Philanthropy Age Issue 08

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DEDICATED TO THOUGHTFUL GIVING

Issue 08

Middle East, North Africa and South Asia

June – August 2015

Power to the people How the digital revolution is changing the way we tackle the world’s most pressing problems

PLUS Saudi philanthropist Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber on the power of education for global good

Meet the charity using drones to save the lives of Middle East migrants in the Mediterranean

Young, engaged and giving: the next generation inspiring social change in the Gulf

CONTENTS

In this issue...

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REGULARS

08 10 12 14 72 76 80 4

Need to know

26

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Crossing the divide Saudi businessman Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber on the power of education to promote global good and bridge cultural divides

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Sea of troubles Meet the charity battling to save the lives of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe

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The world in 2025 From the rise of mobile money, to migration; our experts predict what will shape the aid industry over the next decade

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Top of the class Aided by Dubai Cares, a bilingual school programme in Senegal is helping to forge a brighter future for the country’s children

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Call of the crowd The digital revolution is disrupting all spheres of life.

We explore how the crowd is changing aid, and how we give

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Spreading the word Social enterprise could be the answer to Arab youth unemployment, says Emirati businesswoman Muna Al Gurg

The Moment Global Eye Guest Column One Day Trends Diary

CONTENTS

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Young, gifted and giving

38 46

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Games for change

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Building Gaza’s future

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Aiding orphans in Mali

Cutting the cables How developing nations are using technology to find off-grid solutions to pressing social problems

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CONTRIBUTORS

With our thanks to...

Patrick Meier

Patrick Meier is a renowned thought leader on humanitarian technology and innovation. He is currently director of social innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Forbes, Times, Wired and Mashable. In this issue, he explores the potential of big data as a force for good.

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Angela Giuffrida

Angela Giuffrida is the editor of The Local Italy, part of a network of European news websites. Her work has appeared in The National, the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, and in this issue she examines the plight of migrant refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

Kentaro Toyama

A computer scientist and international development researcher, Kentaro Toyama studies new ways in which technology can be used to support socio-economic development. For this issue, he reminds us that the digital revolution is no substitute for human capabilities when it comes to driving widespread social change.

Amanda Fisher

Amanda Fisher is an award-winning journalist, photographer and videographer who contributes to a range of publications including Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Middle East Eye. For this issue, she interviewed fellow journalist Nawal Mostafa, who has battled for 25 years to help women and their children in Egypt’s jails.

Darren Arthur

A freelance photographer based in the UAE, Darren Arthur works for a host of commercial and media clients. His briefs vary from sports specialisms and still portraits, to landscapes and travel reportage. In this issue, he photographed an upcoming generation of Gulf humanitarians.

EDITOR’S LETTER

Philanthropy Age is published by Touchline FZ-LLC The publishers regret that they cannot accept liability for errors or omissions contained in the publication, for whatever reason, however caused. The opinions and views contained in this publication are not necessarily those of the publishers.

The publishers take no responsibility for the goods and services advertised.

All materials are protected by copyright. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photography or storage in any medium by electronic means) without the written permission of the copyright owner, except as may be permitted by applicable laws.

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

Digital

Studio

Editor-In-Chief Leonard Stall leonard@touchline.ae

Managing Editor Andrew White andrew@touchline.ae

Senior & Web Editor Joanne Bladd joanne@touchline.ae

Senior Editor (Content) Stuart Matthews stuart@touchline.ae

Senior Writer Tamara Walid tamara@touchline.ae

Assistant Editor Adrienne Cernigoi adrienne@touchline.ae

Arabic Editor Fawaz Jarrah fawaz@touchline.ae

Translation Zaineb Bouftas Ayat Abbasi

Director of Digital Juan Whitby

Digital Design Director Matt Walker

Digital Publisher Shaun McGuckian

Group Comms Manager James De Vile

Studio Manager Mohammed Khalafalla Touchline FZ LLC Studio Ahmad Marei; Anas Ahmad Albounni; Vanesha Ramdoyal; Mark Makhlouf; Liz Rankin; Faraz Qaiser; Mareena Khawar; Michel Al Asmar; Qaiser Nawaz; Sam Birouty; Jason Dutch

Touchline CEO Leonard Stall FZ-LLC

COO & Partner Waleed Gubara

Publisher & Partner Salem AlShaikh

Business Development Mona Mahmoud mona@touchline.ae

For advertising enquiries: Stefanie Morgner stefanie@touchline.ae

Account Manager Serhan Serhan

Office Manager Linda Musco

Receptionist Leofel Toledano

Contributors: Patrick Meier; Angela Giuffrida; Kentaro Toyama; Amanda Fisher; Darren Arthur; Issa AlKindy; Bahr Karim

Breaking new ground If proof were needed of how society prizes philanthropy, it came in January, when a global poll named Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man. The accolade was recognition not of Gates’ vast wealth or his broad influence, but of his efforts to use both to reinvent large-scale giving and pioneer impact-led philanthropy - and to persuade his peers to do the same. In the last 15 years, Gates and his wife Melinda have given away more than $30bn through their foundation in the pursuit of world betterment. The Giving Pledge, a campaign championed by the Gates’ and Warren Buffett to convince the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half their fortunes to philanthropy, has won over more than 130 billionaires, with a net worth of more than $700bn. From Hong Kong to London, the poll showed, his acts have not gone unnoticed.

Few of us can be Bill Gates. However, when it comes to tackling the world’s most pressing social problems, many of us wish to do more than spectate. The rise of the digital economy ensures there is more opportunity than ever before to contribute skills or monetary support to worthy causes, unhindered by geography. Via crowdsourcing or crowdfunding platforms, the world’s best and brightest minds can pool ideas and funding to amplify their impact; creating a collective economy with far-reaching results.

This has not been lost on Gulf governments. In this issue, we hear how one Qatari institute is using social media to shape the way relief agencies respond to disasters, using digital volunteers to track live tweets and direct organisations on the ground. In Saudi Arabia, we see how a young entrepreneur is convincing retailers and buyers to make ethical choices about the clothing they buy, through sharing real-time stories and photos from suppliers. All are examples of how we can be impactful philanthropists, when we give intelligently of our skills and wealth. At a time when there are fewer barriers than ever before, there can be no excuse for standing idle.

Joanne Bladd Deputy Editor, Philanthropy Age The publishers seek to broaden the knowledge and understanding of good philanthropy and do not seek to promote the interests of any one individual, organisation or agenda. Individuals and organisations are featured solely according to the merits of their philanthropic endeavours.

Go interactive with Philanthropy Age and Blippar. Just follow these simple instructions on pages 26, 45, 55 and 75: (You can download the Blippar application for free from the Apple App store and Google Play)

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Images: Getty Images; Reuters; UNHCR; MBI Al Jaber Foundation; ITP; UNCDF; Dubai Cares; Medic Mobile; NetHope; Makerble; Magic Eye; Asda’a Burson-Marsteller; CFPA; Al Gurg Foundation, Shutterstock ISSN: 2306-0328 Distributed by: GLS Media Services Printed by: Emirates Printing Press, Dubai

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NEED TO KNOW

Nine things you should know...

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600,000 The number of child refugees out of school as a result of the conflict, according to global charity Save the Children.

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$3.8bn pledged but war rages on The conflict in Syria entered its fifth year in March 2015. As fighting rages on, schools, homes and families are destroyed, and the death toll grows steadily upwards from the 220,000 lives claimed so far.

For those left behind, life is unimaginably tough. Some 12.2 million people, including 5.6 million children, now need humanitarian assistance, according to the UN. And more Syrians than ever have fled their homeland: the bleak milestone of 4 million refugees is drawing closer. It is a dismally sad reversal for Syria, which has transformed from the world’s second largest refugee-hosting country to being the second largest refugee-producing country in just five years, according to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR. On 31 March this year, more than 50 states joined together to pledge $3.8bn for the Syria crisis at the third conference of its kind hosted by the Amir of Kuwait (seen below). Gulf states led the pledges, with new aid commitments of $500m from host Kuwait, $100m from the UAE and $60m from Saudi Arabia. Still, the commitments are less than half of the $8.4bn goal the UN estimates is needed this year.

“After four years of conflict, we are at a dangerous tipping point,” said António Guterres, UNHCR chief. “It is clear that the world’s response to the crisis in Syria cannot be business as usual.”

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The number of doctors left in the Syrian city of Aleppo, reports Save the Children. The city needs around 2,500, according to the charity’s estimates. Across the country, more than 60 per cent of hospitals are no longer functional.

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“The Syrian people are not asking for sympathy; they are asking for help”

Ban Ki-moon,UN secretarygeneral, addresses the pledging conference for Syria in Kuwait

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NEED TO KNOW

20%

1in 5 A fifth of Lebanon’s population is now comprised of refugees. Half of all Syrian refugees are children, UN data shows.

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4 out of 5 Syrians live in poverty, UN figures show, with conflict taking a devastating toll on the country’s development. Syria was classified a middle-income country before fighting broke out; now two out of three Syrians live in extreme poverty. The conflict’s economic impact is reverberating around the region, too. Countries and communities hosting refugees are under severe strain as health and education services are stretched thin, public infrastructure is overburdened and competition for jobs and resources stokes unrest among host countries’ populations.

The percentage of asylum applications in the industrialised world from Syrians in 2014. The war has helped drive asylum claims worldwide to a 22-year high 8

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3,922,166

The number of Syrian refugees registered by the UN on 19 March 2015 across the Middle East and North Africa. The UN estimates the conflict will create 4.3 million refugees by the year-end

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“Syria is the biggest humanitarian crisis in modern history” Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Amir of Kuwait

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THE MOMENT

Monday, February 9th, 2015

A year to make history e are the first generation that can end poverty, and the last that can avert the worst impacts of climate change.”

So warned – and cajoled – UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, in Dubai in February, ahead of highlevel talks that will shape the world agenda for at least the next 15 years.

Speaking on the sidelines of the city’s annual Government Summit, Ban made clear the scale of his ambitions for global change.

“By 2030, we have to eradicate abject poverty around the globe, provide quality education for all and promote gender equality,” he told Philanthropy Age. By any measure, 2015 will be a watershed year. The clock is ticking on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which expire in December. The coming months will see nations meet in critical talks that – if governments can agree terms – will commit them to a fresh global blueprint, known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Vastly more sweeping than their predecessors, these targets aim to transform the world economy

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by 2030, ending poverty, slashing mortality rates, and marking a shift towards a more sustainable future.

“We have to unite and work together,” said the UN chief. “There is no difference between the developing and developed world. Let us work together to ensure no-one is left behind.”

The UN’s ambitions do not end there. A December summit in Paris represents an historic opportunity for countries to make binding pledges to keep global temperature below a disastrous 2oC rise. A climate deal has so far eluded world leaders, with nations as diverse as China, the US and OPEC states unable to find common ground. But with humanity’s impact on a warming world now firmly established, the time for quibbling is past, Ban said. Nations, global leaders and individuals must act.

“We have to take urgent action before we regret our inaction,” he said, adding there is no time to lose. “This is the world where all succeeding generations have to live. We have a moral and political responsibility to make this world better for all.” n

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GLOBAL EYE

Bright young things The entrepreneurs of today are the philanthropists of tomorrow. So understanding where the next generation of donors might come from, the size of their wealth and their outlook, matters. According to two new studies, their profile is increasingly young, self-made and originates in developing markets. round the world, entrepreneurs are getting younger, especially in the Middle East, reports a global study by BNP Paribas. The first seeds of entrepreneurialism in the region start to grow at around 25 years old while, by comparison, American entrepreneurs are on average 33 years old before they start to consider going it alone.

There is increasing geographical diversification, too. The focus of entrepreneurialism is shifting south and eastwards towards emerging markets.

India is a particularly vibrant source of new wealth creation and the forecast looks particularly good for women. Nearly half of successful entrepreneurs surveyed by BNP Paribas in India were female, while Hong Kong and France also did well in the gender equality stakes for entrepreneurs.

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A second report by research group the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) shows that, as patterns of prosperity change around the world, a new category of givers is emerging. This fast-growing group of professionals, executives and entrepreneurs represents what the EIU terms new wealth builders (NWBs). While not super-wealthy, with assets of between $100,000 and $2m, together they still wield serious financial clout: NWBs hold around $88 trillion globally, a figure expected to reach $145 trillion by 2020. Overall, NWBs in emerging markets are amassing wealth much faster than their contemporaries in developed countries. Crucially, this group has a keen sense of global citizenship and already regularly gives to charity. If these new sources of wealth embrace philanthropy, the future looks bright indeed.

Location, location, location According to a poll of more than 2,500 global entrepreneurs, the Middle East and South Asia region offers fertile ground for start-ups. Turkey and India, for example, outrank mature markets such as the UK and US, when it comes to supporting entrepreneurial activity.

Supportive regulations, a strong business community and a flourishing pioneer spirit in the country are all important to shaping a culture of wealth creation, the survey found.

Top 10 wealth creation countries for entrepreneurs in 2014 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

China Hong Kong Turkey Italy India Singapore UK USA Gulf states Switzerland

*Source: BNP Paribas Global Entrepreneurialism Report 2015

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GLOBAL EYE

Youthful enterprise

New money, new giving

The age at which the entrepreneurial urge kicks in is falling. Entrepreneurs who are 60 years old today first considered going into business when they were 37 years old. Current business-savvy youth, in contrast, start out at an average of 30 years and one month. This age varies across world regions.

Lack of employment opportunities and fast-developing economies mean Middle East individuals on average start their first company a full six years before their US counterparts do.

It is not just ultrawealthy generosity that is shaping the giving landscape. Some 97 per cent of the so-called NWBs – those holding assets of between $100,000 and $2m – give a portion of their income to charity and more than half choose to donate their dollars to low-income countries. India is the rising star of this category, with Indian NWB assets expected to grow tenfold by 2020.

Age of first-time entrepreneurs, by region 35

25

28.3 Middle East

30.2

30.8

Rest of Asia

China

32.3

34.5

Europe

USA

*Source: BNP Paribas Global Entrepreneurialism Report 2015

Percentage of income given to charity (% of gross income)

(% of NWBs)

6+%

30%

1-5%

67%

0%

3%

*Source: Economist Intelligence Unit, Spotlight on the New Wealth Builders report, 2015

Setting priorities Across the world, NWBs have similar priorities when it comes to giving. Almost half favour gifts to their country of birth, while some 56 per cent donate to their local community. Charities that support children receive the lion’s share of donations from NWBs. Top charitable preferences among NWBs

67% Religious

69% Poverty reduction

75% Education

76% Health

83%

Children’s charities

*Source: Economist Intelligence Unit, Spotlight on the New Wealth Builders report, 2015

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GUEST COLUMN

Made in the Gulf: a new era of humanitarian aid Big data will be a force for change, if global aid agencies can leverage technology to unleash its power. Patrick Meier reveals how Qatar is leading the charge id agencies today face a data overload. For an industry once marked by information scarcity, the problem is no longer finding the data, but sifting through to find what is relevant. Social media, mainstream media, satellite and increasingly aerial imagery, are just some of the drivers of data change.

For relief organisations, the deluge is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. The ‘needle’ is potentially lifesaving information.

The ‘haystack’ is the flood of other data generated during disasters.

At the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), we believe the answer lies in next generation humanitarian technologies.

QCRI’s social innovation programme seeks to apply advanced computing for social good. A principal area of focus is data change in the humanitarian space. To this end, we work directly with leading aid organisations around the globe to help them win the big data battle.

In response to the Nepal earthquake in April, the United Nations used our MicroMappers platform to rapidly assess disaster

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damage. MicroMappers pairs crowdsourcing – in the form of digital volunteers from around the world – with artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through data created during crises. In the case of Cyclone Pam in March of this year, the UN used MicroMappers to quickly find and map more than 1,000 pictures of disaster damage from both social media and mainstream media.

AI plays a critical role in MicroMappers’ success. As digital volunteers find relevant tweets, our AI engine can be trained to learn from users in real-time. The technology reads all tweets tagged as ‘urgent needs’, and learns to recognise patterns. Once our AI engine has read enough, it will automatically tag new tweets – at a rate of up to 2 million per hour.

About the writer Patrick Meier is an expert in innovation in aid and author of the book ‘Digital Humanitarians’. He is director of social innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute where he develops next generation humanitarian technologies

Still, many people in disaster-affected areas are not on Twitter, which is why we developed a system to detect and tag SMS messages. Our partners Unicef and the World Food Programme (WFP) are piloting this extension for public and emergency health projects in Africa.

Our team is now working to extend this real-time machine learning, to analyse pictures posted on social and mainstream media.

We hope to develop automated algorithms that can identify disaster damage in Instagram pictures and YouTube videos, for example. This is no trivial task, and underscores why aid agencies are unable to combat data change alone.

Aerial data is fast becoming a big challenge too. At the time of writing, the World Bank is using MicroMappers to help tackle the aftermath of Cyclone Pam. The agency is using remote control helicopters and planes to capture aerial shots of disaster-affected areas, and utilising MicroMappers to filter them. The platform has previously been used by wildlife protection experts in Africa to analyse aerial imagery of their wildlife reserve for monitoring and

protection purposes. Clearly, our humanitarian technologies can be used for much more than sudden onset disasters.

Looking to the future, the sky may not be the limit for next generation humanitarian technologies. We are currently collaborating with US-based Planet Labs to accelerate disaster damage analysis using satellite imagery. Planet Labs plans to deploy hundreds of micro satellites into space to create the first global constellation of satellites. This will give us access to daily imagery updates for the entire planet.

We plan to use MicroMappers, among other platforms, to quickly crowdsource the analysis of satellite imagery for a wide range of humanitarian and social good projects. We also plan to use AI to create the algorithms that can automatically identify features of interest in satellite imagery.

The end goal is to have one map that pulls in all the filtered information from tweets, pictures, videos and imagery. Ultimately, we hope to transform the way aid agencies respond to global crises and to help solve major humanitarian challenges. n

“The problem is no longer finding the data, but sifting through to find what is relevant�

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Crossing the divide Education is critical if the Middle East is to foster understanding in its own communities, and bridge the gap with the West, says Saudi businessman and philanthropist Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber

BY TAMARA WALID iving is a complex matter.

For many philanthropists, the task of identifying how best to deploy their cash for impact – and to which of a myriad of needy causes – is dizzyingly difficult. Not so for Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber. The Saudi-born businessman’s approach to philanthropy is refreshingly direct, and can be summed up in a single word: education.

“Everything starts with education; it is the key,” he says. “Individuals can and do make a difference in the world, but to do so, they first need education.”

Al Jaber is the founder of MBI Group, a Saudi-based conglomerate with stakes in hospitality, oil and gas, property and more. A self-made entrepreneur, he claims assets of more than $9bn, with interests stretching across the Middle East and Europe.

Throughout his career, he has siphoned off millions of dollars to philanthropy through his eponymous foundation, seeking primarily to bridge the divide between the Middle East and the rest of the world through education and cultural dialogue.

This ethos took root in the mid1990s, when Al Jaber was pursuing his studies in London. In what he saw as

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the absence of a high-level educational forum to forge ties between the West and the Middle East – “to aid understanding and counteract negative perceptions; not only the West’s view of the Middle East, but vice versa,” he explains – he created one. Today, still backed by the MBI Al Jaber Foundation, the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) sits under the umbrella of the University of London as a leading hub of teaching, research and debate on the Middle East and wider Arab world.

Al Jaber also funds a raft of scholarships for young Arabs, in an effort to shape a new generation of leaders, able to straddle both East and West. His foundation has enabled more than 1,000 students over the past two decades to enroll on courses in Britain, Austria, France and elsewhere.

“Our only stipulation is that they return to serve their home country

RIGHT Saudi-born Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber, founder of MBI Group, launched his foundation to improve ties between the West and the Arab world

“Individuals ‘We have a moral can and anddopolitical make a responsibility difference in the to world, make this but to do so, worldfirst they better needforeducation” all’

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when they have completed their studies, so they can contribute to their country and their culture,” he says.

“The foundation’s primary raison d’être is to serve the people of the Arab region.”

This support has rarely been needed more. Turmoil in the Middle East dominates world headlines, with bloody conflicts dividing Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. Globally, refugee figures have passed the 50 million mark for the first time since the Second World War, a quantum leap driven by conflicts in the region and reflected in the makeshift tents that span Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Children are a particular casualty; of those living in refugee camps, fewer than half have access to formal education and among those that do, the drop-out rate is high. For Al Jaber, promoting dialogue and a greater grasp of the region will be critical to resolving its biggest issues.

“There is nothing unique about my part of the world. We Arabs, whether Muslim or Christian, and our neighbours in Israel are not a hopeless case,” he says. “With knowledge, understanding and tolerance we can work together to bring about peaceful reform and progress… giving the people the chance to enjoy the benefits that are accepted as normal in the West.”

Many of the Arab world’s challenges today stem from ignorance and people “fired up by information that is biased and usually plain wrong,” Al Jaber explains. Individuals and governments together must tackle these problems.

“Given what is happening in the world, we Arabs and Muslims need to work even harder to make the views of the moderate majority heard. This is one of the things I hope the young people I provide scholarships will contribute towards,” he says.

“I tell graduating students: don’t leave it all to the politicians,” he adds.

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Credit: ITP Images

PHILANTHROPY AGE

“Given what is happening in the world, we Arabs and Muslims need to work even harder to make the views of the moderate majority heard” “It is too easy to blame them. Whether as doctors, teachers, artists, journalists or – as in my case, in business – we all have important contributions to make.”

The focus of Al Jaber’s foundation shifts according to regional needs.

For a number of years, its scholarship

programme helped female students from Saudi Arabia, young people from Iraq and more recently Yemen, to pursue their educational goals. With the ongoing unrest in the latter, Al Jaber feels an increasing obligation to assist the troubled country’s youth, in the

PHILANTHROPY AGE

hope of contributing to a more stable, prosperous future.

“This year we will, once again, be focusing on Yemen. We are in the planning stage at the moment, so it is not possible to say how many students we will assist, especially with the difficult situation there,” he says. “But we will do our best to benefit as many young people as possible.”

To date, Middle Eastern youth funded by the foundation have pursued higher education at top regional and international universities, including the American Universities of Cairo and Beirut; Dar Al Hekma College in Saudi Arabia; INSEAD, Sciences Po and the University of Nice Sofia Antipolis in France; Vienna’s MODUL University, and the University College London.

Fahmia Al Fotih is among them. Born in a tiny mountainous village in Yemen,

she was the third among eight siblings.

When she was old enough to go to school, she had to endure a one-hour walk to the top of a mountain to reach the only school in the area. It had no chairs or tables and students had to

BELOW Al Jaber’s foundation has helped more than 1,000 Arab students pursue further education in countries such as the UK and France

make do with sitting on a cold floor. At five years old, Al Fotih had to help out with domestic duties from fetching water, grazing animals and harvesting to housework. She never imagined a world outside her diminutive village, let alone her country.

Now at 36, Al Fotih works as a communications analyst at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Yemen, raising awareness about reproductive health and rights and helping reduce maternal mortality in the country, where the rate is among the highest in the region.

With her father’s support, she graduated from university in Sana’a and became the first female journalist in the newsroom. She enjoyed journalism immensely, but wanted to grow and pursue her education. She persistently applied for an MBI scholarship and was finally one of seven lucky students to win one three years later. “It was the happiest moment in my life and for my dad. He didn’t have any money or property so all his investment was in our education. I remember everything as if it was yesterday,” recalls Al Fotih.

She travelled to London to do an MA in International Relations at the University of Westminster, graduating in 2009. “For an ordinary girl who came from a tiny village in Yemen it was a turning point in my life,” she says. “I discovered myself. It wasn’t just about supporting me financially, but the complete package. Through it, I could discover my soul, see the world, and the many possibilities out there.”

Stories such as Al Fotih’s are what drives Al Jaber to continue giving.

He says he allocates his capital when and where he can make an impact and advance his overarching goal of fostering understanding between the Middle East and the wider world. He is a strong believer in social responsibility, seeing philanthropy as the duty

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of all individuals, and not just the responsibility of the wealthy.

“We believe that business people have a major role in society, creating jobs that give dignity to the worker, and paying back to society the benefits they have accumulated,” he says. “[But] philanthropy should be part of everyone’s life. We can always find someone less fortunate than ourselves.

“Today there are several global philanthropists who provide role models, but everyone has something to give. Everyone can make a difference.”

In an extension of this, Al Jaber believes it is critical to foster cooperation between the private sector, government and large global organisations such as the United Nations. Such tie-ups could go some way towards addressing the lack of resources and economic difficulties seen in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, by leveraging the ability of the private sector to provide some services with greater efficiency, he says. One example is the MBI Al Jaber Foundation’s partnership with the UN education and science agency, UNESCO, on education reform, which seeks to enhance education systems in the Arab world, from curriculum content to teacher training.

“The programme had its ups and downs initially, [but] now many countries throughout the region are making progress on this issue and reforming their systems,” Al Jaber says.

It is not the foundation’s only success.

As a proponent of free speech, Al Jaber cites one of his proudest achievements as the MBI Media Institute in Sana’a, Yemen, which has been operating for almost two years, often under extreme conditions. The institute, which is funded by the foundation and offers free courses in journalism, photojournalism and production, has trained more than 1,000 people in pursuit of a non-partisan press.

“Philanthropy should be part of everyone’s life. We can always find someone less fortunate than ourselves” When asked about his legacy, the Saudi businessman says he hopes to leave behind a world where people in the Arab world and the West have a better understanding of each other and share a mutual respect. “To achieve that, we need to foster education and

ABOVE The MBI Media Institute in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, offers free training courses in journalism and has trained more than 1,000 people in the past two years

break down barriers by exposing young people to other cultures and ways of seeing the world,” he says. “I have attempted to make my contribution by supporting educational reform, funding scholarships and assisting those who are willing to listen as well as speak.”

For Fahmia Al Fotih, Al Jaber has left a lasting impact on her perception of the world and on her future. “I consider Sheikh Al Jaber as a champion of education in the Arab world, and women’s empowerment in particular, in a world where women are perceived as second citizens,” she says. “I thank him every day of my life.” n

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

Sea of troubles Desperate and fearful, an increasing number of Syrian refugees are risking their lives to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

One charity, funded by philanthropists, is fighting to ensure they survive

BY ANGELA GIUFFRIDA zzam Daaboul, the son of a truck driver and tailor, was just 19 when violence flared in his home country of Syria. Until that point in March 2011, life was relatively settled. From Lattakia, Syria’s main port city, he had been studying for a degree in banking and insurance at Tishreen University, while earning a living as a salesman and freelance web designer.

People had expected the revolution to be comparatively swift, he says. But as civilian deaths mounted, and the regime’s security forces quelled dissent with brutal tactics, Daaboul decided to take flight.

“We had to leave Syria,” he adds. “We had no place to disappear to. We also thought the revolution would be short and that we would soon be free.”

Syria’s conflict, now in its fifth year, has killed more than 220,000 people and forced nearly 4 million to leave their homes, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. It is, said spokeswoman Melissa Fleming in March, “the worst humanitarian crisis of our era”.

Daaboul was the first of his family to escape, after buying fake documents and travelling to Belgium by plane. The rest of his family, like thousands of

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others, paid people smugglers to take them on the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Unlike thousands of other refugees who made the same journey over the past four years, they survived.

More than 22,000 migrants have died trying to reach Europe since 2000, according to figures released last year by global body the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), and the crisis is getting worse. More than 1,770 migrants died in this stretch of sea in the first four months of 2015, already half the count of dead and missing for the whole of 2014. Twin calamities in April saw 400 and up to 900 migrants die in the course of less than 10 days crossing from Libya to Italy when their boats capsized.

“We try to remove the politics from migrant search and rescue.

No-one deserves to die out at sea”

“In the absence of enough resettlement offers and other legal ways to get to Europe, many find no other way other than getting there on rickety boats,” says Irem Arf, refugee and migrant rights’ researcher at human rights organisation Amnesty International.

“Many die along the way.”

The high-risk journey became more dangerous after the Italian government shut down its €9m-amonth ($9.5m) Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation last November, an initiative it could no longer afford.

The operation, which aided vessels in distress, saved more than 100,000 lives during its year-long mission. Urgent EU talks in April brought more money for rescue missions, along with new measures to fight traffickers and support resettlement, but these are just the tip of what is needed, UNHCR warned.

Yet as the EU grapples with how to respond to the unfolding tragedy, one private mission has stepped into the breach. The Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) was set up by Maltabased philanthropists Christopher and Regina Catrambone two years ago. After the Lampedusa disaster in 2013 where 400 migrants drowned off the Italian coast, the couple – originally from the

ABOVE  Death rates of those making the lethal journey across the Mediterranean have risen 50-fold since the end of the Mare Nostrum mission

PHILANTHROPY AGE

US and Italy – invested $7m of their own cash in a 40m ship equipped with an onboard clinic, two high-speed inflatable boats and two surveillance drones to find and rescue migrants in peril on unseaworthy vessels.

The Phoenix ship rescued some 3,000 migrants from the Mediterranean between August and October 2014, transferring them safely to Italian navy vessels or to Sicily. Nearly two-thirds of those rescued were Syrians, according to Martin Xuereb, MOAS’ director.

“We try to remove the politics from migrant search and rescue. Once you do that, you realise no-one deserves to die out at sea,” says Xuereb.

Private efforts such as MOAS are likely to become even more critical amid an expected swell in asylum demand in industrialised countries. In 2014, 866,000 people applied for asylum across 44 industrialised countries, with Germany,

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the US, Turkey, Sweden and Italy the top destinations. Germany alone received a fifth – or 173,000 – asylum applications last year, a quarter of them from Syrians. In a sign of how the ranks of the desperate are growing, the number of Syrian refugees who reached and applied for asylum across the 28 EU states in the three years up to October 2004 stood at 150,000, according to Amnesty. Inevitably, more will set their sights on Europe.

“I have no doubt the number of Syrians attempting to cross will increase this year and exponentially so,” says Xuereb. “There is a moral and legal obligation to lend assistance.”

MOAS plans to restart operations on May 2 for six months and is seeking help from donors to keep the operation running. It costs $550,000 per month to operate the mission, with the drones – which Xuereb says are central

BELOW The private Migrant Offshore Aid Station mission rescued some 3,000 migrants in three months last year.

60 per cent were Syrians

to pinpointing boats’ exact location – accounting for more than half the budget. The Catrambones have funded two months’ worth of their use, leaving a gap of between $1.2m and $1.5m for the drones alone. More funding is critical to underpin the remaining four months MOAS hopes to be operational for.

“We need philanthropists and highnet-worth donors who consider this a worthy cause,” says Xuereb.

For this year’s operation, the maritime rescue foundation will partner with medical non-governmental organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). From May to October, two

“We need philanthropists and donors who consider this a worthy cause”

PHILANTHROPY AGE

22,000

More than 22,000 migrants have died trying to reach Europe in the last 14 years

doctors and a nurse will join Phoenix’s 20-strong crew, offering emergency care such as treatment for dehydration, fuel burns or hypothermia. MSF will also provide cultural mediation, deepening the range of services MOAS can provide.

“We cannot put an end to the wars and misery which force people to leave their home countries, but we do have a chance to reduce the number of deaths and provide critical assistance to the thousands of human beings who will cross the Mediterranean this summer,” says Arjan Hehenkamp, general director, of France-based MSF. If funding permits, MOAS could offer a year-round service. This is becoming ever more important now that migrants are increasingly attempting the journey

BELOW By April 2015, more than 36,000 migrants had been rescued in the Mediterranean, of which Syrians were the largest group, according to UNHCR

in the winter months, when deadly storms have traditionally put people off trying to cross, notes Xuereb.

“We know what we are doing is not the solution to the problems of migration. However, it is a crisis and

when you have a crisis you need to manage it,” he says. “We want to humanise the face of migration.”

Even for those who survive the journey, life in Europe is not without its perils. As illegal immigrants, both Daaboul’s brothers were arrested along the way, with the youngest, who was under 18 years old at the time, jailed for three months in Greece.

His parents, older brother, sisterin-law and their two children arrived by boat from Egypt to Italy. They all eventually made their way across Europe to Belgium, where they were met with a frosty welcome.

Daaboul’s luck changed when he learnt how to speak Flemish, got his residence permit after an eight-month wait and found a job in IT support. “I felt as if Belgium smiled at me. I found a job, and was able to help my family, which made me feel like a positive human being to society.”

In that respect, he considers himself among the lucky few. n Additional reporting: Adrienne Cernigoi

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

The world in 2025 The global humanitarian landscape is in a state of flux, buffeted by forces as diverse as technology, conflict, population growth and climate change. From education, to employment, to the advent of mobile money, our team of experts offer their predictions on how the industry will change – for good or bad – over the next decade

Gender: closing the gap orldwide, women are still not equal to men. They earn less, they are highly vulnerable to violence and they are underrepresented at every level of leadership.

These inequities are being heightened by conflicts and by the growth of fundamentalisms around the world.

Yet – despite all this – I am hopeful, because I believe that our world is finally recognising that achieving gender equality is not only the right thing for the world’s women, but one of our best levers for eradicating poverty, minimising conflict and achieving a sustainable world.

In 2025, I’d like us to look back over a decade that saw exponentially more funding for women’s rights – especially for the grassroots women’s groups we know are the best mobilisers of lasting change. I’d like us to be applauding the fact that we attained every one of a challenging set of Sustainable Development Goals, because we put investments in women’s rights at the centre of our effort on every goal.

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ABOVE By 2025, I’d like women and girls around the world to know they are valued for their brains as well as their bodies, and for all of them to have equal chances to learn

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With money and policy behind us, we’d see a different world in 10 years’ time. By 2025, I’d like to see dramatically reduced rates of violence against women; with not only the right laws on the books, but consistent enforcement of those laws.

I’d like to see wage equality and parity in political representation and leadership.

I’d like every woman to have access to contraception and safe, legal abortion.

I’d like women and girls worldwide to know that they are valued for their brains as well as their bodies, and for all of them to have equal chances to learn and access new technology.

Now is the time for gender equality. We simply need to amass the money, energy and will to get us there. We welcome the support of all parties in this goal, whether as advocates, donors, partners or activists.

Together, let’s champion women’s human rights so the world is a better place for everyone by 2025.

Musimbi Kanyoro CEO, Global Fund for Women

Aid: the long game he Middle East will dominate the humanitarian sector over the next decade, quite simply because we have failed to respond adequately to the crises in the region. Today, we boast cutting-edge technology in everything from transport, to logistics, to IT. Yet we aren’t able to deliver online education to displaced children in camps, or provide digital cash transfers for refugees.

These are simple problems to solve.

The days of handing out basic pots and pans and plastic sheeting to desperate refugees must end.

Refugees are no longer a shortterm concern. The Syria conflict alone has given rise to millions of children in refugee camps, with no stability or access to education. If, as an industry, we fail to address this and do not look beyond emergency aid, we risk creating a generation of disaffected youth.

A critical influence in the industry going forward will be the involvement of the private sector and philanthropists. Governments are slow to change, but many philanthropists and foundations take their lead from the private sector – and with that comes efficiency. The humanitarian sector has for too long relied on temporary fixes; band aids for vast, complex problems.

What we need is a hard-headed, sustainable approach.

The humanitarian sector cannot afford to continue approaching emerging disasters as it does. As an industry, we should never have found ourselves spending billions of dollars responding to the Ebola crisis. Aid has been channelled

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to West Africa for more than 30 years, yet there isn’t even a semblance of a sustainable primary healthcare system there – proof, if it were needed, that the industry is falling short.

By 2025, our intervention methodologies must focus on preventing

disaster, rather than responding to it.

If we fail, the consequences will be vast.

Kevin Noone Executive director, International Medical Corps UK, managing director, International Medical Corps UAE

ABOVE The Ebola crisis in West Africa showed where the aid industry has fallen short. Future interventions must focus on preventing disaster, rather than responding to it

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

Youth employment: a tipping point ducation and employment top the list of issues set to create an outsized impact on the future of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Long before the Arab uprisings catapulted the region’s youth unemployment issue into global headlines, skills and opportunity gaps had left record numbers of youth locked out of the labour force. The International Labour Organisation forecasts regional youth unemployment will rise to 30 per cent by 2018, and many predict the situation will only worsen through 2025.

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ABOVE The International Labour Organisation says that, without interventions, youth unemployment in MENA will reach 30 per cent by 2018

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This moment is the tipping point.

A decade from now, the region will witness a deepening crisis with social, political and economic reverberations.

Or, massive improvements in the employment outlook for youth will unleash tremendous creative energy and growth. I am hopeful for the latter.

The global media’s unrelentingly negative narrative of MENA and its “demographic time bomb” is overdue for change. Some news organisations are beginning to tell another side of the story, and individuals – from the youth breaking into the job market, to the CEOs

hiring them – are changing perceptions.

As more recognise the tremendous asset of a young and dynamic population, we’ll see increased investment that creates job and entrepreneurship opportunities.

Over the next decade, the private sector has the chance to drive a transformation in education and workforce development practices.

Indeed, a handful of early adopters have already begun making major, multi-faceted investments. Firms like Consolidated Contractors Company, the Abraaj Group, Souq.com and Accenture understand that investing in youth employment produces returns beyond near-term corporate social responsibility benefits, by positively impacting the longterm, broader business environment.

In 2025, these companies won’t be the exception they are today. Because of this, classroom education will be more closely aligned with the skills that companies need, and we’ll see the first signs of education systems and businesses working together to anticipate future skills needs.

A growing sense of urgency will also produce new champions, who will commit to supporting long-term investments. I see youth employment becoming a major draw of philanthropic capital, attracting support from within the region in the same way health and emergency aid issues do now. As a result, more experimental approaches will be possible, and we’ll see the pace of innovation and scale quicken.

The changes outlined above will not occur easily, but they are possible.

Ten years from now the education and employment outlook for young people in MENA can be far brighter than it is today.

Ron Bruder Founder, Education for Employment

Mobile money: complex cash obile money did not exist 10 years ago and it may not exist 10 years from now. At the heart of the industry is the mobile wallet, an electronic account that can be used for payment or converted to cash. It is a great innovation, filling the gap between bank accounts and cash, but key trends are pulling it in different directions.

Globally, over-the-counter transactions (OTC) – where clients use an agent to cash in a money transfer – are soaring.

This is because OTC is unregistered and easy to use for low-income clients. At the same time, quick loans are exploding and showing lenders that digital credit can be a tremendous driver of revenue.

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The Commercial Bank of Africa and Safaricom’s M-Shwari loans, or Chilebased financial services provider Tiaxa’s emergency advance, are key examples.

To this mix, we can add technology trends that could affect how mobile money develops. We’re seeing the rapid expansion of mobile data, smart devices and social networks in developing countries, alongside India’s massive effort to create portable, digital identities. Each of these trends weakens the hold of mobile network operators on clients.

In the next decade, we may see the mobile wallet torn asunder by the draw of informal, unregistered services on the one hand, and the freedom to choose among any service through mobile data and smart phones on the other.

Should countries follow India’s lead, digital identities would allow customers the freedom to shop around for specialised providers who offer

“We could see a growing pay-asyou-go economy”

ABOVE Mobile money fills the gap between bank accounts and cash, especially for the millions of unbanked poor, but it might not exist 10 years from now

products to meet specific needs, whether saving for school fees or crowdfunding a wedding. We could see a growing pay-as-you-go economy, with banks and regulated, deposit-taking institutions the likely platforms for these digital transaction accounts.

The flipside is that fraudsters will be ever present. Our greatest challenge will be protecting clients from the hackers and fly-by-night money shops that prowl the new digital dimension.

Tillman Bruett Manager, mobile money for the poor, UN Capital Development Fund

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

Migration: winds of change igration, or human mobility, will be a megatrend well beyond the first half of this century. There are more people migrating today than at any other time in recorded history. While a portion of this is forced migration, driven by conflict, persecution and disaster, the important thing is to recognise the inevitability in the next 10 years of mass migration.

The challenge we face is twofold. First, we must try to change the narrative about migration from the current negativity, to reflect the historical reality that migration has always been overwhelmingly positive.

The second challenge is to help countries learn to manage social and economic diversity, as well as ethnic and business diversity. That will be a major challenge. Europe, for four centuries, was a continent of origin. Now, for four decades, it has become a continent of destination. That requires a significant psychological and political shift in how migrants are regarded.

The other priority is to put in place policies that will save lives. Today, politicians are increasingly prepared to win votes off the back of the migrant issue, rather than acknowledging the inevitability and necessity of migration.

The next five years will be very difficult, but beyond that, the issue will become less complex simply because societies will recognise that they are only hurting themselves by not bringing their policies on migration up to date.

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“We must try to change the narrative about migration” Over the next decade, I hope to see more countries passing laws to allow dual citizenship, and to see regulations that support the portability of social security benefits. I’d like to see countries join one of the many regional dialogues on migration, to talk about the issues at hand, rather than allowing it to become politically exploited.

ABOVE Some 22,000 people have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in the past 15 years alone

Lastly, I would like to see a move towards humanitarian border management. In a crisis situation, such as that now in Syria, borders must be more open to those fleeing conflict.

That would allow us to save lives in places like the Mediterranean, where we’ve seen 22,000 die in the last 15 years. We’ve lost thousands this year alone. It will not get better, and the boats will keep coming, unless our policies towards migration change.

William Lacy Swing Director general, International Organisation for Migration

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Education: beyond the classroom here are 58 million primaryage children across the globe today without access to education. What is more worrying, is that a further 250 million primary-age children are not able to read, write or count adequately. Making quality primary schooling accessible to every child – regardless of nationality, creed, religion or gender – is more pressing now than ever before.

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Education is a central driver of social and economic change. It is a primary mechanism to tackle poverty, increase income, reduce conflict and aid sustainability. Basic education for boys and girls gives them greater power to initiate change. In the next decade, we hope to see greater emphasis on quality of learning, transforming the ‘one-sizefits-all’ tradition towards more relevant and applicable education based on

BELOW Education is a central driver of change and a means of addressing poverty, improving economic outcomes and aiding sustainability

children’s needs. We would also like to see further progress towards greater equity in education provision, transitioning to a more inclusive model from the old ‘chalk and talk’ model.

We look forward to seeing more and better prepared, better compensated and better-supported teachers across the developing world. We hope to see the realisation of country budgetary reforms funneling more domestic resources into the education sector. In addition, we foresee better use of those funds to ensure adequate teacher development, as well as sustainable, equitable and inclusive school environments.

We also expect advances in technology to enable developing countries to afford education management systems that track and report on contextual learning indicators.

In the MENA region we hope for more stability that can support long-term development efforts in education, as opposed to emergency response tactics.

We’d like to see nations perform better on learning outcomes, especially in science, maths and literacy. In more stable environments, such as the UAE, we hope to see the realisation of a knowledgebased economy through investments in local research and innovation. Lastly, we hope to see further investments in programmes that provide youth with 21st century skills. n Tariq Al Gurg CEO, Dubai Cares

58 million The number of primary-age children across the globe today without access to education

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

Top of the class By bridging the language gap in Senegal’s classrooms, Dubai Cares hopes to help forge a brighter future for children in the west African nation

BY TAMARA WALID n the small village of Niacoulrab, about an hour’s drive from Senegal’s capital Dakar, seven-year-old Abu Fi is getting ready for school. As he leaves, he shouts goodbye to his mother in Wolof, one of more than two dozen languages spoken in the multi-ethnic African state. Each morning, he walks 2km of dusty, winding paths to reach the local village school, where he joins his 77 classmates in learning to read, write and solve maths problems.

Fi’s daily routine is one familiar to thousands of households nationwide, but with one vital difference. He is part of a pilot programme in Senegal that seeks to help elementary school children learn more effectively, by teaching them in both their local language and French.

If successful, it will shape the course of the rest of his life.

For a child of school age, being able to understand simple mathematical equations and basic phrases could be the difference between staying in school or joining the 30 per cent drop-out rate Senegal is struggling to reduce. With most children using their local language at home, but expected to study in French at school, the programme’s dual-language approach aims to help students overcome linguistic barriers and prepares them to rejoin the official French-based curriculum.

“I like maths and I understand it better now,” says Fi, as he races to solve an

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equation on his small chalkboard before his classmates. “My parents can also help me with my homework now because they understand it.”

Among the 12 classes in Fi’s school, only two follow the bilingual programme, a pilot project started by Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED) in 2009, with the support of the privately-run William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In Senegal, a country of 14 million, almost half the population ekes out a living at the national poverty line, according to the World Bank, while less than 50 per cent of adults are literate.

Following a successful trial phase and with backing from the Ministry of Education, ARED sought funding for the next stage of implementation. This is where Dubai Cares, the education foundation launched by the emirate’s ruler in 2007, stepped in to offer its support.

“Dubai Cares is coming in at a critical point,” says the foundation’s chief executive Tariq Al Gurg. “The government has recognised the programme’s value, but to scale it up to a nationwide level, it needs a first step. This is the first step.”

Dubai Cares, which over the past eight years has backed projects in developing

RIGHT Children enrolled in the bilingual education programme have achieved higher exam scores than those taught under the one-language system

“Children are often demotivated by their inability to comprehend”

nations to give children access to quality primary education, is providing a $1.33m grant to enable ARED to extend the scheme and benefit 10,500 children across the country over a three-year period. With the funds, ARED can roll out the programme in Dakar, the Saint Louis and Kaolack regions of Senegal, and possibly cover wider areas in the future. The money will also allow ARED to train some 300 teachers, and recruit 24 education inspectors, to ensure the expansion runs smoothly.

“In many parts of the world, children find it difficult to absorb content in the classroom due to differences in the languages spoken at home and those used at school,” explains Al Gurg.

“Children are often demotivated by their inability to comprehend and keep up with the syllabus, which causes many of them to drop out. Closing this gap is critical to ensuring children stay in school.”

Worldwide, some 58 million children are out of school; 30 million of which live in sub-Saharan Africa. A further 250 million primary school-age children globally cannot read, write or count adequately. Some 12 million out-ofschool children in sub-Saharan Africa live in conflict-affected countries where schools either simply don’t exist, or are too dangerous to attend.

To date, Dubai Cares has reached close to 13 million beneficiaries across 39 developing countries through its various programmes. Their aim is to increase

PHILANTHROPY AGE

“Impact in education generally takes 10 to 12 years. We’re trying to halve that” children’s access to quality primary education by eliminating challenges that prevent them from going to school and learning. These efforts include school feeding, where children attending classes receive regular meals, deworming activities, curriculum development, literacy and numeracy through teacher training, school infrastructure as well as water, sanitation and hygiene in schools.

“The target is always to have the maximum number of children and diversity in our programmes, for better and faster impact,” explains Al Gurg.

“Impact in education generally takes 10 to 12 years. We are trying to halve that.”

Both parents and students have felt the results of the bilingual programme.

Children studying in two languages have demonstrated better understanding of the subjects and achieved higher scores than those under the one-language curriculum. They have improved in both languages and enjoy an 80 per cent pass rate, compared to a 40 per cent national average, especially when it comes to reading and maths, according to Samba KA, chairman of ARED. “In the beginning, parents thought it might reduce their ability to learn French.

Some parents refused and thought it would be a lost year for their child. Now those parents have come back,” says Lisa Slifer-Mbacke, technical director and copractice area leader for basic education at Washington-based Management Systems International (MSI), which is helping the Senegalese government form a plan to take the project countrywide.

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ABOVE Nearly a third of school-age children in Senegal drop out of formal education, in part because of language challenges

For Besse Nguer, mother of two children studying at the L’ecole Kawabata in Dakar, the programme’s positive impact on one of her sons is evident.

“My son now reads well, learns better and knows maths. His grades are much higher than my other son who is not studying under the bilingual programme,” she says, adding that she would like to

transfer her other child to allow him to learn under the same system.

“Parents have seen the results. That is one of the things that we see in terms of the scalability of the pilot project: the community and parents see the difference,” says Slifer-Mbacke.

With fresh funding from Dubai Cares, ARED can increase the number of

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Education for all At the end of last year, the world came close to achieving the Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) target for universal primary education for all by 2015, set by the UN. By 2012, some 91 percent of primary school-age children worldwide were enrolled in school.

The biggest challenges remain in west and central Africa and south Asia, where many countries are struggling with conflict.

In September this year, world leaders will decide on a new development blueprint for the next 15 years. These successors to the MDGs, known as the Sustainable Development Goals, will target social and economic issues such as poverty, global health and access to education, among others. High on the agenda will be ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Dubai Cares’ CEO Tariq Al Gurg says the UAE-based foundation is already prepared for these goals, as its programmes have focused not only on access to education, as stipulated by the MDGs, but also on the quality of education provided to the world’s youth.

“The MDGs talk only about access: they are not talking about teacher training, access to pre-school education, literacy and numeracy, as we are,” he says. “We are ahead of the game. We are already prepared for that.”

Despite more children attending school worldwide, many still drop out of formal education or fail to learn. Of 650 million children of primary school-age worldwide, 120 million do not reach Grade 4. A further 130 million reach Grade 4 but fail to achieve a minimum level of learning, according to UNICEF. If the world is to make strides in tackling extreme poverty and promoting economic inclusion, its efforts must begin in the classroom.

children under the scheme from 6,000 to 10,500, according to Mamadou Amadou Ly, general manager at the nonprofit. But that is still a drop in the ocean compared to the money needed to support the rollout of the project nationwide.

Slifer-Mbacke is assisting ARED, in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, in developing a practical approach to scaling up the programme across the country. This extension is earmarked for a six-year period, following Dubai Cares’ three-year contribution. The government will require about $29m to reach all elementary schools, targeting 15,000 classrooms with around 60 children per class.

Serigna Mbaye Thiam, Minister of National Education in Senegal, sees the cooperation between the Dubai foundation and ARED as being “critical for the education system” in his country, and a key part of the government’s strategy.

“But we will need a lot of resources,” he says, adding that there are plans to seek approval from the head of state for this long-term approach.

“Developing the plan is really the very first step in scaling up,” says Slifer-Mbacke.

One of her main priorities is continuing

ABOVE Almost half of the Sengalese population lives at the national poverty line, World Bank data shows

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“We are certain that once positive results start coming out, it will send an echo to the world” ARED’s work with communities and parents to create social awareness around why bilingual curriculums are important.

The other is funding. “It’s a big advocacy campaign and fundraising campaign at this point,” she says.

For Al Gurg, Dubai Cares’ assistance and its good reputation in supporting education will be critical in attracting new donors to underpin the expansion.

“We are certain – and this is what’s been happening with all our programmes to date – that once positive results start coming out, it will send an echo to the world,” he explains.

Dubai Cares has already lent funding and support to programmes in other west African countries, including Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and

ABOVE Dubai Cares hopes to see the programme rolled out nationwide, once funding has been secured

Chad. By improving access to education, the foundation’s wider goal is to tackle poverty and support broader economic growth in these developing nations.

“Dubai Cares has been an active supporter of primary education in west Africa since the organisation’s very beginnings, focusing on school infrastructure, school health and nutrition, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene in schools,” says Al Gurg.

Many of its programmes have focused on improving education opportunities for children, especially girls, in remote areas. In Niger, where the net enrollment ratio in primary education is as low as 54 per cent, the foundation helped marginalised communities in 12 communes, bringing about change in schooling practices affecting girls. Its efforts improved access and retention rates of girls in 16 schools, boosting enrollment levels.

In a bid to strengthen education in rural areas in Mauritania, Dubai Cares distributed 141,000 school kits to students and built 100 school latrines, fenced 100 schools and put in place

a hygiene and sanitation mechanism.

Further west in Sierra Leone, where 300,000 children are out of school, poor sanitation facilities and shortage of clean water are key hindrances to school attendance, especially for girls.

The foundation’s WASH-in-Schools programme, targeting a reduction in water, sanitation and hygiene-related diseases, has benefited more than 10,000 children in 20 primary schools.

ARED, meanwhile, hopes that more schools across Africa can follow the dual-language programme, and is helping them to do so through sharing expertise, methodology and new tool kits. Africa is today home to thousands of native languages, with some countries having inherited western languages from the colonial era.

On her teacher’s instruction, Aissata Kooghomou, 9, scribbles sentences in Wolof in her notebook, before adding her voice to her classmates’ in reciting a French song. At this moment, she is a bridge between two very different worlds – and a bright, encouraging glimpse of their future prospects. n

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

Call of the crowd Digital networks and big data are disrupting all spheres of life – and the world of philanthropy is no different. As more people chip in to support good causes, spurred by technology, we examine how the crowd is changing giving and shaping the delivery of aid

BY ADRIENNE CERNIGOI

C. Barns, from Colorado, US, will have a walkon part in the next instalment of the mega-franchise, Star Wars: Episode Vll out this year. The part cost him $10. His entry – and those from 125 other countries – helped raise $4.26m for UNICEF’s Innovation Labs, in partnership with Star Wars: Force for Change and Omaze, a crowdfunding site that raffles off celebrity experiences for good causes.

As in most spheres, leaps forward in the digital realm are disrupting the world of philanthropy, driven by a millennial generation obsessed with data, speed and transparency. In 2012, the UN Foundation was part of the team behind the digital drive #GivingTuesday, a day dedicated to gifting time or money to charities amid the pre-holiday shopping frenzy. Last year saw some $45m raised in 68 countries..

Technology has reinvigorated the old adage that many hands make light work. Crowdfunding, the digital version of the collection tin, is

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the most obvious star of this trend, with platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo taking centre stage.

Born as a recession-busting tool for entrepreneurs, they raised $2.7bn worldwide in 2012, financing more than one million projects of all hues.

Kickstarter estimates it raised $1,000 a minute in 2014.

It is not just a rich world gig either. Households in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) could deploy $5.6bn a year by 2025 in crowdfunding investments, according to World Bank estimates.

Money is not the only thing being amassed on a grand scale.

Tapping the crowd for information and expertise could prove to be a game-changer in the way aid is delivered. NGOs and charities are taking a slice of the action through platforms dedicated to good causes, such as Hollywood star Edward Norton’s CrowdRise. These platforms are particularly attractive for small NGOs with few fundraising resources of their own, as well as big philanthropic organisations keen to

ABOVE Households in the MENA region could deploy some $5.6bn a year by 2025 in crowdfunding investments, according to World Bank estimates

scout out innovative projects. Kite Patch – a device to fool mosquitoes and reduce malaria transmission in developing countries – raised more than $550,000 in 2013 on Indiegogo, or 743 per cent of its goal.

Crowdfunding depends on having a crowd, which can be anyone who wants to throw $1 or $1,000 into a project’s virtual pot. Far from

being the preserve of the wealthy, crowdfunding means anyone can be a philanthropist.

“The younger generation like to share,” says Sandra Khalil, co-founder of HopeCan, a crowdfunding platform for social causes in the Middle East set to launch this year.

“It is part of their identity, they are a champion for ideas that are important to them.”

Crowdfunding infrastructure is just starting to grow in the region, but online giving is slowly penetrating MENA’s pockets.

The UN World Food Programme’s

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Click to save Sometimes it takes a crisis to spur innovation: and the UN’s refugee agency is no stranger to crisis. Almost half its 2014 funding needs for Syrians in the region went unfulfilled (right).

In response, UNHCR launched the Private-Sector Partnership Platform, an online portal through which corporates can pledge cash in $25,000 units, in-kind donations, or cash assistance.

The platform allows donors to see urgent needs quickly and makes clear what they get for their money: $25,000 buys 12,500 jerry cans, for example. The platform will also cut processing time, says Ziad Ayad, UNHCR’s external relations officer.

UNHCR has already received five cash pledges (of between $25,000 and $150,000) and one in-kind gift since February.

The first phase of the platform targets GCC firms.

UNHCR hopes to introduce crowdfunding by World Refugee Day, on 20 June, where individuals can club together to raise $25,000, or groups of corporates to fund an entire need. If successful, the portal could be a template for UNHCR’s other underfunded emergencies worldwide.

“The digital platform is primarily a tool to make us, and the response, more effective,” explains Ayad.

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(WFP) social media campaign #ADollarALifeline raised $80m in a week in December, after the agency was forced to halt food assistance for Syrian refugees. Just $1.8m of that came from the crowd, but almost 12,000 of the 14,000 individuals who contributed were new donors, according to communications officer Joelle Eid. Still, organisations need to beware crowdfunding’s pitfalls, says Lucy Bernholz, co-director of the Digital Civil Society Lab, a Stanford University project. The fees charged by platforms may be low, between 3 and 5 per cent, but the cost in time required to develop a compelling pitch and to cultivate the social network that makes a project successful, is high.

More worryingly, the focus on discrete projects often overlooks overhead costs. “It may be very appealing to donors, but it’s a starvation cycle for non-profits in the long run,” warns Bernholz. “It creates a cycle of granularity that doesn’t lend itself to long-term institutional help or systemic action.”

“The ability for lots of people to donate a small amount of eyeball space to help make a terrible situation visible and save people’s lives? You can’t put a dollar value on that” And while platforms increase the visibility of money flows, the jury is out on whether it enhances accountability or impact.

“You can count every click, every tweet, but do any of them matter?” says Bernholz. “The good news is that we are encouraging norms of greater transparency.”

Still, this data explosion offers another avenue for the humanitarian space – crowdsourcing. A watershed moment came in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake when digital volunteers gifted their time and mouse clicks to emergency relief efforts. Students from Tufts University in the US sifted and

tagged thousands of texts and tweets about collapsed buildings or trapped people to plot a real-time crisis map. Some 1,000 Creolespeaking volunteers chipped in to translate the messages. The map was critical for aid agencies overwhelmed by the urgency and confusion of search-and-rescue efforts.

“Ten years ago if there was a disaster on the other side of the world your only option was to send money,” says Bernholz. “The ability for lots of people to donate a small amount of eyeball space to help make a terrible situation visible and save people’s lives? You can’t put a dollar value on that.”

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Vital signs Planning how many doses of a medicine to order is hard when you have no numbers. When Josh Nesbit, Medic Mobile’s CEO, saw this at St Gabriel’s hospital, Malawi, he knew he had to act: “There was just a black hole [of data].

They had to guess.”

Founded in 2010, Medic Mobile uses SMS messages to transmit health updates between the crowd – volunteer community health workers who reach poor, rural patients – and hospitals. The system maps out data from a network of health workers onto a dashboard, giving doctors an accurate picture of the health landscape.

“That helps people at higher levels of the formal health system do things differently, such as redistribute stock of

essential medicines, or plan their outreach vehicle to target the right places,” explains Nesbit. “All you need are slivers of information that help you make decisions.”

St Gabriel’s doubled the number of patients it treated for tuberculosis in six months as its TB monitoring officer could identify and visit at-risk communities.

Medic Mobile’s technology is amazingly simple, says Nesbit. Using an extra sim card that slides into any phone, community health workers send information to a central manager about the 100 or so families in their area.

Start-up costs range between $150-$190 to equip and train each health worker and running costs are $2 per health worker per year. Some 7,800 health workers used Medic Mobile

in 2013, with the non-profit reaching 5 million people in 21 countries.

Donors cover the $50,000 to $70,000 development costs for new products.

The system has been used to monitor polio outbreaks in Nepal since 2013, using a network of 600 reporters.

“We need to pick up any signal we can of a potential case,” says Nesbit. “Even hearing that we have no cases is really important.”

Medic Mobile has ambitious goals. It wants to add 5,500 health workers this year and, by 2020, aims to support 20,000 community health workers and 100 million people.

“We’ll see the professionalisation of the crowd in the future,” predicts Nesbit. “It’s going to help us support health systems better and faster.”

Digital mapping has been part of almost every disaster since, she adds.

And in 2012, the UN set up its own Digital Humanitarian Network.

While emergencies lend themselves to cutting-edge technology, everyday development work is testing more prosaic tools such as SMS messages. The resulting data can improve essential services and give citizens a say.

In the Indian state of Karnataka, a social enterprise is using crowdsourcing to improve water access and quality. NextDrop sends an SMS, alerting subscribers to when the water valve in their area will be turned on. Such information is vital to reduce wasted trips in cities such as Hubli where people typically wait three days for water. Crucially, the information flow is two-way: subscribers report water delays, too.

Six months into the programme, NextDrop started receiving feedback

BELOW NextDrop’s map-based dashboard collates users’ feedback on broken water pipes, reducing repair times from 10 to three days in some Indian cities

about pipe damage and water contamination, explains Bindu Susheel, head of utilities business.

Now, NextDrop informs water companies where complaints are clustering via a map-based dashboard, so they can hone in on the problem. Depending on the issue, repair times have dropped from 10 to three days. NextDrop currently has 50,000 subscribers in Hubli, Dharwad, Bangalore and Mysore.

“Collecting feedback helps utilities visualise [the problem],” says Susheel.

“It is more efficient and people feel the utility is more responsive.”

The service is free for individuals while the water company pays between four and 10 rupees ($0.06$0.15) per person [continued on p.45]

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Filling in the blanks When Ebola struck West Africa last year, aid agencies rushing to help faced an unusual challenge: finding the victims. Alongside the tens of villages and settlements clamouring for help, were dozens more invisible to relief teams.

These, like great swathes of the undeveloped world, were overlooked and for a simple reason – they don’t appear on maps.

A shockingly large percentage of the world remains unmapped. From cities in emerging countries, to vast rural regions in the developing world, whole communities exist with little to no official data on their location, geography or population size. Poor and underdeveloped, they are at increased risk of natural disasters, conflict and disease outbreaks – and without maps, humanitarian agencies can struggle to respond.

Missing Maps is one answer. Launched last year, it is the brainchild of the American and British Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Backed by an army of digital volunteers, the project aims to create free, online maps for every settlement on earth.

MAP UNMAPPED 42

“All you need is a computer to contribute; time and skill are the donations,” says Andrew Braye of the British Red Cross. “It’s a real collaborative effort.”

The method is simple. Remote mappers use satellite images to trace the outlines of buildings, roads, rivers, and other key landmarks in a given area, creating a basic, digital map. This is printed out and given to volunteers on the ground in the community, anyone from students to local aid workers.

These volunteers add in details such as street and building names, to add colour and context. Lastly, the completed map is fed back to Missing Maps’ offices in London, where more volunteers update the information on OpenStreetMap. The result is a freely available digital map, and a vital tool for helping to shape future disaster response efforts.

“There are many people who want to offer hands-on help, rather than just money” says Kate Chapman, executive director, HOT. “This – filling in holes in geographic information – this is something they can do.”

MAP

DIGITAL VOLUNTEERS

STREET BUILDING

BUILDING

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

MENA means business Very small businesses have a hard time getting off the ground. This is particularly true in MENA where crowdfunding’s growth is hampered by caution about online payments. “I call it the cash society dilemma,” says Genny Ghanimeh, CEO of micro-lending platform Pi Slice.

Instead, Pi Slice has turned to the private sector to leverage its crowd, with six corporate partners that encourage employees and social media followers to offer loans. The Dubai-based outfit works with payment partner, Mangopay, to provide one-year loans of around $1,500 to would-be entrepreneurs. The platform has a 70 per cent funding success rate, she says.

Pi Slice has helped raise around $250,000 since 2012 for 200 micro-entrepreneurs in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan.

The platform plans to expand to Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia this year and add Islamic financial products, Musharakah, to its offering. There are some 3 million households in the region who could benefit from micro-loans, according to Pi Slice’s estimates.

“If we succeed we’ll be the first micro-lending, Sharia compliant platform in the world,” Ghanimeh adds.

per month. NextDrop aims to expand to some 50 other cities in Karnataka in the next two years.

Trust is at the heart of effective crowdsourcing, according to Susheel. NextDrop had to win over the utility companies and its crowd – each city’s residents – by demonstrating how it could be useful and investing in training subscribers to give feedback.

“Crowdsourcing democratises the whole system, it improves transparency,” observes NextDrop’s Susheel. “Direct access to information will go from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’.”

Another challenge is picking the right crowd. Big data can mean useful reports get drowned out in the tsunami of information, something Medic Mobile has filtered right from the start. The non-profit’s platform collates and analyses texts from community health workers in remote locations to give doctors the big picture on the area’s health status, and identify potential hot spots.

“We layer technology over networks of people. For example, a hospital’s community health manager is looking after messages from 100 community health workers.

And each of them are looking after

“We’re going to get smarter about the underlying nature of digital data and less enamoured of the gadgets”

BELOW Non-profit Medic Mobile’s crowdsourced data allows doctors to better allocate scarce resources

100 families,” says Josh Nesbit, Medic Mobile’s CEO. “Trusted community contacts will increase your signal-tonoise ratio tremendously.”

Nesbit is adamant information is key to improving services where resources are tight. “We’re always pushing for new vaccines, better treatments. But the big story is we need to figure out efficiency and distribution. Community members and patients are going to play a big role in that,” he says.

Managed in the right way, the wisdom of the crowd offers great rewards. “We’re going to get smarter about the underlying nature of digital data and less enamoured of the gadgets,” adds Stanford’s Bernholz.

When it comes to philanthropy, every little helps. n

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

Cutting the cables Developing nations are leveraging smart thinking and the digital revolution to find fixes to tricky social problems. Philanthropy Age explores six applications using off-grid ideas to help drive social change

BY STUART MATTHEWS

echnology is enjoying an era of convergence. Declining costs have collided with a proliferation of cheap wireless devices to create opportunity. Reliable cellular networks and low-cost mobiles have revolutionised communication in remote places phone lines have never reached, allowing whole populations to leapfrog the advent of analogue technology and bounce right into the digital age.

However this is just one step toward accessibility to products and services that were once the preserve of the rich, connected and industrialised. Portability and ease of use has cut the cables on everything from medical fieldwork to classroom education. Read on for a snapshot of how wireless technologies are being brought into play across the world, to tackle pressing social challenges.

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LEFT Wireless technologies are bringing change to previously intractable problems around the world, in areas such as health, education and energy

Digital library E-books are being used to boost the development of literacy skills in poor nations, through tablet devices and mobile phones hipping paper books to isolated communities is an expensive and difficult exercise, but it is a cost the developing world no longer needs to bear thanks to the growing reach of e-books.

Cheaper tablet devices and mobile phones have coincided with programmes to digitise thousands of existing written works, plus a surge in digital publishing for new content, creating an opportunity to bring reading to the masses in ways not seen before.

It’s a chance that Worldreader could not pass up. The San Francisco-based non-profit has set its sights on delivering digital books to

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countries and communities where access to reading materials has traditionally been limited. By being device agnostic – any e-reader or simple mobile phone will do – the organisation is reaching out to a huge audience of phone users with Worldreader Mobile and pushing into schools and libraries with digital books.

Worldreader has made storybooks, textbooks, and all sorts of other reading matter available to people on devices many of them already own, improving literacy rates and underpinning education systems in developing nations.

The programme’s initial focus has been in sub-Saharan Africa, but the mobile phone applications are already having an impact throughout the Middle East, North Africa and southeast Asia, where mobile readers number in the tens of thousands. Worldreader hopes to capture thousands more.

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

TUBERCULOSIS

Power cut-proof care

Prescription for success Tamed in much of the rich world, tuberculosis remains a major public health threat in Asia and parts of Africa. In India, one NGO is using digital monitoring to quash its spread in the country’s poorest neighbourhoods uberculosis (TB) is a hugely infectious disease that plagues communities in developing nations. No country is harder hit than India, where some 2 million cases of TB occur annually, and two people die from TB every three minutes. Many of the sick are poor, hampered by limited access to treatment and the stigma of illness.

While stigma is being tackled by the likes of high-profile Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan speaking about his own treatment for TB, keeping track of complex drug dosages is key to recovery and to curbing the disease’s spread.

Operation Asha, an India-based NGO, has set out to tackle TB head on, taking delivery of treatment to the doors of the poor and underserved in India’s most blighted slums. To track treatment and ensure that patients take a daily cocktail of drugs, the NGO created a biometric tracking system using small computer tablets, a fingerprint scanner and a cellular connection. The NGO’s staff take instructions from the tablet and fingerprint patients when a dose is administered. Over the course of the treatment, both patient and healthcare worker must enter their fingerprints at the same time, to confirm all medication is given under observation. Any missed dose triggers an SMS alert sent to health workers and the patient, prompting further action.

The results have been dramatic. In South Delhi, the NGO’s longest-standing programme boasts an 86.5 per cent cure rate, while fewer than 3.5 per cent of patients fail to complete their drug courses. In the long battle against TB, digital monitoring has proved a powerful weapon.

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Unreliable power from overloaded electricity grids, combined with shortages of essential medical gases, can threaten healthcare at the most critical times nywhere that suffers power outages or a shortage of medical supplies may find itself without the ability to administer vital surgeries. A lack of reliable infrastructure and an inadequate supply of medical essentials can cripple a conventional anaesthesia machine, making any surgery requiring a general anaesthetic impossible.

A potential solution to this key issue emerged in Malawi, where anaesthesiologist Dr Paul Fenton developed a prototype – the so-called Universal Anaesthesia Machine (UAM) – able to operate in blackouts.

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Able to work with or without power, the UAM is kitted out with air filters and compressors, capable of turning room air into 95 per cent oxygen at the rate of 10 litres per minute. The system combines a powered option with ‘draw-over’ anaesthesia, where a patient’s breathing powers the gas flow, should the power be out, or nonexistent.

To date, the UAM has helped doctors perform more than 23,000 surgeries in Malawi, the UK and Nepal. Among others, the machine has seen service at the United Mission Hospital Tansen, which serves more than 5 million people in 10 districts across western Nepal and northern India.

There, two UAMs have been in service since 2010 and 2011.

According to manufacturer Gradian Health Systems, the hospital performs three to eight procedures a day using the kit, and has become a teaching site for other Nepali hospitals.

PHILANTHROPY AGE

A bright solution Solar panels have plummeted in cost in the last decade, while their efficiency has risen, creating a dynamic market where creative ideas are starting to tackle problems from new angles he founders of Bboxx, a solar systems developer, saw an opportunity to use cheap and efficient solar panels to the advantage of communities where the power supply was either unreliable or didn’t exist.

Bboxx created ‘plug and play’ solar systems – essentially do-it-yourself solar power kit sets – in a bid to improve access to power and energy across the developing world. Since it was founded in 2010, the company says it has sold more than 41,000 Bboxx products across 35 countries, bringing power to some 205,000 people.

Not only has the company taken on the whole supply chain, from design to distribution, it has combined this with financing options and NGO support to get the products into the hands of those who need them most.

Using what it calls Smart Solar, Bboxx is giving off-grid customers in rural areas the ability to buy electricity monthly

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– no upfront spending on the technology itself – at costs that are kept the same or below what consumers would normally pay for kerosene or other inefficient, unhealthy fuels.

The system allows local agents to monitor and manage battery performance remotely, as well as to adapt each component to extend its life. Potential problems are identified early and the service agents pointed to the right location, with or without street signs.

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Fertile groundwork

Get the message

Capturing detailed information about soil quality across the expanse of Africa may seem a vast and difficult task, but one creative project is making it happen

Mass communication to remote corners of the globe can be used to drive health and education campaigns through the most basic of phones

he Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) is in phase two of its massive project to develop continent-wide, near real-time digital soil maps. It has just won funding to cover its next four years thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Run through Columbia Global Centers, the AfSIS project is marrying existing information with data gathered from new surveys, drones, remote sensing equipment and geographic information systems. The aim is to update and improve available information about soil conditions, to help farming communities boost yields.

Focused on the sub-Saharan countries of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Ethiopia, a critical element of the AfSIS project is developing modern national soil information services within its partner countries. Among its early achievements has been shifting soil science from

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the ‘wet chemistry’ of sample testing to the rapid ‘physics’ of testing with spectroscopy.

“It allows us to analyse potentially thousands of soil samples a day,” says Andrew Billingsley, project director, Columbia Global Centers. “So in the future, countries will be able to take spectroscopy machines into the field and do the analysis in places where it would have been very difficult in the past.”

While still in its early stages, the project has already had an impact. In Ethiopia it worked with the government and the African Transformation Agency to develop EthioSIS, an Ethiopian soil information system, something CGC’s Billingsley describes as “an enormous achievement”.

Information from EthioSIS has changed the way the country looks at fertiliser use. Where once blanket recommendations were made, now specific fertiliser blends are identified for particular areas, boosting crop yields and improving productivity.

LEFT Digital maps help provide farmers with information on soil conditions so they can tailor fertiliser use to boost crop yields and improve productivity

hen the world’s largest democracy, went to the polls recently, Indian citizens were armed with more information than ever before.

Anyone with even the simplest mobile phone could text a candidate’s code number and in return get an answer on anything from their education and views, to personal assets.

Set up by India’s Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), the initiative was made possible by a clever mobile messaging platform, Vumi, which makes it easier for mobile networks and databases to ‘talk’ to each other.

“Vumi provided access to information in the democratic process in India that really introduced a new level of accountability,” explains Simon de Haan, chief engineer at the Praekelt Foundation, the technology’s makers.

Developed out of a text alert service prompting patients with chronic diseases to keep up their medication, Vumi has the potential for more, says Gustav Praekelt, the foundation’s CEO. “We believe in the use of technology – especially mobile technology – to scale the impact of non-profit

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organisations and government, to help deliver lifesaving and inspirational information services to those at the base of the pyramid, or the most vulnerable elements and parts of our society,” he says.

“We build the types of tools that make it possible to deliver information to each and every single person that has a mobile device.”

Next up is mobile money, a phenomenon pioneered in Africa, as philanthropists turn their attention to the unbanked.

“It should be possible to build a new range of products that really enable users to make transactions; transactions that can make their lives easier,” Praekelt explains. n

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

All to play for Video games and their players are becoming an engine of social change and a source of fundraising for philanthropic causes, reports Stuart Matthews

ur City has been in betatesting for three months.

In game-speak, that means it’s being tried out by a few thousand people. Launched on Facebook in December 2014, the game has so far attracted some 8,000 players to its ranks.

They each build and manage a small city, trying to keep its virtual citizens happy and striving to unlock the next slew of features to advance their urban growth. Take a tour of Our City and it won’t be long before you spot that it’s different to other virtual towns. For one, there are minarets and a special feature looks suspiciously like Petra, the famously picturesque ancient ruin.

Set in Jordan, the game’s distinctly Arab citizens – thanks to artwork from Amman-based Curl Stone Entertainment – are part of a new wave of game development taking aim at direct social impact. This pilot release heralds what the game’s backers hope will be a series of virtual cities matched to target locations around the globe.

“This pilot came about through the idea that there is a huge demographic youth bulge of concern in the Middle East,” says Shahera Youssef Younes, programme manager at NetHope, a technology nonprofit. “Millions of dollars worth of donor money has gone into youth engagement programming with

O

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very little impact. Finally, there was a realisation that we needed to get a little more creative, instead of just cramming kids into training rooms and thinking that will change the situation.”

Our City is an effort to meet youth where they are, in this case on Facebook, leveraging the tools of gaming and technology. Players don’t just make a virtual difference; to really progress, they have to make a real-world effort too. At certain points, players are prompted to go offline and do anything from water conservation activity to a workforce development course. Only a few months in, there have already been two gamerelated events hosted by Our City’s NGO partners in Jordan. Avid players have to log in at these real events to unlock special game features, after taking part in activities aimed at civic engagement.

While entertainment is the hook, offline programmes show the serious intent behind the clicking and dragging.

“The game’s unique component is that it’s trying to prove a virtual theory of change, which says that youth can be more effectively engaged through gamebased interactions, in particular social gaming,” explains Youssef.

“The game is stimulating a virtual behaviour change, but we wanted to go one step further. The youth bulge has social and political risks associated with

RIGHT Known as gamification, game-like behaviours and patterns of reward are being used to encourage giving from the next generation

it and the only way to mitigate those is through real-world behaviour change.”

If games are to make the grade in a young person’s discretionary time they have to be entertaining and attractive.

Our City deliberately flips the usual model of an education-focused game, which would typically stress the message ahead of the play. It’s an issue participating organisations are aware of as they try to find the perfect balance.

“I’ve worked a lot with interaction around gaming platforms and really it’s the education push that you want,” says Douglas Ragan, chief of youth and livelihoods at the urban economy branch of UN Habitat, one of the Our City’s backers. Others include USAID, Al Nasher and Gate2Play. “But then there’s the issue of the actual engagement of young people in the game. There’s a very narrow sweet spot to hit.”

Ragan says UN Habitat’s goal with this particular project – it has other gaming interests including a collaboration with the makers of the hugely successful Minecraft – is to raise the awareness of

“In-game charitable campaigns are a win-win for everybody”

PHILANTHROPY AGE

ABOVE First wave games, such as those from Half the Sky, were designed to work on the simplest of mobile phones prevalent in target markets such as Africa

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young people, specifically in the Middle East and North Africa region, about how to positively influence their cities.

“It’s in large part awareness-raising and then hopefully that changes behaviour so that it actually gets them active,” he says. “The potential of games is huge, but as with many things in technology, it is sometimes oversold.”

It’s still too soon to see how real-world events have affected play in the game.

The Centre for Games and Impact, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed initiative to study the potential for games to influence social development, is in the process of reviewing the results.

“I think the idea of exploring what a citizen’s role is in society and what a

government’s role is in terms of engaging citizenry in how a society is built, are all things that can be introduced then explored further,” says Alan Gershenfeld, a founding industry fellow at the centre.

As founder and president of E-Line Media, the company which made Our City, Gershenfeld has spent years working at the intersection of entertainment, technology and social entrepreneurship.

“A game can only go so far, but it can serve as a gateway to start a dialogue and situate some concepts,” he says. It is not, he adds, a road to quick results and rapid change. Failure occurs when agencies dabble, hoping for a massive impact.

“It is hard. The technology is hard, the engagement is hard and learning is hard.

But it is solvable if you’re committed.”

Before Our City, simpler games have been more direct with audiences less connected than a typical Arab teenager.

First-wave efforts include a series of games developed under the umbrella of Half The Sky, a philanthropic movement to end the oppression of women. In a programme led by Games for Change and supported by USAID, UK-based Mudlark, a game-based digital production company, created 9 Minutes, Worm Attack and Family Values.

All three were designed to work on the simple mobile phones prevalent in the target markets of Kenya, Tanzania and India. They tackled health issues such as worms and pregnancy directly, while promoting messages about the benefits of hygiene, medication and making the right choices.

“In the developing world your mobile is the most penetrative digital device and it very quickly gives people not just communications and computing, but also the entertainment platform,” says Charles Hunter, Mudlark’s managing director.

Although simple in format, Hunter describes the content as ‘hardhitting’,

with negative choices in the storylines quickly leading to negative ends.

Like Gershenfeld, Hunter has noted the tendency of organisations to dabble and emphasises the commitment needed to see a game through, and win users in the crowded content markets.

“I think people don’t understand that a game is quite a piece of work to put together,” he says. “It has to be playable and has got to give agency to the actual player so they can feel reward and entertainment from it.”

That sense of reward and entertainment is a key motivator. Known as gamification, game-like behaviours and patterns of reward are being used to encourage giving from those who have grown up in the Xbox era. UK-based for-profit company Makerble has built a donation platform that takes cues from games, including progress bars and colourful icons that represent donations as equivalent to everyday items, such as a coffee or a movie ticket. Founder Matt Kepple explains that gamification is a moniker applied to Makerble after its launch in December, and which occurred as a natural result of the design process.

“People have described Makerble as ‘beautiful’ and ‘playful’,” he explains. “It’s unusual to use those words when talking about charity and social impact. People have fed back that it feels like they’re shopping and it’s easy to browse and see what’s going on.”

Part of the donor’s ease of use is created by Makerble’s underlying transparency. Charities have to report back regularly on how donor money is spent – one mosquito net, two vaccinations, for example – for the causes they select. This, says Kepple, addresses the public’s cynicism about how donations are used.

The impact of the new platform is already being felt as far afield as Malawi,

PHILANTHROPY AGE

where the World Medical Fund for Children (WMF), which treats 25,000 children a year in Africa, posts regular brief updates to attract donor interest.

“What we liked was that you don’t have to write long reports to donors,” explains Nazlie Chan-Wing-Yen, project coordinator for the WMF. “After a hard day in the field… what we want is to tell people where their $1 or $2 is going.”

Other platforms are also showing that game players can be converted to donors if the motivation is right. Games giant Zynga, which made its name with the colossally popular FarmVille, has used in-game donations to fund charities in its home market of North America and around the globe since 2009. Its charitable offshoot Zynga.org now runs regular campaigns across its portfolio, combining the power of its audience reach with micro-donations and a meaningful boost to awareness.

“It’s really ingrained in studios that ingame charitable campaigns are a win-win for everybody,” says Abby Speight, Zynga. org’s lead product manager. “They deliver great value, players love them and some

games have established such a regular cadence... that players expect them.”

Since their inception, some 150 ingame campaigns have prompted players to donate more than $20m to the benefit of 50 non-profit organisations. Donations accrue when players purchase special

features that aid game progress. Just as in Our City, these features unlock advances or help players make more rapid gains.

Success is not accidental. The sold features are developed specifically for a charitable cause, with the Zynga.org team coordinating the campaign between the game’s designers and the charity. Zynga collects the donations and passes the funds on when a campaign ends.

“We align the geographic impact of our partners with the demographic of the game,” says Speight. “The majority have a global player base, so we make sure partners work globally.”

The Zynga model plays on the company’s massive audience. It also works because of a collaborative partnership with the beneficiaries. This illustrates two points: whether the aim is social impact or fundraising, neither can stand in the way of game play. Charities that get their game strategy right could open themselves up to a new world of donations, but, much like players in social games, they are unlikely to do so alone. n

LEFT Makerble’s team overcomes cynicism by making sure game donations are transparent, and donors know exactly how their money is spent

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ABOVE  More than half of young men and more than 80 per cent of young women in Gaza lack jobs, says the UN’s International Labour Organisation

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Against all odds: inside Gaza’s first start-up accelerator

BY JOANNE BLADD adeel El Safadi thinks big. At 24, the founder of digital animation start-up Newtoon has grand plans to grow her nascent business into a regional behemoth – if she could just secure the funding. “My biggest dream is for my company to go from being a start-up, to being the largest producer of animation in the Middle East,” she says. “We need support and investment to scale beyond the local market.”

El Safadi is in good company. From Cairo to Amman, the Arab world’s startup scene is abuzz, fired by tens of thousands of fresh-faced hopefuls seeking to capitalise on the Middle East’s changing business culture and put their ideas into action. Less typical, however, is El Safadi’s location.

Newtoon is based out of Gaza, a sliver of land more commonly associated with strife than start-ups, and home to one of the world’s deepestrunning geopolitical conflicts. Even more remarkable, is that she is one of a growing band of young Gazan entrepreneurs, all intent on defying gloomy economic odds to forge careers, scale businesses, and bring jobs to an impoverished local market.

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“Even in one of the most conflictridden parts of the Middle East, there is opportunity” “This is something Gaza has never seen before and young people are hungry for it,” says Iliana Montauk. “They want to show that even in one of the most conflict-ridden parts of the Middle East, there is opportunity.”

Montauk works for a group called Gaza Sky Geeks, the first start-up accelerator in the Gaza Strip. Created

ABOVE Backed by a $900,000 grant from Google, aid agency Mercy Corps launched the Gaza Strip’s first start-up accelerator in 2011

in 2011 by Mercy Corps, a global aid agency, with a $900,000 grant from Google, it has helped trigger a leap in entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a city strewn with rubble, where power blackouts are a daily event and where GNI per capita is just $1,665, Gaza Sky Geeks offers advice, free office space and investment exposure to dozens of fledgling local ventures. Its pipeline includes Gaza’s answer to Uber, a ride-sharing app called Wasselni that hails taxis and private cars; Datrios, a social network for Arabic sports fans; and DWBI Solutions, a fix for big data management in governments or large companies. Half of start-ups under its wing are headed by women.

“Our aim is to give start-ups in Gaza the means to succeed,” says Montauk, one of three staff members at Sky Geeks. “Our goal in the next three to five years is to see a start-up secure followon investment, and to start providing jobs. In 10 or 20 years from now, Gaza could be a tech hub.”

For local youth, this might be a tipping point. Gaza’s economy is broken, bowed by three Israeli offensives in five years and an eight-year economic siege that bars people, goods and crucial reconstruction materials from entering – and Gazans from leaving. The blockade has all but extinguished the

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prospects of the younger generation, helping to foster sky-high youth joblessness. More than half of young men are unemployed, according to the UN’s International Labour Organisation.

Among women aged 15 to 24, the rate soars to 86.3 per cent.

“There are no jobs,” says Said Hassan, an entrepreneur who also serves as outreach and acceleration manager for Sky Geeks. “Even for the most talented graduates, there are few opportunities.”

Born and raised in Gaza, Hassan earned his stripes in Egypt with the former start-up Souq.com, now one of the biggest e-commerce players in the Middle East. When his mother fell sick,

“There is so much potential here.

We are shaping Palestine’s future”

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he returned home to support his family.

He recalls seeing the best and brightest of his friends relegated to taking menial, part-time jobs in an attempt to generate an income. “I thought I would never work with something like Souq again,” he says. “I thought in Gaza I would be lucky to find any job.”

In June 2014, he launched his own start-up, a second-screen social network built around television shows called Tevy. To date, with Sky Geeks’ backing,

BELOW The accelerator has reached more than 1,500 individuals in four years through events and outreach activities

it has secured $30,000 in early funding.

“There is so much potential, here,” says Hassan. “We’re shaping Palestine’s future.”

Tevy is not the only win. In the four years since its launch, Sky Geeks has run more than 100 events in Gaza, reaching over 1,500 individuals and banging the drum for entrepreneurship. In 2011, some 300 people applied to attend its first Start-up Weekend for a rare chance to mingle with international mentors and venture capitalists. Applications for the June 2014 event, held to a soundtrack of rocket fire and airstrikes, topped 600.

Four of its start-ups have netted investments from regional players, such as Jordan’s Oasis500 and Palestine’s Palinno, ranging in size from $15,000 to $20,000. Sky Geeks has also funded overseas trips for its start-ups – to an incubator in Jordan and an event in Egypt – and hopes to send teams to Silicon Valley later this year.

Closer to home, it has inked a deal with recruitment giant Bayt.com to gift salaries and mentorship to two start-ups, freeing them up to focus full-time on getting their ideas off the

PHILANTHROPY AGE

ABOVE AND LEFT: CREDIT: MAGIC LENS FOR MERCY CORPS

ground, while gaining real-world work experience. “There’s a level of success now that didn’t previously exist, and it’s inspiring more people to want to participate,” says Montauk.

Bridging the gap between startups and the outside world through travel and access to experts is critical to ramping up this success, she says.

Most aspiring entrepreneurs in Gaza have never left the strip. “The main barrier they face isn’t conflict, it’s a lack of connection to the wider world,” she explains. “When our start-ups were in Jordan, they were surprised to learn there was electricity available there the whole time.”

The contrast between Gaza and other digital hubs around the world is stark. Yet the tiny territory boasts one of the highest tertiary education rates in the Arab world, and a surprisingly robust tech infrastructure. Amid the Israeli bombing campaign of last summer, which obliterated whole districts, Gaza’s internet held steady.

Launch costs are also low: local developers earn around $400 a month, compared to $100,000 a year in Silicon Valley, so a $20,000 seed investment goes a long way. For savvy young Gazans, web-

$1,665

Gross national income per capita in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Source: World Bank

based start-ups offer a way to pierce the blockade and take part in an economy that transcends borders. For Sky Geeks, they are vital to its efforts to redraw Gaza’s image abroad, and flip its narrative from that of a war-torn ghetto, to one of a humming entrepreneurial hub.

“We want to show it’s possible to create a successful and vibrant tech sector in a frontier market,” says Montauk. “We want to lead that charge.”

Business in Gaza is not for the timid.

Added to the usual risks inherent in hatching a new venture is intermittent electricity, the threat of conflict and

BELOW Sky Geeks faced closure in 2014 when its funding dried up.

The Arab world’s largest crowdfunding campaign put it back on its feet

the brutal isolation of daily life under siege. Entrepreneurs are nothing if not tenacious. One, recalls Montauk, pitched coolly to US investors as bombs exploded nearby. “They are desperate to contribute to the world in positive ways, and show Gaza has more to offer,” she says.

Sky Geeks ran aground in mid-2014 when its funding dried up. While Mercy Corps dug deep to keep the accelerator afloat, Sky Geeks turned to the crowd in a bid to keep its lights on. The response was electric: from a first goal of $70,000, the #GazaStarts campaign drummed up more than $267,000 in donations, capturing dollars from 60 countries and territories. Nearly half of funds came from the US. According to Sky Geeks, it is the biggest crowdfunding campaign the Arab world has seen.

“There is a grassroots desire for this to succeed, from around the world,” says Montauk. “People want to see new solutions in Gaza, and they believe in the potential of entrepreneurship.”

The next goal is to raise $1.5m, giving Sky Geeks a runway of three years.

To do so, the accelerator is calling for backing from regional blue chips and philanthropists – “people with skin in the game”, Montauk says – keen to ignite change in one of the Middle East’s most embattled neighbourhoods. It is no exaggeration to say the future of potentially hundreds of young Gazans hangs on whether they answer.

“Sky Geeks is the reason for me to smile and have hope every day,” says Nalan al-Sarrah, an entrepreneur who has also helped with the group’s marketing push. “I swear this place is magical.” n

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Young, engaged and giving Armed with technology, resources and with more diverse ways than ever to engage in charitable giving, today’s youth have the potential to transform the way the philanthropic world operates. In the first of a new series, we meet some of the region’s young philanthropists, to explore what is driving next-generation giving

BY TAMARA WALID

Climbing for a cause A t 32, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Thani has found his calling. He combines his passion for mountain climbing with a zeal for philanthropy – and now he is encouraging other Gulf nationals to follow suit.

The Qatari youth, who lives in the UAE, believes giving should start at a young age with children being taught the value of volunteering. “It has been a big part of my life since I was in school. It’s a part of the way I live. You have to give back with whatever you do,” he says.

Al Thani’s most recent expedition was in October last year, when he led 12 Qataris to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The group, comprised of six men and six women, raised QR2.2m (about $604,180) in donations to improve and rebuild schools in Gaza.

Al Thani describes himself as an entrepreneur, mountaineer, philanthropist, photographer and

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sportsman. He is also the co-founder of UAE-based travel portal Musafir. com, named for the Arabic word for traveller. His goal is to climb the seven highest summits on the world’s seven continents, and to campaign for projects in deprived and war-struck countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, Nepal, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen and Syria.

The funds he raises are funneled to Reach Out To Asia (ROTA), a Qatar-based non-profit organisation, of which he is brand ambassador. ROTA works globally to raise awareness that education is a right for all. The organisation has been operating in Palestine since 2007 and plans to help build and restore 22 schools in the besieged Gaza Strip.

“When you are climbing for a cause, you are climbing for something greater than yourself,” says Al Thani. “When you are tired, when you are slow, when you think of giving up, you’re not thinking

about yourself, but about those who depend on your climb or those who support you to climb. It gives me that drive and extra push to keep going.”

The first Qatari to reach the top of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, in 2013, Al Thani hopes a growing number of Gulf Arab youth will join his adventures or take up volunteering of their own.

It all boils down to education, he says. “[Schools] should have students volunteer at a young age,” he says.

“Learning to give at a younger age is much easier than learning to give when you’re older.”

ABOVE Al Thani’s expeditions include Mont Blanc in the French Alps, Mount Elbrus in Europe and Mount Kosciuszko in south east Australia

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Clothing with conscience hahd AlShehail, 29, strives to bring ethics into fashion by helping brands and consumers to better understand how and where clothing is made. Using her online platform, Just, she tells the stories behind each garment – where the material came from, the worker that made it – allowing designers and buyers to trace the history of their clothing through the supply chain, and make more conscientious choices.

Dubai-based AlShehail grew up in Saudi Arabia’s eastern region of Al Hasa, a town she describes as “full of culture, natural resources and most importantly an interconnected community”. From a young age, she recognised the power of business as a source for good. After a short stint in the corporate world in the US, she returned to Saudi seeking to become a social entrepreneur.

“I felt if I truly believed in the power of business to alleviate poverty, bring dignity and create social good I needed to be on the ground doing the work and seeing what value I could add,” says AlShehail.

She began working with cooperatives to create a sustainable market for their products, before returning to the US to undertake an MBA in entrepreneurship at Johns Hopkins University. As part of the programme, she worked in Rwanda, Turkey and Armenia.

While in Rwanda, AlShehail saw firsthand the bureaucracy and dependency aid could create. One night, sitting in her hotel room in Kigali, she began re-reading The Blue Sweater, a book by Acumen founder Jacqueline Novogratz. The story inspired her to seek out new ways to tackle poverty and social issues, and to join Acumen, a global non-profit organisation that raises funds

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to invest in ideas, companies and people who seek to end poverty.

AlShehail became the first Arab female to join the Acumen fellowship, going on to spend a year in India helping to scale one of the nonprofit’s investee companies.

She then teamed up with Acumen fellow, Natalie Grillon, to develop Just.

“In the complexity of fashion supply chains, it’s easy to hide human rights abuses and destructive environmental practices. Supply chains hide good and bad actors in obscurity as seen in everyday abuses,” she says. Examples of such abuses include the exploitation of 168 million child labourers globally, resource overuse and unsafe operations, leading to incidents such as the explosion at the Rana Plaza clothing factory in

Bangladesh in 2013, which killed more than 1,200 workers.

Through Just, AlShehail hopes to bring transparency to the industry by using realtime stories, photos and data from suppliers to reconnect consumers with the products they buy. “With transparency comes accountability.

Accountability of the supplier, of the brand and of the consumer,” she says.

AlShehail’s goal is to improve millions of lives touched by the industry. This year, Just aims to work with 50 suppliers, impacting 4,000 lives through increased access to global markets, improvements in wages and the freedom to speak up.

“In an interconnected universe, one’s action in one place can directly impact another’s in a different place,” she says.

BELOW Social entrepreneur Shahd AlShehail aims to improve transparency in the garment industry through her business, Just

PHILANTHROPY AGE

Do good, do well harifa Al Barami cites an upbringing that involved living in numerous countries as a key influence in her decision to pursue social enterprise.

The 37-year-old Omani was born to a diplomat father, and lived in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, the UK and Oman, where she is now based.

“I am what we call the third-culture kid, from all over. I think this really helped with social entrepreneurship because you develop this resilience and understanding of global issues rather than just a local or regional perspective,” Al Barami says.

After graduating in medical sciences from Portsmouth University, she returned

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ABOVE Social entrepreneur Sharifa Al Barami helps give other startups in Oman a leg up, by offering support, mentoring and office space to fledgling businesses and new entrepreneurs

to Oman to work in the public sector for seven years. To her parents’ alarm, she then quit her job to start Al Jazeera Training, a coaching and consultancy firm for aspiring entrepreneurs. Eight years later, Al Barami is a driving force in the sultanate’s budding start-up scene.

“It’s about the lessons learnt and trying to make it easier for others to start up. In the first five years of launching a company, I learned as much as I did in 20 years going through the education system,” she says.

Al Barami realised early on that hydrocarbon-based economies such as Oman needed a sustainable ecosystem to help entrepreneurs and the wider

economy thrive, eventually turning to corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds in the sultanate to help support her consultancy’s activities. When she convinced fertilizer company OMIFCO to allocate the biggest chunk of its CSR funds to creating a locally-tailored start-up accelerator, Cell was born. The country’s first such initiative, Cell offers support, mentorship and funding of up to $20,000 to local startups.

Taking it a step further, Al Barami converted part of her office space in 2013 to create BizHub to serve entrepreneurs who needed working space but couldn’t afford fully-fledged offices. Entrepreneurs could rent spaces, use office facilities and equipment for as little as OR50 ($130) per month. It was a “win-win situation”, she says, as she could also hire their services and many of them provided a cheaper and better alternative to larger firms.

Such activities help Al Barami assist those wanting to become producers in their community, not just consumers.

“Oil is a blessing but also a curse in disguise, if we don’t invest it in the correct way,” says Al Barami. “I cannot comprehend the notion of unemployment. You have no excuse nowadays not to work on something.”

Al Barami spends a lot of her time providing pro bono mentoring, assisting startups, but also learning from their struggles in the marketplace. Through education and upbringing, future generations can be taught to “fend for themselves” and help create a sustainable community, she says.

“You either choose to wait for handouts or create and then give some,” she explains. “The more you create, the more you want to give away. That makes the difference because you don’t care how much money you have in the bank but how many people you can help.”

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“We saw we were entering a new era where we could be influential”

An army for good resh out of university, bursting with energy and eager to serve their community, Khalifa Bin Hendi (pictured above) and Ayesha Saeed Harib founded a volunteering initiative to encourage young Emiratis to give back to society and use their energy for the greater good. It marked the beginning of 1971team.

One of the group’s first social initiatives originated from a spontaneous tweet, following the UAE’s 40th National Day celebrations in 2011, recalls Bin Hendi. The streets were littered with

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ABOVE UAE-based social enterprise 1971team started with a tweet.

Today, the community service organisation hopes to build awareness of volunteering among youth

remnants of celebratory activities and in dire need of cleaning. One of Bin Hendi’s colleagues took to Twitter one evening to complain, suggesting, “Shall we clean up the roads tomorrow?”

The clean-up attracted people from all walks of life – Emiratis, expatriates, tourists, young and old. The morning started with a group of 15 people and reached some 250 as the day ended, gaining support through Twitter, word of mouth and instant messaging.

“It was huge. This had never happened in Dubai before, getting youth together overnight to do something social and help the workers,” says Bin Hendi.

To Bin Hendi’s surprise and excitement, Dubai’s ruler and prime minister of the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, lent his support to the initiative with a tweet, thanking the youth who took part in the clean-up.

“A move by us, a couple of young social workers, was noticed and supported by the leadership,” Bin Hendi says. “We saw we were entering a new era where we could be influential.”

It was a trigger for the founders to formalise 1971team’s activities, creating an organisational structure with teams and departments, and setting up an office. The group has since worked with the elderly, labour workers and cancer patients across the UAE. In London, Bin Hendi’s studies and Harib’s internship at Google helped them gain a better understanding of social enterprise and realise such initiatives were lacking at home. The pair sought to register 1971team at the Dubai

Department of Economic Development, a process that proved challenging.

“We were informed there was no such thing as social enterprise as a category to register. We waited and kept at it until they created it,” he says. Often, people still confuse their work for charity, a perception Bin Hendi is trying to change.

“This isn’t charity. This is social work; awareness, community service.”

At 23, Bin Hendi, who comes from a family with interests in retail, runs his own travel agency and a retail franchise in the UAE. He is a strong proponent of business and social entrepreneurship, saying firms ought to invest a percentage of their profits for social impact. His current projects seek to do just that.

These include creating a space for social entrepreneurs, designers and creatives to come together and pitch ideas, serving as an incubator. Also in the works is a café named after 1971team, with any profit to be funneled back into the enterprise to fund social projects in the UAE. Another undertaking is The Book Joint, an electronic moving library for patients across hospitals in the UAE, inspired by the team’s work with patients.

The initiative, which is sponsored by Dubai Culture and Dubai Health Authority, will feature a unit with e-books for adults and children, as well as two screens for documentaries and gaming. It will start with Latifa Hospital in Dubai in April.

Bin Hendi hopes to create more awareness of community work among the youth. “We need their support. We want them to be serious about this and give their time to these things,” he says. n

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Spreading the word Social entrepreneurship could be a fix for the Arab world’s vast youth unemployment problem, says Emirati businesswoman and philanthropist Muna Al Gurg

BY TAMARA WALID

s a child, Muna Al Gurg would listen eagerly to her father discussing his philanthropic projects and ideas with his peers. She would hear him brainstorming about digging wells in villages where people suffered water shortages, with photos of droughthit areas strewn across the table in front of him, or conferring over which scholarships to invest in to gain the most impact. These childhood experiences shaped her adult perceptions of the importance of giving and of developing a solutions-led mindset.

“My father was always the driving force behind these projects, many of which started happening many decades ago,” says Al Gurg. “It was a natural progression for me to also be passionate about philanthropy.”

While her full-time job is running the retail unit of her family’s conglomerate, Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group, philanthropy has always been part of her wider family’s philosophy, she says. It enabled the 40-year-old Emirati to get involved early on in the family’s namesake foundation’s projects, from providing scholarships to building clinics and schools around the world. Al Gurg says she derives immense satisfaction from seeing students graduate, as a result of a scholarship she

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funded. She recently began working with the American University of Beirut on a programme to sponsor gifted young refugees from the Syrian camps.

“These are people whose fathers are construction workers perhaps, and who are one of six to seven kids. When I see that someone is on that scholarship and it’s going to make a huge difference in impacting the family when these people graduate, it’s really something that I enjoy doing,” she says.

One project close to her heart began four years ago, when the Al Gurg Foundation built a school in the village of Bwejuu in Zanzibar, Tanzania. She proposed the project to the foundation, of which she is a board member, and supervised it from start to finish.

“This particular village didn’t have a school that took kids beyond grade four.

Kids would reach grade four and go back to grade three because they didn’t have schooling to go beyond that,” she says.

“Now, there are over 300 kids from the village getting a very good education from the Tanzanian curriculum.”

The foundation went a step further, facilitating teacher training and looking at sustainable ways of keeping the project going and creating more jobs for teachers at the school. The new school teaches children until grade seven, or age 14, and

LEFT UAE-born Muna Al Gurg, board member of her family’s foundation, is an investor in the Acumen Fund and board member of the Emirates Foundation

has a large library space, a computer lab and students quarters – a stark contrast to the previous shabby structure where children didn’t have tables or chairs and sat on the floor during class.

While Al Gurg continues to work with her family’s foundation, which focuses on education and healthcare, her activities over the years have come to focus on helping the region’s social entrepreneurs.

Her introduction to the sector came when she read a book authored by The Acumen Fund founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz, which describes her struggles and triumphs living in Africa.

“I was blown away and inspired by what she does. To me, Jacqueline Novogratz is the pioneer of social entrepreneurship and pioneer in her field,” she says.

The book prompted her to look at philanthropy in a different light. “I really wanted to contribute to the social entrepreneurial scene because for me it was the idea of not just giving out handouts, but creating jobs and longterm sustainable projects that really appealed,” she explains. “The mindset of going beyond charity is something that is regionally nascent.”

Al Gurg subsequently met Novogratz and became an investor and partner in the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit social venture capital firm that uses

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“The idea of not just giving out handouts, but creating jobs and long-term sustainable projects really appealed” entrepreneurship to tackle challenges arising from poverty in developing countries. Through Acumen, Al Gurg helped support projects and job creation in a number of communities.

The fund, which claims to have impacted 100 million lives, collects donations and makes small equity and credit investments in entrepreneurial projects and businesses that help poor communities. One example is the

Duterimbere bakery that Novogratz helped build in Rwanda, after finding a group of influential women to support it and teaching a group of single mothers the core business skills to run it. The project changed the women’s lives by offering them financial security and improving their confidence.

“I think every individual has a responsibility towards the community, country and the greater world they live in, and I believe when people have reached a certain stage in their career, their life, it’s really important to think about contributing back and creating an impact in the world,” Al Gurg says.

Acumen’s approach appeals to Al Gurg, who advocates for a new form of charity that is not passive and empowers the receiver. “A mind shift needs to happen, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region. Charity is

important here, but there’s charity 2.0, which is taking it to the next level and thinking about sustainable projects,” she says. “The region needs more social entrepreneurship and we need to concentrate on it because of our high levels of unemployment. This could be one of the biggest solutions.”

As a board member of Emirates Foundation, a philanthropic organisation set up by the government of Abu Dhabi, Al Gurg is an integral part of a team that works to foster social entrepreneurship initiatives across the Arab world. In November, the foundation presented the Emirates Award for the Arabian Gulf Youth to three winners from the GCC, with each receiving incubation grants to help them get their projects off the ground. The award was launched in July last year, with the aim of encouraging youth in the GCC to compete to find scalable solutions to social challenges.

The award stemmed from a rise in requests from youth with social enterprise businesses or ideas, which lacked funding. Al Gurg was part of the judging panel, shortlisting the ideas and

picking the winners. “We had an influx of hundreds of people from all over the Gulf coming in with their ideas and each had a social aspect to it,” she says. “It was really interesting to see how young people are thinking along those lines. A lot of the ideas were super interesting – some tackled issues related to obesity and [protecting] the environment.”

The winners, who received a grant of AED100,000 ($27,224), were the UAE’s Mashaal Al-Marzooqi and Saeed Al Nazari. Their project, Factory of Dreams, is a crowdfunding website dedicated to helping young entrepreneurs from lowincome backgrounds.

Al Gurg’s responsibilities do not end here. As the chairwoman of Young Arab Leaders UAE, she provides guidance and mentoring to young entrepreneurs in the region. While doing so, she stresses to them the importance of social impact and believes local startup incubators ought to do the same.

One of her favourite local projects is Maska, a gift-wrapping store in Dubai that uses fabric rather than paper. Launched

by Emirati Fatma Al Khoori, Maska gave rise to The Sewing Machine Initiative, which helps women from poorer families earn an income for their children’s education by sizing and hemming the fabric Maska uses from home.

“The mindset is changing. Young people are thinking more along the lines of social enterprise,” Al Gurg says.

However, youth also need support in the form of legislation that allows them to set up social ventures, she adds.

What’s more, the education system can “facilitate and educate young people on community and giving back”, she says.

While this is a topic Emirates Foundation is addressing, through various initiatives targeting the education system, more needs to be done.

“More schools need to adopt that way of thinking. Like any other normal

business, social entrepreneurs need role models. We need to keep communicating about these new ideas and why they are important, so people understand the results of social enterprise,” she explains.

When it comes to role models within her family, Al Gurg’s eldest sister Raja has been a great inspiration to her. Raja Al Gurg is the managing director of the family business, a philanthropist, and someone “who has managed to do a lot and keep the balance between being a good leader, a good mother and grandmother,” she says.

Al Gurg wants to continue inspiring and helping Gulf youth. Her message to them is direct: “Stay focused on your end goal. Creating a business is important, but creating a business that also impacts society is even more important,” she says.

“Keep that in mind when working on an idea because that will impact your entire community and the people living in it.” n

BELOW The Al Gurg Foundation supports a school and its teachers in Zanzibar, Tanzania, allowing 300 children to pursue their education

Educating women Al Gurg is currently exploring the idea of a structured scholarship fund for women. The project is a personal goal, independent of her family’s philanthropic foundation.

“I am involved with the American University of Beirut in terms of sponsoring young people from the Syrian camps and I feel there’s a lot more impact to be had with women who are in need,” she says.

At the moment, she is looking into ways of structuring the fund and hopes to finalise that within the next two years. The fund will mainly look to assist women in the Arab world, especially those at university level where a degree can help them secure employment and positively impact their families.

“I know that my passion lies with young people, but also with women and helping them overcome some of the challenges, perhaps even cultural challenges, and I believe education is a weapon they can always keep with them,” Al Gurg says. “There are a lot of women out there whose families don’t have the means to put them through university and they have tremendous potential.”

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EXPERT COLUMN

Beyond technology The digital revolution is no substitute for human capabilities when it comes to driving widespread social change, writes Kentaro Toyama etween 2004 and 2010, I spent most of my waking life working on projects at Microsoft Research India, in which the goal was to see how digital technologies could support socioeconomic development. Together with an interdisciplinary team of researchers, we tried more than 50 different projects: personal computers with multiple mice so that many children could interact

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with a single machine; mobile video as a way to deliver healthcare information to mothers in rural villages; SMS messaging systems as a way to help agricultural cooperatives communicate with farmers – and on and on.

We used good principles of design.

We immersed ourselves in the lives of potential users. We designed prototypes with them, seeking their input at every step. We considered the economics of our solutions, keeping in mind the hidden costs of technology. And we tested our solutions with scientific methods.

But when I looked back across all of our projects, I discovered that it was rarely the technology that separated the successes from the failures. Of course, bad technology rarely led to good outcomes – but even well-designed technology was no guarantee of positive change. In fact, when I searched for the qualities that made impactful projects impactful, they were all about good

About the writer Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and author of ‘Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology’

people: the dedication of the project team, the good intentions of relevant officials and the capacity of our partners.

Even in a technology project, what mattered most was the heart, mind, and will of the people involved, not the technology itself.

In an age of digital miracles, it’s easy to believe that technology will solve complex social problems like poverty, injustice and oppression. A laptop per child could boost basic education.

Telemedicine could provide the best medical care to remote patients. Social media could bring people together.

But while all of these ‘coulds’ illustrate the potential of technology, they are poor representations of reality. Rigorous studies show that on average, students provided with free laptops – at home, or at school – show no improvement in grades, test scores, school attendance or overall discipline compared to students without. Medicine at a distance inevitably runs into economic challenges: why would doctors in the city serve people in far-flung areas who typically can’t pay the high fees urban hospitals command?

And whatever can be said of social media, it doesn’t appear to be bringing peace across deep political or religious divides. There are now 1.4 billion Facebook users in the world and over 7 billion mobile phone accounts, more than the global human population. Yet

EXPERT COLUMN

“Technology alone doesn’t fix broken institutions or heal social rifts” conflict continues and, in many places, it appears to be intensifying.

This is true even in locations where technology is advanced. I live in the US where everyone watches YouTube and it’s not rare to see children with their own iPhones. Over the past four decades, America has given birth to many incredible technologies. Yet, during that same period the country’s rate of poverty stagnated at about 12 to 13 per cent – growing higher since the 2007-2008 recession; its citizens became

more politically polarised; and inequality climbed to record highs. In other words, a golden age of technology did not catalyse a golden age of social progress.

My experiences with technologyfor-social-change projects have led me to a theory of technology and society that I call the Law of Amplification: that technology’s primary effect is to amplify underlying human forces. Thus, even the best-designed technology is not a substitute for positive human intentions and capabilities. Laptops are helpful in education where there are capable teachers and caring administrators.

Health IT improves healthcare systems that are already well-run. And people connect online with the same people they would connect with offline.

The unfortunate consequence of the Law of Amplification is that technology alone doesn’t fix broken institutions or heal social rifts. It requires a base of positive human forces to amplify.

But amplification also leads to clear recommendations for action. First, we should dispense with ideas that more technology in and of itself will bring widespread social change. Projects whose primary goal is to spread more technology typically fail to attain more meaningful outcomes, whether in health, education, or governance.

Second, the impact of meaningful work can be amplified. For anyone hoping to apply technology to social causes, the best approach is to find excellent partners and amplify their efforts. Good schools can benefit from good technology; capable nonprofits can raise more funds via online campaigns; and citizen groups working toward peace could expand their reach through social media.

Third, for economic growth, it’s far better to be a technology producer than a technology consumer. When someone buys an iPad, it’s not the buyer, but the shareholders and employees of Apple who grow richer. Apple’s technology effectively amplifies its ability to achieve its goals – to transfer wealth from its customers to itself. In the world of consumer technologies, technology creators are the ones who see economic growth for the most part, not customers.

Lastly, amplification implies that in a world full of digital devices, what is most important is to nurture better human intention and more human capacity, with or without gadgets. The march of technology will undoubtedly continue, but it will require good, capable people to put it to positive ends. n

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ONE DAY

‘I am responsible for these women and their children’ Journalist Nawal Mostafa has spent 25 years battling to aid women incarcerated in Egypt’s jails with their children. Through her charity CFPA, she has helped hundreds of so-called poverty prisoners to repay their debts and walk free – but many more need her help. Here, she takes Philanthropy Age through her day

BY AMANDA FISHER didn’t plan to become an activist. I was a journalist.

I’d visited Egypt’s AlQanater prison in 1990 to write a story on four female drug smugglers on death row and as I was leaving, I saw small children playing in the prison yard. I remember clearly seeing them for the first time and asking the prison officer: ‘Why are they here?’ I was shocked when he told me they lived there with their mothers.

There are about 200 children living inside Egypt’s six female prisons.

The penal system allows imprisoned mothers to keep their children until they are two – it’s seen as a mercy to the women, but also for the children who need their mothers. In many cases though, there is simply nowhere for the child to go. If relatives refuse to take them once they turn two, they are often sent to one of Cairo’s orphanages.

Unlike other stories I’d covered, the children stayed with me. They were the reason I set up the Children of Female Prisoners Association (CFPA) in 1990.

I felt they deserved a future. We try to help the kids living in prisons – and also once they have left – by providing care and protection as well as basic necessities like food, blankets, milk

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and access to medical care. With the support of the Ministry of Interior, we’re also hoping to offer educational programmes and counselling.

The children were my focus, so it wasn’t until 2007 that I discovered Egypt’s poverty prisoners. These are women sent to jail, often spending years in prison, for an outstanding debt that can be as little as EGP500 ($65). It can be hard to imagine that anyone can go to jail for less than $70.

The majority of these women have debts of not more than $1,000, after falling behind on repayments for domestic items, such as fridges or furniture. Each debt is given a separate

penalty by the court, so the total term could be as much as 30 to 35 years.

They have very difficult lives. The prison gives inmates a portion of food each day, but it isn’t enough to live on. These women work for the richer prisoners, washing their clothes and cooking their food. In exchange, they get cigarettes they can use as currency to buy food and other items. Up to a third of women in Egypt’s jails are poverty prisoners; unable to raise the money they need to pay off their debts.

The first woman CFPA helped to free was Omayma in 2007. She’d served six months of a 3.5 year prison term for owing $1,000. I was able to raise enough money to pay the debt and her release was a miracle. We’ve since helped secure the release of more than 100 women, but many more need help. However, it is encouraging that President General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seems supportive of our efforts, recently setting free a group of 47 female prisoners.

My days are very full. I still work as a journalist for Akhbar El Yom, one of Egypt’s biggest newspapers, and I was an editor-in-chief until two years ago when I stepped back to focus on my charity work. Each day I spend several

ONE DAY

“What we need is a change in the laws that turn these women into criminals”

hours on my story for our weekly paper, before travelling to Al-Qanater, which is Egypt’s largest female prison. I visit the women there for four or five hours, often with a lawyer, to discuss their cases and their problems. Through CFPA, we help wherever we can. I feel I am responsible for these women, and for their children.

CFPA’s goal is to offer a better solution to our beneficiaries. We fundraise to provide necessities such as food and clothes, and we also offer training and counselling. Some women learn handicrafts and sewing while jailed, so they will have better job prospects once they are released. We’ve reached more than 1,000 women with our prison programmes, raising about $37,000 a year.

One of the biggest problems is the stigma these women face on release.

They can’t find jobs, which is why I plan to launch a textiles factory next year – we have the funds to rent the building, but not yet for the machinery. We hope to employ 50 ex-prisoners initially; the graduates from our prison ‘incubator’, which prepares them for employment.

CFPA has also started a work-fromhome project, giving sewing machines and materials to about 100 released prisoners. We sell the products on their behalf, to create an income for them.

The ability to work and to secure money has a remarkable impact on these women and their self-esteem.

Twenty-five years ago, I was the first to really raise the issue of women’s

prisons in Egypt. Now there are many NGOs working for these women, and this spotlight has ensured better treatment of prisoners. Things have improved drastically. What we need now is a change in the laws that turn these women into criminals. I dream of legal reform that will stop women being jailed for their small debts, and instead create a solution where the government repays the debt in exchange for the women doing community work.

It has been a turbulent time in Egypt recently, and that has been felt most strongly among the country’s poor. Still, I am optimistic for the future, and I won’t stop working to help them until I see real change. n

ABOVE Nawal Mostafa (right) and CFPA have helped free more than 1,000 poverty prisoners in Egypt since 2007

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MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Frédéric Oumar Kanouté Where did the idea for the Children’s Village come from?

After a glittering career scoring goals for clubs in France, England, Spain and China, footballer Frédéric Oumar Kanouté now dedicates his efforts to his eponymous charitable foundation. He tells the story of its flagship project, Sakina Children’s Village, a community for orphans in Mali, and describes how his faith inspires him to help others

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When I was 21 or 22 years old and playing in England, I started to practice my religion properly and also took a few trips to my father’s lands in Mali. I thought that my purpose in life was not just to enjoy all the luck I had, but to share it with people who need it most, and in Mali, I saw that there were huge problems with poverty. Life expectancy was low and there were many orphans. I resolved to try and build a village where we could cater to all the needs of the kids – from the age of five years – and take care of their education, health and training as they grew older. Today we have a school, medical centre and teaching programmes, as well as a number of other facilities.

How important was it to build a community rather than an orphanage?

I wanted to build a village where the children could feel part of a real family with sisters, brothers and ‘foster mothers’ that live with them. Most importantly, education and skills training is at the core of what we do, because it’s obvious that if you take care of the kids but don’t give them any training, they will become too old to stay, but unable to leave because they can’t do anything else. The children need to be self-sufficient, so that they can live their own lives, fly with their own wings, and perhaps one day even help the village in turn.

How do children come to find their way to Sakina?

The complex is 30km away from the capital Bamako, but we take kids from all over Mali. Today we have 65 children but the total capacity is up to 150 and there is a lot of demand for places. We go through applications very carefully and it’s sad but we have to decide which children to prioritise. We investigate the family situation of every child, analysing what kind of family is left to take care of them. Obviously they are orphans, but do they still have aunts or uncles that can support them? We have to find those who are the most vulnerable.

Many of them arrive with some issues and many are traumatised by their previous lives. It takes time for us to reassure them, to give them back their confidence, and to teach them how to live a structured lifestyle with school, family and a routine. Eventually, they learn to smile again.

How does the Children’s Village fund its operations?

The project began initially with my own funds, but after that we really wanted to involve others and move forward with partners. I tried to make the most of my media profile to organise charity events with organisations such as UN children’s agency UNICEF, and big charity games with famous football stars from around the world.

Most of the players we called were happy to come and help, and these funds – along with personal donations

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

through the foundation – have helped to support the project. Other organisations have helped in different ways; for example the Qatar Charity has built a mosque at the entrance of the children’s village, for the use of the local community.

In addition, the school, the health centre, the training centre and other facilities are open to the local community. They pay a small fee that goes towards the funding of the village, and we are also running livestock and agriculture projects that will help us in the future so that we do not have to rely on external funds. We think the children’s village can be self-sufficient within two or three years.

Was it a challenge to balance your footballing career alongside your charitable work in Mali?

The Kanouté Foundation formed in 2004, while I was playing in England, so I spent a lot of time during my career on this. During my holidays I would always go to Mali, and daily, after training, I would be in contact with the foundation managers. While I was on duty with the national team, I would always make time to go and visit the project.

It was quite a rare thing for a footballer to be doing, although I’m not saying that footballers don’t help.

They do, and when they do they’re quite generous. It’s just that this was part of my personal fulfilment and so I was more involved personally, from a young age. I wanted to make sure that nobody deceived me or took advantage. We have been very careful to do everything in a very transparent way because this kind of work is very sensitive – you have to make sure that all the funds raised to

“Sometimes we say faith is only in the heart, but I don’t think that’s true. It is in the hands as well” go into a specific project actually do go directly to that project. Even with the best of intentions, mistakes can still be made.

How important has your faith been to your work with the foundation?

In my personal experience, my faith has been the engine. Faith, if you practise it correctly, pushes you to commit good acts. Sometimes we say faith is only in the heart, but I don’t think that’s true. It is in the hands as well. In the Quran we always put the faith in partnership with the actions; “those who have faith and do good”. It rarely says; “those who have faith alone”.

I also believe that it is important to talk publicly about giving. While it is encouraged to give without people knowing, players can also use their profile to influence others and perhaps inspire them to emulate that player. It’s all about the intention. If you talk about your philanthropic work out of pride then that’s not positive, but if you talk about it because you want people that like you to emulate what you are doing, then that’s good.

How does this stage of your life compare to being a famous footballer, at the height of your career?

I wouldn’t mind if, one day, people didn’t remember me as a footballer,

ABOVE Sakina Children’s Village in Mali houses up to 150 orphans. Its school, health and training centres help equip the children to lead independent lives

or remember my career. I believe I’m going to my creator one day and that He won’t ask me how many goals I’ve scored, but instead will hold me accountable for how I behaved on this earth, and how I helped people. That’s why this is the most important thing to me and that’s why I was not anxious about stopping football and leaving that life.

Recently my little girl had to make a presentation about charity work to her class at school. She asked me about the children at Sakina and based her presentation on that. I was really happy because I saw that it could influence her to go on and do this kind of work in the future. n

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TRENDS

Global philanthropy on the rise, Middle East edges up hilanthropic giving is rising worldwide as rich donors in Europe and Asia race to catch up with American generosity, a global index reports, though Middle East donors have made slower progress.

The 2015 BNP Paribas Individual Philanthropy Index by Forbes Insights ranked US donors the most effective givers, with a score of 55.7. The index, which polls 400 philanthropists from around the world, evaluates their current and projected giving, the effectiveness of that giving and their promotion of the cause. Europeans pushed their score up by 9.2 points this year to 55.5, while the Middle East scored 30.3, compared to 29.4 in 2014.

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One explanation for the slower growth seen in the Middle East might be confusion over which of numerous charitable causes to support. Some 40 per cent of Middle Eastern donors surveyed ranked cause selection as the most complex and difficultto-navigate aspect of giving.

Middle East donors were, however, clear about the wider areas in which they most wanted to help, with health (67 per cent) and education (49 per cent) taking the top spots. While health was the most popular cause worldwide, education earned its highest ranking from the Middle East.

Among the positive trends pinpointed by the report was the tendency among Middle Eastern

donors to favour issues that tackle the root cause of social problems, rather than the symptoms.

More than 60 per cent of those polled saw this as a top priority, reflecting the region’s “long-term and patient approach” to philanthropy, the report said.

Crucially, supporting entrepreneurship ranked much higher in the Middle East than elsewhere in the world. The finding highlights the growing force of social enterprise in society, as well as the more established tactic of using microfinance to help the unbanked establish their own businesses.

Faith was the region’s biggest motivator for giving, with 54 per cent of respondents putting it top of their list. A sense of duty and a desire to give back were the biggest factors elsewhere.

Worldwide, the survey revealed that relatives shape donors’ philanthropy, with 57 per cent of Middle East respondents identifying family as a vital resource in their giving decisions, a trait shared by those in Asia and America.

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MIDDLE EAST

PHILANTHROPISTS What motivates people to give?

54% name religious faith as their motivation for giving

What’s the hardest thing about philanthropy?

40% say choosing from the large number of causes is the toughest part

How do people decide to whom to give?

57% use family relatives as a resource for giving decisions

HEALTH CARE What’s the top cause?

67% put health at the top of their list of causes to support

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Source: Forbes Insights

Why give?

61% want to address the root causes of problems

TRENDS

Poorer countries lost out on aid in 2014: report fficial overseas aid to some of the world’s poorest countries fell by 8 per cent in 2014, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The drop contrasts with steady overall levels of development assistance, matching the record $135bn gifted in 2013.

The OECD’s recap of aid spending found some $135.2bn flowed from member states in official development assistance (ODA) last year. While debt relief was down by 87 per cent, humanitarian spending rose 22 per cent – from $11bn in 2013 to $13bn.

The study highlighted winners and losers in the aid stakes, with lower-middle income countries doing particularly well: funding rose by $500m, particularly to Asia and Eastern Europe.

By contrast, sub-Saharan Africa was one of the victims of lower aid spending. Bilateral ODA fell 5 per cent from 2013 levels to $25bn, with top aid recipients Kenya and Tanzania, as well as Afghanistan and Myanmar, witnessing big drops.

The proportion of OECD countries’ income spent on aid also remained on a par with 2013 at 0.29 per cent, but far below the UN recommended target of 0.7 per cent. Still, five OECD nations – Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and the UK – exceeded the UN goal.

The UAE spent the highest share on aid of any donor for the second year running, at 1.17 per cent of GDP. While not a member of the OECD, the Gulf state is a participant of the group’s aid committee. The UAE’s 2014 contributions were down 10 per cent on 2013 due to lower lending to Egypt. The US remains the biggest donor by volume, gifting some $32.7bn in 2014, mostly in aid for Jordan and sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite the 2008 financial crunch, the report said overall aid levels remained encouragingly high. Net ODA has risen steadily since the millennium development goals were agreed, rising 66 per cent since 2000.

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India heads impact investing pack in South Asia region

India

Pakistan

$4,983.4 $1,827.2 $437.7

$162.0

Bangladesh

Sri Lanka

Nepal

Myanmar

$834.3

$386.3

$16.1

$8.0

$120.7

$101.8

$1.2

$4.0

Capital deployed by development finance institutions, 2004-2014 (US$ millions) Capital deployed by other impact investors, 2004-2014 (US$ millions)

mpact investors have poured some $5.4bn into India over the course of a decade, nearly three times as much as Pakistan, the second-largest impact investment market in South Asia, research has showed.

Between 2004 and 2014, development finance institutions invested $5bn in India, and other impact investors another $437m, making it the most active impact investing country in the region, said a report by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN).

GIIN examined the growth of this new social impact tool in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

After India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the most active impact investing markets in the region; development finance institutions (DFIs) invested $162m and $121m, in the pair respectively, in the same period. Domestic investors drive Pakistan’s market, while DFIs are behind the growth in Bangladesh.

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This new type of investing – where money is invested in projects with social or environmental, as well as financial, returns – has grown as a tool in the region to leverage development, particularly since 2009.

DFIs, such as the International Finance Corporation, typically make investments of between $10m and $50m, while foundations – such as the Skoll Foundation – and philanthropists typically invest less than $1m per venture, said the report. To date, the energy, financial services (including microfinance) and manufacturing sectors have attracted the most investment in South Asia.

While investors are increasingly attracted to the practice, barriers remain to its broader uptake. High transaction costs, unfriendly regulations, a limited pipeline of investmentready social enterprises and low awareness of social businesses as an investment option, constrain impact investing’s growth, said GIIN.

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THE NEXT STEP

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

Digital appeal The Qatar Computing Research Institute’s (QCRI) social innovation programme applies advanced computing for social good.

QCRI (www.qcri.com) is looking for more digital humanitarians, so get in touch if you want to help those on the front line win the big data battle.

Sea of troubles The Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) is one philanthropic organisation stepping into the breach to find and rescue migrants fleeing conflict, who find themselves in peril at sea. Your dollars can help MOAS (www.moas.eu) help the desperate with nowhere else to turn.

Gaza Sky Geeks Gaza’s only start-up accelerator (www. gazaskygeeks.com) is a lifeline for local youth determined to start a business, change lives and make a difference to their community.

They urgently need your support to keep the coworking space alive and support Gaza’s vibrant start-up movement.

Vital signs With a mobile phone and a laptop, Medic Mobile is built for the last mile of healthcare, assisting health workers in rural areas use and allocate scarce resources more efficiently to save lives. Visit them (www.medicmobile.org) for more details and to learn how you can help.

Games for giving NetHope believes young people can make a big difference. The nonprofit helps aid agencies get smarter about technology, including through social gaming, to get youth engaged and change real-world behaviour for the better.

To see how you can help, take a look at www.nethope.org.

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London

Milan

Philadelphia

The World Vaccine Congress Asia 2015 offers experts and policymakers the chance to explore innovation in the region’s vaccine industry. Now in its eighth year, the two-day event offers roundtables and networking opportunities to delegates, alongside the main conference track.

Climate change control is a core focus of this year’s International Conference on Earth Science & Climate Change. The event is pitched at academics, scientists and researchers who have a strong interest in promoting awareness of climate change in education and to the wider public.

There is a global push to make malaria a disease of the past and the means of doing just that will be up for discussion and debate at Beating Malaria 2015. Delegates will get the chance to discuss new thinking about malaria infection, as well as strategies for treatment and eradication.

Social entrepreneurship and impact investing will be in the spotlight at the eighth Social Enterprise World Forum 2015. Social entrepreneurs and policy makers will discuss the most innovative examples from around the world, social enterprise ecosystems and how this approach can help beat poverty.

This year’s World Congress on Special Needs Education will gather academics and professionals in the sector to bridge the gap between theory and practice in special needs education.

The four-day event will look at, among other issues, curriculum development, art education and educational foundations.

June 3-4

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June 16-18

June 29-July 1

July 1-3

August 17-20

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Singapore

Kathmandu

Almaty

Now in its fifth year, the International Conference on Education and e-Learning will delve into how technology has revolutionised education.

Researchers and industry professionals will look at the integration of technology for special needs students, learning across borders and flexible education models.

Held over three days, the second International Conference on Poverty and Sustainable Development (ICPSD 2015) will focus on economic growth, environmental mitigation and poverty reduction policies as the world agenda shifts towards the post-2015 sustainable development goals.

The Kazakh capital will host the fourth EcoTech & WaterTech exhibition to explore sustainable water and waste treatment in Central Asia. Manufacturers, suppliers and traders will gather to promote the latest resource-saving technologies, clean technology and green growth in the region.

September 14-15

September 15-17

September 16-18

October 7-8 Global Impact Forum, Zurich October 8 Charity Finance Summit 2015, London October 14-16 2015 National Forum on Family Philanthropy, Seattle October 19-20 Social Value International’s Critical Mass conference, London October 22-24 Social Ventures Partners Conference 2015, Seattle October 26-27 2015 African Philanthropy Forum, Kigali November 18-19 AIDEX 2015, Brussels December 2-4 International Conference on Improving Sustainability Concept in Developing Countries, Cairo

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PHILANTHROPY AGE

In the next issue…

The Arab Giving Survey n the next issue of Philanthropy Age, we publish the results of our inaugural Arab Giving Survey, an exclusive study of the giving behaviour of Arabs across the GCC. We examine how much they give, to whom they give, and how often. We reveal what motivates them and what frustrates them, how they prefer to give, and what they seek out in their charitable causes.

Conducted in partnership with market research agency YouGov, the survey represents a groundbreaking study of giving in the Gulf. It offers a snapshot of modern attitudes to the culture of giving endemic within the region, sheds light on donors’ priorities, and suggests how potential donors can best be reached.

We’ve asked the questions that matter; now it’s time to hear the answers. n

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