Hadeel Ibrahim talks about her work with the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and the need for integrated, multi-issue approaches to the Syrian refugee crisis and other global challenges.

Transcript

Thank you so much. Every time I speak at GPC I’m worried that I won’t be invited back so every time I’m invited back I think it’s a kind of encouragement to say even more challenging things, which I hope you’ll permit me to do.

One of the lovely things about this forum, Peggy, you talked so eloquently last night about seeing your role in the world as creating a safe space and I think this is a safe space and the purpose of safe spaces is to say difficult things. So permit me to say what I think are two challenging things that I’ve learned about philanthropy.

I celebrated ten years since starting to work with my family foundation a few months ago so I’m in retrospective mode.

I want to talk about how the world is changing in two critical ways.

The first way speaks to the intersectionality of the world. As Melissa eluded, I was privileged enough to be invited to serve on a UN high level panel, which is really when the Secretary-General asks nine people who are allegedly experts to address one of the crises facing the world and ours was the humanitarian crisis.

So it was not a small mandate. And I learned something really profound.

I had spent ten years working on development issues thinking that I was really helping the poorest people in Africa and I realized that there is, that nothing I had done in ten years had ever addressed.

I couldn’t point to one program we’d ever done that affected anyone in a refugee camp.

And to give you the numbers, there are 60,000,000 displaced people in the world today, 125,000,000 people in need of humanitarian assistance, that is assistance to stay alive on a daily basis.

These are largely stateless people.

They don’t vote.

They don’t consume.

They don’t register on any matrix of how we accord people identity in this world.

They are basically just a budget line on a UN or an MSF ledger.

So this is an invisible country of 125,000,000 people. If that was a country it would be the 11th largest country in the world. The 11th largest country in the world is an invisible country.

And that really opened my eyes to a different way of doing philanthropy.

So, to speak of this country, every day in 2014, forty-two and a half thousand people left their homes, were forced to leave their homes because of conflict every day. Fifty-three thousand people left their homes every day because of climate change. And the average amount of time that they’ll be away from home is 17 years. A Syrian crossing the border into...a Syrian crossing the border in Turkey is not going home for 17 years. And for those of you engaged on the SDGs we’re meant to have achieved the SDGs-no one left behind in 15 years.

125,000,000 people will be left behind.

So the first thing I really learned was that we can no longer be single issue specialists.

We can no longer say, “I do development.” No.

We have three interlocking global crises. We have a development crisis, and environmental crisis, and a humanitarian crisis. And the... boundaries, the silos when you’re on the ground, when you’re in a refugee camp, they’re invisible.

We talk about Syria as a conflict. We neglect the three years of drought that lead to food price rises, that led to social unrest that triggered the conflict. So do you want to call that a climate crisis or a political crisis?

We talked Darfur, my country, Sudan. We’ve had people living in refugee camps now for ten years. Many people, including the government of this country, called it genocide.

I would prefer to call it the first of many water wars we’re going to see. Darfur was a water war.

So when the facts on the ground neglect these silos can we any longer say, “Oh, I don’t do humanitarian, I don’t do environment“? So my first learning was that in every program I do, in every talk, in every thing that I try, wherever I try to affect change I have to say, “How is this program cognizant of climate mitigation or adaptation? Is there something that’s applicable in a refugee camp? What’s the humanitarian dimension?”

And that’s where I kind of think Synergos, with all respect to the people, the wonderful team here, was so ahead of their time because their holistic approach spoke to the world as it is becoming, and I think this, this is a particularly apt forum to talk about this.

So, it’s a call to arms for all of you. No more single issue specialism. We all have to be everything, and not, this is not an intellectual conceit. This is what is needed.

The second thing I want to briefly talk about is legitimacy. The other really significant way in which the world has changed, as my father likes to say, “In ten years every one of you will be able to read everyone else’s emails.” You’ve seen the Panama Papers. You’ve seen WikiLeaks.

And, again, to quote my father, “A light has been turned on and it’s not gonna be turned off. And under that light we’re all naked. And if you’re naked, you’d better look good.”

[LAUGHTER].

I think in philanthropy we face a legitimacy crisis. I really do.

Most of us now, as much as we try to influence outcomes on the ground we try to influence public policy. But let’s think for a minute.

A group of people with disproportionate means trying to influence public policy according to what they think is right, I would ask questions.

If I was a journalist, I would interrogate that.

I sit on the nextgen group of another philanthropic organization and we had a retreat.

And at some point I said, “Out of curiosity how many of you have non-family members on your board?” Not many hands went up.

“How many of you have a majority of non-family members on your board?” And I can say this very comfortably because we did -- we have a majority of non-family members so I felt very righteous.

No other foundation in the room had a majority of non-family members on their board.

So you are trying to influence public policy outcomes with a very closed pool of people.

Now, I don’t know if you know about the work that my family foundation does. Well, we really try to encourage better governance in Africa, we try to encourage leaders to step down when they’re supposed to and not stay too long.

And one of the reasons that project had a lot of impact was because all the decision-making around our prize for leadership was devolved to a group of experts,

six people, half of them Nobel Peace Prize winners, and my family had no input, had no visibility, and had no insight into that decision making until the decision was made.

This stuff is important. It is very, very important to think that when those questions start to be asked do you have a good answer.

The amount of philanthropic capital in the world today is huge and I think that’s a wonderful development.

But as I said, the light is on, we are all naked, how good do you look? Ask yourself.

Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]