Transcript

TEDxSFU Shawn Smith

so as you heard I I I've done a fair few things that are engaged in this space that's generally termed social change social Innovation social entrepreneurship uh more specifically a lot of our work has had to do with global poverty um so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that today I'll start by introducing you to will um in this picture Will's 14 years old he's sitting on the floor of his family home in Malawi and he's trying to connect up a battery you can see in the corner because he's trying to squeeze out whatever electricity he can because his family is one of the estimated two billion in the world with a bee that still doesn't have access to electricity um and that is living in poverty um we get hit with numbers like that a lot um two billion is a big thing to get your head around we see maps we see stats we see graphs this one's you know the percentage of population in any given country living under $2 a day one of the many numbers we use but uh it seems really hard for an individual or or an individual organization even to engage with this and possibly make a dent and I think most of us have a somewhat natural reaction reaction and disengage we decide that maybe this is a problem for somebody else to work on or maybe it's just the way the world works if these do get engaged it's often through a a a guilt more than anything you know you're trying to watch TV on Saturday morning and you stumble across that infomercial with Nelly Fado or some other sort of famous person imploring you to give through a 1 1800 number um and and maybe if you give up the right number of cups of coffee in a day you can save a poor child in in the developing world and I wonder what that perspective what that that take on poverty does for how we try to engage and I think most of us from that perspective act in a way that again is natural to us we we see this as a lack of material Goods we see it as a lack of stuff and a lack of money so we build schools we try and come up with cool technological solutions to lack of Clean Water we buy Tom's shoes because we somehow hope our consumptive behavior is going to help a poor kid in the developing World um unfortunately as a friend of ours in the organization likes to say uh Daniela papy uh schools don't teach children teachers teach children and good curriculum matters and we don't tend to think about that software nearly as much as we think about the hardware and physical tangible stuff we can touch um I don't know about you guys but that does not look like a way I would like to get my clean water for the rest of my life um there's a lot of reasons why the life straw this this thing doesn't work um but just basically looking at that picture I I I don't know why we would assume poor people would think that's a better better answer to to clean water than we do uh and toms I think is a solution looking for a problem more than anything I don't think they ever started trying to address any sort of meaningful issue they're a better marketing campaign than they are a social change campaign worse than that um they're example of some of the things that happen in the development sector that uh that can be truly damaging um this guy's trying to build up a good little shoe business in his community he's struggling along he's doing an okay job scraping together a living and and supporting his family Toms decides his community is going to be the lucky one to get a a free free shoe drop next and whack he's out of business and I don't mean to just pick on Tom this is a story that happens fairly often in this sector um you know social entrepreneurs or Enterprises try and find ways to deliver goods and services to their communities the same way we might expect to see them deliver to our communities and just when they're doing a decent job of it a very well-intentioned NGO or a government agency or someone decides free stuff would be a good idea and comes in and disrupts that market um so I'm painting a complicated picture you know this is tough stuff to deal with what do you do maybe we need big complicated answers from organizations like the UN who can keep all these factors in check and think about all the negative consequences um the issue with this kind of approach is these organizations are really good at known solutions to known problems what they're not particularly good at is coming up with innovative solutions to issues and and kind of planting the seed and taking those risks that allow new ideas to Bubble Up and flourish um and I think most of us would agree that in many of these cases new ideas are what is needed the old Solutions don't really seem to be getting us there so perhaps what I'm suggesting is that what we need is a bit of a shift in perspective um maybe it's our own perspective on on poverty and and oversimplifying this issue and assumptions about what poverty is and what it means for for people living in it that cloud some of how the ways that we try to get engaged um this is a map of kind of the general Continental space of Africa a space that I think many of us here not to prejudge you guys tend to think of as a single unit on this Continental map you can see that Africa is massive it's large enough to fit all of China United States India Europe a whole bunch of other small countries that I can't read from here and and it's equally diverse as that might suggest there's a multitude of cultures and language and problems and issues and reasons that poverty exists in some places and some countries are flourishing six of the 10 fastest growing countries in the in the world in a recent Economist report are in Africa um so sometimes our perceptions might just be a little bit off so what can we as an organization here do to come up with solutions to an intractable issue like this that can be implemented there and that's a bit of the struggle that our organization's been going through um and I think what we've come to is is um possibly not much at least in the way that we've typically thought about it so I'm not going to dive too too far into that we'll take a bit of a step back and give you an idea of where our organizations come from and how we got there um change of pace who likes bikes I love bikes these guys love bikes those first those first guys love bikes these guys love bikes this is a group of us riding across Europe these guys love bikes um bikes were really important to the start of our organization Global agents um this is our first ever project we ran a cycling tour from Vancouver to Tijuana Mexico with 21 of our closest friends we raised $30,000 um for something that we were terming at the time Sustainable Solutions to Global poverty to us what that meant at the time were solutions that had some sort of hope to be self-sustaining that weren't going to be dependent on grants and and handouts for the rest of their lives but once you catalyze them they can continue forward on their own and specifically at the time it meant micro Finance um for people who are not familiar with with micro Finance we can get a little bit into it in a minute um so being largely SFU business grads we did a pretty good job of building an organization off off the bat they train us pretty well here um over time our our Revenue was doing great but I think what was interesting at the time that at the same time Revenue was growing and things were going really well I would argue our our own certainty about our ability to affect that change was uh steadily declining um we were really starting to ask ourselves some of those very hard questions that I was asking of the projects in the beginning and we came in with a very naive attitude that we could I was going to play with my slides that we could uh we could affect change in a way that other people hadn't thought of somehow before um in reality it was it was just as tough for us and it raises a few questions one yeah we were fairly naive when we came blistering in as fresh grads out of SFU and thought we could somehow change the world too um but the second Point our donors weren't really asking us those tough questions either because as you'll notice while we were going through our existential crisis our Revenue wasn't really having any sort of problem um at the we did the intelligent thing I would say at the time um we essentially froze our outgoing spending we stopped investing in a lot of the programs that we had been we stopped our outgoing grants so we could kind of take a moment to gather ourselves and figure out we were on the right track we knew these sustainable ideas were the right thing but weren't sure we quite had it right and the natural consequence was we quickly had it wasn't over a lot of time but we quickly had this $300,000 Nest Egg to work with as we did think about what we wanted to do going forward and how we could leverage that so how did we get there what did we actually land on to some degree I think what we realized Iz this you know shift happens change happens it wasn't necessarily on us to come up with big brilliant ideas for how we could change the world and go out and try and Implement them in some sort of uniform way and impose them in in a top down top down manner the world's changing every day there's people all over the world trying to change their own communities who understand their own contexts and and know what they're trying to build and maybe it's more on us to recognize where that's happening and get behind it at the right time and the right way so when we boiled it all down and we looked at all those things that we didn't really think were working all that well and we looked at the work that we' previously done it kind of came down to us to people and ideas um what do we mean by people and ideas ideas like microfinance um some of you might be familiar with Dr Muhammad yunice has received the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago it's essentially the provision of very small trust-based loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world so they can pull themselves and their families out of poverty it's reached about 100 million people so far from a standing start 30 or so years ago um or ideas like aravan Eye Hospital uh Dr V in the corner here was so inspired by the the ability of McDonald's to churn out uniform standard 99 cent hamburgers all over the world that he thought i' take a harder look at how they were doing eye surgeries and eye care and cataract surgeries in his own hospital and they managed to drive down costs and drive efficiency up to such a degree that they're now handing out tens of thousands of of free surgeries to people who can't afford it by cross- subsidizing from people who do have enough money to pay for the pay for the surgeries um or Solutions like delight and Delight is a solar lighting company um mostly operating in Africa and India and they figured out a way to provide solar lighting at a rate that poor people can't afford uh and they can afford it in the sense that they're already spending a lot of money on worse solutions to lighting and home energy kerosene dirty dangerous types of things they figured out to structure this in a way that uh every time they sell a light they're making money so they can become a bigger company and reach more people and help more people without the help of outside grants and without the help of of of the typical types of funding support we tend to associate with poverty so how do we take these ideas of of people and ideas and the things we want to support and we did a couple of things we started a platform called education generation which is essentially all about finding that next wave that next generation of young leaders who are going to have these ideas and roll them out in their communities um it's an online crowdfunding community and we support scholarships for young leaders in the developing world uh leaders like via here who needs $400 to continue her University education uh you don't have $400 likely to Pony up but I've got 20 bucks you've got 20 bucks you've got 20 bucks and quite quickly we've quickly we've collectively raised enough money to put her in school for a year through that kind of mechanism we funded I think it's actually closer to 270 students now uh raised well over $70,000 while spending very very little um and more interestingly to us what we're actually doing in the background is thinking really hard about the software in those education systems what are the the programs that we want to support and these are kind of where all of our partners to date are located and they're some of the more Forward Thinking and Progressive institutions that we can find who are really thinking about what it means to put a young person through an educational program in the developing world how are they going to come out equipped to deal with the problems that their communities are facing um as opposed to the traditional approach of just kind of basic access and hopefully somehow they're going to get jobs and and that's going to somehow deal with with the broken systems that they're they're already living in we also run something called the global Catalyst initiative um the global Catalyst initiative is a program that invests in very early stage social entrepreneurs and social Ventures so the next wave micro Finance aavan ey hospitals and delights but we catch them in a really early stage they've probably only got their first little bits of funding together they've got a pilot on the ground they're showing something that works it's got lots of potential um but they probably are way too early to get support from larger funders and to gain investment or to scale their organization in a really meaningful way so we spend a year with them we invest money to help them prove out their model we work really hard with the entrepreneurs to help get them and ready to absorb investment and take this thing to the next stage one of the first things we invested in through that is a project called livelihoods just as an example uh livelihoods is uh working with Urban Street Youth in Kenya and essentially employing them as a distribution Salesforce in urban slums they recognized that a nobody knows these communities like the street youth that live in them and B there were a bunch of companies trying to sell products that would actually be quite beneficial to these communities but they had no idea how to how to sell because the usual distribution channels just don't exist so they paired those two issues up and acted as an intermediary and now they're building a thriving little business um these are six of their first class that went through training and have have sustainable livelihoods now and they I think now are dealing with 40 or 5050 or that are either in train training or are actively employed uh We've supported three others like this in in the last year and we're trying to support 10 more in the year going forward uh the grant the average Grant to a project like this is $50,000 um so what we realized is you know we're definitely not the only people who are recognizing this as a new approach to these types of issues we're certainly not the first to recognize ideas and people as as some of the tricks to get out of this and that we need to invest in these new approaches there's a whole ecosystem emerging organizations like Asoka and echoen green and skull and reasonable they all play different roles skull among many other roles plays the role of providing scholarships for people to go do their mbas at Oxford who want to focus on social entrepreneurship um and I was uh lucky enough to land one of those but you feel this wave of momentum coming and uh the development sector particularly and I think any social change sector is really prone to the Silver Bullet everybody always wants to find the next hottest best thing that can tackle these issues and right now it really feels like this is becoming that thing you can feel the whole sector's attention drifting towards focusing on social entrepreneurs and how to build up this ecosystem and well I think that's great I think it's also time to remember to take take a step back and to pause and think about the assumptions we're making you one we're assuming that market-based Solutions can play the role that we've typically assumed governments and and Charities can play and I think to some degree that's true but it's not true all the time so we should be careful about over applying it two we're also taking a lot of risks you know we're investing in entrepreneurs as they preach to us here at SFU entrepreneurs should not be afraid to fail entrepreneurs fail all the time that's kind of the way you find yourself towards success but it's a very different ball game when you're working with Urban Street Youth in Kenya very vulnerable populations that are very susceptible to your failure and the risks that you want to take so risk fine but make sure that you're thinking very very int intelligently about ways to fail carefully um and also to make sure that that the failur are worth it at the end of the day the few successes that you find are actually going to be big and impactful enough and sustainable enough that that it's worth the battle this uh we thought would be a good idea to put a picture of me and spandex bike shorts um this is on our our cycling tour in Europe so what's the point uh what can you guys do um I hope I'm not painting an overly depressing picture of what it's like to try and create social change what I'm trying to suggest is there's lots and lots of really brilliant ways to do it but very often we don't know them um and what I would suggest for you what you're trying to do with your money and your time and your Social Capital because you are engaged in this game whether you feel like you are or not is to think really hard about the organizations you tend to support um are they actually creating long-term systemic change are they applying Band-Aid solutions to problems that just make us feel a little better are they catalyzing things that will carry on Beyond them or is whatever they're supporting going to drift off and die as soon as they pull the money away because eventually the money will be pulled away in the traditional kind of approach to this stuff um and if you struggle with how to separate those organizations out I guess I would just suggest look for organizations that are self-critical enough um that you know they're asking those hard questions are they transparent do they tell you as much about what they do that doesn't work as what they do that works it tends to be a very glossy sector and everything works you don't hear a lot of stories from from Nos and organizations about what didn't work so I guess it just wrap I'm going to take you back back to introduce you to will again this is the same poor young man that was sitting on the floor of his parents home he was trying to connect that battery up to this windmill that he built from scratch at the age of 14 I'll remind you off of nothing but a plan he found in a library because he was desperate enough to connect his family up to electricity that he just damn well made it happen I guess what I would suggest is if we can find more wills and more livelihoods and more of these organizations that are envisioning new ways to tackle issues in their own communities and if we can all see the world to the lens of possibility that will sees it we're more than capable of tackling some of these in able issues that's me thank you