First Person: The Rohingya Refugee Crisis and Spreeha
Posted on November 10, 2017.
The following email was written to Global Washington’s president & board chair, Akhtar Badshah, by Tazin Shadid, CEO of Spreeha Bangladesh Foundation, on November 6, 2017. Spreeha and Extend the Day, both GlobalWA members, have been working in makeshift camps that were set up for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The correspondence is reprinted here with permission in the hope that it will inspire greater awareness, support, and collaboration towards alleviating suffering in this crisis. If you would like to get involved, please contact info@spreehabd.org.
Dear Akhtar,
Hope you are doing well. I wanted to share with you my experience at the Rohingya refugees. Last weekend Spreeha organized a health camp at the refugee camps in Bangladesh. We were accompanied by one of our partner organizations from Seattle, Extend the Day, and they distributed solar lights to families. I’ve been reading about the Rohingya refugee crisis from the very beginning and following some sources that are sharing pictures and videos on a regular basis. Yet, going over there in person was a whole different experience. I do not have the right words to describe how bad the situation is. I’ve been working in slums with extreme poverty for over ten years now and I have never seen anything like this. Almost a million refugees has now arrived at the camps and the magnitude of the problem cannot be imagined without being there physically.
We went to one of the remote camps, Putibonia in Ungciprong, which is past the two big camps Kutupalong and Balukhali, which are more established. One of our partners had received government and military approval to work over there and they are the ones who helped us organize the health camp and the solar lights distribution. As our van was travelling through the roads, we saw thousands and thousands of small shacks just like the slums we work in, but only worse. Each small shack is housing 10-16 people. There’s very little food (only rice sometime) and water. Sanitation issues are huge. We saw kids about 4-5 years old carrying two 5 liter water jars for about a mile and then going on top of the hill.
Continue Reading
Investing in Farmers (and Technology) to Expand Sustainable Agriculture
Posted on November 7, 2017.
By Elsa Watland
On November 2nd, Global Washington and the World Affairs Council partnered to host a panel discussion on Financing Sustainable Agriculture. The panelists represented a range of stakeholders involved in various aspects of agriculture financing. Panelists included Matthew Arnold, managing director and global head of sustainable finance at JPMorgan Chase (JPMC); Steve Hollingworth, president & CEO of the Grameen Foundation; and Paul Moseley, who leads agriculture finance strategy for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMFG). The conversation was moderated by Kristen Dailey, executive director of Global Washington.
The future of global food security is a significant challenge humankind will face in the coming years, and smallholder farmers hold the key to this challenge. 2.2 billion people depend on agriculture for their livelihood and 80 percent of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers. By 2050, food production must double to feed the projected global population of 9.8 billion. This means that we must focus on finding sustainable, long-term solutions to ensure agricultural systems are more efficient, and can meet our planet’s rising nutritional needs in three decades. Continue Reading
October 2017 Newsletter
Posted on October 27, 2017.
Welcome to the October 2017 issue of the Global Washington newsletter.
IN THIS ISSUE
Letter from our Executive Director
This month Global Washington published a new report on the Global Development sector in Washington state. It highlights not only the tremendous global reach of organizations based here, but also the increasing variety of partnerships we’re seeing between our non-profit and corporate members seeking ways to expand their social impact to improve lives in developing countries.
Our Global Development sector includes socially-minded leaders within financial services, such as JPMorgan Chase and Grameen Foundation, who are financing sustainable agriculture – raising farmers’ incomes, reducing extreme poverty, and improving food security globally.
Increasing food security is both critical for a thriving, equitable future and incredibly complex in finding sustainable solutions. I remember being struck by the level of complexity and variety of players in agricultural development when I first attended the World Food Prize in Iowa over a decade ago – an award given each October that recognizes effort to improve the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.
The organizations we’ve profiled in this month’s newsletter have wrestled with many of these challenges, and have come up with a unique set of approaches that I hope you’ll find inspiring and impactful. We are also discussing these issues on November 2 at a panel discussion with JPMorgan Chase, Grameen Foundation, and the Gates Foundation.
Lastly, if you haven’t yet registered for our annual conference, visit Renewing.Global to join us and continue the conversation on November 29. One of the speakers I’m particularly excited about is Dr. Alaa Murabit who is the Founder of the Voice of Libyan Women. Hope to see you there!
Kristen Dailey
Executive Director
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Issue Brief
Financing Sustainable Agriculture
By Joanne Lu
(Photo: Jim Cline/Grameen Foundation)
After more than a decade of steady decline, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization announced in September that global hunger is on the rise again. In 2016, global hunger affected 815 million people – 38 million more people than the previous year – and much of that increase was due to violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.
The need for sustainable agriculture has never been more urgent. Global demand for food has risen precipitously, even as climate change continues to upset delicate regional ecosystems, exacerbating natural disasters, pests, and diseases, and fueling increased violent conflict and human migration.
Scientists are also finding that because of the atmospheric changes, food crops are receiving more carbon dioxide, which results in higher sugar and carbohydrate content, but fewer nutrients. This means that even if a food supply is sufficient, malnutrition may remain a challenge.
Finding the money to pay for sustainable agricultural interventions has proven challenging, yet development experts see signs of hope.
According to the World Bank, about 80 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas. Most of them – 65 percent of poor working adults – rely on farming for their livelihoods. Agricultural development is, therefore, one of the most powerful tools for raising incomes, reducing extreme poverty, and improving global food security.
The agriculture sector – especially smallholder farmers in developing countries – is in urgent need of resilient and sustainable farming practices to halt growing world hunger, reduce poverty, and mitigate climate change. Organizations and innovators are aggressively developing tools and techniques for “climate-smart agriculture.” The challenge is financing the transition.
“Farmers don’t have the money they need, and investors don’t know where to put their money,” Simone Bauch, Latin America director of the Global Canopy Programme, told Mongabay.
It’s a vicious cycle of high risk and low returns. Because these smallholder farmers are often in areas where capital markets are underdeveloped, their access to financial products such as loans and insurance, is limited. This leaves them with no credit history, no significant collateral, and no means to adopt more sustainable practices that would increase their resiliency and productivity. To potential investors, these are just more reasons they are risky.
But advocates say that financial instruments that incentivize sustainability and are tailored specifically to the needs of farmers can help transform risk into opportunity.
For example, some crops, like coffee, can take about four years before production becomes profitable. Loans with lower interest rates and longer terms – say, 15 to 30 years – can help farmers who are switching to sustainable agriculture survive these “valley of death” years that are usually characterized by high initial costs and reduced returns.
Insurance is another valuable instrument for mitigating risk. While farmers in developed countries take out insurance to cover potential losses, such policies are prohibitively expensive for most smallholder farmers in developing countries. Instead, some institutions have begun to offer cheaper index-based insurance, which protects against shared – rather than individual – risk when external factors exceed certain thresholds, like unusually high temperatures, low rainfall, or disease outbreaks.
The largest program currently offering index-based insurance is the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), which is managed by the World Bank Group and funded by the European Union, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.
Because of “co-variant nature” of the risks insured by index-based insurance, reinsurers are very helpful mechanisms to make sure a country’s economic losses from a disaster are shared with other insurance companies outside of the affected economy. All of GIIF’s programs are supported by reinsurers, such as Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organisation (MiCRO) in Central America, which was co-founded by Mercy Corps.
A recent report by the Global Canopy Programme listed other emerging financial instruments that can mitigate risks and incentivize sustainability as well. These include grants and subsidies, equity investments, green bonds, partial credit guarantees by non-governmental organizations or banks to compensate for smallholder farmers’ lack of collateral. Off-take agreements, in which buyers commit to purchase future production, also helps reduce risk.
Although these tools are not new, they can be combined into innovative financial mechanisms that incentivize sustainable agriculture, especially with the help of new technologies.
The World Food Program, for example, launched the Food Security Climate Resilience (FoodSECuRE) Facility in 2015. FoodSECuRE is a “multilateral, multi-year, replenishable fund” that reinforces community resilience not just during and after climate disasters, but also before they occur, using forecasts.
Forecast-based financing allows organizations to preempt disasters with early responses. Some, like Grameen Foundation’s FarmerLink in the Philippines, also disseminate forecast data and preparedness procedures directly to farmers through SMS alerts. Of course, the prevalence of mobile phones in developing countries has also created huge opportunities for financial services to reach remote farming communities.
Another emerging technology that some say has the potential to “revolutionize” the agriculture industry, especially for smallholder farmers, is blockchain. Blockchain creates a secure digital ledger system shared by all parties in a supply chain.
The transparency of a blockchain system would help farmers retain a bigger share of their crop value, as well as facilitate timely mobile payments and financing. As consumers increasingly demand organic, fair trade products, blockchain-based records would also allow producers and manufacturers to verify exact origins. Therefore, if adopted on a large scale, blockchain would also incentivize sustainable farming.
In practice, innovative solutions to financing sustainable agriculture fuse together existing resources – including financial instruments, investors, technology and human capital – to meet farmers’ needs first.
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The following Global Washington members are working on financing for agriculture, and broader goals around global food security:
Agros
At Agros, agriculture production is a true partnership between staff and farmers. While the organization’s initiatives are market-oriented and follow best productive and environmental practices, they are also based on shared risk and mutual accountability. Agros provides working capital and market connections, while the farmers provide sweat equity. If a harvest fails, we both lose; if the production succeeds, we both share in the success. With a good crop, working capital is repaid and profits are shared equally: 50% to land repayment, 50% to the farmers. The result? Our land loan repayments are 97% in line: exponentially higher than industry standards.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks to increase the supply and affordability of nutrient-rich foods, reduce food price instability, empower women, and increase the levels of overseas development aid, and increase access to and use of digital financial tools. Our Level One Project and recently released, open source, Mojaloop mobile payment software uses blockchain technology to make it easy for a variety of financial service to work together to benefit farmers everywhere.
Global Child Nutrition Foundation
The Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF) focuses on “home-grown”, large-scale school-based nutrition programs that contribute to food security around the world. GCNF encourages governments to leverage investments in school meal programs to benefit local, smallholder agriculture–and vice versa. School feeding programs provide a predictable local market for farmers, spurring them to produce more, and to produce more nutritious and diverse crops, thus promoting economic development while also investing in children and their futures. School meal programs provide about 30 percent of children’s nutritional needs each day at school, equivalent to adding that much to a vulnerable family’s food basket.
Global Partnerships
Global Partnerships invests in impact-led microfinance organizations, agricultural businesses and cooperatives that provide smallholder farming families with high-impact products and services: improved market access, technical assistance, agronomic education, and financial services including affordable loans and financing for agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilizer. These enable smallholder farming families to increase and/or stabilize their income due to income diversification, improved yields, and better pricing for what they buy and sell. Last year, Global Partnerships invested more than $16 million in 12 countries through our rural-centered and smallholder-focused initiatives, and impacted an estimated 175,000 lives.
Grameen Foundation
Grameen Foundation’s mission is to enable the poor, especially women, to create a world without poverty and hunger. For a farmer, the journey out of poverty may begin with gaining first-time access to financial services. Grameen Foundation’s financing for sustainable agriculture comes in different forms. Financial services that meet farmers’ needs: loans, savings, insurance, payments, and the financial identity that accompanies these services can become an on-ramp for full economic activity. The foundation combines the use of digital technology, strong partnerships, and person-to-person training to tackle big, interrelated challenges: exclusion from the formal economy; lack of education and literacy; limited information on markets, agricultural practices and climate adaptation; and gender roles that limit opportunities for growth.
Landesa
Since its founding, Landesa has partnered with governments, communities and other stakeholders in more than 50 countries to advance pro-poor, gender-sensitive land rights reforms using law and policy tools. These reforms have helped alleviate poverty, reduce hunger, and ease conflict over land for more than 120 million women and men. This transformation—from land insecurity or landlessness to secure rights to land—has boosted agricultural productivity in the developing world by billions of dollars per year, improved health, nutrition and school enrollment in hundreds of villages across the globe, and placed scores of billions of dollars in new land wealth in the hands of the rural poor.
Literacy Bridge
Literacy Bridge helps the hardest-to-reach, non-literate, farmers learn and adopt sustainable practices using an audio device called the Talking Book. The Talking Book program empowers farmers with knowledge on topics such as integrated soil fertility management, money management, planting techniques, post-harvest loss prevention, and a range of health topics. The device also provides a channel for user feedback and usage monitoring to understand needs and interests. In partnership with AGRA, CARE, UNICEF, and others, nearly half a million people throughout West and East Africa have learned from the Talking Book new techniques to improve their health and income.
Mavuno
Mavuno’s mission is to develop local leaders to end extreme poverty in eastern Congo. The organization’s work in food security is geared toward a grassroots model of development. Mavuno develops local leaders through the creation of Grassroots Organizations (GO). The GO’s meet weekly, and Mavuno consults the partner communities to self-identify ways to tackle their community’s unique challenges – in ways that they choose, with tools they select. Mavuno supports the GO’s by providing financing, equipment and access to markets and quality agriculture inputs, as well as training from local agronomists. This structure fosters true grassroots leadership, giving the Congolese control of their future, along with a more stable food supply. Partner households improve their agriculture techniques, maximize their crop production and increase their incomes and food security.
Mifos
To support the needs of agricultural lenders and cooperatives in its open-source community, Mifos has extended its loan product configuration engine to support a completely flexible repayment schedule, one that maps to the actual cash flows of the farmers at harvest and planting of their crops. Organizations across Africa and Latin America use these variable installment loans to adjust the amount, frequency, and due date of installments for each farmer. Partners in Mifos’ ecosystem also leverage its mobile banking and field operations apps to enable outreach into remote and rural regions that lack formal branch infrastructure.
Oikocredit
Oikocredit is a cooperative social investor that supports over 180 agricultural partners in 35 countries. The Oikocredit cooperative has identified agriculture as a priority sector because it is one of the most effective ways of reducing rural poverty, strengthening food security, and mitigating the effects of climate change for smallholder producers. Oikocredit’s AgriUnit finances partners across agricultural value chains, including producer groups, cooperatives, traders, and other SMEs. Oikocredit supports farmers with capacity-building grants, education, and network services.
Oxfam
Oxfam aims to transform food systems so that small-scale farmers, food workers, and entrepreneurs realize their rights and capture more value for their work. Oxfam focuses on the people who grow and process food. The organization works to protect their livelihoods and help them claim their rights. Oxfam supports producers in accessing the tools, land, and capital they need to grow food, and helps them access the information and markets they need to sell it. The organization mobilizes consumers to challenge governments and companies to rewrite their policies and practices. Finally, Oxfam demands global action to respond to climate change.
Thriive
Nguyen Thi Mai, owner of Vinh Ha Vegetable Farm in Vietnam, couldn’t get a loan for equipment to increase her production, until she applied to Thriive. Thriive helps small businesses in the developing world with equipment loans. The loans are paid forward with donations to the community instead of back to Thriive in cash. Nguyen’s repayment is training for 15 very poor small holder farmers to grow more vegetables with her donated seedlings. With the added income they’ll earn, farmers are more likely to stay on their land, instead of moving to large cities, abandoning their children to other relatives, increased poverty, and the risk of trafficking.
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Organization Profile
Grameen Foundation
By Joanne Lu
Digital-based loans give female farmers like Anne Ndungu the safe, reliable financing they need to build strong agribusinesses in Kenya. (Photo: Riccardo Gangale/ Grameen Foundation)
The Grameen Foundation is on a mission to “enable the poor, especially women, to create a world without hunger and poverty.”
To do this, it engages with a network of community partners in countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America to implement solutions in three main areas: financial services for women, digital innovations in agriculture, and health care financing and access. Though they appear to be distinct areas of work, there is actually a great deal of overlap.
“A lot of what we do is based on looking at interconnected problems and solutions,” Lauren Hendricks, Executive Vice President for Program Strategy and Institutional Relations, said.
For example, in Rajasthan, India, Grameen and its local partners, including Freedom from Hunger India Trust (FFHIT), worked with women’s self-help groups to address malnutrition. They trained Community Nutrition Advocates to not only educate the groups on health, but also on gender dialogues, financial literacy and resilient, nutrition-sensitive agriculture.
The strategies were as simple as encouraging women to eat at least one meal per day with their husbands, not separately as is the cultural norm. When families ate together, food quality and portions for women and children improved dramatically. It also opened the door for more gender dialogues,
“Women gained more decision-making power within the home, and more freedom of movement outside the home,” Saraswathi Rao, CEO of FFHIT, said in a press release. “And with this, they began to change the crops they grew, what they ate and fed their children, how they treated common childhood illnesses like diarrhea, and when and where they sought health care.”
Within two years, food security more than doubled for women and children, and 80 percent of women in the project had savings set aside for health.
“We focus on women for two primary reasons,” Hendricks said. “One is that women are disproportionately impacted by poverty. They are more likely to live in poverty than men are. But also, they are more likely to invest in the food, health, and educational needs of their children. When they move out of poverty, so do their families.”
Therefore, women’s engagement with interventions is critical in order to increase the productivity of smallholder farmers, who make up about 65 percent of the world’s poor.
Using a variety of digital tools, Grameen not only helps farmers increase actual production through good agricultural practices (GAP), but also continually develops a range of financial and health services around that.
In the Davao region of the Philippines, for example, Grameen’s FarmerLink program utilizes mobile technology to tackle four major issues that keep rural coconut farmers in poverty despite being in a multibillion-dollar industry.
To tackle low productivity, field agents document and digitize best practices and share them with farmers over their mobile phones. Field agents also work with farmers’ to help them comply with global organic certification standards. This significantly improves their direct market access.
An early warning system also alerts farmers through SMS and radio to pest outbreaks, diseases, and climate shocks so that they can respond proactively with treatments, protections, early harvesting or in extreme weather cases, evacuation. In one case, thousands of farmers were able to protect their trees from a four-month drought.
Finally, FarmerLink is helping smallholder farmers gain access to financial services.
“Agriculture finance is a big, hairy issue that we as a global community are trying to tackle,” Hendricks said.
Most financial institutions consider smallholder farmers to be very high risk because they lack any sort of credit history. However, FarmerLink compiles comprehensive profiles for each farmer through mobile tools. This data allows FarmerLink’s microfinance partner to determine which financial product is most appropriate for each client, whether it’s a financial literacy program, a savings tool, or a loan.
Digital technology helps farmers like Theresia Wairuba receive and repay loans via mobile phones. (Photo: Riccardo Gangale/Grameen Foundation)
“It gives the bank a lot of visibility to meet farmers where they are,” Ana Herrera, Grameen’s FarmerLink program manager, said. Such insight has enabled one financial partner to support farmers with loans for intercropping of coconut and cocoa, diversifying farmers’ income and strengthening their resilience. Shared data also provides an alternative means to assess credit risk. For example, a transaction history with the country’s major coconut exporter, Franklin Baker, serves to improve farmers’ credit ratings.
Grameen has a similar digital tool in Colombia called the Alternative Risk Evaluation Tool (ARET), developed in collaboration with the Andes farmers collective, and funded by Starbucks and the Inter-American Development Bank. Starbucks recently invested an additional $2 million for loans to support Andes members in replanting aging coffee trees and purchasing processing equipment. Grameen Foundation will continue to work with Andes to use ARET in support of farmers.
“With ARET, farmers don’t have to have a credit history,” Director of Marketing and Communications Bee Wuethrich said. “They can have a history of being really smart and responsible farmers.”
As part of the Grameen family of institutions – emanating from Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel prize-winning microfinance in Bangladesh, Grameen Bank – the Grameen Foundation bases many of its solutions on the idea of “bringing people who’ve been in the informal sector into a formal financial institution – one that’s really designed to meet their needs,” as Hendricks put it.
For example, Grameen and its partner, Musoni Kenya, designed a loan specifically for smallholder farmers. It allows farmers to draw down portions of approved loans as needed, since not all agricultural costs are up front. This means that farmers only have to pay interest on what they’ve taken out, and it prevents them from spending the money on other expenses.
This people-led approach is evident throughout Grameen’s efforts – whether it’s exploring development of a blockchain biometric identification database for people without officially recognized IDs, increasing women’s access to mobile finance by training more female agents, or fighting anemia with iron cooking pots.
No matter how complex or simple, the Grameen Foundation looks for solutions across finance, health and agriculture that “enable the poor to create a world without hunger and poverty.”
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Changemaker
Matthew Arnold, Global Head of Sustainable Finance at JPMorgan Chase
By Andie Long
“My mom is a complete rockstar,” said Matthew Arnold, Managing Director and Global Head of Sustainable Finance at JPMorgan Chase.
Asked who his role model was growing up, without hesitation Arnold names his 93 year old mother, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at Brown University’s medical school.
“Her basic code in life is it doesn’t matter what you do, just do it really well,” Arnold said.
Coming from a medical family, Arnold was always fascinated by science.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, he pursued psychobiology, studying the neural basis of behavior. He went on to get his Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Today, his passion for science has expanded to include his two college-age sons, one of whom is majoring in neuroscience, the other in physics. Like their dad, neither plans a traditional career path.
Arnold has a track record of starting businesses and initiatives that go on to shape larger efforts. In 2003 he founded Sustainable Finance Ltd, which was acquired by PwC in December 2008. After that, he served as principal and leader of Sustainable Business Solutions at PwC for nearly three years.
Prior to PwC, Arnold served as Chief Operating Officer and acting President of the World Resources Institute, having previously founded the Management Institute for Environment and Business, which merged with the World Resources Institute in 1996.
Arnold is excited about taking his environmental efforts further thanks to the assets and reach of JPMorgan Chase and its clients. “To me, finance is an instrument of social change,” he said. With $2.6 trillion on its balance sheet, JPMorgan Chase is in a position to wield that instrument powerfully, and in ways that are beneficial for society and the environment.
According to Arnold, JPMorgan Chase believes that giving more people access to opportunity and the chance to move up the economic ladder is intrinsically a good thing. Directing assets toward agriculture, poverty alleviation, and other development goals requires someone like him inside the organization helping set the direction.
Having worked at JPMorgan Chase for a little over six years, Arnold’s proudest accomplishment is the firm’s recent announcement of two new sustainability goals to guide the company’s sustainability efforts. The definition of sustainable finance for Arnold is “seeing finance flowing towards sustainability goals.” One example might be focusing on the supply chain of a major multi-national company, ensuring their suppliers have the resources to obtain sustainability certification.
JPMorgan Chase’s new sustainability goals, which include commitments to source renewable power for 100 percent of the firm’s global energy needs by 2020 and to facilitate $200 billion in clean financing by 2025, came together in late July. “I told my wife that night, ‘This is the most important thing I will ever do in my career,’” Arnold said. JPMorgan Chase’s senior leaders all signed off on the commitments. “It creates momentum like I’ve never seen before,” Arnold said.
The company is focused on scaling its efforts to reach as many people as possible. “We have a team of people who are constantly ginning up new ideas – whether it’s focused on healthcare for disadvantaged communities, the environment, agriculture, education, or microfinance and financial inclusion,” Arnold said
To Arnold, success will be seeing JPMorgan Chase’s sustainability commitments take a life of their own. “If you build something that goes away when you leave, you haven’t built anything at all,” he said.
In his early 50’s, Arnold took up triathlons obsessively. It was something of a midlife crisis, he admits, but one he excelled in as he was able to qualify for a national championship. An injury put a damper on that obsession, but he continues to nurture another dream – becoming the sports program director at an orphanage in southern Africa.
Arnold’s wife, Elizabeth Littlefield, is onboard with this plan. A fellow Africanist and social finance guru, Littlefield has served as a director at the World Bank (twice), CEO for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and President & CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
Together, this sustainable finance power couple is likely to continue driving change in surprising ways.
Matthew Arnold will be speaking at the Rainier Club in Seattle next Thursday, Nov. 2nd on a panel about Financing Sustainable Agriculture. Tickets are still available. The panel is jointly organized by GlobalWA and World Affairs Council.
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Partnership Highlights
Q&A with Ambassador Sally G. Cowal, Senior Vice President, Global Health, American Cancer Society
By Andie Long
The American Cancer Society, a member of Global Washington, has a long history of working towards a cancer-free world. With chapters in all fifty states, the organization has a great deal to show for its efforts, including the fact that 47 researchers who have been funded by the organization have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize for their work.
In early October, the American Cancer Society announced a breakthrough partnership with two pharmaceutical companies, modelled after the campaign to fight HIV/AIDS and designed to provide affordable cancer drugs to people in Africa. I recently talked with Ambassador Sally Cowal about this partnership and the other global work that ACS does.
Following is a transcript of the conversation with Ambassador Sally Cowal, edited for length and clarity.
Many people don’t realize that the American Cancer Society has a global mission. Can you talk about what percentage of your work is focused globally?
Of course, we are the American Cancer Society, and by history, mission, and definition, our focus remains the United States. The global program, in terms of percentage, is a very small part of what we do.
My budget is about $7 million, which is less than one percent of the overall ACS budget.
All the way back to our founding in 1913, our mission mentions having relationships with other cancer societies around the world. And in the last few years, we’ve seen an opportunity to share the lessons we have gathered – lessons that others could benefit from outside the United States.
As to why we’re doing this, I think it reflects an enlightened leadership by our board and our CEO, Gary Reedy. We’ve done a very good job as a country at exporting our risk factors for cancer – poor diet, tobacco use, and a lack of physical activity. So we might owe it to others to export what we’ve learned about how to deal with the consequences of those risk factors.
We have been working at the country level in parts of Africa, providing technical assistance in prevention, treatment, and early detection, as well as patient navigation of services.
Tell me about this new campaign that was just announced? How did that come about?
On the practical level, it came about because IBM has a foundation, and they have something that they call the Global Health Corps.
About a year ago, we put in an unsolicited proposal saying that we needed help putting together a tool we’ve come to call ChemoQuant – an online chemotherapy forecasting tool, so that people in low and middle income countries (Ministers of Health, prescribing physicians, etc) can predict how much of certain kinds of medications they might need, depending on the burden of cancer in their specific area. That’s how it got started.
IBM has decided that the biggest difference they can make philanthropically is by loaning others their brain power. They agreed to work with us on the development of this tool.
They sent a team of six of their best and brightest from all over the world to work with us for a six week period.
So that’s the tool. The other piece we knew would be needed to make this successful was getting the right drugs at a price that would be affordable in these countries. That’s when we brought the Clinton Health Access Initiative into the partnership.
They have such experience working with the pharmaceutical industry to bring down the price of HIV drugs. But they had no experience with cancer care.
The third part of the effort was we knew we could make this an even better tool if we could get various countries around the continent to agree on treatment guidelines– so each hospital wasn’t setting its own guidelines for the same type of cancer.
That’s when we brought in the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. They are world-renowned and provide all of the treatment guidelines used all over the United States. They agreed to work with us on a pro-bono basis, together with an African coalition, led by Africans, to identify treatment guidelines for the most common types of cancer. The African Coalition today includes 40 oncologists from 13 different countries.
The African Cancer Coalition will be formally announcing these guidelines at a meeting in November that takes place in Rwanda. Virtually every specialist in Africa comes to that meeting.
So those three pieces together make the whole thing possible.
The price of cancer drugs was the biggest part of the equation – the six countries that are currently part of the coalition represent 44 percent of all of the cancer cases in Africa. And the average reduction in the price of the 16 drugs provided by Pfizer and Cipla is 57 percent.
Africa is the region of the world which is least well-served right now. We know you don’t treat your way out of an epidemic, so we’re also creating opportunities for improving patient support and capacity-building for the organizations that are on the ground.
What are the greatest challenges remaining?
Well, money is certainly one of them. What we’ve been doing is proof of concept with measurable results. To scale up, it will depend on the resources we can make available.
The global burden of disease now is around cancer and other non-communicable diseases. But financing to help smaller countries meet this need isn’t there yet.
The U.S. assistance still overwhelmingly goes to HIV and AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and maternal and child health. This despite the fact that cervical cancer alone is a bigger burden of disease than all pregnancy-related causes of mortality and morbidity.
We’re stuck in a last century model right now, but I have some sympathy for that. I was at UN AIDS, when we built the case for why that disease is a worldwide threat. HIV has since changed from being a death sentence to being a chronic disease thanks to the medicines, political will, and financing mechanisms to expand access to the drugs in those countries that were most affected.
We haven’t yet seen that for cancer, or other non-communicable diseases, and that’s a big problem.
Why do you think that is?
Traditionally, the communicable disease are seen as a bigger threat. There’s this feeling that they could spread like wildfire if they aren’t contained, and that they will eventually directly affect us.
But if these countries fall apart because the burden of disease is so great, it’s a bigger threat than we recognize.
Zambian Airlines went out of existence because all of its pilots were HIV infected in the late 1990’s.
What we’ve missed is that non-communicable diseases are also a threat to the stability of countries, and that, in turn, is an economic and security concern for us.
Cancer strikes earlier in low and middle-income countries than in the U.S. and other Western countries. It’s people in their 30s, 40s and 50s, who still have many years left to contribute to their societies.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, out in your neck of the woods, has been part of the wonderful medical advances that are saving lives. It’s very exciting. But we can’t be an island of hope, surrounded by a sea of despair, and expect to live in a safe and prosperous world.
I see cancer as a very big threat to global economies, to prosperity and to the ability of countries to continue to progress.
You’ve outlined that very well – the national security, economic and moral arguments for supporting affordable cancer treatment in the developing world.
With communicable diseases in the developing world, we hear how a disease will come to our shores and infect and kill our kids.
When you think about the risk factors involved in cancer, though, we’re really the ones threatening them!
The other day I was in Nairobi and there was a huge demonstration on the sidewalk. It was election season, so I assumed it was a political rally. In fact, it was people storming the Kentucky Fried Chicken that had just opened. Everybody wanted to get in!
So I feel like we have to save the world from greasy chicken.
There goes your Pepsi franchise.
Yeah, right. [Laughs].
On the prevention side, we’ve got two big campaigns. One is Prevent20, which is a tobacco tax campaign. Tobacco is responsible for 20 percent of all cancer deaths, and research shows us that taxation reduces tobacco use. We’re leading a campaign to get countries to increase their tobacco taxes, and we’ve now got 30 organizations in 20 countries working with us.
The other big opportunity is HPV-related cancers. We have a campaign in the United States in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control called, HPV Cancer Free. HPV causes six different cancers, and almost all cases of cervical cancer. 90 percent of the deaths are in low and middle income countries. These are women in the prime of their lives! There’s an opportunity here that can’t be overstated – we could actually see an end to cervical cancer in our lifetimes. The first cancer we’re really able to wipe out.
We can’t just talk about the United States, though. We’ve wiped it out when it really no longer exists globally. The closest thing you have to a silver bullet is a vaccine-preventable cancer. GAVI has raised enough money to vaccinate 40 million girls, but there’s been fewer than two million girls vaccinated to date. We’re seeing if we can ramp this up globally.
Is there anything else?
The other part of our work that I would mention is that the obstacles to doing much about cancer care is that we’re working with partners to increase patients’ access to transportation and lodging so they can complete treatment. We know that people are sleeping on the ground outside hospitals. We’re starting something we call a Hope Lodge in Kenya.
My message to the Global Washington community is let’s not fail to follow the changes in the global burden of disease, and let’s see what we can do in partnership to address the burden of cancer that has become such a threat to prosperity and security in many low-income countries around the world.
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Welcome New Members
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
University of Washington – Continuum College
Continuum College expands the University of Washington’s educational impact by meeting the needs of learners wherever they are in life — and wherever they intend to go. It provides relevant educational experiences, delivering the right programs for the right people at the right time, so that anyone can access the knowledge they need through the University of Washington to have a greater impact in the world. continuum.uw.edu
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Member Events
Oct 27: World Affairs Council // US-China Relations: Progress and Uncertainty
Oct 27: Shoreline Community College //Shoreline Multicultural Night
Oct 28: Mission Africa // 2017 Benefit Luncheon
Oct 28 – Nov 4: Partners Asia // Ultimate Bike Trip to Myanmar
Nov 12: Living Earth Institute // Annual Fundraiser Dinner
Nov. 15: Global Child Nutrition Foundation // Local to Global: A Tasting of Locally-sourced School Meals
Nov. 27: Capria // 5th Investment Cycle applications due
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Career Center
Sales and Marketing Manager, Snow Leopard Trust
Communications Consultant, Days for Girls International
Chief Development Officer, Landesa
For more jobs and resources, visit The GlobalWA Job Board/
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GlobalWA Events
November 2: Financing Sustainable Agriculture
November 29: GlobalWA Annual Conference – Renewing Global Leadership
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An Evening with Muhammad Yunus in Celebration of Global Philanthropy
Posted on October 13, 2017.
© Rozarii Lynch
On Wednesday, October 11, together with Seattle Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Washington honored global philanthropists at a dinner with Bill and Paula Clapp, and the Clapps’ longtime friend and mentor, Nobel Laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.
In his talk Professor Yunus shared his philosophy on charity, his views on the nature of poverty, and his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
David Wertheimer, director of community and civic engagement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, welcomed the assembled philanthropists and other distinguished guests. Afterwards, Tony Mestres, President & CEO of Seattle Foundation, gave remarks about the importance of global giving to Seattle Foundation, including observing that in a recent report from Council on Foundations, the Seattle region ranked number two among its community foundation peers across the nation in terms of percentage of total international giving. “I think we should all aim for number one,” he said, drawing a round of applause.
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Assessing the Global State: How Washington Leads in Global Development
Posted on October 12, 2017.
New Global Washington Report Highlights Impacts of the Global Development Sector in Washington State
SEATTLE – A new report by Global Washington (GlobalWA) explores the economic impact and interconnectedness of Washington state-based businesses and nonprofits that are working to improve lives in developing countries.
“Increasingly, businesses have stepped up their commitments to global corporate social responsibility,” said Kristen Dailey, executive director of Global Washington. “As a result, we’ve seen a steady increase in companies looking for ways to collaborate with our non-profit members on the ground in emerging markets.”
Currently GlobalWA has 27 for-profit members. In addition to supporting humanitarian responses globally, such as the Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East and the hunger crises in Eastern Africa and Yemen, businesses are also working to improve the resiliency of their supply chains and at the same time benefiting local communities where they work.
The economic impact of the global development sector in Washington state is sizeable and growing. In 2015, Global Washington’s nonprofit and foundation members directly supported more than 10,000 jobs in the state, and had a combined total of $8.5 billion in expenditures on international activities.
GlobalWA members that are grant-making foundations include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pangea Giving, SE Asia Foundation, Seattle International Foundation and the Seattle Foundation, and the Mona Foundation. The global impact of these members is far reaching. Collectively, they operate in or issue grants to organizations working in more than 50 countries. They represented approximately 1,200 Washington state jobs in 2015, as well as $4.8 billion in revenues.
GlobalWA’s 18 academic institution members also contribute to global development through educational programs and international exchanges that are geared toward entrepreneurship, as well as women and girls’ empowerment.
“Global development has made incredible gains in improving people’s health and economic wellbeing,” said Dailey. “The challenges that remain, however, are so immense that our members realize we all have to work together, speaking with one voice, in order to continue making progress. And that is why Global Washington exists.”
• Download report (PDF)
September 2017 Newsletter
Posted on September 26, 2017.
Welcome to the September 2017 issue of the Global Washington newsletter.
IN THIS ISSUE
Letter from our Executive Director
The Pacific Northwest is known for its natural beauty, technical innovation, and a collaborative, can-do spirit. That’s why I’m not surprised that so many advancements in humanitarian aid and development are coming from right here in our region.
Disruptive innovation in the financial sector is happening all over the world, but nowhere is this more true than in developing countries. As humanitarian organizations experiment with ways to deliver financial aid to families in emergencies, digital forms of cash have opened up new avenues to make a transformative impact.
An estimated two billion people currently don’t have bank accounts, and yet 80 percent of adults in emerging economies have a mobile phone. Rather than sit back and wait for commercial banks to reach more people, disruptive development change makers are working to make sure poor people have access to affordable financial tools to better manage their savings, protect against losses, and invest in their future.
In this month’s issue we dig deep on this topic. The technical lead for financial services in crisis at Mercy Corps gives us her thoughts on what it takes to succeed in this field and where she thinks it’s all heading. Then we take a closer look at how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working together with humanitarian organizations, governments and business partners to clear the way for this transformation in financial solutions for the poor.
As we head into the fall and winter months, I hope you will learn more about the global work of non-profits, for-profits, academic institutions and foundations based in the northwest region, and the global leadership needed for the future. Find out more at Renewing.Global and join the conversation at our annual conference on November 29. Hope to see you there.
Kristen Dailey
Executive Director
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Issue Brief
Innovations in Cash-Based Aid Help Promote Financial Inclusion for the Poor
By Andie Long
Flooding in Bangladesh in early 2017 impacted nearly 5 million people. Affected families received cash from World Vision to purchase food and rebuild their lives. Photo: World Vision
Humanitarians have begun to acknowledge a painful reality: There are more people in critical need globally than we can reach. That is, if we stick to business as usual in emergency response.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, “An unprecedented 65.6 million people around the world have been forced from home.” Layer on slow onset disasters like the hunger crises that have been building in Yemen and Eastern Africa, and add in sporadic natural disasters – earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, landslides – and you have a global response community stretched almost to the breaking point.
Giving cash directly to people in emergencies is one solution to the growing gap between humanitarian needs and capacity. In fact, research over the last decade has proven this method of aid delivery to be not only cheaper than traditional in-kind aid, but also incredibly effective at alleviating suffering.
A paper jointly authored by the Overseas Development Institute and the Center for Global Development two years ago extolls the benefit of cash-based humanitarian aid where appropriate. In addition to reducing the cost of providing aid, giving cash instead of stuff increases the speed of the response, improves transparency, and enables recipients to purchase exactly what they need when they need it most. And it has the added benefit of supporting local economies and businesses.
Catherine Nabulon, 34, of Abulon, Kenya, uses her E-wallet to procure safe drinking water for her family. Photo: Joy Obuya/Oxfam
To be sure, giving cash is no panacea. Where markets aren’t functioning, and where broader systemic needs are lacking, traditional aid responses are still necessary.
Only about 6 percent of all humanitarian aid is cash-based today, but that figure is growing. Further, cash aid is increasingly going digital, and this presents an opportunity to solve yet another challenge associated with poverty: financial exclusion.
According to McKinsey & Company, two billion people in emerging economies lack access to formal savings and credit. Having access to formal financial services would enable the poor to better manage their financial lives.
While they may not have access to financial services, nearly 80 percent of adults in emerging economies have something else – a mobile phone. Foundations like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and aid organizations like Mercy Corps are increasingly exploring ways to turn cash-based aid into an on-ramp to wider financial inclusion for the poor.
A Mercy Corps partner in Bangassou, Central African Republic, explains to beneficiaries how a community bank works. Photo: Sean Sheridan for Mercy Corps.
The following Global Washington members are currently providing cash-based emergency aid globally, whether in the form of physical cash and vouchers, or as mobile money and electronic vouchers:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor program aims to play a catalytic role in broadening the reach of robust, open, and low-cost digital payment systems, particularly in poor and rural areas—and expanding the range of services available on these platforms. Their approach includes three objectives: Increasing poor people’s capacity to weather financial shocks and capture income-generating opportunities; generating economy-wide efficiencies by digitally connecting large numbers of poor and low-income people to one another and to financial services providers, government services, and businesses; and reducing the amount of time and money that poor people must spend to conduct financial transactions.
Mercy Corps
Over the last decade, Mercy Corps has implemented cash programming in 31 countries including Syria, Ukraine, Haiti, Niger, Yemen and Uganda. Mercy Corps was the first organization to pilot cash-for-work in Afghanistan and in response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004. Since July 2016, the organization has distributed over $46 million dollars in cash programming — benefiting more than 173,000 households. In 2017, Mercy Corps connected more than 1 million people to cash during emergencies, infusing more than $46 million into local economies around the world.
Oxfam
When disaster strikes, people living in the affected communities often lose the assets and income they need to keep their families fed, sheltered, and clothed. Distributions of cash can help disaster-affected families meet the complex needs that arise. For Oxfam, it’s a means to empower people and give them some control over their own destiny at a time of great uncertainty. Both in Oxfam’s humanitarian response programs, and in its advocacy to change government policy, cash programming is one of the central ways of supporting food security and livelihoods in an emergency context. Oxfam will continue to promote a “cash first” approach, so long as it is backed up by sufficient analysis of the market, wider context, and utilizes a well-honed information communication technologies capacity – and where it is not appropriate, Oxfam will utilize other modalities, including in-kind support.
World Concern
During the 2011-2012 Horn of Africa famine, World Concern provided families with vouchers for food and other items, but they have since found cash to be more efficient and useful for beneficiaries during a disaster or crisis. The organization is distributing cash grants of approximately $80 to families in Somalia affected by the current drought crisis. Families are using the cash to purchase food and supplies to survive. In addition, in 2016 World Concern provided cash to families in Haiti affected by Hurricane Matthew.
World Vision
Cash-based programming is an increasingly important tool for tackling the underlying causes of poverty. World Vision recognizes that using cash strengthens local markets; restores dignity and choice to people who are in need; and can provide efficient, tailored help to families. In 2016, the World Vision International CEO committed to providing 50% of the organization’s humanitarian assistance through cash by 2020.
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Organization Profile
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Financial Services for the Poor
By Andie Long
Giggling community members have a bit of fun in line, as they wait to use their Last Mile Mobile Solutions cards to pick up their goods. They are part of a cash-for-work program implemented by World Vision following Typhoon Haiyan in The Philippines. Photo Credit: World Vision
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mission is to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives. One of the most powerful leverage points the foundation has found to increase opportunities for people in the developing world to lift themselves out of poverty is ensuring they have access to the right tools to manage their financial lives.
“Poor people like everyone else have complex financial lives,” said David Lubinski, a senior program officer at the foundation. With the right financial tools, people can securely put away small amounts of money over time to create a cushion for unexpected financial shocks and to invest in growing their income through money-making opportunities.
Increasingly, as the humanitarian community has shifted towards cash, including digital money, as the preferred method for providing aid in emergencies, the foundation, other donors and their partners have been exploring how to turn these digital payments into a gateway to greater financial inclusion for those who have been marginalized or excluded from the financial system.
In early 2016, representatives from more than two dozen organizations, including the humanitarian and financial sectors, as well as funders and other experts, gathered in Barcelona to discuss how to make that dream a reality. Out of the two-day meeting, participants derived eight guiding principles for digital payments in humanitarian response.
With the Barcelona Principles in hand, the foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor and Emergency Response teams reached out to Ericsson, a telecom service provider, to explore possible commercial technology solutions that humanitarian organizations could learn from and possibly use to help deliver on this mission.
Ericsson was already a part of the United Nations’ emergency telecommunications cluster, and well-versed in disaster response. The company also had its own mobile wallet product, and the foundation sought to learn from the humanitarian community what else was missing.
As it turned out, quite a lot.
“When we first started working with Ericsson, what we thought was that the humanitarian organizations just needed a better technology,” Lubinski said. Instead, the four biggest challenges they found had very little to do with technology.
What was most urgently needed by the humanitarian community was a standard and efficient way to legally identify people. Within the financial sector, there’s something called KYC, which stands for “Know Your Customer,” and it enables financial institutions to comply with regulations and laws, not the least of which are anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism. Yet, Lubinski and the broader team working on this found that there were many diverse definitions of what could constitute the “minimum viable KYC.”
But KYC isn’t just a big problem for the humanitarian agencies; it’s also a challenge for the entire financial services ecosystem. At this point, Lubinski and his team posed two questions: Why is KYC different in emergency response than in non-emergency? And should it be?
To get to the bottom of these questions, the foundation became a major funder of Identification for Development. Hosted by The World Bank, ID4D is a group that is looking at how to arrive at a minimum standard data set for the approximately 1.1 billion people in the world who are currently unable to prove their identity, and are therefore excluded from not only financial services, but also healthcare, social safety nets, education, political participation, and more.
A second major challenge for humanitarian organizations wanting to use commercially available mobile wallets in emergency settings is that, in Lubinski’s words, “Sometimes donors ask for silly things – and they cost a lot!”
For example, a donor might stipulate that her funds only go to a particular individual, and only be used for one specific thing – such as food. This type of request might seem reasonable to the donor, because she wants accountability. But should the recipient of those funds be required to juggle multiple digital wallets in order to keep money from different sources separated? And what if there is money left over in one digital wallet, say the food budget, while another category, like medical expenses, is suddenly more urgent? Allowing for the beneficiary to make these decisions on her own is empowering and it reduces the administrative burden of tracking each and every purchase for every account holder.
The last two major barriers to using mobile wallets in emergency settings come down to infrastructure – physical infrastructure and human infrastructure. GSMA, the global mobile network providers association, along with others are looking at ways to improve damaged or insufficient infrastructure after a crisis or natural disaster. Further, The Level One Project at the foundation is taking a broad look at in-country policies and requirements that prevent resilient digital financial ecosystems from taking hold.
Finding ways to improve and expand financial services for the poor is just one of many complex challenges that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken on to alleviate extreme poverty.
“We have co-chairs of the foundation who challenge us to take risks, including taking on these challenges in partnership with the community of humanitarian organizations who respond with frontline services in every disaster,” Lubinski said. “We are not funded by any government so we do not and cannot have a political agenda. That means we have an important role to play in accepting bigger risks and tackling the most pressing challenges facing the people who are most vulnerable – and this includes the two billion people who today do not have access to the basic tools to manage their financial lives.”
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Changemaker
Thea Anderson, Technical Lead for Financial Services in Crisis, Mercy Corps
By Andie Long
Not everyone is comfortable talking about financial services in a humanitarian setting, which may belie our own discomfort with the topic of money. For Thea Anderson, Mercy Corps’ technical lead for financial services in crisis and migration, money itself is an enabler, the thing that holds together any type of successful humanitarian and development response.
“I see financial services as the critical piece for reaching larger development, resilience, and humanitarian goals,” said Anderson.
Over the last 16 years, Anderson has worked in over 40 countries, managing multimillion-dollar financial and market system programs in fragile and complex environments across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Her first exposure to financial services came in 1998, when she began her career at CHF International – now Global Communities.
“They had a huge focus on financial services when I started,” she said. “CHF looked at ways to provide housing finance to people post-disaster, as well as financing to reinforce structures, so they could better withstand future disasters. After a disaster, people can fall into such deep cycles of debt. You need different savings and insurance products to help mitigate that.”
Asked what she likes best about the financial services sector, Anderson said, “I love how dynamic it is. It’s constantly changing with new actors, new technologies, and new research so we can understand what works and what doesn’t.”
Increasingly, Anderson finds herself excited by the role technology can play in increasing access to financial services. Yet she says, “The challenge is making sure it is used to include, rather than exclude people.”
The youngest of three kids growing up in Kentucky, Anderson remembers her family moving around a lot. But it wasn’t until college that she was exposed to life outside the U.S. “It was then that I realized there’s a whole world out there that I wanted to be a part of!”
To succeed in this field, Anderson advises would-be financial services practitioners to cultivate a wide range of technical skills and experiences.
“You need to be open to new technologies and working with people and understanding what their actual needs are and what their lives look like. You also have to be flexible and always wanting to learn, travel, and meet new people. If you stay closed off, the innovation will pass you by.”
When she thinks about how financial services will change within the humanitarian context over the next ten years, Anderson has a few theories. “I see the role of technology growing, especially the use of mobile technology and the potential role of digital ledger technology. Peer to peer financial options are also going to be stronger and more digital based.”
Anderson also sees a huge role for remittances sent from family members working abroad. In Africa alone, over $40 billion is sent and received annually in remittances from diaspora populations.
“Not only do remittances put money directly into people’s pockets, supporting household expenses such as food, education fees, and health costs, but they also enable longer-term investments in housing or businesses,” she said. “There is a huge opportunity to move remittances onto digital channels, reduce transaction costs, and ensure that ‘last mile’ clients can easily send and receive payments.”
Even the United Nations has recognized the need to elevate the focus on remittances. The Sustainable Development Goals push governments and providers to find ways to reduce remittance transaction costs and improve the infrastructure.
Having worked on market development and financial services at Mercy Corps for the last six years, Anderson recently took on a new role: financial services in fragile regions and frontier markets where the agency works. This includes a focus on refugee and internally displaced populations and opportunities to integrate people into local and national economies.
“Fragility is very context specific and within a country there can be separate fragile regions,” said Anderson. This might include countries or regions affected by a rapid-onset disasters (such as natural disasters or conflicts), as well as latent fragility, such as drought-prone areas, and long-simmering conflicts that cross borders. “Households and business owners often face reoccurring shocks and stresses, making it difficult for them to get ahead.”
People’s financial needs are often the same in both fragile and non-fragile areas. However, the challenge is that fragile regions tend to have higher overall operating costs, owing to the unpredictable political environments, poor infrastructure, and greater movements of people.
Mercy Corps has set an ambitious agenda for itself, not only to use digital cash relief in emergency settings to help families and business owners get back on their feet, but also where appropriate, to increase opportunities for them to access formal banking services. Mercy Corps’ relief effort in The Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 is one such example, and it led to the organization being awarded the Global Mobile Award by GSMA in 2015 for “Best Use of Mobile in Emergency or Humanitarian Situations.”
Merly and her husband Niño Francisco check their mobile bank account in North Cebu, Philippines. The couple were part of an unconditional cash mobile transfer program by Mercy Corps, following Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.
To coordinate these complex responses, Anderson and her team work with people from many different sectors – businesses, donors, foundations, governments and regulatory agencies, even religious institutions.
Cultivating trust among so many different groups can be challenging. “It requires understanding the different incentives behind each of the actors’ interest in financial inclusion,” said Anderson.
But the challenge is worth it.
“As an NGO we can’t do it alone. When we partner with the private sector, we have the potential to reach millions of underserved and underbanked individuals and get them on a pathway to financial inclusion.”
Organizations like Mercy Corps are looking for ways to reduce the potential risk for financial service providers in order for them to consider new clients, such as people in rural communities, or displaced populations, and offer new financial products to meet their needs.
“When companies look at their next billion customers, they will find organizations like Mercy Corps are already there,” said Anderson. “This creates a unique opportunity to build lasting partnerships that strengthen communities and meet commercial needs at the same time.”
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Member Events
Sep 30: Women’s Enterprises International // Harambee Gala
Sep 30: SIGN Fracture Care International // Wine Dine for SIGN
Oct 7 – 15: Ashesi University Foundation // 9th Annual Trip to Ghana
Oct 11: Washington Nonprofits // Effective Online Donation Strategies
Oct 13: International Rescue Committee // Rebuilding Lives Dinner
Oct 26: Sahar: Education for Afghan Girls // Dinner
Oct 28: Mission Africa // 2017 Benefit Luncheon
Oct 28 – Nov 4: Partners Asia // Ultimate Bike Trip to Myanmar
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Career Center
Chief Development Officer, Landesa
Executive Director, Seattle International Foundation
Marketing Associate, Upaya
For more jobs and resources, visit https://globalwa.org/job-board/
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GlobalWA Events
October 26: Inland Northwest Conference for the Greater Good
November 2: Financing Sustainable Agriculture
November 29: GlobalWA Annual Conference – Renewing Global Leadership
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Congressman Adam Smith Meets with the Global Development Community in the State of Washington
Posted on September 20, 2017.
On September 18th, together with Global Washington, Congressman Adam Smith met with about two dozen members of Washington-based non-profits to discuss issues of concern to the global development community. The meeting was held at the offices of World Relief Seattle in Kent, WA.
Congressman Smith represents Washington’s Ninth Congressional District, which comprises the central Puget Sound region, including parts of King and Pierce Counties. Continue Reading
A Conversation with E. Anne Peterson, MD, MPH, Senior Vice President of Global Programs at Americares
Posted on September 14, 2017.
Following is a transcript of Global Washington’s conversation with Anne Peterson. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Integrating Mental Health in Humanitarian Response
Editor’s Note: Americares President and CEO Michael J. Nyenhuis participated in a plenary session at the 2017 Concordia Annual Summit in New York (Sept 18-19), on sustaining health services in insecure settings. One aspect of health that Americares has sought to elevate within the global community is recognition and care for the mental and emotional health of people who have been through traumatic events.
Why do you think that mental health hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves? What are the things that are lacking in a robust response?
At Concordia in New York, we’re going to talk about refugees and their ongoing trauma, especially looking at how you integrate mental health treatment across different kinds of programs. Not only is there a need, but we’re able to measure things that we can do that make a difference.
I think that the health world for a long time only thought about physical health. When I think about my own training as a medical doctor, I only had one class on psychiatry, but nothing really on mental and emotional well-being. I think that the first exposure I had to mental health concerns in a global health setting was around HIV. For the people who received this life-threatening diagnosis, we realized we should be dealing with their emotional health and coping abilities, as well.
There are also child soldiers who need mental health support as they work to reintegrate into their communities. And, of course, in war you see post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and as we started to measure it, we would see the difference it made on overall health outcomes. Slowly the global health community began to move from just seeing their work as preventing death, toward improving people’s lives.
Continue Reading
Fundación MAPFRE Partnership Helps Develop Global Leaders
Posted on September 14, 2017.
Fundación MAPFRE has made an extraordinary gift to support the future leaders of NPH.
September 14, 2017
The Institute’s Class of 2017 – 2018: Ever, Maria, Darich, Darlyn, Farid and Yomara. Credit: NPH
Fundación MAPFRE is proud to announce an exciting partnership with NPH USA by providing more than $93,000 to support the Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH) Seattle Institute, which develops a future generation of leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Now in its seventh year, NPH’s Seattle Institute offers promising young adults a deep and advanced leadership formation experience in the U.S. Each year six university-aged students from NPH are selected to spend ten months in Seattle, enrolling in a full-time English program and participating in a comprehensive leadership development program. The goal of the program is to train talented youth to maximize their own potential and to serve others in their local communities.
Read more: https://www.nphusa.org/news/fundacion-mapfre/
August 2017 Newsletter
Posted on August 22, 2017.
Welcome to the August 2017 issue of the Global Washington newsletter.
IN THIS ISSUE
Letter from our Executive Director
My daughter will be starting kindergarten in the next few weeks and is filled with excitement and curiosity. Education gives kids a chance to understand their place in the universe and how to make sense of the world around them. Research has shown us again and again that making sure young people have access to quality education has a transformative impact on their lives. And ensuring that girls as well as boys have that same opportunity has an even greater impact on the health and prosperity of their communities.
In this month’s issue, we’ve highlighted various Global Washington members that are serious about expanding quality education in developing countries, including the Mona Foundation and Rwanda Girls Initiative, which are sharply focused on empowering young women.
We also explore the way in which the metrics that are chosen impact the success of education programs in developing countries – such as evaluating the quality of the education, rather than just tracking enrollment rates. Many organizations believe that it is not enough just to educate a child if she is not able to make a lasting contribution to her society. Learn more in the articles below about how our members are prioritizing education that addresses the needs of the whole student.
Similarly, a video interview we did with the founder of Ashesi University Foundation, lays out the importance of educating youth to be strong moral leaders, people who set an example for others to follow. We look forward to exploring more with you at our annual conference what it truly means to be a global leader.
Enjoy the last weeks of summer, and I hope to see you all this fall.
Kristen Dailey
Executive Director
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Issue Brief
The Transformative Power of Education, Especially for Girls
By Tom Murphy
Photo credit: Rwanda Girls Initiative
How powerful is education? Some 171 million people could be lifted out of extreme poverty if every student in low-income countries finished school with basic reading skills, according to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
It is particularly important for girls. Research shows that an additional year of schooling can raise future wages for a woman by up to 20 percent. Girls who complete primary education are less likely to become teen mothers. Nearly 200,000 maternal deaths could be avoided if all girls completed primary education, according to one study. Other benefits include fewer child marriages, lower rates of HIV/AIDS and gains in gender equity.
“I have travelled the world and met people in many countries,” Malala Yousafzai said to the Canadian Parliament in April.
“I’ve seen firsthand many of the problems we are facing today — war, economic instability, climate change and health crises. And I can tell you that the answer is girls. Secondary education for girls can transform communities, countries and our world.”
The problem is that too many children are not going to school. More than 264 million children around the world are out of school – 130 million are girls. They range from the Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, to the children of subsistence farmers in rural Rwanda.
The good news is that more children go to school today that at any point in human history. The number of children not attending primary school fell by half between 2000 and 2013, despite a growing global population. It is an impressive feat.
But more money is needed if the world wants to achieve the goal of providing quality pre-primary, primary and secondary education to every child by 2030. Current spending falls short by $39 billion per year, according to the Global Partnership for Education. The group provides assistance to the countries with the greatest number of children out of school and is trying to increase its annual spending to $2 billion a year – still a fraction of the total needed to achieve universal education.
There is also more work to be done to ensure children not only go to school, but they learn while in the classroom. Students in some countries graduate primary school unable to read simple text nor perform basic arithmetic. Harvard University research Lant Pritchett has tracked the problem for years and even wrote a book on the problem.
“Schooling, however, is not the same as education,” Pritchett says. “Few of these billion students will receive an education that adequately equips them for their future. The poor quality of education worldwide constitutes a learning crisis.”
One major problem is the priority placed on getting children into the classroom. The Millennium Development Goals, a set of global goals aimed at reducing problems associated with poverty, only called for increases in enrollment. The newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals address the problem by including targets aimed at addressing problems like teacher quality and increased access to vocational training. They also emphasize the importance of girls’ education, namely calling for the elimination of gender disparities in education by 2030.
There is still a lot at stake when it comes to global education. It is hard to overstate the power of education in reducing poverty and inequity. Education can do many things beyond basic learning. For example, it helps lower youth unemployment and it can reduce discrimination against indigenous children.
Education alone cannot solve all of the world’s problems, but it is a crucial part to the wider solution.
“If we want to reduce armed conflict and stem irregular migration flows, equitable access to quality education is essential,” Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and Chair of the Global Partnership for Education said in May.
“Quality education for all matters whether you are a business leader searching for talent, a security analyst fretting over the risk of conflict, a voter who worries about rising numbers of asylum seekers, or a feminist who admires Malala’s courage. I am convinced that people everywhere are able to embrace the education agenda.”
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Many Global Washington members are working toward improving education for young people, especially girls and young women, around the world.
Ashesi University Foundation
Ashesi University Foundation mobilizes support for Ashesi University in Ghana. Ashesi’s mission is to educate a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders in Africa and cultivate within its students the critical thinking skills, concern for others and courage it will take to transform their continent. Founded in 2002 by Ghanaian Patrick Awuah, Ashesi offers majors in Computer Science, Business Administration, MIS, and Engineering, all grounded in a liberal arts core curriculum. Ashesi plans to broaden its impact by growing to 1,000 students by 2020 and adding new programs, while maintaining their strong culture of ethics and critical thinking. Ashesi is seeking partners to continue to expand their impact in Africa.
Bo M. Karlsson Foundation
Founded in 2004, the Bo M. Karlsson Foundation (BMKF) awards higher education scholarships to underprivileged women in Nepal, empowering them to become confident, self-reliant, vital citizens in their communities and country. Over the past decade, BMKF has awarded scholarships to 45 young women who have gone on to pursue careers in accounting, business management, engineering, journalism, law, medicine, nursing, public health, rural development, social work and teaching — futures that were hopelessly out of reach before receiving scholarships to pursue their undergraduate degrees. As the majority of BMKF scholars come from remote villages, most of them are the first in their families to receive any education. Several scholars have a physical disability, belong to marginalized castes or ethnic groups, or have experienced harrowing civil war and human trafficking situations. All share a passion for education. BMKF is committed to helping them succeed.
Kobi Academy
Kobi Academy’s mission is to provide exceptional education that empowers children in Ethiopia to be creative, achievement oriented, compassionate citizens committed to life-long learning and community stewardship.
Mission Africa
Mission Africa believes that education is the key to ending generational poverty and that investment in education can have a profound impact on communities. Many African countries do not offer free education and Mission Africa is dedicated to ensuring that all children regardless of their income level have access to quality education. In the past ten years, Mission Africa’s academic scholarship program has awarded 795 scholarships and has allowed more than 300 students in rural villages in Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Togo, Rwanda and Uganda to graduate high school and continue on to college or vocational training. Mission Africa has also shipped 10 40-foot containers filled with books and school supplies to children and families in Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania.
Mona Foundation
Since its founding in 1999, Mona Foundation has had a simple but compelling goal — to support grassroots educational initiatives that build stronger and sustainable communities by raising the status of women and girls. Mona achieves this by partnering with local organizations and investing in the education of children and youth and women. Mona selects initiatives that are initiated and implemented by the local community and have a proven record of success. A long-term partnership enables sustained social and economic development activities, which often leads to an increase in reach, greater efficacy of programs, and an expanded ability to address complex problems. Mona partners with organizations that work to reduce the barriers to education, improve quality of learning and cultivate agency among girls and boys. Programs use an integrated approach to develop academic skills, and creative and moral capabilities of their participants and transform individuals to become agents of change in service to their families and communities. As a result, young people gain competency, agency, integrity and a commitment to building socially just communities. Mona Foundation has awarded more than $10 million in support to 35 initiatives in 18 countries, providing access to quality education and training for more than 246,000 students, teachers and parents annually. For 2016 Mona supported partner organizations in the U.S., Haiti, Panama, Brazil, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, and India.
NPH USA
NPH USA supports Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (Spanish for “Our Little Brothers and Sisters”) which is raising more than 3,400 orphaned, abandoned and disadvantaged boys and girls in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. NPH believes that a quality education is the key to a better life. Many children arrive at NPH with little or no formal schooling. Each child is given a strong foundation of basic academic and interpersonal skills and provided with an extensive variety of educational opportunities. Nearly all of NPH homes feature on-site schools from Montessori preschool through middle or high school, as well as vocational trade certification courses. In 2015, NPH supported 369 students in university – the most in the organization’s history. Children grow up to become accountants, carpenters, doctors, farmers, mechanic, nurses, teachers and community leaders. An additional 2,100 children who live in low income areas outside the homes receive scholarships to attend NPH schools. Click here to see stories of nine children who are learning in different ways at NPH.
Rwanda Girls Initiative
Rwanda Girls Initiative’s mission is to educate and empower girls in Rwanda to reach their highest potential. The organization’s vision is for students to graduate as inspired young leaders, filled with confidence, a love of learning and a sense of economic empowerment to strengthen their communities and foster Rwanda’s growth. The Gashora Girls Academy of Science and Technology (GGAST) is an innovative and socio-economically diverse model upper-secondary STEM school designed to provide a “whole girl” education. GGAST provides a rigorous college prep academic program, combined with leadership training and extra-curricular activities that fills girls with confidence so they can pursue their dreams of university education and impactful vocations. Since opening GGAST’s doors in January 2011, Rwanda Girls Initiative has educated 270 girls each year with a 93 percent matriculation rate to universities in 16 countries, including 153 in the U.S. and Canada with over $30 million in scholarships. Educate a girl. Inspire a community. Transform a nation.
Sahar Education International
Sahar provides access to education in Afghanistan and supports an educated future for Afghan girls, enabling them to actively participate in social, political and economic arenas in their communities. Sahar builds schools, computer centers and teacher training programs utilizing local labor and community support. Since 2009, Sahar has invested over $2 million in building, repairing and supplying schools in Afghanistan, a country in which 45 percent of schools operate without adequate buildings. Sahar operates 13 schools, 9 rural and 4 urban, and 87 classrooms have been built or renovated. Sahar impacts 20,000 girls annually and serves girls from Uzbek, Tajik, Pashto and Hazar ethnic groups. In total, Sahar’s programs have impacted more than 200,000 girls.
Schools for Salone
Schools for Salone partners with local villages in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to rebuild the schools devastated in the ten-year civil war that ended in 2002. The organization has built 16 schools and two libraries since 2005.
SE Asia Foundation
SE Asia Foundation emphasizes education for girls, provides hands-on coaching for sustainability, and complies with the Istanbul Principles, ensuring religious inclusion. In Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand, the Foundation supports girls’ education from preschool to university.
The Rose International Fund for Children
The Rose International Fund for Children (TRIFC) is transforming education for blind students in Nepal. Being a blind or visually-impaired student in a developing country is an incredible challenge. There are no areas of these student’s educational and personal needs that are properly covered with the limited funding provided by the Nepal government. Add to that the societal stigma attached to having a disability, where one is considered to be cursed or suffering from a past-life sin and the result is a neglected, marginalized group with a devastating loss of human potential. TRIFC is working to solve this problem through an innovative, holistic program which addresses all areas of need and provides students with the necessary tools to be successful in school and in life. TRIFC is working to enhance personal and educational support in the areas of health, hygiene, nutrition, school tools for the blind, daily-living skills and more.
West African Vocational Schools
West African Vocational Schools’ (WAVS) mission is to create hope and opportunity in West African communities by working hand-in-hand with indigenous leaders to establish vocational training centers and economic development programs, while sharing the Gospel message.
World Bicycle Relief
In rural developing countries, the biggest barrier to education is often the physical act of getting to school. Tasked with many more domestic chores than boys, girls fall behind because of the cultural obstacles they face. In many of the areas where World Bicycle Relief works, it is common for girls to arrive at school late and tired if they arrive at all. By providing bicycles to children, especially girls, they empower girls with knowledge and ultimately, change the course of their lives. Keeping girls in school has been shown to have a multiplier effect that can help break the cycle of poverty.
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Featured Organization
Rwanda Girls Initiative
By Tom Murphy
The Gashora Girls Academy of Science and Technology, located in the East African country of Rwanda, provides girls the opportunity to access a world class secondary school education regardless of their family income. The school and additional support provided to the girls is the result of the Rwanda Girls Initiative (RGI), based in Kirkland, Washington.
Photo credit: Rwanda Girls Initiative
“We met so many girls who desperately wanted to continue their schooling, but the opportunities were very limited,” Shalisan Foster said. “Even the girls who did continue to secondary school were burdened by household chores and safety concerns – so they tended to drop out at a higher rate than the boys.”
Foster and Suzanne Sinegal McGill founded RGI in 2008 as the result of consultations with people living throughout Rwanda. Construction started soon after on a community center which opened in 2010 and the school opened in January 2011. Today, some 270 girls attend the school annually and there are already graduates attending universities across the world, including at least one student attending every Ivy League school.
The boarding school is more than just a center for learning. RGI takes a “whole girl” approach – providing support for the girls’ health and social development. The school offers extracurricular and leadership programs to further its broader goals, and the girls who graduate are prepared for life beyond the classroom.
“It is easy to fall in love with the school based on girls’ empowerment, educating girls in Africa and more,” Hillary Carey, Chief Business Officer at RGI said “But learning more about the country and history and the true intentions of RGI captured my heart.”
Rwanda is still rebuilding in the wake of its 1994 genocide that nearly 1 million people killed in 100 days. It was the result of ethnic divides created by Belgium in the early 20th century when it controlled the country. An additional 2 million people fled the country as refugees, an event that transformed an entire generation. It left a post-colonial independent country that was already struggling with high rates of poverty in an even worse position.
Despite the challenge, the country made remarkable gains in reducing poverty and improving health in the more than two decades since the genocide. It is one of Africa’s fastest growing economies over the past decade. It is also one of a few countries in the world where women make up more than half of the parliament. What’s more, it cut extreme poverty from 77 percent of the country in 2000, to 10 percent today.
However, the gains lag in some areas – notably secondary education. More than 95 percent of Rwandan children go to primary school, up from 78 percent in 1999. Yet, the figures drop off significantly for secondary school, with only 27 percent of age eligible students enrolled.
The rates are even lower for girls and fall further when they are from rural areas of the country. In the end, only eight percent of Rwandan girls graduate from secondary school. RGI’s school seeks to address that problem. But graduating more girls is not enough. By focusing on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) they hope to nurture the next generation of scientists, social entrepreneurs, advocates and thought leaders in Rwanda.
Photo credit: Rwanda Girls Initiative
Student composition is another important part of RGI. The organization boasts the most socio-economically diverse school in Rwanda. The student body is currently made up of girls from 27 of Rwanda’s 30 districts, as well as girls from neighboring Burundi and Somaliland. The diversity is an intentional decision that aims to fulfill RGI’s goal of empowering the next generation of leaders.
Motivating the girls turned out not to be difficult. Students are up at 5 AM studying before classes each day, Carey said. In fact, the school has to enforce a strict lights-out policy at 10 PM because many of the girls are still up doing school work. In one case, a girl contracted malaria shortly before the important national exams – a test necessary for graduation and university placement. She did not let the parasite get in her way and still took the test.
“They are warriors in that way,” Carey said. “They won’t let things get in their way or get them down.”
RGI now looks to the future. The start-up phase that lasted since its founding is ending and programming is underway that will focus on longer term goals. These include thinking about how to continue support for the girls when they finish school. And there is an effort to transition to local governance of the school on the ground, another example of the drive to ensure that the program is accountable to the community.
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Changemaker
Mahnaz Javid, Mona Foundation
By Tom Murphy
Selfie on the Amazon river in Brazil. Photo credit: Mahnaz Javid
It does not take long into a conversation with Mahnaz Javid for her personal ethos to emerge.
“We have a lot more in common than our differences, and the more we recognize it, the more we can come together as one people to build a better world for all of our children” she says.
Javid is driven to make a difference in her community. She founded the Mona Foundation two decades ago, believing that “there is no such thing as self-development. Self-development happens only in service to others.”
The idea for the foundation came together on the back of a napkin over lunch with two friends at a social and economic development conference in Orlando in 1998. Javid saw that it was possible to make a real difference in the lives of many with just a little help and resources – especially when it came to education of children and the empowerment of girls.
“Development data shows that education and gender equality are top two pre-requisites to alleviating global poverty,” she said.
Mona Foundation supports grassroots educational initiatives that provide education to all children, increase opportunities for women and girls, and emphasize service to the community. Their goal is to alleviate global poverty and support community-led transformation such that no child ever goes to bed hungry, or is lost to preventable diseases, or is deprived of the gift of education for lack of resources.
Mahnaz with teachers from the Association for Cohesive Development of the Amazon (ADCAM). Started in 1985 as a small orphanage, ADCAM today is a nationally-recognized institution, which offers K-12, a technical college, vocational training, a family development center and rural education programs serving over 1,000 students, and 4,400 youth, families and elderly a day. Photo credit: Mahnaz Javid.
Mona Foundation believes that the keys to alleviating poverty are universal education, gender equality, and community building. The Foundation also believes that each person, regardless of economic status, has the right, the capacity and the responsibility to be the protagonist of the process of their own development, and contribute to the betterment of their communities.
“Social change is not a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another. Change can only emerge from within a community and belongs to the people and institutions that are implementing the effort,” Javid says. “Education is the light that you turn on in a dark room. It lets you see, removes prejudices and darkness, and gives you the freedom to choose your path forward to be better and give back to your community.”
While the basis for the foundation was sketched out in 1998, the ideas driving Javid were formed at a young age. She grew up in Iran with parents who were always willing to help others. Her father, a physician, dedicated himself to treating the poor. And her mother was so benevolent that she gave more to other people than to her own children, Javid joked.
She also saw the poverty and challenges faced by others in her native land and as she travelled around the world. “A mother is a mother, is a mother. We all love our children, we all want the best for our kids, and none of us wants to see our kids go to bed hungry or sick because we cannot afford healthcare.” The thought of Mona Foundation started to take shape as she pursued her PhD and her advisor encouraged her to write her dissertation about her passion.
“I thought the one thing I was willing to do without pay and do it my whole life was to give back to other people,” she explained.
The Mona Foundation is the embodiment of that passion. Since 1999, it has provided $10 million in support to 35 projects in 18 countries, impacting the lives of thousands. Programs include direct school support for communities in Brazil along the Amazon River, education and skills training for girls in India, assistance to schools in Haiti and more.
Mona Foundation’s focus is more than just providing access to academic education, Javid explained. Mona supports educational programs that offer holistic education to develop academic, creative and moral capabilities of their students and transform individuals to become agents of change in service to their families and communities.
“Giving and caring is intrinsic to our humanity. It defines who we are as a people and helps us to be the best we can be. So, education should help us do great academically – be mathematicians, scientists, doctors, teachers – but it also should give us the skills and capabilities we need to participate in the betterment of our communities. Without giving back and service to the community, we cannot be whole, and nothing will ever change for the better around us,” Javid says.
Mahnaz with students at the Association for Cohesive Development of the Amazon (ADCAM). Photo credit: Mahnaz Javid.
Visible change happens in all the projects that Mona supports because the foundation identifies promising local educational initiatives at the grassroots and accompanies them long-term to help them put their plans into action. The effect of this strategy of long-term partnership has been dramatic. Several of their partner projects have been built from quite humble beginnings to full-fledged, effective, and well-recognized educational institutions, serving thousands of students, teachers and parents.
More than 1,300 teachers in Mongolia were trained, thanks to the foundation. It supports the Mongolian Development Center, a preschool program with more than 40 schools serving 7,500 students across the country. The schools believe that children learn best through the modeling of their parents, so it provides services that help all adults in a child’s life support the learning process.
“Every person regardless of who they are has the capacity, right and responsibility to give back to write their own future – it is not our role as the funding agency to tell others how to do it.”
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Welcome New Members
Please welcome our newest Global Washington members. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with their work and consider opportunities for support and collaboration!
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Street Business School by BeadforLife
Street Business School creates transformation for people living in poverty through building confidence and igniting entrepreneurial skills. For more than a decade, we’ve empowered Ugandan women to discover their own entrepreneurial potential and leave poverty behind. Today, we’re scaling to ignite potential in 1 million women around the world by 2027. www.beadforlife.org/streetbusinessschool
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Member Events
Aug 17: Days for Girls // Bee Her Hero Charity Event
Aug 26: Days for Girls // Girls Soar
Sep 9: Extend the Day // Lights for Learning
Sep 23: Spreeha // Journey of Hope Dinner and Fundraiser
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Career Center
Community Events Coordinator, World Affairs Council
Partnership Development, PotaVida
Head of Marketing Strategy, PATH
For more jobs and resources, visit https://globalwa.org/job-board/
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GlobalWA Events
August 24: Happy Hour with Friends of GlobalWA and World Affairs Council
September 8: Voices from the Field: ACT for Congo
November 29: GlobalWA Annual Conference – Renewing Global Leadership
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