 Okay folks, I think we should get started. I'm Dan Bundy. I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS and I'm also the co-director of the new U.S. Leadership and Development Initiative here at CSIS which has been generously funded by Chevron and we have a very interesting program this afternoon. We have two people who I consider some of the world's experts on the issue of corporate philanthropy, corporate engagement, corporate social investment, and as it pertains to the developing world, I think we're going to hear about the evolution of how Chevron has thought about development more broadly and what it brings to development and then we're going to hear about the specific case study and get an update on the Niger Delta Partnership Initiative that Dennis Fleming runs. So we're very fortunate to have Simon Lowe's here from San Ramon who is a manager at Chevron and along with Dennis Fleming who's the project director of NDPI. I'm going to hand the floor over first to Simon and ask him to give some context about how Chevron has evolved in its thinking over time and then what I'm going to do is I'll ask Dennis to go into much greater detail about the NDPI initiative and then we'll have a broad conversation. I think we've got a number of very interesting stakeholders here who will be able to, I think, have a lot to offer to this discussion. So Simon, I'm going to turn it over to you. Thanks a lot, Dennis. You used the wrong word philanthropy just to... I know, that's why I added several other words because knowing that that's not the word Chevron uses but various other folks do. There's a whole group of Chevron people around the table here so please let me invite everyone from Chevron to chip in because I think you've actually got an awful lot of people involved in a lot of partnership developments. It is in charge of our global issues and policy groups. It spends a lot of time here. Mamadou hides out in bars in the evenings talking about Angola and Nigeria. And Tammy Odo and then Dennis is running this Nigerian partnership which I think is almost like a development agency inside of Chevron. So you have an awful lot of Chevron people here. It's embarrassing so please ask any one of us and please have one contribute. I've known Dan for a long, long time. I think an awful lot of our partnership evolution and a lot of our partnership thoughts came from work that we did with Dan and Ollie starting off in Angola eight or nine years ago. So a tremendous amount of our thinking has evolved just from the relationships we've had through our partnerships. So Mamadou and Tammy and Dennis and I sat around last night and tried to figure out one of the best opening comments here to talk about how our partnerships have evolved. So what I'm about to say I think is a summary of all of our thinking. Up until about maybe eight or nine years ago I would suggest that partnerships inside Chevron in the development area were primarily philanthropic contributions to NGOs that were aligned with our geographies and our themes and what we were trying to achieve in our different countries. So we were very active I think and strong in working with NGOs and selecting NGOs to help fund. And we called it partnership but in my mind it really wasn't partnership it was more just executing policies that our business units were asking us to work on or we were trying to project from a corporate standpoint. We would tend to select competent NGO partners. We would fund them and we would work with them. But we didn't really get that much involved in the dynamics and the work that was involved. We were going to turn that over to a partner that did the work. So our other partnerships really were directly funding of NGOs. Then the demands on us grew a lot and I think the stakeholder expectations inside the business units, inside the US and inside the policy leaders and the shareholder activists. We started to see a changing demand for what we should be doing in our high-risk business unit. So I think we moved I would say to early partnership model. Angola was the first one that we did. Angola was a post-conflict type of situation where we were asked to come and do some partnership work where we started for the first time working with development agencies in multi-development agencies, several of them together where we were doing nationwide capacity building, economic development type of partnership. And that was a model we hadn't had before and the dynamics of that for us were incredibly interesting. Dennis and I were both involved in that and we got much more involved in the governance, the management processes. We looked for matched funding and we started to get into thinking we'd never had in the corporation before about working on development outside of our area of operations. We actually didn't do anything that helped our particular operations. We spent a lot of time working on capacity building and economic development in a very broad sense. That moved us into a realm of partnership we'd never had before. So we sort of went from direct NGO funding to working with development agencies and co-managing, helping to, where we agreed on strategic objectives together, working outside of our areas of operation. So I would call that sort of a post-conflict nation-building type of partnership. Then a few years later we got into a different type of partnership in Nigeria which was a partnership where we were really trying to bring economic development into conflict area which was a Niger Delta. And we set up a whole series of different partnerships with the communities which were using the same process we'd learnt in Angola of having much better participative type of processes with our stakeholders. And again, jointly funding activities rather than just going to the communities and saying here it is we're going to do this, we're going to do that. We spend a lot more time building the relationships, trying to figure out what the communities might want and then putting in place a process to allow them to deliver their own programs and then trying to add some governance and sort of leverage to it. So that was a model that we used directly with the communities but again we learnt from Angola that you need these participative processes I think to really create ownership and a much better, higher impact from our investments. And I think from those three models, one was direct stuff, the other was partnership development through a nation building. The third was a direct partnership to try and deal with conflicts that were immediately impacting our communities. We sort of evolved into the model that Dennis is going to talk about which I would suggest that she has elements of all of those different models inside it. He's working, I should let him do this, he's working with development engineers, he's doing participative processes. But the unique thing about Dennis's partnership is that it's providing a lot of thought leadership and a lot of guidance for a much broader base of stakeholders and it's actually almost gotten outside of the company itself and is a model where he's developing relationships which we hope will be to the benefit of the whole Niger Delta as opposed to just models that just might particularly help share money with the communities around our operations. So it has elements of all of the different models that we have worked on all incorporated into one major foundation-orientated partnership. As I was thinking about the characteristics of all the different models we've had, the work that comes out is participative processes. We have really, almost every single thing we do in the company now and every sort of review we do of our social investments be it corporate or business unit, we're trying to get into participative processes where it's slower and it takes a lot more commitment to do these participative process partnerships. But the end result is much more sustainable and we learn a lot from doing them. So the participation of the communities or the development agencies or the NGOs where we give up control a lot, I think we make commitments to themes before we actually agree on what the projects might be within those themes. And I think we really show a commitment almost like we're a development agency approach about inside the company. Those participative models are really helping us have much more effective, I think, results. The second thing is flexible. We've been really lucky because our business unit managers and our corporate executives, I think, are giving us a lot of flexibility in how we move this investment around, again, both in the business units and through the partnerships that we evolve. So we've been able to change and we've started partners and work group partners have taught us how to change. So instead of these rigid, you know, we give them idea of this and we sit back in two or three years' time, I think we've gotten much more involved in the governance of the projects and that's allowed us to be much more flexible as the dynamics have changed on the ground. The third aspect, I think, that cuts across all of our partnerships is leveraging our company's assets. In all the ones I've seen and been involved with, we've leveraged something. We leverage our people. We actually put people into managing the projects. We put them on to committees. We get our engineers and our geophysicists and our geologists involved in projects and they ask us why are we doing that and it's a wonderful way of getting resources into partnerships. So we leverage our people. We leverage our capital projects big time and I think we do a much better job of managing the social risks across our capital projects, across the whole life cycle of our projects and in doing that, we get our project managers heavily involved and they start to really think about social risks and social issues and then they help us develop and stuff up the projects. And then we leverage our IT in some of the countries where we are, our IT systems are better than the government systems and I think we leverage everything that we can now in our partnerships and I think the last piece of it is we're much more sophisticated. We're nowhere near where we'd like to be but we're much more sophisticated in our M&E systems and we have pretty good partnership selection matrixes which we go out and talk to our business units a lot. So that's just the basic introduction I think of the evolution of the thinking in our H.Evron and the last thing I'd like to leave you with we sort of have realized that there's no one size that fits all. We do small partnerships in some of our really sophisticated but not particularly strategic business units. We do huge partnerships in Nigeria which clearly is the highest risk area I think anywhere in the world where we operate and we change, but we learn I think with each sort of evolution of the new approaches and what you're about to hear from Dennis I would suggest is by far the most sophisticated thing that we've ever done and a lot of different learnings sort of having cooperated into Dennis' approach. So let me just turn it over to Dennis. Dennis, over to you. Just if you just push the black button there. Okay, good morning everyone. Good day. I'll just start off by giving you kind of a brief overview of what the Niger Delta Partnership Initiative is the concept and then as Dan had mentioned focus a little bit more specifically on some of our strategies for economic growth in the region. On this slide here you can just see I tend to think visually so I tried to kind of use one overall very busy diagram to kind of explain what the Niger Delta Partnership Initiative is all about and what I'd like to show from here is that the idea is as a partnership initiative that we don't want to just use the Chevron funding for this initiative to fund projects on our own but we want to do things in partnership with other donors and of course with a broad range of implementing partners. So if you see on the screen you can see at the funding level we have the Chevron funding which goes into a foundation that we created last year called the NDPI Foundation and this was a model that we had used in Papua New Guinea some years ago that I had a chance to work on and I found that the structure of using a foundation as the funding vehicle for an initiative was very helpful particularly in terms of broadening out the decision making process and the structure that we bring in expertise and support in a structure that provides a lot more I guess guidance in terms of accountability and transparency when you have a separate legal entity the reporting requirements, the audit requirements the way that you structure the governance of a foundation is a useful way of structuring the governance of any type of initiative or funding decisions and so we kind of started off with the NDPI Foundation and then discovered also that we would also have to have by Nigerian law a foundation incorporated in Nigeria too so it was kind of the first step to say yeah let's set up a foundation and then the next step was okay well let's set up another foundation in Nigeria and both foundations have our independent entities they're nonprofit foundations and we started kind of a new approach for Chevron or as one that we had a chance to explore with a little bit in Papua New Guinea in having a board of the foundation which has a number of independent directors that were brought in to make decisions and projects that have expertise a lot of experience in the types of things that we're funding and can provide a lot of very important guidance in these decisions and we're fortunate to have two of our directors for the NDPI Foundation here and Pauline Baker and Lori Regalbrucker and they've been very helpful in that and it's certainly a part of the model that I feel is an important lesson for Chevron we have basically very strong decisions a lot of very useful input some good healthy debate in our board meetings and that's exactly what you want when you're planning to determine how to spend $50 million the PIN Foundation also has the same thing we have three Chevron directors or trustees in the case of that foundation and four independent trustees based in Nigeria so the NDPI Foundation focuses more on the strategic issues and priorities for the foundation and the PIN Foundation focuses more on the operational issues both of them are new foundations set up specifically for this initiative but this independence and autonomy of these foundations gave us quite a lot of flexibility to do what we needed to do to address the issues and challenges in the Niger Delta and I think that's something an important lesson that I would encourage anyone to think about with these types of initiatives is the fact that the types of systems and approaches to doing development partnerships are unique and often it's better to structure them into a new entity rather than trying to kind of fit those systems into a company department or some sort of an add-on to something which already exists the great opportunity that we had with the NDPI Foundation was this flexibility to say this is what we want to do in the Niger Delta let's create a legal structure a decision-making structure a governance system which suits exactly what we want to do it's designed to do that it's not meant to fit under some broader structure so Chevron's funding goes through these foundations but we also have our donor partners involved and as you can see on the slide we have both government partners and we have our donor partners and not just aid agencies such as bilateral and multilateral organizations but also companies, private foundations we're trying to cast a fairly wide net in terms of who we're working with I think essentially for two reasons one reason is there's a lot of donor-funded development programming going on in the Niger Delta region but it's not coordinated everyone's doing their own thing many times they're working on projects that are working at cross threads with each other one project is undermining another because there's just no real coordination there's no sharing of information or lessons learned and then another key reason is when you get different diverse donors into a project I think you get a much healthier project because you get a diversity of thinking I mean those of you that have worked with different organizations you know what it's like to work with a big powerful donor in a particular project they tend to have much more influence over all the decisions and don't have to question what they do and we've all worked with people that are incredibly open-minded and are willing to consider a lot of different approaches in their work but I'm sure we've all seen donor representatives that don't that say my way or the highway kind of thing and so the opportunity to partner with other donors really gives us a chance to use these projects and the co-funding that we're doing together in these partnerships as a development form to get some useful debate as to what's working what's not working how can we work together how can this initiative link up with this other one and it's clear through the early efforts that we're making so far with NDPI that actually everyone is really keen on having that that everyone recognizes that they're not working in coordination as much with others and very few organizations have the flexibility and the the opportunity to coordinate to take a step back and work with others and take more collaborative approaches and so we found a niche essentially for our foundations to be in a coordinating role to be sharing information more broadly to be linking up various initiatives and we're getting quite a lot of interest and support from various partners in doing that you can see in the blue box there in the middle the wording may not be clear enough towards the back but funding the programs themselves development and peace building programs I'll go into the next slide in terms of what types of programs we're doing also research and advocacy and capacity building is a very key element in what we do the Niger Delta region has a history of conflict at a complex place there's high levels of crime in places and militancy and criminality and what that means is a lot of development programming done in the region almost always has to be implemented through small local NGOs and CSOs that are really the only ones that have access to the communities in the conflict prone areas but the capacity is very limited so we quickly realize as we looked at our various programs that we had to have a very aggressive capacity building program to build the capacity of those partners since in many locations it's only through those partners that we can really get information as to what's happening on the ground and even when international partners come in they also have to work through those same sort of organizations so as we work with these various partnerships it allows us to make sure that we look at what is the local content of organizations participating in these projects and how can we make sure that every international partner comes in is building the capacity of the local partners to do more and more of this programming with less and less guidance and mentoring from their international partners so what does this mean in terms of of what we're actually doing what programs are we doing we started off in developing our strategic framework for this initiative in developing we looked at the conflict that we were seeing in the region and we recognized that we needed to take a more systemic approach than many of the donors have taken particularly the oil company donors in the region had taken in the past and we wanted to address what was seen through a lot of stakeholder engagement as kind of the root causes of conflict in the region which is essentially poverty and unemployment lack of civil society capacity and government capacity in the region and we saw those as key drivers of conflict that we could address as a part of our programming so we looked at economic growth very high expectations for jobs in the region that's driving a lot of conflict we looked at developing a capacity building program to address the capacity of local government and CSOs we identified a peace building program that would look at promoting peace in the region and then an analysis and advocacy program which is kind of cross cutting and providing the analysis that feeds into the program design in the other three program areas but when we drafted our first strategic framework we realized that it's very easy for those program areas to become silos within the foundation where what you're doing in economic development has nothing to do with what you're doing or peace building so we kind of had a rethink early this year to make it more integrated and you can see in the boxes above those four program areas how we're basically integrating those four program areas under the overall goal of generating impact in terms of income and employment it was an interesting evolution in my own thinking because I really kind of thought more of economic development since we saw it as a root cause of conflict it was like economic development for peace but now as we kind of restructured it from a programmatic point of view we see more peace for economic development it's kind of a subtle difference but it's important in terms of integrating our programs because there's a lot of types of conflict within the Niger Delta region it's not just militancy that is one type of conflict but there's actually quite a lot more some of it violent, some of it nonviolent but when we started relating those conflicts that relate back to the kind of the systemic constraints to economic growth it helped us to target our peace building strategies a little bit more specifically to how they can generate kind of poles of economic growth in areas where you feel like that economic growth is going to be an incentive to reduce violence and conflict in a specific area so that means that for all of our program areas now we look at that integration aspect much stronger that has to identify in a peace building program or a capacity building program how it contributes to economic growth and our board members very rightly so you know ask anytime that we put a project through for approval well how does this relate to the rest of the programs that you're doing how does it contribute to your overall strategy and that's really important because it's very easy when you look at a partnership initiative to just kind of follow what the various donors are doing before you know it you have kind of an ad hoc portfolio of different projects which are very hard to get some level of integration but with this strategic framework we are much more focused and at times it's actually helped us to even get some of our donor partners a little bit more focused on linking and integrating the programs that they want to do with us because in some cases our donor partners too are struggling to see how they can get their programs to contribute towards a common strategy rather than four separate strategies related to four separate program areas at the bottom then that gives you an indication of some of the principles of intervention that we're focusing on government participation and alignment for example it's a critical element you know that working with the government in the Niger Delta is challenging there's a lot of corruption in various places there's there's so much kind of political maneuvering involved in government development decisions it's hard to get them kind of focused on real needs that needs to be addressed gender and youth mainstreaming the women of the Niger Delta clearly have extra challenges in terms of participating in the economy there there's a lot of traditional gender norms there's a lot of gender issues that if they're addressed correctly in our programming and our mainstream in our programming can make a big difference for that segment of the population the same thing with youth youth population of the Niger Delta is about 60% it represents a huge chunk of the population and when you relate it to those people that are involved in conflict it represents a much higher percentage of those people involved I won't go through every these point by point because you can ask a questions later but one I would like to highlight a little bit here is recognizable constituency that's kind of a vague term but what it meant for us is as we look at local partners for example to work with we find as you find in so many areas but particularly areas where there's funding going in and a lot of the funding for development programs is actually coming from oil companies in the region they haven't tended to be so specific in terms of who those organizations are representing it's really that a lot of the CSLs in the Niger Delta are contractors they're doing what the donors say they want to do they're bidding on those projects they rarely get the opportunity or the resources to pursue their own strategies their own vision for development in the region but there are civil society organizations more often CBOs and particularly business membership organizations which have a clearly definable constituency you deal with the organization you know who they represent they have details of their members you go to many of the smaller NGOs it's not clear who they represent they may focus on a specific sector or development need but they don't have any kind of a membership base that you can point to it's not clear who they actually represent and so like in our capacity building programs for example that's focusing us much more on market women's associations farmers associations various trade associations and business membership groups that have that clearly recognizable constituency we know who they represent and many of them are already sustainable without any kind of donor support because they exist on the support and the dues of their members and if their members are continuing to pay their dues then that's a clear indicator that they have a broad level of support because the economy there is not such that people have a lot of money to burn on a trade association that doesn't do anything for them and civil society organizations such as trade associations trade unions actually wield quite a lot of influence and power within the region and so it's an important check and balance on what the government is doing and gives us in terms of our capacity building programs some specific focus areas in terms of who we can work with organizations that are not going to be just totally dependent upon donor funding to exist after our projects other basic things I think you're all aware of participatory approaches transparency and accountability the foundation models we have to have audits we have to release annual reports we have to do a lot of things which are really discretionary for corporate funding initiatives in situations where it's just a charitable contribution or it's done from a department and that increases the accountability and transparency of what we do and another one that I want to highlight is polls of growth the Niger Delta region isn't all of Nigeria but it's still 30 million people it's still too vast for 50 million dollars to really have a region wide impact so that means you're going to have to narrow your geographic focus you're going to have to look even at how do you go about prioritizing that geographic focus and so our strategy essentially is to look at we are the right condition for creating we call polls of growth where you can cluster projects and activities and you can focus on the geographic area that through all four of those program areas is going to have a more balanced and aggressive development agenda and then ideally what you're getting is not just a strong example that helps us to scale up our own existing programs but it also gives us a chance to show some models that can be replicated by others it doesn't have to be done by us we can share our lessons learn maybe plow some new ground for other organizations other donors even to do that and we're already getting that kind of interest other oil companies have been paying close attention to what we're doing with these foundations and this initiative and there's a great deal of interest in getting involved and learning from it and learning from it in ways where we can collaborate with them on individual projects or set examples that they can they can replicate and say okay well we'll set up a foundation and we'll do our own type of thing and we'll collaborate with you where you can and so those kind of ideas are coming out and it's still early days for us but the interest that we're getting is even much larger than we had expected and we really feel like we've kind of found a niche in terms of what donors and implementers and government are looking for to ways to collaborate so I've talked a little bit about what we're doing I'd like to mention briefly about some of the partnerships that we already had signed up GIZ was basically our first agreement and commitment they came in with a small amount of funding but they had an economic development center in another state which posed as a useful model for us to consider doing in the Niger Delta region and got into a partnership with us on developing an economic development center in Waii in the western Niger Delta we are collaborating with UNDP on the design of a social action fund for the Niger Delta if any of you are familiar with Angola and familiar with Foz the Fundo de Apoio Social is one of the models that UNDP and the EU are looking at for the social action fund in the Niger Delta and that's intended to be a multi-donor trust fund and is kind of under the umbrella of the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs so that's kind of an exciting project but it's very early days and our participation in that is contributing some consultants to the design team for identifying how this fund can be set up our biggest partnership so far is with USAID we signed an agreement for a total of $50 million of funding $25 from NDPI and $25 million from USAID into what we're calling an integrated peace and development alliance and that's not one project I'd hate to spend $50 million on one project so it's a portfolio of projects and we have a number of them identified as planning stages and we'll come out over the next say one to two and a half years as we kind of work through the priorities of which projects that we're focused on but to give you an idea of some of the things that we're working on with them now our planning is a civil society small grants program a local governance program very early stages of planning a conflict management program and an agriculture value chain program which I'll mention a little bit later as I talk more about economic development and then lastly we haven't developed a formal agreement, partnership agreement with DFID but they've recently received ministerial approval to get into a partnership with us and mostly focused on economic development and a little bit less on peace building but they can't actually formalize those partnership agreements until we work through some of the analysis that again I'll be talking about a little bit later however DFID have already really started partnering with us in terms of doing the economic research and analyzing the sectors that we want to focus on and so we're already working very closely with them in terms of our economic development strategies so those are just some of the partnerships we have some other programs that we're developing include organizations like Rotary International are working with us on an appropriate technology project we just recently have had some discussions with the company Schlumberger who are putting in a special technology project under that appropriate technology project and that's one that we've structured such that different donors can come in with dedicated technology funds for a specific purpose but supported and guided by the appropriate technology enabled development that's the name of the program ATED for short that program staff to support those so the donors can come in with the funding and the guidelines and representatives on a grant committee to look at how those individual projects are funded but all the legwork all the planning and the support can be done by one common team of specialists that look at the appropriate technology engineers without borders is the main implementer in that and is a close partner with us and it's interesting to note that while the technology the technical aspects of those programs are important quite often what we find is that the bigger expertise that's needed is not technical expertise but the ability to apply the technologies to the development context that they're needed so quite often it's still actually more social than it is and that's been one of engineers without borders big challenges is they get a lot of volunteers that want to go out and design a very complicated water supply system for example and they come out and they find that the technical side of it is the easy part is how do you structure the water community in the community how do you structure that project to be sustainable that's where the expertise is really needed and to their credit engineers without borders has really developed a lot of expertise in the arena so now this is the my little fun slide but I'd like to talk a little bit about some of our strategies as they relate to economic development and partly why economic development is our kind of the key priority for this Niger Delta partnership initiative so I'm going to take you through something a little bit conceptual here but if you think about you know and if you look at basically levels of income and the size of population in the Niger Delta region and start to kind of break them up into various categories and groupings whether they be by communities or by gender or age group and you can identify different segments of the population some of which have high levels of income so the genie coefficient in the Niger Delta looks pretty bad you know there's a huge disparity between the haves and the have-nots in the region and so what you have is a lot of people a much you know a higher percentage of the population in these lower income levels and really a poverty barrier you know I've just for example used the dollar a day kind of definition but you know if you look at in terms of people's attitudes about their economic conditions it's going to vary in terms of whether they consider themselves to be in poverty or not and that's an important issue when it relates back to say a company like Chevron working with communities that are close to our operations because typically what we find is those communities that are closest to our operations their definition of poverty is as much you know if they consider themselves to be in poverty compared to say a community in the north of Nigeria they would be pretty well off you know but it's all relative they feel like they should be receiving you know a much higher percentage of the benefits of oil production in their midst and so you know they might still be making quite a lot more than their you know their compatriots in the north of Nigeria but still like they're you know in dire poverty and in need of assistance to get out of that but you have this this poverty barrier that's very difficult for people to basically cross over that line and below that line this is where conflict breeds you know with a much higher level of economic growth you would not see so much level of conflict it's also where corruption tends to breed and there are opportunities for people to cross that line and to go from the bottom side to the top side there some of them are legal many of them are not some of them are associated with growing sectors maybe even associated with the oil industry itself many of them are associated with political patronage many of them are associated with criminal activities or militant activities but you know basically you have everyone crowded up against that barrier that poverty barrier trying to get past it and so you have various programs that are funded by donors whether they be company donors like the international oil companies operating in the region or by the aid agencies and aid agencies haven't tended to do so much in the Niger Delta region mostly but all of the socio-economic indicators in Nigeria are worse in the north and so they look at how much money is floating around the delta and they say if the oil companies can't make it work if the government can't make it work with all that money going there what can we do we're better off focusing our funds in those communities that are quite happy to be assisted and don't have that entitlement mentality and are clearly worse off in every respect and that's certainly a very defendable position and understandable as to why they would focus just on the north but you know the problem is that the government of Nigeria relies on oil production in Niger Delta for something like 90% of its revenues and so the Niger Delta finances the rest of the country and so you have a situation like you had in early 2009 where conflict was increasing and oil production was more than cut in half than the whole country was feeling it and people started to recognizing including the donor community that the Niger Delta is not just a regional issue it's a national issue and once recognized as a national issue the donor agencies started to want to do more but then you get into the issues okay you're spending more money you're doing more but are you actually moving the needle are you moving anyone from below that line to above that line since that's kind of the key objective for so many people in the region and so a lot of the more traditional approaches towards poverty alleviation in the region we're not really addressing the systemic problems that we're keeping people below that poverty barrier instead they were looking at these direct assistance models you assist one business at a time and you're limited by how many of those businesses that you can train and support and assist so you know looking back at the diagram you'd see that nothing is in many programs is really being done to address this barrier what is stopping people from crossing it and instead just going and helping them one business at a time to bring across that barrier to carry them across that barrier without really addressing the systemic causes of that barrier in the first place and what that means is to to assist businesses to promote entrepreneurship and development in that way you're very limited to how much you can do for each individual business now for those of you that are familiar with M4P or the making markets work for the poor approach you recognize that if you are specifically at these challenges of crossing that barrier that instead of assisting those one businesses at a time and I didn't put this into the animation of the slide but the reality is that those little dots that I moved up often as soon as the funding stops move back down or it's rare for you know donors or implementers to even recognize when they're moving one person across that line is there someone else right back down and all they're doing is you know basically assisting one business at the expense of another so looking at M4P approaches to economic development and taking a value chain approach that looks much more at these systemic constraints that direct that poverty barrier we started to recognize that you can actually have a much more significant impact by trying to remove some of those systemic constraints taking the roadblocks out of the way for people to be able to cross that poverty barrier and then instead of moving one business at a time across you can move one whole market segment across at a time and this is where so much of our discussions get into as we're currently doing that economic analysis is that you know we can see some potential areas for economic growth we can see some opportunities to assist businesses but when we take a systemic look at it instead of looking at assisting maybe dozens or hundreds of businesses we expect to assist thousands and every time that we get kind of into the nitty gritty of our value chain analysis of the different sectors that we focused on and I'll talk about that in a minute we we keep asking ourselves how many people realistically can we make a difference with this initiative is it going to be just a few people or is it going to be hundreds or is it going to be thousands and the fact is that there are things you can do to assist thousands and that's where we're tending to focus more effort so there's a lot of things that can be done but if you just go in and jump in and say okay I'm going to assist this business in that business that's a lot of what is happening people are saying let's train a whole bunch of people give us money and it's not worry about where they're going to find the jobs let's just hope that they get them and we'll do the training side or let's go and train businessmen to improve their businesses and do a BDS program that's going to assist them but if you're not looking at what other systemic problems they're facing you can be investing a lot of money and one thing that's not going to change because you haven't removed that constraint you haven't basically taken out that's true so in terms of how we go about doing that our process now for approaching economic development is we started off by identifying a range of economic sectors for potential support and looked at those with high growth potential but not just income and employment growth opportunities but also those that have a potential a broad impact on the poor yes we want to generate economic growth but we don't want to basically make the rich richer you can get GDP impact you can get raised incomes of businesses but if it's these people that have strong political connections and a lot of contracts and making them a little bit wealthier it's not going to address the social problems of having all those people existing with the poverty barrier in the Niger Delta region so it's not just economic growth it's equitable economic growth in the region and then a potential for stimulating systemic change taking blocks out of that poverty barrier out of that wall that people face so we actually went through that analysis earlier this year we gathered whatever data that we can unfortunately there's not a lot of secondary data available in the Niger Delta region we want data most often you just have to go out and get it and collect it yourself but through that and through the participation of our donor partners we gathered a lot of information on economic sectors I think about 30 different sectors we got some data on and a lot of general economic data sat down with USAID and DFID and World Bank and the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and just went through all of that and where is the potential where is the poor population within this economic sector what is the potential that we can do in some cases we found sectors that have high potential for economic growth but we couldn't really find anything that we could do to improve that and so it's not just enough to find a high potential growth sector you have to find a sector that a program intervention is actually going to make a difference in we kind of narrowed it down to five sectors for economic analysis oil palm, cassava, fisheries building supplies and clothing textiles and we then started a value chain analysis of those five sectors and we're kind of on the tail end of that process now and we're identifying systemic constraints to growth opportunities for the poor within those five sectors and so you start very broad and you just keep narrowing it down as you look at your economic data until you can find something that you're realistically going to move the needle that you're going to take a chunk out of that poverty barrier that I was showing you before and then you can design your programs and your interventions and since we're still kind of finishing our value chain analysis of those five sectors we we don't know yet what we're going to do and we're reluctant to say this is exactly what we're going to do and people come up and say well you know you should be doing BDS and you should set up a BDS project we said well we don't know yet whether BDS is actually going to make a difference you know all of it needs to be based on analysis and so it may be one big project that we do with our donor partners more likely it will be a collection of projects depending on what the donors can do and who is where and how much of a need there is for synergies or how separated the projects will be and that's a process we'll be going through over the next few months as we analyze all of this data that we've been gathering I'll just touch briefly as to what we mean by value chains I think a lot of people are probably familiar with the concept but you know taking this systemic approach and looking at economic development within an individual economic sector we need to understand all of the players in the sector now I've been fortunate to do with a number of different types of development initiatives and quite a lot of them involved in economic growth and development and one of the problems that I often saw in the past is this lack of a holistic approach you get together with the donor partner and you say we want to do microfinance and so it's kind of a solution in search of a problem and you look around for that problem that's going to be solved by microfinance so many programs that I've worked in the past don't neatly cluster all of their systemic constraints in the financial arena or in the business development services arena sometimes they're policy oriented sometimes they're conflict oriented sometimes they're associated with lack of finance or lack of capacity and training but often that training or that capacity building is not going to yield any results unless you're combining it with a much broader strategy for how to improve that sector so you can see in the value chain you look you know basically even before production you look at input supply and you follow channels of distribution channels of economic value added in that whole process until your product reaches the consumer and who all is involved in there and so instead of just like for example for looking at agriculture programs instead of just focusing on farmers if our data is telling us that the biggest economic growth opportunities are in downstream processing they're in distribution they're in import substitution in some way there's a lot of different ways that you can improve that sector that may not involve the agriculture production itself or there may be constraints that yes you can improve yields and improve production but if you don't improve the whole distribution network if you don't improve the processing actually yields aren't going to make any difference and so this is the analysis that we're looking at we're looking at the end markets we're analyzing vertical linkages as well as horizontal linkages looking at supporting products and services we've seen situations where a value chain analysis from some of our partner organizations has started off on one sector and I think a good example that DAI was using in some of the value chain analysis training with our local partners was one where they had a poultry project in Mozambique and it was the need was to focus on improving the poultry industry but when they did their value chain analysis they found that the primary problem was in the production of feed so it started off as a poultry project very quickly turned into an agricultural project focused on feed production and it was a part of that same value chain but it was a value chain that kind of led to another value chain and so these are the things that we're looking at we're looking at the enabling environment issues we're looking at a broad range of systemic constraints and we're basically at this point going where the analysis is leading us rather than making a lot of arbitrary decisions about what we should be doing or focusing on so some of the elements of the value chain analysis looking at the relationships amongst the market participants of value chain mapping I find extremely useful to kind of look at a glance as to who are all the players what are the components of the value chain and where are the opportunities for growth within it market trends and competitiveness, governance structures, constraints and opportunities all of these are components of that value chain analysis and a lot of times it's easy to look at a value chain map and to think it looks fairly simple that you can kind of gather a lot of economic statistics and get it but it represents quite a lot of field work quite a lot of talking to different stakeholders and it's not all quantitative often you have to get a lot of qualitative feedback from different market participants as to what are the challenges that they're facing and so that's pretty much my spiel on economic development I'm sure everyone kind of has their own experiences in that regard but we found it a useful approach to kind of start from a general interest in improving economic growth in the region to the specifics of how do we get to those sectors and those elements of market players of the market system that is going to generate the most impact also I should say just in the slide that if you want to find out more information about NDPI you can go to our website at ndpifoundation.org and we post our quarterly reports on there we post our strategic plan that I mentioned is on that and information on the various partnerships and programs that we have Dennis that was fantastic that was probably the most detailed analysis I've ever seen a company do I mean I can think of AID doing an analysis like that I can see the bank doings I mean it's really it's clear to me that Chevron is a significant development actor in a number of countries including Nigeria I'm curious about two things one is the evolution of how it's particularly in Nigeria but you can also refer to other countries the evolution thinking by other donors and how they work with you I can think about when Simon came to see AID ten years ago I'll be a little bit flippant and not totally fair but and say the following things that the World Bank said no we cut big checks to government so we can't help you in Angola UDP said well Angola's not our favorite country so no and then AID said yes we're available to help and so we were sort of AID was the only game in town I think obviously there's been some stretch on the part of some of the other donors GTZ I think it was you know a small model and you're in essence franchising it DFID's interested and wants to have a second date it sounds like and UDP is you know taking something that they stretched on doing with you in Angola and taking to it sounds like there's been an evolution in thinking it's obvious that it's still not perfect and I'm sure there's lots of shortcomings and challenges of working with an organization like AID can you just talk a little bit about your view about how that's changed over time and how obviously obviously the analysis is probably driving a lot of the interest in addition to the fact that you bring a lot of resources but the fact that you're in essence providing significant thought leadership I would also think is giving you a different kind of a voice at the table well I think that's you know part of the evolution of thinking that we're seeing is usually when the first time I approach a potential donor partner or even an implementing partner in some cases you know particularly if they know that Chevron is funding in supporting this initiative that usually the initial reaction is we don't have a crew as to what we want to do and how we want to go about doing it and and so we have to kind of overcome that perception that okay just do what we tell you to do and then you'll be fine and of course every organization has their own drivers their own objectives and so I think we've gotten better over time at articulating ours and defining our strategy and demonstrating that yes we do know what we want to do and you know particularly in the Niger Delta for example all the donor partners that we're working with have nowhere near the network of contacts and local partner organizations and data and even access to getting data that we do and that's what has really kind of positioned us fairly well within the development community in the Niger Delta because not a lot of people are investing in research for example it's very hard to get any accurate reliable data on the region and as we start to go out and invest in gathering in ourselves of course we got a lot of interest from organizations that want to use that data and so as we produce reports we're putting them on the web and making sure that we make them available to others and also that we do some advocacy with some of that information so if we identify systemic constraints that may not be a part of a program we still can use those value chain studies as an advocacy to encourage other organizations other donors to address some of the things that kind of make our final cut in terms of the programs that we're doing so I think that usually on the first date so to speak they say just give us the money and we'll send you a postcard in about a year right and then when we make it clear that we don't then it kind of starts to open the door to get into real discussions to say okay we can talk like partners it's not us telling you what you should do because the reality is with these kind of multi-stakeholder development partnerships is that everyone has something to bring to the table and if you think that your partner is just there and I see this with the local organizations a lot you know an international organization will come in and they'll bring in the local partner and they'll see it as basically fulfilling a local content policy but they don't really expect them to contribute anything useful or viable and they often they miss a really important opportunity to really explore what that local organization has to offer and so many do have something to offer and you just need to look more carefully as to how to identify that so I think we've kind of now established ourselves within the development community in Nigeria and once we get past that first date then it really starts to open the door and it goes almost to the other extremes like they want to do everything then and then we've gotten in a situation where when we started the NDPI Foundation we thought we would really struggle to get the kind of donor matches our target, our goal was to get a one-to-one match of external donor funding to the $50 million that Chevron is putting into it and we've already identified $30 million in funding and once the different funding is finalized that will go up again to a significant amount and this isn't even, we're not even a year old yet so it's so it's more than doing a movie with DFID at this point, sounds like that's good to know. We're holding hands that's great, that's great we'll keep it at that, we'll keep it at that right I was going to ask, we haven't changed our relationship status on Facebook that's it, that's it I was curious to ask Simon about this additional comment but I'd be interested this is quite deep, the level of analysis this is quite quite involved obviously this has taken this shows a lot of evolution in thinking, massive investments how are you transferring this lessons learned through the system in terms of how are you taking this to P&G how are you taking this Angola there's two things going on one is everything Dennis is doing is extraordinary I think sophisticated and externally focused and as he's been building those partnerships in sort of the enabling environment space we began to realize that we needed to actually pull back a bit and start developing a lot of internal partnerships to learn from some of the leverage I guess that he's been getting with the development agencies so we actually did an audit inside the business unit of what we called social investment we used to call it community engagement we sort of changed the terminology and we found out that we were reporting 30, 40, 50 million dollars to our executive committee under the under the budget category of social investment but the real investment was probably closer to 500 million and when we started this has to do with localization this is localization of your procurement and it's not just the grants money it's all sorts of other activities it's probably six to seven separate buckets of social risk management activity in different parts of the business unit so we had monies we have to give to the Nigel Delta Development Commission there's always a tax on our operations but it's going towards social investment to the Nigel Delta we had our own public affairs budgeting process which was well managed and thematic and sort of focused on the areas of operations we had the GMOUs I mentioned which was partnership investment specifically around eight regional communities where we saw them as high risk we had all of our deep water projects where we have to give a certain percentage of our deep water budgets and this is a new major capital projects to social investment funds that's managed by the industry and then the light bulb went off that our local community content group was outspending 30, 400 million dollars developing an economic sort of value chain to support our local community content drivers you put that whole thing together you've really got massive amounts of money floating around in this area I mean you compare that to AID which is probably 100 million or 150 million dollars a year just in Nigeria as a country right I mean this is multiples of that so to try and bring some capability across all of that and I think match the sort of governance model that Dennis is up here we just set up an internal social performance management council inside the business unit and we've taken all the business leaders that are involved in all aspects of those different buckets of activity and we just put them together and we're just using it sort of a governance model inside Nigeria to try and bring some alignment amongst all these different activities and the beautiful thing about what Dennis is doing the whole value chain analysis sophistication that he's got we're realizing we can bring that same process to our internal local community content and have them start focusing more on which sectors they want to develop for to support local community content and that's almost getting to where we're taking the development expertise we've got and helping us with the compliance activity Nigeria is absolutely unique we don't have anything like this in another business unit the closest to where you might be able to start doing some of that probably in Indonesia but Nigeria is just a step function ahead of every other business unit in the company so we're learning we're working a lot with Dennis we're trying to share a lot of his thought processes but at the moment we're in a very different level of sophistication I think in the other business units because again we don't have the conflict business drivers the business drivers for everything we're doing in Nigeria is very easy to articulate you can go to a managing director and say if you do this you'll get more barrels out of the ground or you'll reduce you'll get your projects in on time and on budget so you can articulate the business drivers very well in Nigeria and you get tremendous support when we get to the other business units and start trying to put together a strategic framework it tends to be a lot more reputation type trip and then it is immediate operations driven and that's so much harder sell for Broadway social investment just doing regular stuff is all there but trying to get to this level of strategic thinking is we're just starting to do that we've got a lot of experts in the room that I want to take advantage of so I want to call on a couple people I'm going to take advantage of being the chair and call on a couple people I want to first start calling on a couple folks from within I'm hoping Jen cook might just make a comment about Nigeria and I'll put you can thank me for that later thanks thank you so much for this it is really an incredible investment the depth of analysis and so forth I mean what's sad is that the government has not done this kind of analysis and that's kind of where my question is on this I mean it seems the primary conflict driver in a delta is the failure of the government it's those states are pretty much a watch in money but not using that money to the better citizens so in this question I'd like to ask a little bit kind of what is your engagement with the government you talked about government participation in alignment I mean I assume it varies from state to state across the Niger Delta but how how do these projects and it's hard for private companies to do this which is perhaps the difference with AID but how do you build in the incentives and to gather as greater government responsibility in these it's the story of the Niger Delta but things that the government should be doing and have followed by default to the law companies and development organizations so I wonder if you selected that how collaborative it is with the government and what that relationship is well I mean it's a challenge there's no doubt about it and we're doing a lot of engagement with different government organizations at the at this point primarily at the federal and state level because until we finalize where these poles of growth that we're focused on it's hard to you know start approaching local governments and that will tend to be on a project by project basis unless we have local government areas which are going to encompass a number of different projects in our portfolio probably the most amount of engagement that we've had so far in the project has been at the federal level primarily through the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and the Niger Delta Development Commission and it's kind of an interesting thing because officially speaking the Niger Delta Development Commission comes under the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs but it operates pretty much as if it isn't and which the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs doesn't really like and it's part of the reason why they're working so collaboratively with UNDP on this multi donor trust fund or social action fund because they see that as an opportunity to kind of make up for all the problems that a lot of people see with the Niger Delta Development Commission but we are also working with them as well with the NDDC but it's early stage we have a pilot project a local capacity building project which is focused on local level government but is using a fund, the project funds are coming from the NDDC and the capacity building of the local government is being funded by NDPI and it's kind of an initial pilot and if that works out well and particularly if we feel like we're having not only some impact in those local government areas but that we're also having some influence in the NDDC to take more participatory approaches in the projects that they do then that will be a benefit but we have to do a lot of multiple engagement at the state level we started that process but the elections basically put a lot of stuff on hold you couldn't get anyone to do anything for the first few months of this year and even now it's starting to ease up but a lot of state governors are still selecting their cabinets and getting approvals for a lot of positions, still a lot of commissioners to a point they're getting a feel for what they're doing so it's a slow evolutionary process but we do recognize that if we're looking at multi stakeholder partnerships the government is one of those stakeholders and even where you have problems and challenges you still have to work with them you still have to address them you can't just pretend like they're not there and so we're doing a lot of engagement now it's a little bit easier because it's more strategic and it's based looking more at needs and yeah you know every time that we go to a government agency and have a meeting within a few days we get the wish list that gets sent to us but you get past that and you have a lot of dialogue and keep that working so so far we haven't had a lot of interference a lot of really blatant attempts to try and steer our money towards something which is totally useless but it's that multiple engagement which really helps because within even say the ministry of major delta affairs we don't focus on just one person we try to work with as many people and you know they have responsibilities in different sectors so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket in terms of how we're getting interfacing with that department you're not going to get the numbers I completely right but the Niger Delta Development Commission is primarily funded by the oil companies and I think the budget like four or five years ago was what was coming from it was like four or five hundred million dollars I mean I remember our share was like thirty five forty million dollars we had to pay to the Niger Delta Development Commission he was driving our management crazy because he just literally wrote this check and he had no control over what they did so one small little mini pilot that we had going was with our eight regional development councils we set them up where the government's committee had community leaders we had some Chevron people on but we actually asked the governors to appoint some local government officials to these committees and the first series of meetings that we had with them they never showed up they wouldn't come and we ended up going through this if you remember this this horrible sort of situation that they told us they wouldn't come to these meetings as we paid them their daily sitting allowances so we went through this whole sort of thought process about are we going to pay government officials to come to sit on committees that realistically should be there that would replace in the work that they should be doing we sort of worked through that and decided that we should and we did and they started coming to the meetings and what sort of happened was nice when they realized how the communities were upset about the fact that the Nigel Delta commission wasn't doing anything in their areas of interest because they were just building these roads to know why they built these great roads across the Nigel Delta there absolutely no rhyme or reason they themselves would start going to the Nigel Delta Development Commission and lobbied on behalf of the community so one very small sort of success was I think in getting some of them involved in our community participated committees and having them go back and lobby the government rather than us but it was really small it's really hard Jim Emory from IFC I wanted to call on you you live in the strategic planning person for IFC for Africa to expect you have a view on this Jim yeah thanks Dan to continue your metaphor I suppose that Chevron and IFC actually have an affair ended in separation microfinance bank in Angola but I think a lot of the elements that you talked about have also shaped the evolution of IFC's approach to how we do private sector development in terms of the importance of participatory processes in designing what you do and also communicating what you do and bringing in stakeholders even though it may take longer initially it works better in the long run certainly and also on the benefits of trying to do things that are programmatic on a sector or market wide basis as opposed to individual company interventions which was IFC's historic background and historic tools but I think we've also shifted much more to that ground as well so perhaps there's opportunities for future engagement although marriage it wasn't that's the best project that we ever did that bank in Angola and I'm not sure it would be hard to actually sell that through the system right now but it was back then to me it was the best one of the best because we made an equity investment in the development project we've never done that before I think that's the best project The question I wanted to ask actually was in terms of how you measure success and results is it enough to just be able to point to the economic benefits the increase in incomes among beneficiaries and stakeholders are you also trying to measure directly the impact on Chevron's brand how Chevron's perceived by the population at large or by stakeholder groups are you looking for fewer attacks on Chevron facilities is it that direct I mean how do you or is it just enough to generate the economic benefits how is it perceived within sort of your overall management team you're working for I think of everything on individual projects in sort of non conflict orientated countries we have very good M&E systems I think we sort of state of the art just measurement of basic statistics about the beneficiaries and the results of our projects we do a good job on that I think on portfolio measurement you know that trying to understand the results from an overall portfolio projects we're less advanced we have a hard time I think coming up with metrics that would measure the impact of our social investment program in a particular country we're starting to talk about that but I don't think we've got that good thinking in terms of the Nigeria I think it's probably it's quite easy to measure the conflict type of things the number of attacks against our facilities versus the number of kidnappings we actually dabbled around in that for a little bit and I think we persuaded ourselves we are some of our programs in the Niger Delta were causing us less to have less you know community conflict than Shell and Total and ExxonMobil but we do a lot of reputation research we do that sort of every two, three years in every country where we operate where we go in and have a very sort of rigid process for talking to stakeholders very confidential some that would know us some that don't know us and we track our reputation over time in particular countries and we have reputation management indexes so it's a bit of everything I think we do one of the projects we we're not so good about measuring the overall return on our social investment in sort of a return on equity type of approach we're looking at some of that but so far it seems very complicated it's very hard to do with correlation with strong economic results and the reputational stuff can you not make that connection Sylvie do you want to comment a bit on that I I'm sorry the correlation between our reputation and our economic return in a particular country I just don't think that's a primary audience or a cherished motivator here obviously it's a good story to tell but again the day our success is built on the point Simon and Dennis have been describing but also in making tangible tangible actions for some of the intangibles in other words there is an opportunity and we can see our partnership with CSIS and bringing all of you here together that we are trying to develop in connecting not only what is happening on the ground in the Niger Delta between all the different community players but also with governments and the real government agencies who really understand what are the successful models making measurable impacts and outcomes and where the partnership at this macro level will actually make an equal effect so I think that's what we really want to drive in these kind of forms of spring thought leaders such as yourselves within your organizations to see where what is your piece of the puzzle fit into that in the more macro we are trying to brand we have a lot of internal discussions about branding our social investment what do we stand for is it health, education, economic development what's the main bucket where we should be putting our social investment into and I think more of us are starting to think about partnership if we actually go out and look at a common theme across everything we have been doing in this whole area I think where we have developed partnerships our reputation has improved so when we look at the reputation research over a period of time one of the main questions we always ask is if you have these are two neutral sort of situations is if you have to partner with a particular company to do or just a basic business concession arrangement who is your partner of choice we do see ourselves creeping up the scale on our reputation research in terms of partnership and I think we are starting to see some examples again without being naive where it's helping us with new market entry and if you look across sort of the whole asset life cycle inside the company you have getting into new market then you have sort of starting up a major capital project then you go into a business operation then you go into decommissioning and you can sort of look at social risk across all four of those areas and the one thing we are finding at the beginning of the chain at the end of the chain a lot of this is helping us do a much better job in the way we are involved with different countries so we are getting market entry positions I think from our social investment partnership reputation and then as we get to decommission countries I think we are doing it in a much better way than we did before Dennis do you want to comment on this? As most of my colleagues know I tend to get focused specifically on the project once I get going but a lot of these issues of looking at measuring success at a portfolio level rather than a project level is an issue that we deal with and the overall monitoring evaluation of the NDPI foundation itself and we have identified some fairly broad indicators that we want to make sure are measured in every single project but at such early days I expect that what we focus on in terms of indicators is really going to evolve over time I have already gone through about two or three different kind of M&E plans where I am changing indicators here and there as we get more data so it is very much kind of a living plan it is critical to have that portfolio wide M&E so that we make sure that not just our individual projects are having an impact but they are contributing towards a broader impact as well I am going to call Jerry and I am going to call Richard Downey Jerry just if you could just click the microphone First of all thank you very much this was fascinating I am coming at this with the objective of someone who has been in the government trying to do something like this systematically that is government driven and I think there are a number of refugees around the table who have struggled with this for years and I am fascinated by the fact that this is truly private sector led what you have described really turns the model the development model on its head and has the company the platform for the coordination of the donors the chart you had earlier had donors at the very bottom of the list you figure out what you wanted to do you chose the sectors the geography the impact that you wanted to have and you had the resources dedicated and you went shopping for the donors and brought the men around you so my question is when you were thinking about how do you replicate this what are the lessons from the perspective of a US government agency for example that would love to do this is there a systematic process or what are the tools that you would need in order to do this in probably more of a truly partnership relationship with the government or is the lesson that in order to get truly sustainable partnerships there really are private sector led it really should start from the company perspective and I think Dan you made the point the other day that you can't push the companies to a partnership they have to be they have to be interested they have to be in on the ground this has to be something that they truly want let's just punch a couple of questions together Richard and maybe perhaps Joanne if you want to make a comment as well just a question really about has there been any sort of interaction integration with the governments and the state program and the major delta and if not do you think there are any opportunities to help breathe new energy into that provision of jobs and training and so forth for those militants who signed up Joanne I just wanted to ask Dennis if you could elaborate on a few of the different specific projects you're doing and maybe say a couple words about how you're integrating the local sourcing piece you know to Simon's point that's been a really productive piece of what you've done as a company are you guys working on that with the NDPI as well okay so just some lessons for the USG amnesty and local sourcing maybe you guys could split that up or take pieces of that I can start off with the government and you'll need to help me remember the next question I was already focusing my answer on that one but I think in terms of partnering with the government there's a few important lessons learned certainly for me in this because we got into this NDPI after a lot of consultation with the donor agencies where we weren't really finding a strong commitment to funding into the Niger Delta region for the reasons I mentioned earlier and so we really felt for one thing we were reluctant to be too prescriptive in our strategic plan as to what we were going to do because we wanted to raise matching funding from the donor partners and if they were reluctant to fund we figured that the partnership opportunities were going to be fairly limited and so we needed to be fairly broad and so when we got a stronger than anticipated reaction from potential donor partners and it was a nice problem to have in terms of having additional money it fairly quickly got us to realize that we had to be a lot more specific and quickly about what we wanted to do because we had choices and we didn't have to just kind of jump on whatever strategies or schemes that the donor partners were doing but we could be a little bit picky about who we partnered with and even in terms of our negotiations with our partners as to what we were going to focus on and what kind of programs we were going to have what kind of a geographic scope that we were going to focus on so I think a lesson to me is don't be afraid to be too prescriptive it's better to be more detailed as to what you want to do and then back off of that if you're not finding the donor partners available then it is to go in with a somewhat more vague notion as to what you're going to want to do and letting your donor partners kind of push you in specific directions that don't necessarily fit the strategic objectives that we're trying to try to address I think another thing that an important thing for the lessons for the government is the same lesson for us you know to me the government structure of NDPI is to me it's already a best practice I had an opportunity to have independent directors on the board of a foundation that was running in Papua New Guinea it was a very positive experience for me and so far it is with NDPI I appreciate the value that the experienced professionals bring into that board with an independent perspective that really isn't driven by corporate objectives it's driven by the development objectives and that's a majority of the decision makers on our board I find that incredibly healthy and I think the U.S. government might find that healthy as well because we're not seeing that same kind of approach with our donor partners and so much of it is driven by a lot of decision makers that aren't willing to kind of share that control and that hasn't been the nature of most oil companies most companies in the extractive sectors so a bit of a side but I think an important lesson for all of you when I was working on this foundation in Papua New Guinea I was presenting at a conference one time where I was talking about how we had taken the company department and turned it into a foundation and two big steps for me there was a guy from a company who was giving a presentation on how they had taken a foundation and turned it into a company department and so we decided to talk and compare and find out why we were going in opposite directions and what he told me was they started off with a good intent and he was an NGO professionally it was kind of his introduction working with extractives at all the board of directors of the foundation that they created this was in Peru if I remember correctly had actually was all company employees the spouse of the managing director was the chairman of the foundation and everyone just saw it as an extension of the company they didn't see it as they didn't see any independent decision making and you know so whether it's a foundation was the company department it was the company it just represented purely the company the thing that I like about the NDPI foundation is that the way we structured the foundation is meant to achieve the partnership approaches that we have we have independent drivers we are not just purely an extension of Chevron but the foundation itself embraces that concept of partnership and as we hire people as we get into you know we have some strategic partnerships that are not dedicated to a specific program but are just guiding us through how to determine what to do and so it's that kind of approach that I think makes a huge difference if you're not prepared to sacrifice some control to the partners that you work with it's not a real partnership it's just basically a contractor type relationship and the contractor will only do what you tell them to do and particularly if you don't give them any opportunity to try and explore ways of improving the project so to me that's a very clear lesson there are two questions I've got a couple more questions out here so just shorter answers on this these two would be on the amnesty ways in which you can link up with the amnesty and then can you talk about one or two examples on local sourcing I think we'll have enough time to get a couple more questions in okay well on the amnesty we are actually engaged quite heavily with the presidential amnesty committee and it's a program that the whole oil industry is funding which we liaise closely with so it's not the NDPI funds that we're using to do some non-violence training in community outreach and also some skills training for the militants but there's what's called the OGI foundation the oil and gas industry foundation which we provide some input on they have their meetings in the pin foundation office and we engage with the presidential amnesty committee pretty frequently but their objectives are highly political and their activities they're focused very heavily on training without enough analysis on the job market so as we're looking at analyzing employment opportunities we share that information but I don't really see as co-funding programs specifically with the amnesty committee because of the risks there but local sourcing local sourcing I think someone had touched on it earlier we found that the value chain analysis approach that we're using for our non oil related economic growth programs is also a very suitable approach to looking at local community content initiatives within the company as well and so again we're not using NDPI funds for that activity because we're kind of there's a lot of local content initiatives going on from the IOCs in the region and we can't really add much more to that other than sharing best practice with them and so that's what we're doing with Chevron Nigeria local content people where we're sharing the value chain analysis approach we invited them to participate in the training that we were doing with our local partners as we gather data we're giving it to them and we're also helping them to select the local partners based on the organizations we've already trained you've got national content and local content and they're slightly different the national content is extremely complex you know how do you build platforms and closed stations in Nigeria and the local community content is how do you support you know goods and services and building supplies and vocational training and skills training stuff were inside your operations we did a good job in linking regional development councils to our local content requirements so as we were putting money into economic development inside these councils we we avoided the mistake of doing training and business development services and microcredit programs and they're not having the jobs because we were able to link that into our local community content requirements the the challenge at the moment is that in the last three to four years our projects in us in Nigeria have been growing and our capital investment's been very strong and so building sort of local community content local economic growth is relatively easy in the growing capital you know expending environment but now we're starting to slow down and some of our projects are coming to completion and I think the challenges of maintaining that local content and meeting the drivers is getting much more difficult now as we start to lay people off the projects and one major social risk we do have is as the embassy program starts to bring people back to the Niger Delta and some of our major projects start to slow down you've got this you know double whammy of social risks that we're having to start to think about and it gets back to a little bit of some of the other conversations we've had that industry cooperation in this whole area of really complex social risk is one of the opportunities to try to help alleviate the problems that one company may have another company can solve but it's really hard and Dennis is on the forefront of this but it's really hard to get industry cooperation in this whole area of social investment because you still have companies that brand it as a competitive advantage and I think you've got to move away from that model very quickly to try and really help in an area as complex as it let me bunch together three first Michael Levitt the woman at the back of the table so Michael thank you very much a couple of things if I may I'm sort of reminded of that old movie the mouse that roared remember you had to make up a war and then you could get aid it sounds like we have to make up wars in Indonesia and Golan other places and then the board the corporate board will support this kind of initiative short of great danger it doesn't seem like there's enough value to the corporation and a little troubling second I am wary of corporations setting development agendas I happen to agree with this one so I think it's terrific but it doesn't mean it's going to turn out the right way and then the third thing is the initials I didn't hear were the oil the national oil companies they're the growing power everywhere I've watched all back everybody down in Angola on good things including my own and I haven't they weren't mentioned at all in this play and they play a not insignificant role in the world of the IOC's so let's go back there yes hi I just finished being the United States ambassador in Nigeria and Sanders and I actually really find this model very very interesting and really like the things that I've seen here both questions that I had on the table though in terms of engagement with the state governments and whether or not you're looking at capacity building for some of the state governments particularly when I do Delta I would say that you know they're oversight of the money you know how they do procurement the things that could possibly take out one of those blocks that you mentioned in the poverty barrier there you know if you help their capacity as well as help the communities hopefully over the long term that they can also then step in and better do their job so I don't know whether the foundation is looking at capacity building projects or activities or initiatives with specific state governments and just as a quick aside I raised that because we did one while I was there and it turned out to be quite well really helping them better manage the budget the money they get from the old derivation so that they could use it better for projects as well as infrastructure development related to communities and it's just something I thought maybe the foundation might want to look at as a way to take one of those other blocks that you mentioned in your very useful power point out of that poverty barrier wall and out of the economic development wall because in the end you've got to build the capacity not only for the communities but at the state level as well yes yes I just want to ask a board member I've heard lots of presentations on this this is by far the best and most comprehensive and complete and I really congratulate you both on it to me the most impressive feature of this approach is the systematic thinking and analysis that goes into it before money is actually invested in on the ground projects it will also enable us to measure the impact a lot better because we've thought ahead about what the standards are so I think it's really you've made a lot of progress I have one question I would like to ask you though and I was looking again to recent political events one of the things I'm sure you have to do is manage expectations as especially when you start getting some of these projects off the ground that you have a president elected in his own mandate from this region it would seem to me that expectations are going to soar in terms of what the government can do but what corporations are going to be doing and you sort of leading the spearhead of that kind of development you notice since the election that there has been a rise in expectations more demand for quicker action anything like that and the second thing is the rise in the incidents from Boko Harung whether that happens in the north some of them go back to their region so the social risk that you will be dealing with will not only be the honesty people who come back to the region wanting to do something but refugees from the north if you will displace persons from the north as a result of the violence who will expect some opportunities when they come back have you noticed anything recently with that with regard to the election just well I'm just cognizant of the time I just wanted to also put my friend Christy Reagan on the spot and just ask you can thank me for that later Christy but it would just I know that you all have done a significant amount of analysis around that I think has informed a lot of the thinking for NDP I would just be useful if you would just if you'd be willing to just make a comment about about that if you would I'd love a link or you know yeah yeah I should and yes um yes yes yes we have we have a few new shutters and I have to say that we we have a script up there that we really need to think about USA but actually we do have a lot of donor projects that are um as workers and are stuff we have some that are very large but we don't get this going on by we think this process that we're doing will shut down to go back to Jeff Jameson's comment it is probably at such a very thoughtful way I have a couple of comments here from doing some I have to just because we're coming from all of us are coming from USA we're sitting at the hand of demanding that we provide policy and we've just sat through a day and a half of comments about you know and on the news and the 20th version and then comments and this is cause shows, it's leverage or in this discussions about that and it's we're not getting to discussions of videos, value chain and market-read analysis that informs partnerships it's not there we haven't seen it yet and so I just want to say that this level analysis the kind of time and commitment that it takes from entity to have patients do this and wait and I constantly say we're not quite ready for that we're not ready for that you may only find this kind of patient's commitment to do the upfront analysis and then we're going to take this back and then we'll get back to 15 USA and people are going to say we're not going to do that and talk about this as well and so I just I think it's a best practice I think it's a good example and I'm just going to take this thanks Christy okay so there are some questions here about expectations there are questions about the national oil companies where Dennis? okay yeah this time I wrote them all down good so starting from the first one and going back from there you know outside of conflict areas why not do this outside of Nigeria or Indonesia places like that I think that what I've noticed within the industry is that it's very difficult to get people to want to make any significant systemic changes to the way they handle anything corporate philanthropy, corporate social investment all of that is the same if they're not seeing a strong imperative to do it those locations where significant social risks to the operations the companies are searching for solutions to their problems and it's there where you see innovation if you didn't have that you wouldn't see as much innovation happening in the rest of the company but the reality is that what we're doing in Nigeria what we've done in Angola Papua New Guinea all these places is spreading out within the company I mean depending on who you talk to maybe not necessarily at the pace that some people would like to see it but it is happening and if it wasn't for these places where we're keen to really kind of push the envelope to think out of the box try something new or different just like Simon was talking about investing in a micro finance bank you know company would have never considered that before and even having the structure to do that you know the great thing about NDPI is not only kind of a good idea to innovate in it it's actually a mandate we're expected to do things differently they don't want to see the same old thing and by doing that in Nigeria where people are willing to take the chances to try something different it spreads it takes a while to spread but it does spread and it spreads to those locations where it may not be such a strong business imperative to do it that way but they still see that it's good for the business practice how will it work out that's something that we encourage everyone when I go to any kind of a stakeholder form or anything my message is always the same watch the space we're sharing all of our quarterly reports we're putting out our strategic plan our annual reports it's all on our website we've shared information on this initiative to a level that we never have on anything before and we invite comment and feedback and whether it will work will partly depend on the feedback that we get in the guidance and input that we get from a growing range of stakeholders truly didn't mention NNPC they don't figure in a big way in this but I will comment that we had a lot of challenges in terms of a location that we had planned for our economic development center which was held by Chevron Nigeria the title but it was a joint venture asset and some of the people within NNPC were kind of pushing back on donating that land to this initiative but when it was taken up to the managing director of NNPC he quashed all opposition within the company they are supportive but again that engagement is difficult you have to take it at multiple levels to get any real change capacity building for the state government in the Niger Delta completely agree we don't really see us doing much capacity building at the federal level but in our strategic framework state and local and particularly given some things that you started when you were there we are following up on one of the big influencers in terms of what we want to try and do in terms of democracy and governance is many right and she's been our key champion in terms of taking a partnership approach to these projects which has made that relationship and that strategic planning with USAID much much easier because we're very well aligned with her thinking in terms of how to do that lately our approach has not been so much to focus on specific capacity building within one state government at the government level but as a part of our local government's efforts this is starting with this lead program that USAID has already been doing in Balchi and Sokoto but it's you know you can't look at local government without looking at state government you have to work with them together and that's the approach that we're starting on with Delta state we've been exploring things with Bielsa but what has been a big challenge is the elections it's kind of put everything on hold with a lot of states some states were able to move forward and ones like Bielsa were still kind of in limbo because the elections aren't going to happen until next year let's see in terms of the political expectations since the elections it's still evolving you know even though the elections are a few months behind us now there's you know the cabinet still the appointments in the cabinet just got most of them got finalized within the last few weeks they're getting settled in they're still dealing with a lot of the internal issues before they can focus too much on us we've had a lot of engagement with the ministry of Niger Delta affairs and one of the things that has really helped with that is our first engagement was to bring them into the economic analysis workshops that we were having and looking at opportunities and that really opened their eyes to see the process that we were following was nothing like anything that they had seen before and so it really paid off for us later we wanted them to be there as stakeholder representatives and they contributed some ideas but not really that much but then as we kind of expected a few weeks after that engagement we got the wish list you know and the list of projects that they wanted us to fund but because we had involved them in the analysis workshops it was a lot easier to explain to them to say that look we need to base these projects and these ideas on the analysis not just start to pursue a wish list and they could see it because they had seen the analysis and they had participated in that and they were comfortable with that the fact was that because a lot of times when we get wish lists from the government they're very vague and so there's often some overlaps that you can explore and it's like we do with any donor partner we start off with what do we want to do in general and then start to narrow it down to the specifics and identify okay how can we take what you want to do and what we want to do and put it into a viable integrated program that makes sense and so that approach is working with at the federal level the challenges at the state level because there's nine state governments and we've liaised with some but part of what we're looking for now and the fact in terms of which states that we focus on is looking at a lot of the same governors have returned but looking at the reform minded ones there's a few reformers that have come in now in the elections and we're watching them closely to see whether they're kind of follow through on what they were campaigning on we should probably end it there I want to thank Dennis and Simon for doing this and I thank everybody for taking time out of your schedules to be with us. Try me in thanking our visitors