A Clinician at Davos: Reflections on the Role & Responsibility of Philanthropy in Collective Impact
The opportunity to attend the World Economic Forum in late January was both an honor and an eye-opener. In Davos, 3,000 delegates representing leadership in global business, government and civil society – including over 70 heads of state – convened for the annual meeting to explore and consider the state of our rapidly changing world and the opportunities and threats we face as globalization thunders forward at a breakneck pace.
I have been reflecting on my time in Davos – which was a whirlwind of lofty rhetoric, ambitious proposals, and high ideals. With good reason, the World Economic Forum is often criticized as a convening of the world’s economic and social elite; a place of all talk, no action; an exclusive gathering of the privilged ‘deciders,’ whose policies and priorities impact hundreds of millions of global citizens – but without those citizen voices adequately represented.
So I attended with a healthy degree of skepticism about the composition of the delegate pool and the aims of the meeting. But I was pleasantly surprised to find so much more representation of those crucial voices than expected. More women, more young people, a profound urgency about the existential threats to our world – from technology to climate change – and a heartening level of attention to the pervasive inequality within nations and globally.
The release of the Oxfam report, Public Good or Private Wealth?, just days before the opening plenary was a clarion call for civil society delegates. The report presented stark statistics on the depth and breadth of income inequality across the globe – and its calamtious consequences for the poor. Oxfam researchers reported that the world’s26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50% (that’s 3.8 billion people). It is not news that wealth is unfairly concentrated. But to consider, in stark detail, how acutely wealth inequality impacts poor families in developing economies – and the disproportionate burden on women and children – is devastating. And a moral imperative that we cannot turn away from.
The findings of the report re-calibrated how I heard and engaged with conversations big and small at Davos – from keynote addresses to side-conversations over coffee. What is the responsibility of the private sector and of governments to decisively address inequality? What does a fundamental structural shift look like and how do we build the political will to take action? And, of course, how does philanthropy fit in?
As a representative of Co-Impact, a newly-launched collaborative philanthropy model that pools resources for deep, strategic investments in programs that are effecting true systems-change level results, I was in Davos to lift up this new approach to collective philanthropic impact. As a philanthropist and a organization founder, I want to do even more than just “shine a light” on a new effort; I want to push the philanthropy sector forward, to embrace more collaboration, to take bolder chances, and to prioritize public-private partnerships (PPPs) and models that hold the potential for transformational change.
I believe firmly that governments have a deep responsibility to drive the development agenda of the nation; the government must “hold the center” for all other actors – private sector, civil society, and philanthropy alike. Co-Impact’s first round of funding is backing exciting and impactful public-private partnerships models, like Last Mile Health and the national Community Health Assistant program in Liberia and TaRL Africa which supports African governments to develop strategies to help all children read and do basic arithmetic. As a social entrepreneur in Haiti, my organization Care 2 Communitieshas developed a public-private partnership with the Ministry of Health to transform community health clinics across the country. In a country whose development agenda has been dictated by traditional foreign aid and uncoordinated charity, we are doing something different because the ‘business as usual’ approach hasn’t worked. Governments are central and they must be engaged as the powerful partners they are, not window-dressing on an entirely private mobilization of funding.
My experience at Davos underscored a truth that we already know: there is enough wealth in the world to ensure that people get a decent shot at life. But we need to work towards a structural shift in international aid and collective action at all levels – not just the world’s economic elite. Governments need to be at the heart of this transformation.
