Investing in Africa | October 2007

During this session of the 2007 Global Philanthropists Circle Annual Meeting, Hylton Appelbaum, Executive Trustee of The Liberty Foundation, Swanee Hunt, President of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, and Narciso Matos, Executive Director of the Foundation for Community Development of Mozambique, presented GPC members with a variety of ways private philanthropists can invest in the future of Africa.

Main Speakers:

Hylton Appelbaum, Executive Trustee, The Liberty Foundation Swanee Hunt, President, Hunt Alternatives Fund Narciso Matos, Executive Director, Community Development Foundation of Mozambique

BETH COHEN: Welcome to our session on investing in Africa. Before we begin this session, I want to talk a little bit about why we put this particular panel together. As we all know, Africa is known for its tremendous challenges, but also for its abundance of opportunities. It's a diverse region rich in natural resources, traditions and also an entrepreneurial spirit. Many of these aspects have been highlighted in the media recently, from a recent Vanity Fair article on Africa, to celebrities adopting African causes and African children, and to the various initiatives we've heard about to make poverty history.

While we should take advantage of the time that people are talking about Africa and thinking about Africa, we also need to think about the long-term. Africa's importance to the development of our planet in human, ecological and economic terms is only growing. As you probably know, the continent is comprised of 53 countries and almost a billion people. What you might not know is that by 2050, it's estimated that 25 percent of the planet's population will be living in Africa.

How do we ensure that this increasingly significant population enjoys the promise of its possibilities and is a positive contributor and beneficiary of our increasingly interconnected world? A great deal of hope does exist. The continent as a whole has demonstrated real progress in better health, education, trade and poverty-related outcomes. Primary enrollments have increased and HIV and AIDS rates have decreased in many places. Several countries also might be on track to achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015. But despite this progress, Africa is still the one region of the world where the number of poor continues to rise. Progress in human development is uneven. Huge disparities exist, both between and within countries, between and within men and women, rural and urban, and between the poorest and wealthiest on the continent.

So how can philanthropic investment address some of these problems in an effective and sustainable way? Synergos believes that supporting local initiative through genuine partnerships is the only way to achieve sustained change, and our panelists today embody those values. They are using their financial resources, their personal contacts, their passions and their smarts to engage with people on the ground. They have the resources and the dignity to speak in their own voice and make their own decisions. They know that to succeed in improving lives in Africa, they must recognize those who are poor and marginalized as stakeholders and partners in their own development.

By working strategically to benefit groups that are traditionally under-resourced and under-invested in and by connecting them across sectors and divides to opportunities for their development, the individuals sitting next to me are realizing a tremendous return on their philanthropic investment. Each has traveled on a personal journey, and that has led them to invest in the promise and the enterprise of others. And we are delighted they're here to share that journey with us.

We think you'll find their stories and their models instructive, whether you are passionate about Africa or another part of the developing world, and I'll briefly introduced them, and then we'll have some time to hear from them and engage with them in some questions. Hylton Appelbaum has been a GPC member since 2002. He is a director and executive trustee of the Liberty Foundation and a member of Synergos's Board of Directors, among others. Hylton has a great passion for bringing educational opportunities to children in South Africa that have been systematically denied quality education, particularly in math and science. He's a visionary. He's used technology, tenacity and tough-mindedness to transform the delivery of education in South Africa and other parts of the continent.

Swanee Hunt has been a GPC member since 2002. Her mission is to achieve gender parity as a means to end war and rebuild societies, as well as to alleviate poverty and other human suffering. She is founding director of the Women in Public Policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School, and served as U.S. Ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997. Swanee's committed to supporting women leaders around the world and is particularly passionate about empowering women leaders in Africa, including Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan and other countries.

Narciso Matos is the Executive Director of The Foundation for Community Development in Mozambique, which has been a partner of Synergos for the past 17 years. FDC supports local initiatives through community investment with the aim of reducing poverty and promoting social justice. Narciso brings vast and deep understanding of development issues and is passionate about solving the problems central to development in Africa today. He is committed to supporting civil society and community development. We're looking forward to hearing all of our panelists today. We will start with Hylton who will talk about investing in education.

HYLTON APPELBAUM: Well, before I say anything about investing in education, I'd like to just refer to something Mr. Gates said a few minutes ago. In answer to the question about water and sanitation, he said how do we bring about widespread improvement? I think the answer is very simply through education. It's self-evident that education or the lack thereof is the biggest challenge facing Africa. The continent faces this extraordinary problem of poverty, and poverty can only be tackled through creating employment, and creating employment is impossible unless we have an educated group of people. To throw a couple of very loose statistics, we have 45 million people in South Africa. South Africa is unquestionably a powerhouse and the economic engine of the continent. We have about 600,000 young people write matric every year. Of those 600,000, about 85 percent are Black African. Black African passes in higher grade mathematics per year is about 3,500; in science, about 5,000. The year before last, the country managed to graduate 5 new mathematics teachers out of tertiary education. If you take those numbers, it is completely and totally impossible that the country has a future. If South Africa doesn't have a future, quite frankly, Africa doesn't have that much of a future.

Many years ago, in response to one of our ongoing educational crises, we became involved in the South African Broadcasting Corporation delivering matric support materials using television. We saw it was effective; at the same time that we saw its weaknesses. The major weakness that existed was that delivering mathematics and science education by television is great, except that it's not interactive, and television, being a passive medium, creates an illusion of learning, but all there is is watching and seeing that the person who is talking about understands it, you think you understand it. You don't. So we began using newspapers to deliver support materials to create some kind of interactivity. This was before the internet had been conceived of, or at least before we knew that it existed.

We were broadcasting with the South African Broadcasting Corporation for 2 hours a day, 3 hours a day it became. But, unfortunately, it was the time that they couldn't sell soap operas during, so it was equally the time that nobody really wanted. So kids were at school, and there weren't that many schools who could use our materials. We needed a full time education channel. We went to see our then Minister of Education and said to him, "We want a full time television channel." He said, "We've costed it, and it costs 2.2 billion Rand," and we said, "Never. It will cost a lot less than that." We took a bet across the table, and we set off to create this. The only way we created it was through a host of partnerships.

I love Synergos's logo of the interlocking circles, because it's when you bring those circles together, and the parts that interlock, there is the potential for collaboration and the creation of the initiatives. The first people we went to see were Pan Am Satellite, the satellite above us, and we explained the problem to them, and they said, "Okay, you can have a transponder on pass 7." I said, "Fantastic, thanks. We'll take it." We left the meeting, and I said to one of my colleagues, "What's a transponder?" We now had a transponder. I discovered we had to get up to and down from the transponder. We went to see on DS-TV Multi-Choice, who owned the cable network, and they call it that in the country, most of the continent too. And we explained to them what we wanted. "No," they said. "Our viewers won't be interested in that."

So, I shouldn't really talk about this, but I went to see Mr. Mandela and told him what our problem was, and asked him if he would speak with the Chairman of DS-TV Multi-Choice, and he agreed. And, miraculously, they came aboard about two or three days later. But, Mr. Mandela liked what we were doing, and he became a partner. And really the only people I know of got a lot more out of the Nelson Mandela Foundation than they ever got out of us.

We established what we called Mindset with our various partners. We deliver education material using broadcast, datacast, print and the internet. It all works pretty seamlessly together. Mr. Gates, if I quote him again, spoke of needing other people who know what they're doing. We discovered that we have actually become those other people in this specific field in our country and in parts of the continent. Our partners include obviously other funders, other governments -- the Dutch government, the Finnish government, USAID, and most important, our own government. It's very easy for us to sit as an independent organization and wish to be above the state. And that's impossible. We are in about 2,500 to 3,000 schools depending on whether we're counting primary schools or high schools. And those schools are all public schools. They are all schools that belong to the state. It would be ridiculous for us to expect to be able to work effectively in those institutions unless we have partnership with government.

Also, dealing with government, we can tackle the problems as they arise. We have brilliant materials. We have the whole of the curriculum available, teachers in a box, as I said. We have print materials to support it, and we discovered we were simply relying on the good will of teachers who had a long and difficult day, often in very unpleasant circumstances. And we expected them to voluntarily give extra of their time when most teachers earn less than $1,000 a month. It's ridiculous for us to have expected them to do that. But, in partnership with the government, we are making rapid strides. The government, for example, has included our materials in all of their schools and has made it mandatory for their teachers to work with us and deliver what we are doing.

About 10 days ago, we had evidence or confirmation of the importance of our relationship with the state. We recently had a debilitating teachers' strike that went on for week after week after week. And, consequently, a large block of teaching was lost. Kids are starting to write matric exams really shortly. The government approached us with the South African Broadcasting Corporation and said, will we use television...they will give us whatever time is possible to, in structured way, deliver math and science lessons for those matric students. The schools will sit and use them. We will publicize when they're available, and hopefully we will be able to start addressing some of that backlog.

I think my 7 minutes are probably up now, right? But anything that you would like to know, I would be delighted to tell you more.

SWANEE HUNT: When I was the U.S. Ambassador to Austria, I had a major failure. I had worked on issues in the inner city and public education and poverty, etc. in the U.S., but when I became ambassador, there were all these refugees coming over the border. I became very, very involved in Bosnia/Croatia, the destruction of Yugoslavia. So I ended up hosting negotiations in '94, between two of the warring parties. And it wasn't until the peace agreement was being signed at the White House that I looked in the room at all of us, and there were 4 women -- Madeline Albright, someone from the White House, the Hill and I -- and 60 gray suits. I thought, "How did this happen?" Here I am a feminist who has worked so hard on getting women's empowerment and it never dawned on me, didn't dawn on me to require that the negotiating parties would include women.

So then I came to the Kennedy School at the invitation of the dean, Joe Nye, and he asked me to create a new program called the Women in Public Policy Program. Let me stop there. I have a big foundation, that's big to me; we have a $10 million a year program. But I am dual-hatted. And so we have the private foundation and then I am the director of this program that I founded at the Kennedy School. So that's great to have two different platforms to stand on, and a lot of you do too. You have your company and you have your foundation, etc., or whatever else.

So there I am at the Kennedy School, and the dean says, "You know, that's interesting, that story about the gray suits. You ought to look at that." So I went to the U.N., and I said, "How come there aren't any women on the negotiating teams in Africa?" And what the U.N. official told me is the warlords won't have them because they're afraid the women will compromise. And I thought, Bingo! You know, I mean, like wouldn't that be something? So I developed a program that would bring these women leaders from conflict areas, the ones who really had a chance of being in the negotiations, of preventing a war, of stabilizing after the war was over, and that post-conflict time, which 50 percent of the time becomes the pre-conflict time, cause the wars just spiral. So, what we do, we bring these women to Harvard. Now, that is so cool for them, to go back home and say, "Well, you know, I was in this program at Harvard University." I mean, Harvard is like, except for Coke, and maybe Gates, you know Harvard is this huge name. And so, again, it's playing on your strengths and that is what I would encourage us all to do as philanthropist. Figure out your comparative advantage. Mine was Harvard and policymakers.

So instead of doing direct service to people in war areas, I worked on getting these women leaders connected to policy makers at the U.N., the White House, the State Department, the European Union, etc. And I've now created a network of 500 women leaders. We are not trying to make it any bigger. But the point is to convince the policy makers, the 6,000 policy makers with whom we've worked, convince them that any time they are involved in trying to stop a war, they need to bring the women leaders in. Because the women are better, frankly, at building bridges. They are less threatening, so they can get into places. Anna Politkovskaya was one of our women. She went 60 times into Chechnya before she was assassinated. They put her on a hay wagon with a scarf, and she'd take off her wire rimmed glasses, because they didn't have wire rims in Chechnya and she would go in as this sort of simple peasant.

The women have their fingers on the pulse of the community, because they know all the neighbors, they know what the needs are, so if they're involved in writing a peace agreement, then you have an agreement that's more likely to succeed because it has the community buy-in. And they are very highly invested in stopping the conflict. My friend from Kenya said to me, "You know, men care a lot about the border, the territories. Women want a safe place for their kids to go to school and get back without being raped or shot." So they are much more likely to compromise. The war lords are right; the women will compromise.

So, the last thing I want to say is at our foundation, which is doing a lot of this work, and then I'm doing it at Harvard, so we get the play on both. This is my big passion, and we're putting about $2.5 or $3 million a year into it. But our foundation board has Henry, who is 37, and Teddy, who is 20, and Lillian, who is 25. So what about them? I mean, mom is doing her thing again, you know, and so I really worried about that. And they had their own program but it was tiny compared to what I was doing. And how was I going to pass on the baton to them, if it was my shtick, you know? And I want to tell you, this is a real success story, because Henry got involved with Liberia, where I had been working with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. And I got an invitation to her inauguration, first woman elected in Africa.

So, anyway, so Henry said, "Look, you can't go because you're teaching. Could I go in your place?" And he did. And he had complete access and he's made a fabulous film. It's going to be on PBS, BBC, South African broadcast, 25 countries, called The Iron Ladies of Liberia. It's going to be so much more effective than most of the stuff I do. And then Teddy came along and he worked with me in Bosnia and in Liberia, where we were training women leaders. Teddy has dreads out to here, I mean, he is sort of finding his way. But he got so turned on by being there on the ground. And the last is Lillian. Lillian is a genius, but she only made it through 9th grade, 5 suicide attempts, bipolar. And you know what? She lives in Denver, and it's been a heartbreaking story, but you know what? Geraldine Umugwaneza from Rwanda went out to be with her for a week. Geraldine lost 19 family members to the genocide, and then she served on the Supreme Court, and then she was a student with us at The Kennedy School. For Lillian to be there hosting Geraldine, that gave her an investment in living. And, I'm going to start crying...I will always be so grateful to Geraldine for helping my daughter understand why she needs to stay alive.

And so now this program is their program. And so let me encourage you to bring your kids into your philanthropy. Let them do their passion, but also give them a first-hand taste of your own.

NARCISO MATOS: Wow. What a powerful story. I want to share with you what civil society means and what civil society organizations do in countries like Mozambique. And I will use the case of Mozambique because that's where I come from, the country I know best. But please use Mozambique as a metaphor for many other African countries who have overcome conflict, war, but are now just starting to rebuild. By the way, it is Peace Day in Mozambique today, the 4th of October, because in 1994, after 16 years of war between our government and our rebel movement that was also fueled by apartheid in South Africa and so on...after 16 years of war, they signed the peace agreement. And thank God, up until today, 3 years later, it is still peaceful in the country.

But that's when it really started in Mozambique I would say. The notion of civil society just did not exist, and I suppose it will be the same situation in similar settings. Before 1994, there was a one-party State in the country. Every business was owned by government, and there was hardly any incentive for private initiative, be it in business or creating organizations that could address some of the pressing needs of the country.

So it was only after that peace settlement that we began to have in Mozambique different organizations dealing with different problems. Some of them dealing with professional issues, like a medical doctors association. Some of them dealing with issues like HIV/AIDS, which is, as you know, a huge problem in Mozambique, but generally in Southern Africa, and in Africa in general. Other organizations, civil society organizations, dealing with issues of human rights, of violence against women, or dealing with caring for the orphans of HIV/AIDS, which is a huge, huge problem.

So all of these started to happen very recently in Mozambique. It's a story of about 15 years only. What is common is that all these organizations, while they are passionate about what they do, they all need better knowledge about what they're doing. They need to learn about what civil society means in other countries, how they play their different roles, how they contribute to solving community's problems, and how they advocate for their causes, whatever they might be. That's one common denominator of civil society organizations in Mozambique. They all need to be strengthened. They all need to be more professional about what they do. They all need to learn to liaise with the government and to benefactors in the country and elsewhere.

Another aspect of civil society organization is that it is still a learning process also for government to understand that working with civil society organizations helps governments to reach out there where government is not present. Let me give you an example. One recent development in Mozambique, and the other countries, is the decentralization of power. That means that up until recently, every decision was made by the central government. At best, it was taken to the provincial level, which will be people in some countries to state level. Below that, at the district level, at the community level, there was hardly any interface between the community and government. Now, very recently, the new government decided 2 years ago that it should give the district, which is the lowest level of government, money for them to decide what they should do. It's not a lot of money. There's $300,000 a year, but, mind you, it was the first time that has ever happened.

Now what is happening is that these communities really don't know how to deal with that. They were never before asked to decide what are their priorities. And there is a role there for civil society to train these community leaders and help them understand how they can now use this power to contribute to so many of the problems there. Again, this is something that government is not good at doing, because it doesn't have the experience of going so deep in the communities. And even if it wanted to do that, it's just not possible. It has so many places to go, and so many issues to address. So that's the second role played by civil society organizations in Mozambique and other countries, to help government reach where it cannot reach, and help society organize itself to exercise opportunities to solve its own problems.

I want also to speak about the role that organizations, if you want a second level, need to play in these countries. All of you care about issues of water or HIV/AIDS or human rights, whatever your passion may be. And the question often is how do you start when you get to a country like Mozambique, or Uganda, or Kenya? Can you go to every place and identify those who are concerned and working on those issues? Or should you rather have some facilitating entity in the country that could help you learn about the priorities, learn about what are the real things that the communities want to have solved? So I am arguing for the importance of wanting the kind of foundation-like organizations, that could work as, first of all, as intermediaries between the benefactors internationally or nationally and the needs at the grassroots level.

Secondly, they operate as trainers for this community-based organization. Take, for example, water. If you want to solve the problem of water really, it's not about going there and building the water hole for the community. It's about working with community leaders and making them not only know how to build the water hole, but also know how to maintain it and how to make sure that everyone in the community has equal share to that new resource, if you have that. So there is a need to train them, because, more often than not, the problem is not only that there is no water, it's also that the community is not organized to solve that problem. So there is a role to be played by organizations that are capable of providing a framework for learning, for joint learning from those who have done it in one part of the country or another country, and those who are just starting to address these kinds of problems.

Another role, and I will stop there, that these kinds of intermediary organizations have to play, again, is to advocate. If you are in a village, and you face the problem that there is no school in that village, very often you don't have access to the provincial level, or to the national level, to argue for that right. So, again, to help the voice of these empowered communities to be heard in the centers of power, that is a role to be played by these networkers, by these intermediary organizations that we have and that we need more of in African countries.

And that's what I have been doing. I work for a foundation that deals with all these issues that I mentioned before, from water, to orphans, to HIV/AIDS, to human rights, but mostly working with the smaller organizations that address the problems at the community level.

COHEN: Thank you, Narciso. Before I open up questions to the room, I just wanted to ask the first question to the group: it seems that in all of your examples that the ingredient for success is an interesting combination of your personal passion, your strategic advantage that you have as an individual and as part of your own set of networks and resources and also your ability to listen to those who are affected by the problems that you're trying to solve. And I am wondering if each of you could just tell something personal about how you have traveled on that journey to find that right mix of your own passion, your own comparative advantage, and your own journey of listening and integrating that into your approaches.

HUNT: I can. This was while I was Ambassador. There was a massacre. It was the massacre of Srebrenica. And 8,000 unarmed boys and men were killed. They were Muslim. And it was a massacre by the Serbs, and there were 30,000 survivors and they were then taken to a place and just dumped. They were living in burned out houses. There were 6 families to get...it was horrible. So here I was, this policymaker, and so I got really involved. And everyone was ignoring them, so on the 1 year anniversary, I helped them come together and I got Queen Noor to come in and some people from the EU, etc. and one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo actually came. And these women still believed that their sons and their husbands were alive. It was the most awful, awful thing, because the mass graves had not been unearthed. So here I am doing all this extremely hard work, emotionally, and I came back home...I would go back and forth. It would be my children...by home, I meant Vienna, going there. And at one point, I was sitting down with one of the women, and she was just sobbing. She had embroidered the name on a cloth of her missing sons. She had 3 missing sons now. She said, "Maybe the first 2 are dead, and my husband and my 2 brothers, but I know that my third son, he was 16, he was so fast, I know he could outrun anyone who was trying to kill him. I know that he's hiding in the woods." And it was just...and then she stopped and she said, "How's your daughter?" And I said, "She's not very well." And this woman just started weeping for my daughter. And that's when I knew that the connection happens at the deepest personal level.

And then I came back to Vienna and it was like this elegant dinner, with the china and the linens, and I'm sitting there with my daughter and my son, and nobody asks a word, a word, about "Mom, how was it?" They are talking about trying to learn to spell or add or whatever. And, finally, at the end of dinner, I said, "Well you all didn't even ask me about this trip." And Lillian said, "Mom, I am tired of competing with refugees."

It's so hard to integrate the family and your work, but you've got to get strength from every place you can, you know? And then you have to apply that strength that you have to the difficulties that you face. And it's those very personal moments that keep me doing this public policy work, because...By the way, war is very bad for clean water. It's very bad for inoculations. We talk about how important education is, that it's primary. There's something else more primary, and it's peace, because the war destroys the education system. It doesn't matter how wonderful it is. So that's what I am trying to do, is to go all the way upstream to the wars that affect hundreds of millions of people in Africa. And I do it because of that woman who wept with me in our shared experience.

APPELBAUM: Very difficult to give my little anecdote or story after that. Couple of years ago, in fact about 10 years ago, before we started out new satellite broadcasting initiative, we had been working with the SABC in the newspapers. One day the phone rang in my office, and it was a guy called Professor Anthony Asher who was the head of Actuarial Science at Wits University. And he said, "I'd like to tell you a little story." I said, "Well, what?" He said, "I've got a guy here who is soon going to graduate as the first black South African actuary who has been locally educated. And I was going back through his files to see if there was anything that I could identify that would indicate what it was that led to his becoming successful, because he came from a terribly disadvantaged background and the like." He said, "At school, he wrote the Learning Channel, and I called him in and said to him, 'The Learning Channel isn't school, now where did you go to school?' And he said, 'Well I used the television and the newspaper as supplements.'" So that was one of those little sorts of moments where you knew that what you were doing on a very personal level was working. There was a face and a name, not just sort of a mass of beneficiaries.

MATOS: Well, I learned early on that a real difference is made by individuals, and I worked the last 7 years for a foundation dealing with education, with public libraries and scholarships for female students, and every time it was when I went there to those who were doing things, that I really felt the energy and the difference that they were making. And very often with the very limited resources, what you would really count as almost no resources in situations where otherwise you wouldn't assume that something is happening. So it's really that privilege of interacting with people who are solving problems under very difficult circumstances, with very limited resources. It's that that keeps me going. I thought before about orphans, which is a huge problem. One thing that I learned recently visiting this district was that there was less hopelessness than we often assume to be the case. There are many women who are as poor as the children they take care of, but still they organize themselves and take care of these children who have lost their parents, and they start to grow their gardens and raise their chickens and goats to be able to share with the kids there. And they do this for free, voluntarily. And that's when you look at it and you say, "All that I can do is to help this happen, because they are doing it anyhow." Our role is really just to facilitate, to enable them to do a little bit more. So that's how I got into this.

QUESTION: I wonder if each of you would speak about your perspective either working with people from outside of Africa or being from outside of Africa and seeking to be an enabler and helper. A lot of people in this room, I think, who are engaged in Africa and wanting to be helpful in Africa are not from Africa. And I think sometimes it's challenging trying to understand what's the proper role to play, as someone who is not of the continent.

APPELBAUM: As an African, I find it a little difficult to answer those questions without sounding inhospitable to all of the incredibly generous Americans we come across. Things have changed, but at one stage, people would come to South Africa with their checkbooks, their good intentions, and their preconceived notions of what should be done. And consultation is a word that lip service would be paid to, but not much genuine consultation would be. And I'll give you a real example that I still sometimes smile about.

There was a group from North Carolina, who had decided that they were collecting textbooks in the state of North Carolina and they had got 2 million textbooks, and they were sending them to South Africa. And we very nicely and politely tried to explain to them that we didn't want their textbooks, but this really was a very good idea as far as they were concerned. The only problem is that our curriculum is completely different, the schools were not going to use them, and somebody was going to have to pay to transport all of their stuff. And, ultimately, someone was going to have to pay to trash all of the stuff. Duly, a couple of million textbooks arrived. They weren't even unpacked. They're somewhere in Capetown Harbor, I think, and they had to be dumped because they had no value at all. It cost us money to receive this generosity. And I think it has changed a lot, but one still does have examples. I am sure you have many.

MATOS: I agree with that. I think really the ability to listen and willingness to listen, I would say that's very important. The communities, they know what they need. They know what are their priorities. If you only want to spend time with them and go from what they ask you to help them with, I think that would be already a very good beginning.

At the same time, and that's something we discussed in the past 2 days or so -- I had the privilege of participating in Synergos' Senior Fellows Network meeting -- is that it's also important that you are candid. And you are open with the communities. You bring experience from your world, from your business, you bring experience from dealing with other similar situations elsewhere, and you should be open about that. You should be willing to share what you bring to the table to the conversation. It's very often that either you assume that you know it all, and therefore you are bringing them the solution, or you assume that you should not share the knowledge that you have, because they will be offended. My experience is that it takes time to build a real relationship of trust, and that's important for any project to be successful. But there is no substitute to building that level of trust where you can say, "Just because you are poor, you won't get away with misusing resources. Or not being accountable. Or, it's not because you are poor that this will succeed, because I saw it not succeed in other places. So you have really a conversation between equals. It's difficult to be equal if you bring the money and the other side receives the money. But, if you think of it, there is really some equality there. There is some symmetry. As you help to change that society or that community, you are also being changed as a human being. You are also contributing to something inside yourself that takes you in the first place to be where you are. Just recognize that and use that for a conversation. So I would say, listen, listen and listen.

HUNT: I am very glad you asked the question. I am very glad you asked this question, because I think about it a lot. We work in actually 30 countries, only 7 in Africa. But the same question applies to anywhere in the world, the role of outsiders. And, frankly, that's why I don't do very much in the way of direct service, because women have tremendous road blocks to getting into positions of authority. But if you get them there, there are 5 studies now that show that corruption drops. And corruption is a huge problem in helping with these issues that we all care about. So corruption drops, the women in Parliament, and this is again a study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the more women you have, the less money goes into weapons. And the more it goes into education and healthcare. So I am thinking systemically, and I want those women then to make the decisions. And you know what they do? They make sure the girls go to school; they pass laws about rape; they change the laws in Rwanda. First thing they did when they got to be 49 percent of the Parliament, they passed a law saying that women could inherit property, which has huge implications down at the village level. So that's how I'm dealing with that issue. And by the way, I'd love to have more partners. I could use your help.

QUESTION: I have a question about poverty. For me, that is a little bit relative, because you have plenty of people living on the countryside and with, let's call it 2 sheep and 1 cow and have never thought they were poor. But then they are told they are poor, and then you have this kind of reaction that they take the family and move into a city and think that's where they can become richer, but it's just the opposite. So how can something like this be solved?

MATOS: Frankly, poverty exists. It's not just a mirage. At least poverty, when people die of diseases, we know how to cure today. And more people die today of, for example, malaria. And there is medication for malaria. There is prevention for malaria and for whatever reason, or for reasons that we know, there are still hundreds, if not millions, of people who will die. People die of diarrhea today, because they don't have safe water or sanitation, as someone said. That is real poverty. There are kids that have no access to a school. The nearest school may be, I don't know, 5 miles away, 10 miles away. That is poverty. So, I think we should not be mistaken. Of course, it's all relative. But, there is absolute poverty by any measures. You get that village and you look at it and you say, it doesn't matter how philosophical I want to be; there is no water close by; there is no clinic close by; even the kids are not registered as citizens, so they don't exist officially, and, therefore, they cannot get access to some of the services that the state should provide. That is real poverty. That is my take of it.

HUNT: Let's look at Liberia. What President Johnson-Sirleaf faced is this very small country where 3 million people, where 2 million had come into the capital, and they were living literally in the sports stadium. She has 30,000 people there, no sewage system, no electricity, 85 percent unemployment, 100 percent unemployment during the war. Anyway, I was with her in one of the IDP camps, Internally Displaced Persons camp, with her when she said, and this was in April, she said, "This camp is closing in December." Now this was part of the city. "This camp is closing in December. You have to go back into your villages." Now the villages didn't have water, they had no schools, and it was a terrible, terrible bind that she was in. But that was her decision, to essentially force...I can't find another word...force people to go back and rebuild their communities, finding new technology, solar technology or otherwise, cell phone technology, to try to reinhabit the countryside.

QUESTION: My question is for Swanee. I was very interested in learning a little more about how your foundation approaches your peace-building efforts and the work you are doing now in Colombia.

HUNT: Yes, well, through my foundation, we have a 14-person office in Washington. We call it The Initiative for Inclusive Security. It used to be Women Waging Peace, but the policymakers would glaze over it, because "women" and "peace." And the women loved it, but the policymakers respond to the word "security," and they don't know what "inclusive" means, so that's kind of fun. So we sort of sneak in the "women" part. And one of the countries we're focusing on is Colombia. So we have brought numerous senators, the former foreign minister, etc. to Harvard and then to Washington. We've set up meetings at the World Bank with the president of the World Bank, with the undersecretary for political affairs in the state department. Again, this is building on my comparative advantage as a former ambassador.

So anyway we have a team then that goes down to Colombia. They will be there in October, and they are working with the president on his various reconciliation efforts, peace building etc. And they are actually training the people who are there running these efforts, the Colombians. Training them in what we call "gender mainstreaming." Every decision you make, whether it's where to build a well, where to put a road, what kind of school, or how you help a community rebuild, every decision has a gender component because it affects the women differently from how it affects the men. And if you don't pay attention, the women will be shut out. It's systemic throughout the society. So we are in there with curriculum. We spend weeks in Colombia, but I mean, in Sudan, Afghanistan, like 30 countries, but weeks there. And I will be there in December myself, leading a workshop with women leaders.

COHEN: I want to thank our panel for sharing the ways that they're investing in Africa.

An interesting theme is that although all of them are investing successfully and taking their initiatives to scale, we see that the passion and the personal connection that they maintain, and the feeling that the difference really does happen on a personal level, one individual at a time. So maintaining that sense and that ambition to invest for scale, but to maintain that the personal connection is so important I know for all of us. So, thank you. Thank you for sharing.