how that presents both unique opportunities for innovation and challenges in terms of programming, priorities and management.
Today, we’re going to look at the other side of the coin and discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with an organization that’s focused on helping solve some of the world’s most challenging problems, but also has scale, and the very real ability to leverage that scale.
My guest today is Jamey Butcher, who is an Executive Vice President at Chemonics and currently leads the Strategic Communications and Solutions Division. I’m excited about this episode because I think it really gives a peek under the hood of what is possible within a large development organization. Just to give you a taste, we cover things like: how Chemonics approaches ICT4D, how they are working to make internal communication and learning sexy, the focus of several strategic partnership, the missing middle in impact investing and much, much more.
Let's say you woke up tomorrow to the sound of someone knocking at your door. And, when you answer, the person standing outside politely explained that they were a representative of a energy company that had recently acquired the rights to extract the natural gas in the area. Oh, and a great deal of that resource happens to be located under your house.
Or, what if you were able to track changes in the water your community uses for drinking, cooking, bathing and cleaning physically change over the past few years - from a pure, clean resource, to one that is smelly, polluted or fouled in some other way. And that those changes began when a mining operation started upstream.
Now here's the kicker - you are unable to bring a complaint against thees resource extraction companies simply because you lack the time, money or other resources. Or, an even more likely scenario, if and when you do bring your issues to your local or national authorities, you find that the scales are tipped against you simply because the companies have access to seemingly unlimited amounts of time, money and insider knowledge.
My guest for the 147th Terms of Reference Podcast, Flaviano Bianchini, is intimately familiar with stories similar to these from around the world. But rather than just listen, he has helped create a powerful solution that has helped communities to fight back and tip the scales in their favor. Flaviano's organization, Source International, helps communities that are adversely affected by resource extraction activities, like mining or well drilling, by providing them with scientific and legal resources. As you'll hear us discuss, the support provided by Source has created profound results - large scale monetary rewards, injunctions against extraction activities and, in one case, completely rewriting mining laws.
How obsessed are you with goal setting? I mean seriously - if you've been living on planet earth you know that, those invested in the science of achievement, have done an incredible of not only convincing, but actually getting us as a whole to adopt goal setting as a lifestyle. And, full disclosure, I am not only a living, breathing product of this paradigm, but I'm also one of its loudest proponents (at least in my mind).
Goal setting has become something of an absolute in the design of products, services and programs in the social sector, as well. Just think of how many times you've designed theories of change, conceptual and logical frameworks or SMART indicators. You know what I'm talking about here - the obsession with defining the results that we want to achieve with our work and, perhaps even more importantly, how will measure our progress towards achieving them.
While I could hold court on how to improve the way we design programs to achieve social goals for the next 4 days, here's the thing: this show isn't about that. In fact we're about to spend the next hour and change talking about how creating objective goals may be the exact wrong thing to do when trying to achieve something amazing.
My guest, and truly the inspiration, for this episode is Dr. Kenneth Stanley. He currently works for Uber Labs while on leave from the University of Central Florida where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Ken focuses on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I learned about Ken from ISG's Director, Micheal Klein, when he shared an article with me from the 538 blog titled "Stop Trying To Be Creative," that was written by Christie Aschwanden. I'll let you read that on your own, but suffice it to say that I was intrigued and had to know more - and how it might apply to the business of helping others.
And, I think that's exactly what you'll get in this episode. The revelation in this podcast should, ultimately, blow your mind. We get started by talking about AI and Ken's pet project (called Picbreeder) and how that led to his discovery that objectively determining what we want to achieve may be the best way to miss out on true awesomeness
Two very common themes in the aid and development community are “resource scarcity” (some even call this resource starvation) and “locally driven solutions.”
The particular resource scarcity I am referring to is a lack of funding. This is a conversation you cannot avoid, because the challenges always seem to be greater than the available pools of money, and one that, unfortunately, will only become more acute as we navigate the age of Trump and the new populism.
Locally driven solutions refers to an ideal that contextualization of products and services results in solutions that are more appropriate, more readily accepted and potentially more durable, or sustainable. By supporting the development of answers at the local level, it is also assumed that we will foster a greater set of unique ideas, which spurs innovation and invention globally.
While these two themes, at least at first blush, seem fundamentally in tension with one another there are a number of approaches that successfully bridge the gap. One of these approaches involves the use of technologies, processes, creative outputs and more that are “open source.” Open source products and services are free, community driven and have a number of incredibly successful examples.
My guest for the 145th Terms of Reference Podcast is something of an open source evangelist. Giulio Coppi is the founder of an initiative called High Tech Humanitarians, which purports to be the first free online platform for collaborative humanitarian innovation on open source technology. He is also CEO of Open Focus, a non profit devoted to open source technology for good and is an Humanitarian Innovation Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University in New York. As you no doubt have guessed, Gulio deeply believes that open source provides a platform to drive otherwise missing, misplaced or misaligned innovation for the humanitarian sector
While we live in a world of unprecedented prosperity for many, we also live in a world that is experiencing unprecedented levels of humanitarian crisis. You know the examples: protracted violent conflicts, devastation caused by earthquakes or hurricanes, the specters of famine or disease outbreak... unfortunately the list goes on and on.
The good news is that we have a humanitarian community that does a fantastic job of responding to these crises with the resources available to them. In large part, supplies arrive, shelter is provided and people receive care until a time in which they can begin the transition back to normalcy.
Unfortunately, as with the creation of any system, developing the capacity to address these large scale crises has produced unintended consequences and externalities. One of these externalities is a logistics and supply chain ecosystem that is bureaucratic, expensive and rigid. On this, the 144th episode of the Terms Of Reference Podcast, I talk with Andrew Lamb of Field Ready about how their organization is disrupting logistics and supply chains currently associated with humanitarian aid by helping to solve problems at the source, in the communities affected by crisis.
Andrew is the Innovation Advisor for Field Ready. He is the former CEO of Engineers Without Borders – UK, he co-founded and serves as a Trustee of the Humanitarian Centre in Cambridge and he is a Trustee of RedR-UK. You're going to love this episode because it is packed with specific examples about how Field Ready is disrupting the delivery of humanitarian aid through design, process re-engineering, 3D printing and more.
We've had a lot of change makers on this show over the past two years - people and organizations that are redefining old systems and creating new products and processes that demand completely new ways of thinking about how we serve those in need. Across these interviews, one of the factors critical to the success of any endeavor is the ability to communicate effectively. This skill not only entails the ability to bring facts and evidence to the table, but to weave these into a narrative that conveys the "why" behind what you believe. While I'm fairly certain that most of you would agree that communication is important, it is still something that we don't properly prioritize, even thought many times it is the deciding factor for convincing someone to join your cause, retain top talent or secure funding.
If you think I'm wrong, I challenge you to spend 30 minutes at any event in any major hub of the aid and development sector this week - places like Washington, DC, New York, Geneva, Bangkok or Nairobi - and tell me if you don't witness rooms full of participants spending more time on their mobile devices than engaged in the presentation and speakers who still haven't incorporated even the most basic presentation and public speaking fundamentals. I invite you to share your stories about this challenge in the comments section on Aidpreneur.com for this podcast.
But here's the good news: my guest for the 143rd Terms of Reference Podcast is Angus Hervey. He is the co-founder of a new media company call Future Crunch. They're decidedly optimistic mission seeks to help people understand what's on the frontiers of science and technology, and what it means for human progress. You should definitely check out their website, YouTube channel, and get on their newsletter. I'm absolutely certain you'll love this conversation about new media channels and the evolution of journalism, fake news, bringing stories of change and progress to the world and what it means to embrace the hacker culture of today.
One reason that innovation has become one of those words that you just cannot escape in social impact, is the fact that the institutions that have occupied this space for the bulk of history are the anthesis of what we would consider "shiny new objects." But really, if we sit back and think about it, for many (and maybe most, or even all) of them, the rapid or constant change that we associate with innovation is actually the exact opposite of what these institutions we're built to achieve. Seriously. The public relies on public structures like governments and international organizations for setting and maintaining rules and processes that ultimately lead to a common, knowable... and stable... environment in which we can run our lives. Injecting the change associated with innovation into any system or process creates uncertainty, which is the opposite of what the "institutionalization" of something seeks to achieve. All of this is to say that, its no wonder that realizing innovation within this sector is a massive challenge - and one that fascinates me to no end.
Luckily, this is something that my guest for the 142nd Terms of Reference Podcast knows a thing or two about. Corrine Gray is an Alternative Finance Specialist in the Innovation Unit at UNHCR, where she leads efforts to engage staff and refugees in open innovation. I'm confident you're going to enjoy our conversation about how UNHCR is working to develop an 'innovation mindset' and how that ultimately makes a difference for refugees.
I invite you to pause just for a second and take a moment to think about the last time you changed your mind about something. Specifically, I'd like for you to identify something that was either very important to you or your worldview, or something that you had taken for granted, that today you have either the complete opposite or at least a very different perspective on. Got it?
Now ask yourself, what was it that made you change your mind? And, again specifically, what evidence did you unearth, or were presented with, that made the case for changing your mind? For most of us, a profound change of mind doesn't happen very often, but when it does, the effects of such a change alter lives, communities, and entire belief systems.
As a final step in this exercise, I'd like for you to think about the core beliefs you have about the work you do in the social impact sector, and what you expect that work will help achieve for people in need. Now, ask yourself, what would it take to alter those beliefs - even if it meant radically shifting the entire system for how you've expected to serve others?
I wanted to start with this exercise because in today's 140th episode of the terms of reference podcast, I'd be discussing the revolution being brought about through the practice of impact evaluation. Impact evaluation holds the promise of confirming, or refuting, the effectiveness of the practices, processes and systems we rely upon in humanitarian and development programming to help those in need.
My guest for this show, David Evans, knows a thing or two about impact evaluations. He is a Lead Economist in the Chief Economist's Office for the Africa Region of the World Bank where he coordinates impact evaluation work across agriculture, education, health, and social protection in more countries than most people will visit in their lifetimes. I know you're going to love this show as we discuss how we can design evaluations to learn more, how to make evaluation real time, and, ultimately how do you create an evaluation that will succeed - even if you're working for a small NGO.
So, imagine for a moment that you're a college student getting ready to spend a summer working internationally. Maybe in a hotel in a tropical resort, or as an eco tour guide, or maybe helping teach children in an orphanage. The options are almost limitless if you look hard enough. This is exciting stuff! So, now your bags are packed, you've said goodby to mom and dad and you're on the plane. But, when you land at your destination, it turns out to be nothing at all like what you expected. You're passport and phone are taken from you. You're locked in a hotel room and, rather than serving cocktails to high end tourists, you find yourself being forced to clean fish or... some other job.
I've just painted a picture that, in reality, is fairly unlikely for a kid from the US or Europe, because there are systems in place that vet employers, study abroad opportunities and the like to ensure they are legit. Unfortunately, however, human trafficking and exploitation is still a reality for thousands of people around the world today. Often the go-to image of this horror is young women being forced into the sex trade. But exploitation happens in numerous other ways as well - in domestic work, in fisheries, in manual labor of all types.
My guest for the 140th Terms of Reference Podcast has spent a career combatting human exploitation. Tara Dermott currently leads IOM X, which is the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) campaign to encourage safe migration and public action to stop human trafficking and exploitation in the Asia Pacific region. This campaign has reached more than 158 million people in less than two years and has helped to not only shape the conversation around exploitation, but also help many people out of it.
The challenges faced by communities in developing contexts around the world are anything but simple. Climate change, protracted conflict, gender issues, food scarcity, natural resource management... these and the hundreds of other topics that development professionals work on everyday are complex by their very nature.
Working effectively within these complex system requires an integrated approach that considers the many factors affecting a community, all at the same time. As one, off the cuff example, adequate health care systems require educational support, which requires funding and facilities, which need a sound foundation of infrastructure and policy. And, that's just looking at if from a practical "how to" perspective - adding in cultural, environmental and unsavory factors, such as conflict, weaves a web that is difficult to untangle.
My guest for the 139th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, Patrick Fine, sees the creation of an evidence base for integrated development as a critical success factor for the future of our sector. As the CEO of FHI360, Patrick oversees a truly global development operation - one that not only implements programming, but also seeks to create new knowledge from which everyone can benefit. I have no doubt you'll enjoy this wide ranging conversation about how FHI360 is positioning themselves for the future of development.
Do you ever have the feeling that your work in the Social Impact sector is akin to "plowing the sea?" That is - despite all of the time and effort you've put into your particular program or project, the effects are less than expected or, worse, completely disappear in a relatively short time? This was a lament of Rainer Arnhold, a pediatrician who, despite having helped countless children around the world and dedicating his life to serving others, felt that his work had not produced lasting change.
Upon Dr. Arnhold's untimely death in 1993, his family created the Mulago Foundation in his honor. My guest for the 138th Episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, Dr. Kevin Starr, who was Rainer's mentee and serves as the Managing Director of Mulago, has led the foundation in investments that see to create lasting change at scale. With alumni such as the One Acre Fund, RootCapital and Sanergy, its plain to see they understand what it takes to go the distance.
If you're listening to this podcast, you're clearly a part of the digital revolution. Social media is a part of your life. Blogging may even be something you do. And... you even have a host of expectations about what minimum requirements you have for a job or an organization regarding your interaction with all things interweb. But how do we align this increasingly frenetic universe of digital options to ensure that they support the social impact we want to create?
Enter Chris Wolz as my guest for the 137th Terms of Reference Podcast. Chris is the CEO of ForumOne, digital agency that works with mission-driven organizations to create the stunning designs, smart messaging, and custom built technology tools they need to realize their goals and extend their influence in the areas they care about most.
Would you agree with me that it is easy to become overwhelmed - in general? If I'm honest, which I always try to be, it actually pains me that this reality is, well, a reality. But, the truth of the matter is we are all a part of this brave new world where information, opinions, new ideas and old obligations are hurtling at us with both unprecedented speed and in abundant volume.
So what, then, do you do, when its you're job to coordinate the implementation of innovation - of new solutions to old problems? With the wrong person or team in place, it could quickly become a case study in watching people go crazy as they attempt to absorb all the information about shiny new objects, while effectively staying the course to roll out the technology or process that has been developed for the needs at hand.
This is exactly what my guest for the 136th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast does day in and day out. Sean Blaschke is the ICT4D coordinator for UNICEF in Uganda and, as you'll hear in just a second, he has essentially an unlimited amount of stories about how implementing new practices can go wrong - but also what happens when you get it right.
Have you ever stopped to think about how many things in your life depend on the weather? Everything from your mood to your travel plans to whether or not you'll get to wear that awesome brand new pair of blue suede shoes you've been dying to show off.
The weather is also, of course, important for farmers. Being able to predict when it will rain (or not) could mean the difference between raising a successful crop or ending up with a field of dead plants. For farmers outside of the tropics, weather prediction has gotten fairly accurate over time (and, no, this podcast is not about global climate change). However, for farmers in the tropics, because of unique micro climates and rapidly shifting patterns, predicting the weather has been troublesome, at best. At worst, it just hasn't been available.
Enter my guest for the 135th Terms of Reference Podcast. Sable Bender is the Digital Marketing and Social Media Strategist for Ignitia - the world's first weather forecasting service specifically designed for the tropics. T
What do libraries have to do with innovation for aid and development? Total honest answer from my side: when I was doing my research for the 134th Terms of Reference Podcast, I knew there would be high value in a conversation with Chris Coward - who is the co-founder, Principal Research Scientist, and Director of the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington - but I had no idea that our conversation would be such a fun, far ranging and wild ride.
From TASHA's convening of the first tech conference in 1999 about how society will be affected by the "new" interweb, to how MOOCS are used in the developing world, to how adoption of smart phones in Myanmar fundamentally changes that populations view of what computing is all about... to libraries, and how these institutions are becoming - not less - but more and more relevant in the age of information. I know you're going to love this show.
I have a confession to make: I'm fairly certain I under-appreciate design. Especially design as the cultural phenomenon it has become in everything from mobile phones to toilets. If you're paying attention to the same types of feeds as me, (you probably need to get out more) you know that design, as a critical practice for success, has come into its own in a massive way over the past 10 years - ever since Apple took over the hardware space in technology.
My guest today for the 133rd Terms of Reference Podcast, Ravi Chhatpar, believes that design also has an important seat at the humanitarian aid and development table. He is one of the co-founders of Dalberg’s Design Impact Group, which is dedicated to helping their clients find creative approaches to breakthrough innovation for social impact. As you'll hear in our talk, DIG's process can help lead to better strategies for innovation, user focused products and services and catalyzing unique and creative outcomes from groups.
I always get excited at the beginning of a new year. I think here is something important about moments like these that allow us a collective opportunity to not only enjoy time with friends and family, but also take stock of where things stand, and what we might like to change. While I remain humbled that you're now listening to the 132nd episode we're publishing here on TOR, I've also spent the closing of last year receiving feedback, working with our team and getting energized for how we will continue to grow, shape and evolve this show to do our part in helping to make aid and development better.
As I'm recording this we're standing at the precipice of a time when the aid and development sector will come under unprecedented scrutiny and pressure. With Brexit, and now the election of Trump, it is not a question of if, but when, this will happen. The time couldn't be more ripe for taking bold steps to better define why what we do to help others not only matters, but is effective in ending suffering and creating change. I, for one, am up for the challenge and I hope you'll join me.
This very reason, however, is why I'm especially excited to bring you this episode. Because, you see, a little more than a year ago, the US State Department also experienced one of these reflective moments where they realized there was, potentially, a massive source of energy and innovation that had never before been tapped, right in their own back yard. What came out of that moment was the piloting of a office in Silicon Valley to learn how they might contribute to solutions for some of the world's most difficult challenges. My guest, Zvika Krieger, has been at the forefront of that pilot and he's here to tell us what they've learned and what will happen next.
One of the things I love the most about the stories here on the Terms of Reference Podcast is listening to the always incredible, but retrospectively obvious, paths which have lead all of our Aidpreneurs to their current passions. In fact, as I've documented in the eBook "Making It," this is one of the factors that defines those who have created a sustainable and satisfying career in development and humanitarian aid.
My guest for the 131st episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, Noam Angrist, is no exception to this rule. Noam is the Executive Director of Young1ove, an organization that finds health-related messages that have been shown to create change, through a pile of evidence, and then finds creative, culturally appropriate ways to deliver these messages for youth, by youth. While this model, on the surface, may not seem ground breaking, as you'll hear in just a minute, the results that Noam and the Young1love team are achieving in Botswana through their "No Sugar" program are.
What would you do if your job was to figure out, on a global scale, who doesn't have enough to eat? Or, more importantly, who had insecurity in their life specifically because of food scarcity? Just thinking about the scale of the problem blows my mind a little bit. But then, wait for it, what if you then had to also design and execute interventions that would, to a large degree, address those food security issues. Oh, and did I mention that this is a constantly evolving and changing process?
This is exactly what my guest for the 130th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast does along with the team at the World Food Programme's Vulnerability and Analysis Mapping Initiative. Jean-Martin Bauer is a Senior Analyst at WFP, where he leads the mobile VAM initiative, which involves deploying digital innovations to collect food security data in near real time. He has been on the front lines of understanding food scarcity for years and in this episode he tells us about how VAM has evolved since its paper-survey beginnings and where it will go in the future.
For those of you who've been listening to the show for a while, it is fairly obvious that there is, quite literally, a ton of data out there related to development initiatives and humanitarian assistance. If you had the time, money and desire, you could find data about almost any aspect assistance: things like baseline data about a population, damage assessments, geospatial data, demographics of the people affected by a crisis, or things like which organizations, governments and companies are on the ground helping. The problem is, in the humanitarian sector, organizations don't have the time, money and people power to hunt down this data. And, even more of a problem is the fact that the data is locked in spreadsheets on individual laptops, only captured in written notes or, unfortunately, kept hidden as a potential competitive advantage.
Sarah Telford, my guest for the 129th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, is on a mission to change all of this. She is the Chief of Data Services at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and oversees the continuing development of a global open data platform called the Humanitarian Data Exchange. The goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis, and, as of July 2014, has been accessed by users in over 200 countries and territories.
You don’t have to be in development or aid to know that mobile has been disruption banking for a while. But those of us in the sector are acutely aware of how mobile banking has literally changed the lives of millions of people by providing financial access to even the most remote areas, and the results have been, generally speaking, fantastic. As just one example, we know that people who have access to mobile banking are more resilient to shocks and emergencies, a potential game changer in many parts of the world.
While its well established, the use of mobile in the banking world is far from complete. In fact, its still just beginning. Where it is going next is the primary focus of Xavier Faz, my guest for the 128th Terms of Reference Podcast. Xavier is the Lead of the Digital Financial Frontiers Initiative for CGAP, which is housed at the World Bank, where they look to leverage innovations around mobile phones and mobile payments that allow new services to be delivered.
So, let's say that you had a great idea for a commercial product or service that ultimately grew into a fairly large, sustainable and profitable company. Would you be the type of founder entrepreneur who would step back and say to yourself, "I wonder how we might give back some of the success we've had to help solve some of the world's more important problems?"
Lucky for everyone, that is exactly what the folks that started Tableau Software have done through the Tableau Foundation. In this, the 127th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, I speak with Neal Myrick and Steve Schwartz. Neal is the Director of Social Impact at Tableau Software and Director of Tableau Foundation. Steve the Marketing Manager for Tableau Software’s Social Impact efforts and supports the Tableau Foundation’s work. Steve is also a co-founder of Upaya Social Ventures, a nonprofit incubator that is building businesses and creating jobs in India’s poorest communities.
Specifically, we focus our conversation on how Tableau has partnered with PATH to create the VisualizeNoMalria campaign, and how Tableau's software contributes to this campaign through data analysis and visualization support.
I spoke with Neal and Steve in Seattle Washington.
Finding ways to empower those in need through better access to education has been a hallmark service of the development and aid community for decades. The education sector, like any other, is ripe for disruption, especially as we consider how we deliver curriculum over distance, customize education for individual needs, provide alternatives and outlets for both the gifted and those that have special needs, and much more.
Michael Trucano, my guest for the 126th Terms of Reference Podcast, has dedicated the past 18 years of his life to thinking and advising governments how they can enhance education through the use of information and communication technologies. Michael is the World Bank's Senior Education & Technology Policy Specialist and Global Lead for Innovation in Education. He is also the principal voice behind the World Bank's influential and widely read EduTech blog.
Getting an idea off the ground is incredibly difficult, even when you have access to the right resources, tools, funding and networks. So what happens when you not only have none of that access, but the very place you live is known as an active conflict zone? Can entrepreneurship be used as a bridge to not only help people out of poverty, but also to change the dynamics of conflict?
My guest today on the 125th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, Hen Ben Saadon, believes this is possible. He is the Vice President for business development and operations for Unistream - an organization in Israel that empowers teens from underprivileged communities, and all walks of life, buy helping them to create their own entrepreneurial ventures.
There is no shortage of talk about innovation in the aid and development space - but how much of this talk has actually moved beyond small scale piloting programs into standard operations for funders and implementors? My unscientific read from the field continues to say "not much," especially in the case of large-scale implementors. Like any established system or process, fundamentally shifting the way business is done takes both time and unwavering leadership.
The US Global Development Lab at USAID seeks to be a mechanism for taking ideas to change-making action. As explained by Alexis Bonnell, my guest on the 124th Terms of Reference Podcast, the Lab seeks to be a catalyst for nothing less than "the transformation of the development enterprise by opening development to people everywhere with good ideas, promoting new and deepening existing partnerships, bringing data and evidence to bear, and harnessing scientific and technological advances."
Alexis is the Division Chief in Applied Innovation and Acceleration for The Lab. As you've come to expect from TOR guests, she is definitely someone to listen to: she has developed and delivered over a billion dollars of humanitarian and development programming in over 25 conflict, post-conflict, and emergency countries, in almost every sector from education to stabilization, for more than 30 International Bi-lateral donors, 10 UN agencies, the military, and the private sector.
Having an idea to change the way we help others is one thing - getting it off the ground and into reality is an entirely different matter. While there are any number of amazing stories about Aidpreneurs who have bootstrapped their way to success, even those who started with no funding eventually find themselves in a place where filling the coffers is necessary to scale, pivot or just grow.
My guest for the 123rd episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast knows a thing or two about funding innovation. Kim Scriven is the Manager of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund. Kim is responsible for the development and management of the Fund, and oversees both its grant making processes and innovation management work. Kim has been a longstanding advocate for increased investment in innovation by the humanitarian system, previously working within the Secretariat of the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP), where his work focused on supporting innovation in humanitarian organisations, and promoting learning around innovation.
So often we find ourselves talking about innovation in the humanitarian aid and development space in terms of gadgets or technologies - the "shiny objects" of the future. While there is certainly a lot to be said about how the brave new digital world will allow us to help those in need more effectively, sometimes... it just isn't necessary to take a massive leap.
My guest today on the 122nd episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, Wanjala Wafula, is a classic problem solver and think-on-your-feet innovators. His organization, called The Coexist Initiative, has been working on gender issues in Kenya and beyond for more than a decade and, while they absolutely use the latest in technology, social media, and more, they also often rely on the most simple tools and ideas to help create change.
As any Aidpreneur will readily tell you, putting together even the most simple service or product to help those in need becomes an all consuming affair rather quickly. That is, if you want to actually get it on the street, refine, grow scale and have a sense of sustainability that can see beyond the next payroll cycle. Then if you add in the need to measure impact and managing or marketing real human behavior change while satisfying the needs of government or private donors... well you see where I'm going.
All of this is to say that it is the exceptionally rare bird who can do all of this alone. In fact, I honestly don't know of anyone who has - no matter our level of genius, we all have a network of support we call upon to breath life into our projects and companies and help them grow from seed to oak tree. Randall Kemper, my guest on then 121st episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, knows and preaches this everyday. He is the Executive Director of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) - a global membership network of organizations that seek to propel entrepreneurship in emerging markets by providing critical financial, educational, and business support services to small and growing businesses.
Would you be willing to give up everything you have, and go into debt, to help some of the most impoverished people in the world? Would your answer change if I told you that you had to jump off that cliff without knowing exactly how you'd go about helping those people?
This is exactly what my guest for the 120th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast did when she founded the Blessings Basket Project - an organization inspired by the small acts of kindness shown to her when life didn't work out as expected in 2002. Now, years later, Theresa Carrington and the Blessings Basket project has not only helped thousands of women, but created a system for identifying, supporting and ensuring that women entrepreneurs break out of poverty, into prosperity.
Theresa is my kind of entrepreneur - she jumped head first into solving the problem she identified without knowing anything about the business of helping those in need. She's brought along some of the voices of the people she's help and works with as extra inspiration for the show.
Even if you are a newbie in the humanitarian aid and development community, I'm willing to bet you've heard about cash. And, by cash, I mean the very-much-growing interest and support for providing assistance to those in need by giving them cash. The theory is simple: people in need of help, especially in situations of poverty and emergencies, know the specifics of their situation better than anyone and cash provides them the best tool to getting those needs met quickly.
My guest for the 119th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast is no newcomer to the cash discussion. Paul Niehaus is a co-founder and president of GiveDirectly, which is currently the top-rated nonprofit by GiveWell and ranked among the 25 most audacious companies (Inc) and 10 most innovative companies in finance (Fast Company). GiveDirectly is a recognized leader in the use of modern technology to transfer funds directly to the extreme poor, and in the use of rigorous scientific methods to document its impact.
You can go ahead and admit it your yourself - I won't judge, because I do it too - that its nice when you have a substantial number of people "like" or follow something you've posted on social media. For most of us, this revolves around a picture of a vacation, something the kids did, or random silliness we happened across on the street.
But what if your post went viral? I mean really viral... so much so that it resulted in you receiving so much feed back that you decided to start an organization to fulfill the need that you just uncovered? Well, this is exactly what happened to Annamaria Olsson, who is my guest for the 118th episode of the Terms of reference podcast.
As you'll hear in the episode, she wrote a post that launched a vibrant growing organization called Give Something Back To Berlin, that seeks to connect people in the city, especially migrants who are looking for ways to thrive in a place that has welcomed them with open arms, but may not necessarily with all the resources they need.
Annamaria is a Swedish journalist and writer, who also has 10 years of NGO experience. As you'll hear in the podcast, she tells you her story much better than I ever could.
When an emergency happens, whether its unexpected like an earth quake, or the result of a steady build up like many of the violent conflicts we have in the world today, people scatter. They scatter from where they live to not only remove themselves from immediate harm, but then to also find and connect with those they care about. This movement presents one of the larger challenges with delivering humanitarian aid to those who need it.
But what if there was a way to detect where people are going, or where they've gone - and determine if, or when, they might come back to their homes... without having to physically see them? This is one example of the work of Flowminder, an organization that uses anonymized data from mobile operators and household surveys to help humanitarian agencies and governments understand the movement of people before, during and after an emergency.
On today's 117th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, I speak with Linus Bengtsson, who is one of the co-founders and the Executive Director of the Flowminder Foundation. Linus is a medical doctor and researcher. In his academic research, Dr. Bengtsson performs evaluations of the use of new digital data types, such as mobile operator data, to measure and monitor development outcomes.
What is it like to not have a voice? More specifically, what is it like to have a voice - a powerful, intelligent, passionate voice - but one that no one can hear? This is the case for, literally, millions of people in the world today who have stories to tell, and stories that need or should be heard, but who are not able to access mainstream media channels that we all still turn to for our news. These are stories about fleeing violence, about what its like to be disabled or about trying to see where the road from poverty to prosperity begins.
Now, I know that social media has evolved this equation, to be sure. However, I also know first hand that even when you have access to all the right tools, and resources and great stories, it is still a massive effort to break out of the overwhelming ocean of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and thousands of other "individual voice outlets" to be heard at scale.
Libby Powell, my guest for the 116th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, is implementing a vision for giving voice to the unheard in mainstream media. She is the founding director of an organization called On Our Radar, a non-profit communications agency that seeks out, supports and helps to amplify unheard voices.
Libby started out like many of us: for several years she worked in humanitarian aid supporting health and advocacy programmes in Palestine and the refugee camps of Lebanon. But then she retrained herself as a multimedia journalist to cover development and rights issues for the UK press. And, as you'd expect, she's no slacker - in 2010, she won the Guardian International Development Journalism award and in 2014, she was listed as one of Journalism.co.uk's top female innovators in digital media.
We have spent a fair amount of time on the Terms of Reference Podcast talking about data - big data, data collection, using (and not using) data. While I'm sure that we will continue to talk about data a lot in the future, and hopefully (and more importantly?) the useful information that data creates, today's episode focuses on the portion of the innovation spectrum in development and aid where the truly tangible, potentially game changing product or service that someone (or group of people) who has poured blood, sweat and tears into making a reality... is actually becoming a reality.
For the 115th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast, I speak with Ryan Oksenhorn of the company Zipline. A member of the founding team, he is the company's Software Team lead and and also runs the flight testing program. Zipline is a complete rethinking of the delivery of critical and emergency health care products, like blood or vaccines, for hard-to-deliver-to places. They fly them there. On demand. Within minutes of receiving a request.
While this seems like a no-brainer, as you'll hear in the podcast, the Zipline team has had to solve massive amounts of problems to achieve the safety, reliability and quality necessary for this service - the solutions to which have only become possible in the last few years. They are kicking off the launch of the Zipline service in Rwanda this summer. I was inspired and I hope you will be as well.
There is a good deal of energy in the development and humanitarian space focused on building an evidence base for what works - and what doesn't. Here on the Terms of Reference Podcast, we've talked with numerous individuals and organizations who are building data sets towards that end, and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation - or 3ie - has been contributing to this conversation since its founding in 2008. To date, they've funded 146 impact evaluations, 33 systematic reviews and 38 other studies in over 50 countries.
But how do we properly reflect on and communicate about the evidence we've collected, and its resulting analysis, so that it can be used by development and humanitarian actors to design (and deliver) better programing? I discuss this and a host of other topics on the 114th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast with my guest, Dr. Jyotsna Puri. Jo is the Deputy Executive Director and Head of Evaluation at 3ie and has more than 21 years of experience in policy research and development evaluation.
Those of us in the innovation space in development and humanitarian aid often talk about making sure that what we do is market driven. Not only should following this path provide the best solution to those who are interested in using your product or service, it should also create a clear roadmap to sustainability. Because, after all, if you have created a solution with such value that the demand not only sustains your organization, but allows you to continue to refine, grow and take risks (or, in one word, thrive), you're doing something right.
This relentless pursuit of providing a product of consistent high value is the passion that drives my guest for the 113th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast. Chris Robert is the founder of Dobility, which produces SurveyCTO, an electronic data collection platform used worldwide by leading researchers and evaluation professionals.
Chris has literally seen and done it all as a technologist, an entrepreneur, an economist, a researcher, and a lecturer. He's been a technology guru before anyone knew what the Internet was (or would become), a deep field researcher in India and Harvard professor.
The field of international development and humanitarian aid is so broad and diverse that it is essentially impossible to keep up with everything that is going on. Combine that with the rapid pace of technology development, communication and all-things-internet and you wouldn't be alone if you felt a bit overwhelmed by it all. The good news is that there are a growing number of forums, groups and conferences that interested professionals can tap into to dive deeper into their area of interest, connect with others of like mind or, perhaps most importantly, take time to look up from their desks to see how the rest of the universe is out there trying to help those in need.
My guest today on the 112th episode of the Terms of Reference podcast is Dr. Silvia Hostettler and she spends a good deal of her time convening spaces where development and humanitarian professionals can interact. She is the Deputy Director of the Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) at EPFL in Switzerland where she is responsible for coordinating research activities and for the UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development - who, incidentally, are also responsible for hosting the biannual Tech4Dev conference in Lausanne. Silvia She is also in charge of the educational program offered by CODEV and gives lectures in the field of development cooperation, in particular on the potential of technologies and innovation in the Global South. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Development Engineering and of the Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE).
It is no secret that there is a very strong push from donors and policy makers that programming for development and humanitarian aid be "evidence based." This push has, to a large degree, driven the technology revolutions we are seeing in data collection and analytics, and it is also responsible for the more difficult conversations that are had around value for money.
So what if you were in a position where you were responsible for both testing and building a viable path to scale for promising evidence-based interventions? This dream job is currently held by Karen Levy, our guest here on the 111th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast. Karen is the Director of Global Innovation at Evidence Action. She leads the organization’s innovation strategy and oversees the “Evidence Action Beta” department that looks for new ideas and tests them to see if they'll work.
Similar to essentially any other industry, the problem of efficiently collecting project or program level data that can be readily crunched, analyzed and, ultimately, used by managers for decision making has been, and will continue, to be a conundrum for the development and humanitarian aid community for the forseeable future. I have often heard the frustration from professionals in the field, who wonder out loud why we haven't be able to put together one, or perhaps a small set of, technology solutions that can be used for monitoring any output, anytime. Beyond the actual technology itself, a key part of this conversation is the question of how to implement such a solution in a way that is not only relevant for a project, but also for the workers tasked with the actual data collection. And, going further, how to build a tool that doesn't add a massive time burden to those who are already tasked with the impossible.
Dimagi is one company who are attempting to solve these problems and today's guest on the 110th Terms Of Reference Podcast, Mohini Bhavsar, is on the front lines for them in Dakar, Senegal. She is Dimagi's Deputy Regional Director in West Africa and she has extensive experience supporting mHealth (or Mobile Health) projects at scale. Currently, she provides strategic guidance for scale-up and trainings for Dimagi’s largest mHealth projects in West Africa, including a partnership with Terre des Hommes in Burkina Faso for the implementation of a tablet based clinical diagnostic tool for eIMCI protocols, a pregnancy danger sign and referral management application developed with Africare in Senegal and a multi-pronged health services and stock management application developed with URC for community health workers in Benin. Formally based in India, from 2011 to 2014, Mohini supported over 50 local and international NGO partners pilot mHealth applications. She has worked closely with partners such as Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, Save the Children, and the Indian Council of Medical Research. Prior to Dimagi, Mohini worked with Tula Salud in Guatemala to evaluate and support scale-up of their mHealth initiatives.
It is no secret that we live in a truly connected world. I can speak from experience that it is possible to be online in every nook and cranny of the planet - from deep inside the Ugandan countryside, to the middle of war torn Syria to the Islands of Fiji. The opportunity to connect to "the net" anywhere, for whatever reason - business, social, and yes, even evil - is here, now. There are many consequences, externalities and unknowns associated with this connected reality - some of which we are painfully aware of, like trolling, and some we don't have the ability to image yet (for example, what happens when virtual reality becomes ubiquitous)?
One of the things we know, is that every time you use your mobile phone, swipe a credit card, surf the internet or basically any other activity that involves passing digital information across the internet, you leave a small, unique breadcrumb or fingerprint behind. If you were to capture and review these breadcrumbs for one individual, across any length of time, you would have the the ability to learn an astonishing amount about them. If we perform this exercise across communities and whole populations, who generate what we now call "big data," the learning and insights can be profound.
Today's guest on the 109th episode of the Terms of Reference podcast is Emmanuel Letouzé and Emmanuel has dedicated his career to thinking about how big data can be used to help those most in need. He is the Director and co-Founder of Data-Pop Alliance, a Visiting Scholar at MIT's Media Lab, a Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a Research Associate at ODI, and a Non-Resident Adviser at the International Peace Institute (IPI).
Emmanuel is the author of the UN Global Pulse’s White Paper, “Big Data for Development: Challenges and Opportunities”, where he worked as Senior Development Economist in 2011-12, and the lead author of the report “Big Data for Conflict Prevention” and of the 2013 and 2014 OECD Fragile States reports. He is also a regular speaker on Big Data and development issues. In 2006-09 he worked for UNDP in New York, including on the Human Development Report research team. In 2000-04 he worked in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the French Ministry of Finance as a technical assistant on public finance and official statistics.
As you'll hear us discuss towards the end of the interview, Emmanuel is also a political cartoonist.
If you're like most people, you're probably listening to this podcast on a smartphone of some type - maybe your on your commute, or an after-work walk with the dog. Others will listen to it on their laptop or office desktop machine in the background as they perform some other task. When I talk about using technology, these types of examples are, what I believe, pops into most people's mind. And, rightly so. I can attest to the fact that, even in the most remote corners of Uganda, technology - as mobile devices and their applications - play a front and center role in the minds of everyone.
But the term technology - the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes - extends far beyond smartphones and laptops. Technology can be as simple as a pulley system, a dam for a reservoir, or a hand cranked water pump. As amazing as it sounds, for a huge amount of people in the world today, these simple types of technology are not only breakthrough, they are the key to a hand up out of poverty through the efficiencies they bring.
Paul Smith Lomas, my guest on today's 108th episode of the Terms of Reference podcast, not only thinks about how how the application of technology can help lift people out of poverty, but the organization he leads - Practical Action - actually pursue Technology Justice. That is, they seek to "create a world in which technology and innovation is used to end poverty and provide a sustainable future for everyone on our planet."
Paul was appointed CEO of Practical Action in November 2015. Prior to this appointment, Paul was Practical Action's International Director, responsible for the overall operation of its programmes and policy influencing around the world.
Paul's professional background is as a mechanical engineer. He worked originally in the water treatment industry in the UK, before going on a VSO assignment in 1985 to Eastern Sudan, where he set up water and sanitation systems for refugee populations from Eritrea & Ethiopia. He then worked with ActionAid in the Nuba Mountains, still focusing on public health engineering with rural communities. After a short spell in the commercial sector, Paul returned to the voluntary sector in 1991 as Technical Adviser for Oxfam, based in the UK. He was awarded an MBE for services to international development.
Prior to joining Practical Action, Paul was the Regional Director for Oxfam in the Horn & Eastern Africa, where he managed a large programme covering development, campaigning, and emergency response.
For most of us, a critical factor in creating a sustainable and satisfying career is the formal education we acquire. In the in development and aid space, a master's degree from a credible institution is really the minimum bar for even an entry level position at any top shelf organization. Access to this type of education, and its benefits, are things many of us simply take for granted.
But what if your community were caught in the grips of conflict? Or what if you find yourself growing up in camp for displaced people? Or what if higher education infrastructure just simply doesn't exist in your neck of the woods?
My guest today for the 107th episode of the Terms of Reference Podcast is Barbara Moser-Mercer. She is the founder and Director of InZone, an initiative that pioneers innovative approaches to multilingual communication and higher education in communities affected by conflict and crisis by designing, developing and scientifically validating learner-centered and technology-supported pedagogical models.
Barbara is also a Professor of conference interpreting at the University of Geneva where her research focuses on cognitive neuro-science aspects of the interpreting process, the human performance dimension of skill development and expertise, and on pedagogical approaches to digital learning in fragile contexts. Barbara also co-developed the Virtualinstitute, which is a virtual learning environment specifically designed for the acquisition of complex skills, which has been used by ICRC, ILO, UNHCR, and UNAMA for enhancing interpreting skills of interpreters working in conflict zones and to advance formal and non-formal higher education in emergencies (HEiE).
If you've been a part of the "innovation" conversation in the humanitarian aid and international development sector for any amount of time, you have - more than once - admitted to yourself two things:
Innovation is only second to strategy as the most overused and abused word in the development/aid lexicon, and
When people are talking about innovation, they're usually talking about technology.
While I am as guilty as the next person, I try my best to avoid stumbling into the trap of either of these pitfalls. However, when we mentally get past these two speed bumps, oftentimes, we find that what we're really talking about is how do we get more/better data in a cost effective way. Technology is helping to answer that question in a big way and, increasingly, I find myself having conversations with individuals and organizations that have access to some fairly large datasets.
But then we quickly run into the next speed bump which is, unfortunately, much bigger than the first - how do we use this data to actually get better results from programming?
Luckily, people like Dustin Homer of Development Gateway have the privelage of thinking about this issue everyday. As my guest here on the Terms of Reference Podcast for our 106th episode, Dustin and I discuss Development Gateway’s Results Data Initiative, which explores how development results data can be collected, shared and used more effectively.
Dustin has learned, thought and written a lot about how tech and data actually matters for governments and development orgs – and how it doesn’t. He has also worked with DG's clients to manage development assistance portfolios, open up development data and visualize performance information. Dustin’s current day job is leading partnerships, communications and new business for DG. His background is in tech, M&E (especially impact evaluation) and transparency. He also co-founded and worked with a community development NGO in Haiti.
So often these days we hear about the need for real time monitoring, fail fast, quick results and projects that make an immediate difference in the lives of those we are serving. While these are often excellent goals to have, the cost, complications and ability to implement and simply deliver on these demands can be overwhelming to the average development worker or aid provider.
At the same time, our community has often acknowledged the need for a deeper, more rigorous approach to understanding how the programming we implement ultimately creates short and medium term outcomes, and ultimately produces longer term results. This is where the work of Annie Duflo and the people of Innovations for Poverty Action excel and I'm happy to have her on the show for our 105th episode.
As the Executive Director of IPA, Annie is responsible for leading the organization to implement its strategic plan and day to day operations. Previously, Annie served as IPA's Research Director where she managed its research network, staff capacity-building, and new project development. She also played a key role in the scaling up of successful programs with particular focus on education. Annie has a wealth of experience implementing and managing randomized evaluations in the field. Prior to joining IPA, Annie was the Executive Director of the Centre for Microfinance (CMF) at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) in Chennai, India, which she joined at its creation.
How do you go about monitoring and tracking the work that you've accomplished as an implementer of humanitarian aid or development assistance? This question has been answered 1000s of times by 100s of organizations around the world.
Even though we're in the year 2016, the reality of tracking progress for the vast majority of initiatives out there is one of two things: written reports in Microsoft Word or numbers on an Excel spreadsheet.... that then get translated into a narrative report in Word. I'm not kidding. I've been evaluating programming in this world for more than 10 years and I have yet to be hired for an assignment where, as a first step, my client sends me a username and password for their online information management that has the ability to instantly report on total program progress with a complete package of visualization and analytical tools.
This isn't to say this doesn't exist: in fact, when I first cut my teeth in development with a large NGO back in the early 2000s, they already had built an internal, web based monitoring system. And I've seen a bunch of flavors of the same type of thing in organizations around the globe. For some reason, even though there have been countless attempts at making this process better, at the project level, we still revert back to spreadsheets and reports.
Herb Caudill is on a mission to change all of that. As my guest today for the 104th episode of Terms of Reference, the founder of DevResults thinks we might finally be at a stage where data, connectivity and capacity are all at levels that real time project analysis and management is possible.
Herb loves to make elegant and efficient systems that solve real-world problems. He is a data-visualization geek, a graphic designer, and a programmer, he started out building websites and software for international development organizations, including USAID, the World Bank, GIZ, DFID, the World Resources Institute, and Chemonics International. Herb grew up in Latin America and worked in Africa for 5 years, first teaching high-school math with the Peace Corps and then working on internet connectivity initiatives with USAID.
How much time did you spend wondering about the potential quality of the last medical procedure you were involved with? More specifically, did you spend a lot of time consternating about whether or not the tools being used in the procedure (either by you or the medical professionals you were with) were reliable and safe?
This is an intriguing question for many of us. For example, I was born in the United States, but I have lived outside the US for the last 11 years and I spend a good deal of my time in parts of the world that do not have running water, reliable power or iron clad hygiene practices. When I consider the question of reliability and safety while wearing each of those three hats, I come up with very different answers, as I'm willing to bet, so would many of you.
This is a question that has plagued Kate Michi Ettinger since 2010, and, as our guest today for the 103rd episode of Terms of Reference, I talk with Kate about OpenQRS - an organization she founded to the issue. Kate is a social innovation consultant, product designer and health care ethicist. She is trained in law, bioethics and conflict resolution and has over fifteen years of health-related experience in private, government, academic, non-profit sectors. The "QRS" in OpenQRS, as you might guess, stands for quality, reliability and safety. As the catalyst for OpenQRS, Kate currently focuses on how to harness new technologies, such as sensors, wireless, mobile – to make it easy, effective and affordable to monitor data on quality, reliability and safety for medical devices deployed anywhere in the world.
The idea of innovation has become so popular in the development and aid community that, unsurprisingly, it is difficult to keep up. There seem to be forums, conferences, blogs (and yes, even this podcast) that are putting information out there for your consumption to the point of overwhelm and it can be difficult to cut through the noise to create a better understanding of what works - and more importantly - what doesn't when it comes to better serving those in need.
Luckily, there are also people out there like Alice Obrecht who are helping to curate some of the learning around innovation and make it accessible to everyone. In this 102nd episode of Terms of Reference, I speak with Alice about her work as a Research Fellow at the Secretariat for the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance (ALNAP), where she is currently leading research on the themes of innovation and effectiveness. And, as part of this work, she has led the ALNAP Secretariat’s involvement in the World Humanitarian Summit process.
This isn't, of course, Alice's first gig in our industry. Prior to joining ALNAP, she worked in policy research at several institutions focusing on capacity building of regional inter-governmental institutions as well as accountability practices and frameworks both in and outside the humanitarian aid sector.
Peace Corps has had an office of innovation for almost 5 years now, and there are some very cool things happening. To learn more about them, I spoke with Patrick Choquette, who has served as the director of Peace Corps’ Office of Innovation since 2012. He is the agency’s second director of Innovation and manages a small team within the Director’s office with the mission of empowering staff and volunteers with a work environment that breeds innovation.
As you've come to expect from guests here on Terms of Reference, Patrick is no slacker: In 2014, he was awarded the prestigious NextGov Bold Award for his accomplishments in creative problem solving and innovation. He has also previously served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, a middle school educator, and was one of the first field operatives hired in Iowa for President Obama’s 2007 primary campaign.
Andrew Schroeder is the co-founder of WeRobotics, a global non-profit organization which works with local communities and international organizations to accelerate aid, development, environmental protection and global health with robotics technologies.
Andrew is also the Director of Research and Analysis for Direct Relief, a non-profit organization based in Santa Barbara, CA which distributes essential medicines to local healthcare programs in over 100 countries.
Andrew is a globally recognized leader in the use of spatial analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) for humanitarian aid and health. In 2013 Andrew won the President's Award from ESRI for his contributions to GIS for social good. He received his PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University and his Master's in Public Policy from the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Dana Graber Ladek is an international development professional with 20 years of experience developing and managing humanitarian assistance and community stabilization projects around the world, in coordination with government agencies, the United Nations, and national and international organizations.
Her recent assignments include Regional Specialist for Project Development for the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Regional Office in Costa Rica, Head of the Regional Support Unit for IOM’s Budapest Regional Office, Displacement Specialist for IOM Iraq, Programme Liaison for IOM’s Washington Regional Office, Director of Outreach for The Communitarian Network, and Youth Development Volunteer for Peace Corps.
Jade Morgan is a Peace Corps Volunteer currently serving in the Philippines where she works with the Department of Social Welfare and Development and Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4 P’s) in providing life skills training, academic and professional development, tutoring, and mentorship to youth in her community.
During her time studying social work at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, Jade worked with recently resettled refugees as an ESL instructor, job skills facilitator, leader in refugee women’s health groups, and mentor. After college, Jade worked as a health education specialist with the Screening Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) program at Denver Health Emergency Department in Colorado providing interventions for indigent patients struggling with alcohol and drug addiction.
Jade aspired to return to her instinctive passion of working with international populations by applying for Peace Corps Philippines. She landed a position in Children Youth and Families (CYF) sector and will be serving for two years, until September 2017. Her goals are to expand her personal and professional capacities as a development worker and contribute to the long friendship between Peace Corps and the country of Philippines.
Bradley Lyon is a communications and knowledge management specialist. Currently, he is the Community Development Lead and Knowledge Manager at the Rocky Mountain Institute - Carbon War Room (RMI-CWR) where he is contributing to the launch of an online community of practice that targets renewable energy practitioners in the Caribbean and other island states.
Brad is also a consultant at the World Bank, where, over the past six years, he’s worked in different capacities and contracts with the Latin American and Caribbean Urban and Disaster Risk Management unit. His main contributions at the World Bank have related to building a knowledge management strategy to influence and encourage knowledge exchange across climate and disaster resilience investments in the Caribbean.
Prior to the Bank, Brad worked in a hospitality-focused start-up company as a Business Developer and Relationship Manager where he created the company’s first environmental and social responsibility campaign and built marketing campaigns to target new clients and increase revenue.
Simon Hampel is a Partner at Leaders’ Quest, a social enterprise that works with leaders to create a more equitable and sustainable world by challenge them to explore purpose and create positive change.
Simon spent the 90s into the new century as a serial entrepreneur, building companies in Europe, the US and Canada in the fields of financial services, leisure, consultancy and technology. Leaving these ventures behind, in 2002, he joined an Amazonian exploration, which ultimately resulted in four years doing scientific research and aid work in the Amazon, across the Himalayas, through Mongolia, and down Ethiopia’s Blue Nile. In 2006, he became the CEO of Right to Sight, an International NGO, and worked on developing sustainable eyecare projects while living in Africa and India.
Simon has spent his time since 2010 exploring how to combine profit with purpose, people and the planet. In addition to his role at Leaders’ Quest he is a Partner at the Global Leaders Academy and is on the Advisory Board of the Ministry of Entrepreneurship. He is an Associate at Positive Group, sits on the Advisory Board of the DO School in Germany, and is an Ambassador for Embercombe.
Michael Lenczner is the CEO and founder of Ajah, a Canadian-based company which offers an online platform for researching funders to the non-profit sector. Its service, Fundtracker, merges dozens of government and public data sets with its own proprietary research so that users can track grant-making by foundations, corporations and governments. Ajah's award-winning non-profit initiative, PoweredByData leverages their expertise to develop a more effective social sector by working with various stakeholders to publish better open data.
Michael has been working in community and public interest technology since 1999, creating the community wireless group Ile sans fil, which runs over 1000 free wifi hotspots in Montreal. He has also been working in open data since 2004, co-founding municipal, provincial, and national lobbying groups for improved access to government data.
Panthea Lee is a Principal and lead designer at Reboot.org, a social impact firm dedicated to inclusive development and accountable governance. Panthea is focused on the practical applications of ethnography and systems thinking in delivering effective international development and governance programs.
Prior to co-founding Reboot.org, Panthea worked with the UNICEF Innovations team where she managed the development of a real-time data platform to support child rights advocacy in Iraq and mobile learning tools in Suriname and Sudan. She also contributed to the launch of Palestine's first open-source software community.
Before joining UNICEF, Panthea worked as a journalist covering access to information, press freedom, and sustainable development.
Panthea writes and speaks regularly about her experiences around the world. She has presented at A Better World By Design, Microsoft’s Social Computing Symposium, and TEDxDumbo. She has lectured at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the School of Visual Arts, among others. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, MIT Innovations Journal, Touchpoint: The Journal of Service Design, Core77, TechPresident and Fast Company.
Kipp Efinger is an independent consultant. Before going solo, Kipp served as Pact’s Country Director in Thailand, overseeing environmental governance and health projects funded by USAID; the Department of State; Chevron; and The Global Fund.
Before moving to Thailand in 2013, he was based in Pact's Washington, DC office, where he managed support for a diverse portfolio in the Asia/Eurasia region, including multi-million dollar start-up operations for USAID projects in Nepal and Ukraine. He was also a member of Pact’s democracy and governance technical team from 2008 until 2010.
Before Pact, Kipp served as Program Officer at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), managing economic reform programs and advocacy grants with business associations in Asia and Eurasia. Kipp has also worked for Mercy Corps in Azerbaijan and IREX in Washington, DC
Owen Barder is Vice President, Director for Europe and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development - an organization that conducts research and analysis on a wide range of topics related to how policies and actions of the rich and powerful affect poor people in the developing world.
From 1988 to 2010, Owen was a British civil servant. During that time he worked at No.10 Downing Street, as the Private Secretary of Economic Affairs to the Prime Minister; in the UK Treasury, including as Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and in the Department for International Development, where he was variously Director of International Finance and Global Development Effectiveness, Director of Communications and Information, and head of the Africa Policy & Economics Department.
As a young Treasury economist, Owen set up the first UK government website, to put details of the 1994 budget online. During 2004-2006 Owen worked at CGD, mainly on the Advance Markets Commitment for vaccines. Owen has also worked in the South African Treasury on budget strategy; at Development Initiatives where he helped to establish the International Aid Transparency Initiative; and was a visiting scholar in economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
He has lived in several countries in Africa, most recently in Ethiopia during 2008-2011. Barder has been an Associate at the Institute for Government, a member of the Advisory Group of Twaweza, the Board of Publish What You Fund, and a member of the UK Government International Development Sector Transparency Panel. Owen is also a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics.
He writes a personal blog at http://www.owen.org/blog and hosts a development podcast at http://DevelopmentDrums.org. He is on Twitter as @owenbarder.
Miki Agrawal is a co-founder of Thinx, a revolutionary women's underwear company that solves a problem for women in the developed world and women in the developing world during "their time of the month."
She was a recipient of the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival’s Disruptive Innovation Award and named 2013’s Forbes's Top 20 Millienials On a Mission. She is also the founder of the acclaimed farm-to-table, alternative pizza concept called WILD in NYC.
Nedgine Paul is the co-founder & CEO of Anseye Pou Ayiti (Teach For Haiti), works to raise education outcomes in rural Haiti by promoting teacher excellence and student success.
Nedgine's previous roles at Achievement First, the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, and WorldTeach included opportunities to manage recruitment, staff orientation, tutoring, and governance duties, as well as the development of a school principal residency program. Nedgine also worked with Partners In Health to manage onboarding, benefits, and workforce planning for the organization’s transnational teams. She has conducted teacher training seminars and extensive research about the historical, cultural, and socioeconomic factors contributing to Haiti’s school system and in 2014, she was named among the top global social innovators by Echoing Green.
David Roach and Anders Hofstee are co-founders of Catalpa International, a design and technology organization which provides innovative, accessible and effective solutions in low resource settings.
Anders has been working in the field of database-driven web application development and information science for nearly twenty years. He has led the design, development, and deployment for numerous national level information management services in both the not-for-profit and profit sectors. Among other projects, Anders is the technical lead for the Timor-Leste's Maternal and Child mHealth project - Liga Inan, as well as, the Technical Lead for Myanmar's Mohinga Platform, the world’s first IATI-compliant and mobile responsive aid information management system.
David has over 10 years of international development and software design experience. David has led the design of large scale technical projects with partners from UN agencies to local community-based NGOs. David has also manages the user-interface and user-experience design across Catalpa's projects, most recently the Open Data Platform -- Openly.
Kari Grady Grossman is the co-founder of Sustainable Schools International. After traveling to Cambodia in 2001 to adopt their son, Kari and her husband created the school, and, because of Kari, the school has the first primary school music program in Cambodia, a teacher’s residence and library. She also started a silk import business and an environmentally sustainable cooking fuel business to support schools.
A former writer for Discovery Channel Online, Kari is also the author of Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia, which was the winner of the 2008 “Peacemaker of the Year” Award from the Independent Publisher’s Association and a Gold Nautilus Book Award for World Changing Books.
David Auerbach is a co-founder of Sanergy, a pioneering social enterprise in Nairobi, Kenya dedicated to building healthy, prosperous communities in Africa’s informal settlements by making hygienic sanitation affordable and accessible for everyone, forever.
Previously, David co-ran Partnerships at Endeavor, a non-profit that helps high-impact entrepreneurs in the developing world. He served as the Deputy Chair for Poverty Alleviation at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005-6. He taught in central China for two years as a Yale-China Teaching Fellow. He began his career researching foreign policy at the Center for American Progress. David is an Ashoka, Echoing Green, and Rainer Arnhold Fellow.
Tonia Wellons has successfully straddled international development and locally oriented community-based development with full intention, skillfully borrowing lessons from one and applying them to the other. With 18 years of development experience, spanning senior leadership roles at the World Bank Group -- to social entrepreneur for a community-based social fund that she founded -- Tonia is skilled in leading global development alliances, managing multi-donor operations, and engaging local communities.
Tonia currently serves as Associate Director, Office of Strategic Partnerships for the Peace Corps and is responsible for leading the agency’s partnerships with government, the private sector, international NGO’s, and the broader volunteer-sending community. The OSP team is tasked with facilitating strategic opportunities that advance Peace Corps’ mission and the role of volunteerism as a tool for development.
Tonia served as Fund Manager for CGAP, a multi-donor initiative focused on financial access and inclusion, housed at the World Bank Group. She spent a significant part of her career working on USAID-funded capacity development initiatives during the immediate post-apartheid era in South Africa. Her work in South Africa with local government associations and City Managers (in the US and South Africa) successfully led to a pipeline of local talent for municipal leadership during this new democracy’s most significant transition period. While living in South Africa, Tonia was able to leverage that experience to establish ‘south-south’ partnerships with municipal government entities and partners in neighboring Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Swaziland.
Dr. Vincenzo Bollettino is the Director of the Resilient Communities Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Prior to his current appointment, he served for five years as its Executive Director. Enzo has twenty years of professional and academic experience in international politics, humanitarian action, civil-military engagement in emergencies, and the security of humanitarian aid workers. He has spent the past fourteen years of his career at Harvard University in administration, teaching, and research where his current research focuses on civil military engagement during humanitarian emergencies, the security of humanitarian aid workers, and on the professionalization of the humanitarian aid field.
Ken Banks is the founder of kiwanja.net and creator of FrontlineSMS. He devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He has worked at the intersection of technology, anthropology, conservation and development for the past twenty years and, during that time, has lived and worked across the African continent. He is a PopTech Fellow, a Tech Awards Laureate, an Ashoka Fellow and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and has been internationally recognised for his technology-based work. In 2013 he was nominated for the TED Prize. Ken is also a published author, with his first edited book, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator”, released in late 2013. His latest project, Means of Exchange, looks at how everyday technologies can be used to democratize opportunities for economic self-sufficiency, rebuild local community and promote a return to local resource use.
Amy Sample Ward is the CEO of NTEN - a membership community that seeks to create a world where all nonprofit organizations use technology skillfully and confidently to meet community needs and fulfill their missions.
Amy is dedicated to educating and supporting organizations in using technology to create meaningful community engagement and make lasting change. Whether it is by connecting individuals, organizations, campaigns, or possibilities, Amy hopes to facilitate the nonprofit technology sector transitioning into a movement-based force for positive change.
In addition to serving as NTEN’s CEO, she is a speaker, author, and trainer having worked with groups and spoken at events around the world. In 2013, she co-authored Social Change Anytime Everywhere: How to implement online multichannel strategies to spark advocacy, raise money, and engage your community with Allyson Kapin. She previously co-authored Social by Social, a handbook in using social technologies for social impact, and has contributed to various other publications about social change and technology.
Roderick Besseling is the Open Data Coordinator within the Corporate Strategy Unit at Cordaid in the Netherlands. In this role, Roderick brings together his expertise in design, development and data analysis and is responsible for taking a leading position in the open development movement within the international development sector. His primary focus areas are the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) reporting process and embedding the open development philosophy within Cordaid. He is a passionate advocate of the open development movement and believes that only through cooperation and collaboration among different stakeholders can sustainable solutions be developed and the aid dependency cycle be broken.
Graham Salisbury is Head of Human Resources for ActionAid, a leading international charity which supports women and children in extreme poverty and fights for their rights and for lasting change. Graham has enjoyed a successful career within major organizations in both the private and not-for-profit sector. He is regularly approached by the media for guidance on making a career transition into the charity sector, and his work in raising the profile of human resources in the not-for-profit sector has been featured in People Management, HR Magazine and the Guardian.
Dale Nirvani Pfeifer is changing the way we connect online. Her #donate software, found at GoodWorld.me, is unleashing the next generation of generosity by making giving easy through social media,. Her goal is to support the evolution of the human experience with money by creating a generosity-based financial system.
A native Kiwi, prior to going to the United States, Dale ran Victoria University's Center for the Study of Leadership. Her award-winning research took her to Harvard where she applied the theory of Allophilia to Maori leadership. This work demonstrates how the power of love and effective leadership can bring big diverse groups of people together.
Jeroen van der Sommen is the director and co-founder of Akvo, an organization that builds open source internet and mobile software which is used to make international development cooperation and aid activity more effective and transparent.
Jeroen helped to ignite the Akvo phenomenon after the Stockholm World Water Week in summer 2006 and has steered Akvo’s evolution to ensure it is relevant to, and supported by, a wide range of implementation NGOs, funding partners and global institutions. He started his career as a geologist, working throughout the 1980s in countries such as Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Niger, Mali, Indonesia and India, managing water supply and management projects on behalf of organizations such as the World Bank and the European Union. In 1998, Jeroen founded the Netherlands Water Partnership, where he built a dynamic network of over 200 member organizations that collaborate.
Laura Walker McDonald is the Chief Executive Officer of the Social Impact Lab Foundation, an organization that designs, implements and measures the impact of inclusive technology projects, and explores new ways that technology can facilitate and simplify project objectives.
Before joining SIMLab, Laura worked for the British Red Cross on international humanitarian policy and learning, focussed on quality and accountability, innovation, urbanization, cash transfer programming and civil-military relations, as well as strategic planning.Drawing on her expertise in humanitarian aid, human rights law and international development, she brings a cross-disciplinary approach to communications, innovation and information management.
Andrej Verity is a disaster responder and information management officer for the United Nations (OCHA) and co-founder of the Digital Humanitarian Network. He has deployed to many high-profile emergencies over while also leading innovation around humanitarian information management and managing the UN’s collaboration with the volunteer and technical communities. Most recently, his work has supported and focused on how big data in crisis, microtasking and artificial intelligence can improve disaster response.
Andrej openly shares his ideas in the hope of finding energetic collaborative partners to help move the humanitarian community forward at http://blog.veritythink.com
Dr Peter Bradley is the Director of Public Health Development at Public Health Wales. He is committed to improving and protecting the population’s health, by reducing health inequalities, maintaining excellent public health services and making health information and evidence accessible and relevant.
Peter has worked in public health for many years in the UK and abroad. For 5 years he worked as a senior medical advisor for the Norwegian government, advising on clinical policy, health technology assessment and was the acting head of the Norwegian equivalent to the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.
He has a strong commitment to using evidence and promoting its use in practice. He has a ten year history of international/national teaching on evidence-based practice and completed a PhD focusing on medical education.
Deirdre White is a globally recognized leader in building tri-sector partnerships to address the world’s most pressing challenges. As CEO of PYXERA Global she has led the transformation of the organization to one that maximizes impact through strong and strategic partnerships through cutting edge programming like Global Pro Bono, Local Content Development, and Integrated Community Development.
Deirdre’s expertise spans private, public and social sector experiences. Her social sector tenure at PYXERA Global is complemented by early career roles at the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) and American Councils. She has also served on the Boards of Directors of the Volunteers for Economic Growth Alliance (VEGA) and the US Center for Citizen Diplomacy (now a signature initiative of PYXERA Global.) Prior to joining PYXERA Global in 2002, Deirdre was a Senior Manager in the Public Sector Practice at Arthur D. Little, Inc., leading projects focused on strategy and organization for the US Agency for International Development, the US Trade and Development Agency, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, along with numerous government agencies across Eurasia. Deirdre began her career in the private sector, working with Welt International, a niche consulting firm engaged in non-conventional means (barter and countertrade) of financing international trade ventures. She later expanded her private sector experience as a Senior Manager in Arthur D. Little’s Moscow office, leading post-privatization restructuring efforts for large manufacturing enterprises in Russia and Ukraine. She also served as an organizational development advisor to several of the Eurasian oil and gas sector’s largest firms.
Sean Martin McDonald is the CEO of FrontlineSMS. Frontline technologies is used by thousands of organizations to reach tens of millions of people, saving lives, improving healthcare and building inclusive societies. Frontline was named the #1 Technology NGO in the world and was listed by the Nominet Trust Social 100 in 2014.
Sean is a Trustee of the Awesome Foundation DC and an affiliate with Harvard University's Berkman Center. Sean is an advisor to Digital Democracy, DoSomething.org, ECPAT USA, the Law Without Walls Program, TechChange, and UNDP. Sean is a lawyer, barred in New York. He also holds an M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University.
Linda Raftree is a co-founder of Kurante a company dedicated to helping organizations better understand how technology can improve development outcomes.
Linda has worked at the intersection of community development, participatory media, youth, gender, and information and communication technologies since 1994. She has advised The Rockefeller Foundation’s Evaluation Office on the use of ICTs in monitoring and evaluation and worked with Plan International USA on youth engagement, innovation, transparency and strategy. She has also conducted research on adolescent girls and ICTs for UNICEF, the role of ICTs in child/youth migration for the Oak Foundation, the use of mobile technologies in youth workforce development for the mEducation Alliance, and ICT-enabled monitoring and evaluation for Rockefeller.
Linda is also a co-founder of Regarding Humanity, which encourages debate and dialogue around the portrayal of ‘the poor’ in the media, social impact work, and non-profit marketing. She coordinates Technology Salons in New York City and advocates for greater dialogue and discussion around the ethics of ICT use and data privacy in the humanitarian and development space.
She also writes ‘Wait… What?,’ a blog about new technology and community development.
Jacob Korenblum is the CEO, President and Co-founder of Souktel. Souktel designs and delivers custom mobile solutions that connect job seekers with employers, and help development implementers get information to and from the people they serve.
Prior to Souktel, Jacob worked managing economic development and emergency relief projects for USAID and the Canadian International Development Agency. Fluent in Arabic and French, Jacob has worked in the emergency aid sectors in the Middle East, East Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. He is a frequent panelist on technology, development, and labor markets--with speaking engagements ranging from the GSMA Mobile World Congress to the World Bank Human Development Forum. He has co-authored a chapter in the sector publication “Mobile Technologies for Conflict Management” and has written articles on mobile technology for the MIT Innovations Journal, CNBC Online, and the Overseas Development Institute. His work as a Souktel co-founder has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company and the UK's Guardian newspaper. Jacob holds an Ed.M. from Harvard University, where was a Harvard Reynolds Foundation Fellow in Social Enterprise.
Djordje Vdovic has over 20 years of progressive experience with the United Nations in the fields of management, logistics and procurement in more than dozen different duty stations across four continents.
Djordje is a proven trouble-shooter with a list career credits that include delivery of fast and effective support services in emergencies and rationalization of the World Food Programme's largest and most complex Purchase for Progress program in Afghanistan.
Dr. Beryl Levinger is a highly regarded development professional, distinguished professor and chair of the Development Practice and Policy program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
With a career that includes senior positions such as the President of AFS Intercultural Programs, Senior Vice President of CARE and Vice President of Save the Children, Beryl draws on a rich array of experiences to teach classes and deliver consulting across the five issues of evaluation, capacity development, strategic planning, education and health. A former vice chair of both Pact and InterAction, Beryl has worked in nearly 90 countries and, for the past 15 years, she been research director or co-director of Save the Children's State of the World's Mothers Report, a publication that offers a comparative perspective on the health, education and gender issues faced by girls and women throughout the world. Beryl has won numerous international awards for the quality of her contributions to the field of development.
Nick Martin is the founder and CEO of TechChange, a Washington DC-based social enterprise that provides tech training for social change. The TechChange training model has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Economist, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Nick is a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow, and an International Youth Foundation Global Fellow. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown and George Washington Universities where he teaches graduate courses on Technology for Social Change, Technology for International Crisis Response, and Mobile Phones for International Development.
Peter Mousaferiadas is a composer, conductor, producer, award-winning leader and executive director of Cultural Infusion, an Australian organization committed to building cultural harmony and wellbeing through a range of sustainable arts and engagement programs for schools, youth and communities.
Cultural Infusion's programs use intercultural contact to catalyze positive change to a broad audience. For example, Cultural Infusion’s education program “Discovering Diversity” is delivered to more than 200,000 students annually.
Michael Ketover is a highly experienced independent consultant currently working with the Peace Corps, USAID/Ghana and a USAID implementing partner.
Michael is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and AmeriCorps/ VISTA alumni. He was hired by the Peace Corps in 2000 as a program and training director for Papua New Guinea and Ecuador. He has also served as interim country director at 11 Peace Corps posts for a total of four years and as Senior Advisor to the CFO at Peace Corps Headquarters focused on internal controls and agency risk assessment.
Before and after Peace Corps, Michael worked as a senior inspector at the Department of Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General, as an evaluator of USAID and MCC international development programs, as a corporate lawyer and human rights and poverty law attorney, and in emergency and disaster response. Most recently, Michael worked on a USAID/Feed the Future project in Ghana and on criminal justice strengthening activities in El Salvador and Mexico
Lori Thicke has worked in languages for over 20 years. In 1986 she founded the Paris-based Lexcelera, a translation company which today has offices in Paris, London, Buenos Aires and Vancouver. In 1993 she co-founded Traducteurs sans frontières to provide pro bono translations to support global aid work.
In 2010, Lori founded Translators without Borders, now the world’s largest community of humanitarian translators. Translators without Borders supports global aid organizations by donating millions of words of professional translations each year. With the creation of its translator training center in Nairobi, Kenya, Translators without Borders is actively taking down language barriers to knowledge for some of the world’s most disadvantaged people.
Alessandra Pigni has run the blog Mindful Next, since 2011, to help aid workers build resilience, prevent burnout and keep sane while serving others in the field.
Trained as a clinical psychologist, she has worked as a psychologist with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders and as a consultant with local and international NGOs spending a good part of the last seven years in Palestine. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford working on a book on aid workers' wellbeing.
David Hess was commissioned as a U.S. Foreign Service officer with USAID in 1980. During his career with USAID, he served as Project Development Officer in the West Africa regional office in Cote d’Ivoire, Rural Development Project Officer in Peru, Director of the Alternative Development Office in Bolivia, Program Officer in USAID’s Africa Bureau in Washington, D.C., Supervisory Program Officer in Guinea, Environment and Energy Officer in India, Supervisory Program Officer in Rwanda and Deputy Mission Director in Mozambique. His final USAID assignment was Director of USAID’s Office of Natural Resources Management in Washington, D.C. Since retirement in 2006, Hess has worked for Conservation International as Vice President for Asia programs; the Millennium Challenge Corporation as Senior Director for environmental and social assessment; International Resources Group Senior Manager for the environmental and natural resources division; and USAID/PPL Bureau as consulting Senior Adviser for strategy and project design. He currently serves as a consulting senior adviser for strategy, project design and monitoring and evaluation for USAID Tanzania.
Tina Cornely is the founder of the non-profit organization Bridging Humanity - an organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty through holistic solutions. In particular, Tina focuses her work on her recently published 9 Steps To Eradicate Poverty, which provides practical solutions for agriculture, self medical care, energy production, water purification, repurposing of trash, family planning, hygiene and environmental protection.
Prior to founding Bridging Humanity, Tina was the Director of Technology of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and former Operations Director of the Miami Art Museum.
Birgitte Jallov is an independent communication and media specialist and the founder of Empowerhouse.
Since 1980, she has worked with community radio for development, empowerment and social change. This includes the development of a series of special tools, organisation forms and methodologies for community organisations to enact change in more than 60 countries and 250 assignments over the years.
Patrick Meier is the author of the book Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. He directs the Social Innovation Program at the Qatar Computing Research Institute where he and his team use human and machine computing to develop "Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies" in partnership with international humanitarian organizations. Patrick has a PhD from The Fletcher School, Pre-Doc from Stanford and an MA from Columbia. He blogs regularly at iRevolutions and you can follow him at @patrickmeier.
Johnny Girges works with with Arcenciel, an organization dedicated to social inclusion through their programing with youth, health, mobility, agriculture and more. Johnny is a true Aidpreneur, combining his skills as a physical educator, circus artist, and NGO manager to "edutain" and empower at risk youth in Lebannon and beyond with critical circus performance skills that can be used under the tent and throughout their lives.
Priscilla Brice is the founder and Managing Director of All Together Now, Australia’s only national racism prevention charity. She has a decade of experience managing social marketing and social change projects, specializing in online communications. Prior to working in the not-for-profit sector, Priscilla worked as an equities research assistant in the investment banking sector.
Priscilla is a recipient of the Churchill Fellowship and the University of Western Sydney Community Award for establishing the award-winning One Parramatta project and All Together Now more broadly.
Seth Selleck is the Youth Coordinator of the Municipality of Simrishamn in Sweden. He has led the development of various projects focused on intercultural understanding, including an international youth magazine, Cultural Horizons, which was published in the 1990’s.
After hearing the Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, lecture about “The Danger of a Single Story” he searched for a way to better encourage intercultural communication. Knowing young people are natural solution finders, he worked with them to develop the rapidly growing card game “More Than One Story.”
Rakesh Nair is an anti-human trafficking crusader and General Secretary of Manav Seva Sansthan (Seva) – an organization that works in the Indo-Nepal border corridor (an area notorious for human trafficking).
Over the past 13 years, Rakesh has been instrumental in creating the nationally and internationally acknowledged cross border transit model called the ‘Life Guard Centre,’ – a unique integrated model of partnership between Seva and the Border Army to eliminate human trafficking. The LGC has been successful in rescuing more than 10,500 apparent victims of human trafficking and has engaged with more than 150,000 cross border migrants on issue of safe and informed migration.
Under his co-leadership, Seva and the LGC campaign have received multiple awards and honors including: the Intercultural Innovation Award 2014, the NGO Award from the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs in 2012, the International Critical Impact Award 2010, the Global Innovation Award 2008 – The World Bank and the Godfrey Phillips National Bravery Awards.
Tom Walker is the President and CEO of LionsGate Technologies, a company that designs and produces life-saving mobile medical technology.
Tom has over 25 years of global medical device industry leadership. He has held senior management positions with Physio-Control, Eli Lilly, Cardinal Health, and AGFA HealthCare. These positions focused on North American and international business and corporate development. He also has extensive early-stage venture experience: he has led start-up initiatives, consulted with numerous early-stage medical ventures, and participated in several successful exits. He has also led key technology transfer initiatives with the University of Waterloo, the BC Cancer Agency, and the University of British Columbia (UBC). Tom is on the Board of Directors of Race Rocks Management Inc., Karos Health Inc.
Adam Anthony is a Program Officer at ForumCC, or the Tanzanian Civil Society Forum on Climate Change, which is an association of civil society organizations committed to working on climate change through individual and collective program initiatives.
Previously, Adam worked with YUNA, a youth-based United Nations awareness organization, Norwegian Church Aid, and Africa Unite, a South-African based NGO working on human rights.
Adam is the 2011 Anzisha Prize semi-finalist, winner of the JGI Global Award for Youth leadership in 2011 and the 2013 winner of the Under-30 Youth Awards in Tanzania for the social impact category.
ElsaMarie D’Silva is the Managing Director of Safecity.in – a website that uses crowdsourcing to identify locations where women have experienced or witnessed any type of sexual harassment.
ElsaMarie is an experienced aviation professional. In 2003, she made a career switch in order to improve the lives of women, youth and senior citizens through awareness, interaction and education. She is also trained in both directive and non directive counseling.
She is a Vital Voices Lead Fellow and an alumni of the Swedish Institute.
Carne Ross is the founder and Executive Director of Independent Diplomat. Carne served as a British diplomat from 1989-2004 in a number of different roles, including speechwriter to the Foreign Secretary. From 1998, he was the UK’s Middle East expert at the United Nations in New York. In 2004, he resigned from the UK Foreign Office after giving then-secret evidence to the first official inquiry into the Iraq war.
Carne is also an author of two books, most recently “The Leaderless Revolution: how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st Century” and “Independent Diplomat”, a critique of contemporary diplomacy. Carne is a frequent commentator on international affairs on the BBC and Al Jazeera, and in publications including the Financial Times and The Guardian.
Dr. Huong Nguyen is the Co-founder and Vice President of Blind-Link, a social enterprise based in Vietnam that provides employment, support, and training opportunities for people with vision disabilities.
Prior to Blind-Link, Huong was the Director of the Macroeconomics and Strategy Department of the Development Strategy Institute (DSI) - a national level think tank in Vietnam.
Huong is currently a Rajawali Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. She was also a Humphrey Fellow as a part of the Fulbright Program. She received her PhD in Economics of Development from the Development Strategy Institute, Vietnam.
Dr. Craig Zelizer is the Founder/CEO of the Peace and Collaborative Development Network. Created in 2007, PCDN has rapidly become the leading online network connecting peacebuilders and change agents from around the globe.
Craig is also is the Interim Director of the MA in Conflict Resolution within the Department of Government at Georgetown University. His most recent publication is an edited volume called Integrated Peacebuilding: Innovative Approaches to Transforming Conflict.
Craig was also one of the co-founders and a senior partner in the Alliance for Conflict Transformation, a leading non-profit organization dedicated to building peace through innovative research and practice.
Craig currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the African Peace and Conflict Journal, Journal of Conflictology and the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and on the boards or advisory boards of several organizations including: Masterpeace, TechChange,The Alliance for Peacebuilding, International Peace and Security Institute, The Amani Institute, and Move this World.
Linn Hammergren is an expert in rule of law, citizen security, anti-corruption policies, and general governance issues. She has a doctorate in Political Science and, before 2008, taught Political Science at Vanderbilt University. She then spent ten years with the World Bank and twelve as an internal consultant for USAID managing Administration of Justice projects.
Linn’s research and publications focus on judicial politics and reform, judicial corruption, citizen security, and the politics of foreign assistance. Her most recent book is Judicial Reform and Development: Rethinking Assistance to Developing and Transition Countries.
Tamar Koosed is the founder and director of Manaus consulting, where her work focuses on impact assessments and corporate social responsibility. She has provided her expertise to organizations such as Plan International, Underwriters Laboratories, the Microsoft Foundation and the Levi Strauss Foundation in places like Vietnam, Nepal, El Salvador, Colombia, Haiti, Brazil and India.
She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community and has published reports and articles with Business for Social Responsibility, the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations Global Compact
Originally from Brazil, Tamar holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in International Affairs from the University of California-San Diego.
Professor Mike Clarke is a founder of Evidence Aid and the Director of the Hub for Trials Methodology Research at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.
For 25 years, Mike has focused his work on rigorous evaluations of the effects of a wide variety of health and social care interventions. He is passionate about improving access to reliable evidence for all decision makers, particularly in resource poor settings.
Serena Olgiati is an expert in human security and armed violence. Her work focuses on measuring and monitoring armed violence, in an effort to advance policy and advocacy efforts that promote evidence-based responses to same. Now an independent professional, most recently she led policy development for the UK based Action on Armed Violence, as their Head of Advocacy. Serena previously worked for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, representing this organisation in Colombia and for the Cluster Munition Coalition where she has been actively engaged in the negotiations of the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Serena also helped found the Global Alliance on Armed Violence and has supported the creation of local and regional networks; such as the Nigeria Working Group on Armed Violence and the Latin American network SEHLAC.
She holds a master in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Dr. Joel Selanikio is an award-winning physician, innovator and public speaker who leads the efforts of Magpi to develop and promote new technologies and business models for health and international development. This includes the award-winning Magpi mobile data collection and messaging software – the most widely scaled mobile technology ever created for international development, with more than 32,000 users in more than 170 countries.
Joel is a frequent keynote speaker and consultant in the fields of social entrepreneurship, innovation, public health, healthcare, and the use of technology for development and emergency and disaster response. He has consulted or spoken on these topics at Davos, TEDx, SciFoo, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Google, DARPA, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Royal Society of Medicine, Fox News, and many other venues. He is a judge for the GSMA Global Mobile Awards and for the Classy Awards for Social Impact, and is a winner of both the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award.
Joel is a practicing pediatrician, as well as a former Wall Street computer consultant, and former CDC epidemiologist. In his former role as an officer of the Public Health Service, Dr. Selanikio served as Chief of Operations for the Health and Human Services Secretary's Emergency Command Center in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2005, he was given the Haverford Award for Humanitarian Service for his work in treating tsunami victims in Aceh, Indonesia.
Belabbes Benkredda is an award-winning social innovator, open debate advocate and the founder of the Munathara Initiative, a fledging online and television debate forum for Arab youth. In 2013, he received the Democracy Award from the National Democratic Institute in Washington, DC for his work in fostering citizen participation in the Arab public sphere.
Prior to the Initiative, Belabbes worked with the German Foreign Office, the League of Arab States and the Council for Arab-British Understanding. Since moving to Dubai in 2005, he’s been a government consultant specialized on public diplomacy in the Arab world, a frequent television commentator, and op-ed columnist for the region’s largest English daily.
Belabbes studied International Relations, Philosophy of Law and Middle East Politics. A son of Algerian immigrants to Germany, he is a polyglot conversant in six languages and with a basic knowledge of another three.
Saji Prelis is the Director for Children & Youth Programmes at Search for Common Ground. Saji co-leads several policy-level platforms including the UN-Civil Society Inter-Agency Working Group on Youth Participation in Peacebuilding and the Global Partnership to enable children and youth participation in peacebuilding. Through the UN-CSO Inter-Agency working group, he has co-led the process in developing Guiding Principles for Young People’s Participation in Peacebuilding that was officially launched at the UN on April 24th, 2014 and is currently co-leading the process to develop Operational Guidance on the same topic.
He served as a co-founder and Associate Director at American University's Peacebuilding & Development Institute in Washington, DC and is currently one of the founding members and chair of the board for PDI-SL in Sri Lanka, an internationally recognized South Asia focused training and research Institution.
Saji was born in Sri Lanka and holds a Master's Degree in International Peace & Conflict Resolution with a Concentration in International Law from American University.
Scott Abrams held leadership positions at the Open Society Foundations for over a decade. As a part of the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, he designed and oversaw hundreds of projects around the world focused on decentralization, citizen participation, good governance and local economic development. Prior to that, he worked at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations and in the private sector. Today, Scott advises donor agencies, private foundations, universities, chambers of commerce and non-profit organizations on strategy formulation, management, advocacy and communications. Scott studied European and African History, International Relations, and Trade and Development Policy.
Raj Rana is the Director of the WolfGroup Consultants. With 16 years of international experience in the aid and development sector, his focus is on supporting organizations and teams to pursue meaningful change through clarity of purpose.
Raj completed his professional and graduate studies in architecture in Canada and started his international career as a Canadian Peacekeeper in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1993. His international experience was shaped through 8 years with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chechnya, Darfur and Iraq. He is a Certified Professional Facilitator and an Accredited Practitioner of Social Return on Investment.
Annika Kjellgren is the Chief Executive Officer & Founder of Impact Consulting. Prior to founding Impact Consulting, Annika worked for UNDP in Moldova and for the World Bank in Rwanda, Sudan, Bhutan, and Tanzania. Annika also worked in the United States for PricewaterhouseCoopers Securities’ mergers and acquisitions team and Riggs Capital Partners’ venture capital team.
Jen Haile is the Senior Manager of Corporate Partnerships & Philanthropy at Population Services International. She manages a new philanthropic initiative aimed at catalyzing the next wave of social investors interested in improving the health and rights of girls and women worldwide.
Prior to joining PSI, Jen spent almost ten years in philanthropy at National Public Radio. She has been committed to international development since college, working in youth camps in Ukraine, volunteering with the IRC to resettle Sudanese refugees, and serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia.
Jen has an MBA in international business and nonprofit management from George Washington University.
Fsahat U.l. Hassan is the founder and current Chairperson of the Youth Advocacy Network, a national level youth-led democratic and volunteer-driven organization in Pakistan with more than 1,500 members across the country.
Fsahat recently received the prestigious Youth Excellence Award from the President of Islamic Republic of Pakistan for his work with young people. He also chaired the first youth-led regional level conference for youth in 2014 and represented Pakistan and the region in multiple other venues.
Fsahat is also a regional council member of Rah-nu-ma and the National Focal Point for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS.
Blair Glencorse is the Founder and Executive Director of the Accountability Lab, an organization that empowers citizens to fight corruption and build accountability around the world. He is also a Social Impact Fellow at the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Previously, Blair worked for the World Bank on issues of governance and development. In 2014 he was selected as an Echoing Green Fellow and a Stanford Business School Social Entrepreneurship Scholar.
Bibhusan Bista is the CEO and co-founder of YoungInnovations, a software development firm based in Nepal. With a background in technology, research and international development, he has led successful projects around open data, transparency, accountability and other development issues in collaboration with local and international partners.
Bibhusan is an active member of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) technical advisory group and has been part of similar initiatives such as the open data movement in Nepal, through the OpenNepal consortium, and the first open data portal for Nepal.
Prior to YoungInnovations, Bibhusan worked with Bellanet, an IDRC project, and SAP International, a regional INGO in South Asia. Bibhusan is also a part-time faculty at Kathmandu College of Management.
Ziad Moussa is an independent development professional specializing in local governance and evaluation who over the past 18 years has worked across the entire Middle East and North Africa, the Mediterranean countries involved in the Euro-Med process and significant parts of the African continent.
Ziad’s track record in local governance and decentralization includes leadership roles in key regional initiatives and the Resource Centers on Urban Agriculture and Food Security. His work in evaluation has included several large-scale evaluations for IFAD, ILO, the European Union and IDRC.
Ziad is a former board member of the International Development Evaluation Association and a former leader of the MENA Evaluation Association.
Janna Greve is a human rights specialist working as a Regional Office Coordinator for MAPP-OEA in Colombia. Previously, she worked with Medecins Sans Frontieres in North Kivu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Janna has also worked in development cooperation, advisory, research, writing and editing roles in Brazil, India and Germany, with NGOs and other international organizations.
Janna studied Political Science, International Relations, Cultural Anthropology, Jurispudence and International Human Rights Law at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany and at the Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal.
Mohit Mukherjee is an educator-entrepreneur who in 2006 founded the Centre for Executive Education at the United Nations Mandated University for Peace (UPEACE).
As Director of the Centre for Executive Education, he has developed and taught over 40 seminars in seven countries on themes ranging from ‘Educating in Changing Times' to ’Social Entrepreneurship’. He is also the founder of ‘Changemakers International’, which focuses on youth and social innovation.
Prior to founding the Centre, Mohit served as Education Programme Manager of the Earth Charter Initiative, which promotes sustainable ways of living through respect and care for the environment, human rights, justice, democracy and peace. He also spent four years at A.T. Kearney, a management consulting firm based in San Francisco.
He was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University, and a Master of Education degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Jodi Nelson is the director of Strategy, Measurement & Evaluation at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Committed to helping the foundation maximize its results, the Strategy, Measurement & Evaluation (SME) team is responsible for the organization’s strategy development and review process and its overall approach to measurement and evaluation. SME leads efforts to integrate results-based planning into the foundation’s grant making and operations; develop a strong, organization-wide M&E Community of Practice; conduct independent evaluations of the foundation’s most important investments; and provide teams and leadership with access to relevant data for learning and decision-making.
Prior to joining the foundation, Jodi was the director of Research and Evaluation at the International Rescue Committee. There for almost ten years, Jodi created two new initiatives to improve the organization’s measurement system. In 2003, Jodi raised private funds to launch a three year effort to bridge the gap between academic research and IRC’s field program implementation. Jodi advocated for and founded a department dedicated to research and evaluation. As its director, Jodi strengthened the agency’s program design capacity; streamlined data collection and analysis across country offices; and built capacity for the use of rigorous evaluation for learning and decision-making. This included partnering with bilateral organizations and university scholars to evaluate post-conflict development models in settings such as Liberia, DR Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Burundi and Afghanistan.
Jodi worked before this at several nonprofit organizations with international missions, including the Asia Society, the Society for International Development, the World Resources Institute, and the Committee for Economic Development. She has taught graduate courses on international development and evaluation at Princeton University and New York University.
Jodi has a doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University with a concentration in political economy, and a Bachelor’s from Northwestern University. Jodi was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2000-2007, and currently serves on the board of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the Antelope Foundation and Maloto, an innovative nonprofit organization committed to youth in Malawi.
A former professional dancer, Stefanie Eppe is an experienced senior nonprofit leader and educator. With a strong track record in nonprofit leadership and strategy, Stefanie holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Southern California, and has served as a senior staff member for the National Youth Employment Coalition in Washington, D.C. and at Para Los Niños in Los Angeles, California, leading programming, strategic planning, evaluation, and quality assurance efforts.
She is a member of the Board of Directors for Everybody Dance Now!, where earlier this year she also led the organization as interim Executive Director. Through her work during the past 20 years, she has advocated for children, youth and families living in poverty, and those searching for access to better resources and opportunities. Stefanie now lives in Costa Rica with her husband, her 1-year-old son, and their two dogs, where she works as a non-profit management consultant, and as a private psychologist.
Nichole Graber-Simmons is Director of the Office of Citizen Security for USAID in Kingston, Jamaica. The Office of Citizen Security is part of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), which in turn is part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA). The OTI was established in 1994 to provide fast, flexible, short-term assistance to take advantage of windows of opportunity to build democracy and peace, seeking to lay the foundations for long-term development by promoting reconciliation, jump starting economies and helping stable democracy take hold.
Prior to joining USAID nearly six years ago, Graber-Simmons worked for the American National Red Cross in its response to pandemic influenza, and before that she worked for the UNDP in Fiji, mainly on disaster preparedness projects. Graber-Simmons has a Master’s in International Development from Monash University and a Graduate Diploma in International Relations/Development from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.
Sandra Sudhoff is Technical Manager at CartONG, a French NGO that enables emergency relief and development organizations and local governments to manage their own existing data, integrate other data sources and then use that data to plan programs and monitor progress and impact.
Sandra has worked for CartONG for nearly eight years, facilitating mobile data collection with Android phones; implementing remote and thematic mapping projects; developing e-learning and screencast capabilities for GIS applications, and developing information management and GIS UN Cluster Coordination and products.
In addition to her work as Technical Director of the organization, she has undertaken field work in Kenya, Bangladesh, Haiti, Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malaysia and Uganda.
Evert Bopp is a self-described "low-flying Dutchman" who has made Ireland his home. After 15 years in commerce- and revenue-driven fields in the tech industry, Evert founded Disaster Tech Lab in 2010 to provide rapid response communication networks for use in disaster relief and humanitarian aid work globally by responding organisations, as well as affected communities.
Christy Stickney is an international development consultant with over 20 years of experience designing, evaluating and documenting innovative, market-based development initiatives. She has developed particular expertise in housing micro finance, and worked as regional Director of Housing Finance at Habitat for Humanity International, overseeing the design and implementation of innovative projects in shelter finance and construction throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. She has published over a dozen studies, manuals, and practical guides in microfinance, affordable housing, and alternative technologies for water and sanitation.
Nesreen Barakat has more than 20 years of experience in the area of economic and social development, working with government, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector in Jordan. Recently, she served as a Minister of Social Development, Minister of Public Sector Development and General Director of the National Aid Fund. Prior to that, she was a Council Member at the Greater Amman Municipality, Economic Advisor to the Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW) and a Director of the Competitiveness Unit at the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation.
As an entrepreneur, in 2005, Nesreen founded To Excel Consulting and Associates, a company focused on the provision of consulting services related to socio-economic, administrative and local development studies. Nesreen has extensive experience in managing and implementing result oriented technical assistance projects: she was the lead of the Enhancing Productivity Component (Economic Development Program) at SABEQ, a USAID funded Program, and previously held the position of the Manager of the Policy Support and Institutional Strengthening Component at EJADA, an EU-funded program.
Nesreen is a member of the UNWOMEN NGO Advisory Group in Jordan, member of the Business and Professional Women Association (BPWA), board member of Amman Arab University, fellowship of Vital Voices and a founding member of the Jordan Corporate Governance Association, the Competition Association and the National Global Compact Network in Jordan. She served on the boards of Jordan Enterprise Development Corporation (JEDCO), the National Fund for Enterprise Support (NAFES), and was a member in a variety of task force committees including the National Agenda Investment Task Force.
Nesreen holds an MBA degree from the Business School at Durham University in the UK and B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Jordan. She also received intensive international training at Harvard and Berkeley Universities on enhancing the competitiveness of nations, scenario planning, strategy development and implementation.
Timo Lüge is a Communications and Advocacy Consultant working mainly for UN agencies, NGOs and the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. He has been working in the humanitarian sector for seven years and worked as a journalist for nearly ten years prior to that. During emergency response operations, Timo works mainly on public information and media relations. When in Europe or the US, he focuses on how digital technology can be better used to support emergency management and humanitarian relief operations. Timo blogs at http://sm4good.com.
Kyle Schutter is the Founder and Managing Director of Takamoto Biogas.
Trained as an engineer at Brown University, Kyle researched biogas in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana and the USA before in 2011 he founded a company that constructed individual biogas systems for small-scale farmers in rural Kenya. After two years of operations, Kyle invented the Takamoto Pay-As-You-Go Biogas business model and technology to enable more people to access renewable energy without a large up-front capital investment.
Kyle has received the Enjuba Young Entrepreneur Award, Heinberg Social Innovation Award, received “Special Recognition” from the Sankalp Africa Summit 2014 and took second place in the William James Foundation Business Plan Competition. He has lived in Kenya for the last three years and continues to search for innovative solutions to provide sustainable, modern energy for rural communities.
David Shorr has spent most of his career as an analyst working with leading think tanks, philanthropies and advocacy groups across a broad range of foreign policy issues, and is currently working to wind down the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation’s nuclear security program.
Before he was engaged on that project, he spent 14 years with the Iowa-based Stanley Foundation, developing constructive new approaches to the world's compelling challenges, including the evolution of the G-20, climate change, the roles of rising powers, US national security strategy, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's 2005 initiative to reform the United Nations, and refugee protection and rights issues.
He was awarded a BA in religious studies from Brown University, and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Malini Patel is the Senior Director for Middle East and North Africa and Acting Senior Director for Economic Empowerment at Vital Voices Global Partnership. She is responsible for vision and leadership; day-to-day program and financial management; program design, quality and integrity; new business development; and internal and external relations.
With 20 years of international development experience, Ms. Patel has led teams globally in Europe, the Caucasus, Africa, Middle East, Latin America and the Pacific and has overseen technical programs in SME/MAGE growth, community development, democracy and governance, advocacy, local and regional economic development, micro-finance and organizational development globally.
Prior to joining Vital Voices, Ms. Patel worked at numerous non-profit, for-profit, educational, and government entities including CHF International (Global Communities) and Peace Corps. Ms. Patel received her Bachelor of Arts from University of Michigan and Masters in Public Administration from New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Erin Bourgois is Project Manager of Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity (CASC), a non-profit based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia that provides medical, legal, and psychosocial support to survivors of acid attacks, as well as working to eliminate acid violence through raising awareness, research, education and advocating for strict regulatory action at the national level.
Previously, she served as Programmes Manager for Acid Survivors Trust International in the U.K., and worked as Senior Financial Manager, Foreign Policy Program, and Project Administrator, Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She studied Political Science at Shepherd University in West Virginia, USA.
Jonah Ayodele Obajeun is Chief Curator of Tolerance Academy, a Nigerian non-profit youth membership-based organization that he founded in 2010 with the aim of establishing peace-building and democratic systems that empower young people to make responsible decisions concerning their development. In addition to his efforts with Tolerance Academy, Obajeun works as a Customer Service Operations Manager for the Nigeria operations of a multinational consumer goods company, and is a multi-award winning writer and blogger whose first book of fiction will be published later this year. He was named a Finalist in the 2011 Echoing Green Fellowship, and has studied in Portugal and Nigeria.
Farzeen Ferdous Alam is the Founding President of OGGRO, a development organization based in Bangladesh. He started OGGRO while in high school and subsequently dropped out and continued his studies privately in order to dedicate time to OGGRO during its infancy.
His risk paid off when OGGRO won the prestigious Youth Solidarity Fund award of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAoC) in 2009. The following year he was honored by MTV Staying Alive Foundation UK for “outstanding achievement in HIV/AIDs awareness”. Farzeen has developed numerous social business models in order to transform OGGRO from a fund-dependent organization to a self-sufficient one.
A graduate in Economics from the University of Dhaka, Farzeen is also the Chairman of Ferdous Biotech Pvt. Ltd, which uses tissue culture to produce various agricultural products for local and foreign markets.
Kathleen Cronan is Executive Director of Earthlinks, a Denver, Colorado non-profit organization that provides a paid-work program offering low-income and homeless people an opportunity to learn skills and create eco-friendly products, which are sold to support the program. She has extensive experience working with Denver’s nonprofit community, both as a volunteer and in various leadership roles, and in addition, has practiced law for more than 30 years in the Denver area.
Nida'a Nasser is Youth Leadership Project Coordinator at Baladna—the Association of Arab Youth, and research assistant at Mada al-Carmel - Arab Center for Applied Social Research. She was awarded a degree in Social Work from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2008, and an M.A. in Research of Conflicts and Struggles at the College of Social Sciences. Nida'a has worked as a project coordinator in a number of civil society organizations, including the Society of Public Advocacy in Jerusalem, the Project against Early Marriage in Kufr Manda, The Menara Society to Support Friends with Disabilities in the Arab Community, and the el-Hawakeer Association for Agricultural and Community Development.
Development consultant Jason Wares splits his time between the non-profit and for-profit worlds as Managing Director of North Carolina’s Community Nutrition Partnership, devoted to increasing access to fresh, local, affordable food, and Managing Director of Safe Water, a company that provides sanitation and disinfection solutions in a wide range of industries. Wares has development experience on five continents as a strategic and financial management consultant for organizations including the Fair Labor Association, Global Education Partnership, CHF International and RTI International.
Francine Pickup is Strategic Planning Advisor, Asia-Pacific, for the UNDP. She has 15 years of experience in humanitarian and development organizations in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia.
In her current role, she developed the regional priorities in the UNDP Strategic Plan 2014-17, and leads the planning, monitoring, reporting and communication of results and performance achieved by the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific bureau.
She worked as Head of the Research and Analysis Unit of OCHA in the occupied Palestinian territory, and at the outset of her career, worked in a number of roles for NGOs.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics in 2002.
Mansoor Abbasi is the Executive Director and co-founder of The Intercivil Society - a not-for-profit company that works to reduce poverty, protect the environment and improve community relationships. The Intercivil Society creates opportunities to help people improve their own situations, whether economic, social or environmental.
Mansoor is experienced in training, group facilitation and dispute resolution – both community and workplace – with specific expertise in facilitating “difficult” conversations. He also works as a community projects advisor and as a consultant designing, delivering and project managing peace-building programs in conflict areas (where the focus is on strengthening civil society through developing intercultural community leadership, conflict management skills, capacity development and improving intercultural and interfaith dialogue and cooperation).
Mansoor has worked with a range of partners and clients, including the European Parliament, West Yorkshire Police, UN Alliance of Civilizations, local and national governments and local community groups.
Ian Philp is the Director of The Clean Energy Institute, a Canadian public-private partnership that aims connect high potential energy technologies with international market opportunities and to establish a flagship position in the global clean energy economy.
Previously, Ian worked with a boutique investment bank focused on energy efficiency investments, and as an international trade lawyer defending Canada’s renewable FIT program. Ian was also a UN legal and constitutional advisor to the Iraqi Government from 2005-2007. He is an Atlantic Council Emerging Leaders in Environment & Energy Policy (ELEEP) Fellow, and was a 2011- 2012 Action Canada Fellow.
Richard Catherall is Executive Director of Cyprus-based Katarsis Ventures, which works primarily in transition states and post-conflict zones to help make social change happen by enabling big money to connect with big, undiscovered ideas. Catherall also has a U.K. focus, through Radical Capital, which aims to shape the UK social investment market.
Catherall says, "I am investing and actively involved in nurturing the conditions for innovation, supporting leadership through enterprise and encouraging investment in the social economy. The social economy is growing in the space between how the market provides, where the state intervenes and the increasing expectations and aspirations of people. In this space social entrepreneurs seek to solve problems, realize opportunities, shape and create markets through their products and services."
Charles McJilton is the CEO and founder of Second Harvest Japan, and came to Japan for the first time in 1984 with the U.S. military. He returned in 1991 to conduct research at Sophia University as part of his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota.
During that time he lived in San'ya, a low-income area that many Japanese would not recognize as a part of Tokyo, or Japan, and in an effort to better understand the challenges facing the area’s residents, many of whom live below the poverty line, McJilton lived in a “cardboard” shelter alongside the Sumida River from January 1997 to April 1998.
In 2000, he became co-chair of a coalition of groups working together to share resources among food distribution programs, and two years later, he incorporated Second Harvest, the first food bank in Japan. Second Harvest Japan collects food that would otherwise go to waste from food manufacturers, farmers, and individuals, and distributes it to people in need such as children in orphanages, low-income households, and the homeless.
BeCause Global Consulting CEO Nadine Hack has advised leaders of Fortune 500 companies, heads of state, and other organizations globally on clarifying and achieving their goals. She has served as a non-executive director on for- and not-for-profit boards, including as chair, vice chair and committee chair for governance and nominating.
She was the first woman to serve as Executive-in-Residence at IMD Business School and continues to work in executive education programs providing guidance to senior executives in many capacities. She distilled decades of her work with clients on engagement leadership and its framework Strategic Relational Engagement (SRE™) into teachable lessons on improving stakeholder engagement within organizations and among sectors to increase productivity, profitability and sustainability.
Hack has advanced degrees from Harvard and The New School and has received numerous awards including International Outstanding Achievement, Woman of the Year, and Inspiration Award for lifetime achievement presented at the Säid Business School Oxford University. She is a Fellow at New Westminster College, created and taught graduate courses at NYU and SNHU and has guest lectured at many other universities.
She has been a speaker at meetings and conferences globally. She’s had articles written about or published by her including in The Financial Times, Forbes, Huffington Post, ReWiring Business, The New York Times and UN Chronicle. She’s appeared on television, radio, Internet, at a TEDx event and is on an international on-line database of women experts, SheSource.
Tibor Vörös has over 15 years of experience both in academic and corporate environments. He has worked in various management areas (knowledge management, decision making, business intelligence, information systems) as practitioner, but he also researched these topics and evaluated corresponding frameworks from the theory point of view. Vörös holds an MSc in Maths, Physics and Information Technology and is a Senior Lecturer at Central European University Business School. His research work ranges from social media to cultural and strategic issues for corporations. More recently Mr Vörös spent considerable time on various business simulations and created unique storyboards to help students experience real life problems in classroom situations. Current research work concentrates on the relationship of culture and technology. CEEMAN has selected Mr Voros as the winner of the Innovation in Course Design category for the CEEMAN Champions’ Award 2010.
Sue Miller is Director of Programming and Training for Peace Corps Georgia, and oversees the development and delivery of training programs for Peace Corps volunteers in Georgia, as well as bearing responsibility for programmatic direction, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, site development, and strategic partnerships for the three Peace Corps projects in Georgia: English Education, Organizational Development, and Peace Corps Response. Prior to assuming her current position, she worked for over 10 years for development organizations in Latin America, Africa, Russia, Georgia, and East Timor on community and international development programs.
Phil Bright is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community – a technical assistance organization covering the island nations of the South Pacific.
Phil’s work focuses on supporting census activities and includes capacity building, planning, implementing and analyzing census data. Prior to joining SPC he was a Research Assistant at Curtin University of Technology.
Sigrid Gruener is a program manager at the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation who focuses on peace building, security and development. Prior to joining the Foundation, she worked as a practitioner, trainer and researcher in the field of development, peace building and conflict transformation for International Solutions Group, Relief International, and Columbia University’s Center for International Conflict Resolution. Sigrid earned a master's in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
In 2005, American writer and editor Ken Budd's father collapsed and died after a heart attack.
After that shock, with his 40th birthday looming, Ken had a few questions about his own life that suddenly seemed more urgently in need of answers. Over the next couple of years, he traveled the world, volunteering with a wide range of organizations, and wrote a book that covers his adventures as a ‘voluntourist' in six countries, travels he made with and without his wife Julie, in pursuit of the answer to the question, “What am I doing that matters?”
Fresh out of university, Tim Ludford volunteered in Nigeria with poverty-focused British development organization VSO. On his return, he got a job selling mobile phones, but his volunteering experience had made him realize development was a career, and that it was possible to get paid for helping people. He put out a few feelers, and landed a job in London with JICA, Japan's overseas aid development organization.
Ludford works now as an independent humanitarian aid and development consultant, has operated extensively in Iraq, and as a program evaluator for organizations including UNICEF and Plan International.
Michael Klein is the Director of the Washington. D.C.-based International Solutions Group, a humanitarian aid and development-focused management consulting firm that specializes in program performance, private sector development, capacity building and information technology development.
Barbara Pierce Bush is the daughter of former President George W. Bush and co-founder in 2009 of Global Health Corps, which provides opportunities for young professionals from diverse backgrounds to work on the front lines of the fight for global health equity.
Global Health Corps pairs its fellows with organizations that require new thinking and innovative solutions, and works right now in Burundi, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, the United States, and Zambia.
During a 35-year-long career, oilman Rod MacAlister has mostly worked in Africa, managing businesses, but also keeping an eye on and supporting the communities in which he was working.
He served as president of the U.S. African Development Fund for several years, and with primatologist Jane Goodall, built an orphanage and sanctuary for chimpanzees in the Congo that is the largest in Africa.
Other projects he has spearheaded include building toilets for rural schools in Gabon, and establishing a medical clinic in the Congo.
Rod now works in Gabon, running a small, independent company that produces 10 percent of the country’s oil. In the spring of 2013 he spoke with Terms of Reference host Stephen Ladek.
Claire Hajaj is an independent political analyst and writer who over the course of her career has produced recommendations for G20 responses to the Arab Spring, the UN’s first integrated strategy for Iraq, and advised the UN on a five-year plan for development and peace consolidation in Kosovo. She has also worked as a journalist, and a public affairs consultant.