 I'm very happy to have such a crowd and I'm very happy that a lot of people are connected to each other and so I'm really pleased that the atmosphere that we have for this event is really just quite something. So I want to, I'm Dan Rondi, I am the co-director of the U.S. Leadership and Development Project here at CSIS and I'm also the Shrier Chair in Global Analysis. I want to welcome you all here today to CSIS. We're launching a new report Seizing the Opportunity, Strengthening Capacity at the State Department, USAID and MCC around public-private partnerships. This is the first of several reports over the next several months that will be released under the CSIS project on U.S. Leadership and Development, which I co-direct with Joanne and Nessa. And the U.S. Leadership and Development Project has been stood up in partnership with Chevron which is a company that really understands the power of partnership and is also somebody that, an organization that we've been really pleased to work with over the last six months here and have a longer standing relationship going back several years in the energy sector and health and other areas. But in particular, it's been so great to work with Chevron on these development issues over the last six months. But I think what is the bottom line of the report that you have in your hands is that on the good news side, U.S. government agencies have made considerable progress in the last ten years on building partnerships with the private sector, with the non-profit sector, but we are running up against a limit of what can be done within a system where we're having to use workarounds and there's going to be significant process and organizational change that's going to be needed. The intellectual arguments about working in partnership have been one for the most part. It's now, I like using the term, I don't use it in the report because I was told to take it out, but I'm going to use it in this audience. It's now politically correct to talk about working in partnership with others. If you're the head of the World Bank, if you're the head of the IFC, if you're the head of DFID, you now have to talk about it. It's now something you have to talk about if you're a development leader. Whether or not you make it a priority or not, or whether or not you make the systemic changes to allow it to happen is another question, but it's now the good news is folks like Holly Wise, leaders like Henrietta Ford, leaders in the private sector like Neville Isdell have now helped win the intellectual argument that we have to work across sectors to solve societal problems. That is the good news. And I think that we have, I think the other side of the good news is we have excellent senior leadership at the State Department, USAID and MCC that understand the importance and the power of partnership. Secretary of State Clinton totally gets this. Her speech in 2009 at the Global Philanthropy Forum was fantastic. Her more recent speech at the Economic Club of New York about this, it just underlines how she understands this at a DNA level. We also have Rajiv Shah's speech 10 days ago on the 10th anniversary of the Global Development Alliance. Fantastic speech and I recommend everybody read it and I'll read some excerpts from it a little bit later. So we have excellent top level leadership and then we have some great folks who are actually pushing this at the institutional level. We have Mora O'Neill here. We're very fortunate that you're here Mora. Thanks and thanks for your leadership on this. So we have some very strong thoughtful people who are seeking to drive change and what we need to do is help make some process changes and some culture changes so that with the leadership that's there that we can take it to the next level because we're going to have to be working more closely across sectors and we're going to need to fix these things. So let me just underline one more time on the needs improvement side. Our friends in government are running into these problems of systems, incentives and planning models that were designed for another era. Where 80% of the resources to developing countries came from governments. And we're running up against the limits of institutional workarounds and small fixes. In many cases working in partnerships with others should be the starting point of our work in developing countries. Not an afterthought or something that's built at the very end of a very lengthy internal conversation within a bureaucracy. I want to recognize a few people here who've been sent to our success. First is Neville Isdell, who you'll hear more from in a few minutes. And I also want to recognize Cedric Suzman and Wayne Lord, both of Georgia State University and the World Affairs Council of Atlanta. They've flown up with Neville from Atlanta to be with us today and we're very grateful. I also need to recognize Holly Wise, who's been a senior advisor on this report and convened the Working Group Sessions Force here at CSIS. All of you know Holly as the founder of the Global Development Alliance Initiative. And we'd not be here today without Holly's vision and efforts over many years, both in government and now outside of it. I also want to thank Anna Sado Carson and Eleanor Coates for their efforts as contributing authors to help make this report possible. And now I want to introduce Henrietta Fore. Administrator Fore was someone who has always grasped the power of partnership and made it one of her signature efforts during her time at USATE. We're very fortunate to have Administrator Fore as a CSIS trustee and a trusted thought partner for the CSIS project on U.S. leadership and development. Administrator Fore, the floor is yours. Today, but he is a fellow trustee of CSIS, so we're delighted to see you here, Neville. And I also see in the front row Rob Mossbacher, our very good friend who used to head up OPIC. So let me, on behalf of John Hamry, welcome all of you to CSIS. John Hamry is our president. And this morning, what we've been thinking with Dan Rundie and Neville is that we want you to think differently. We really want you to think about U.S. leadership in development in a new way. You will hear from our speakers today that they actually want to rewire our brains. And so we want you to sit back and think about rewiring how you think about public-private partnerships. And part of this is to think about what we, the United States, can do. What if the United States decided to lead in developing public-private partnerships? And what if we said that 50% of our development portfolio would be in public-private partnerships? What would that mean in the world today? Would it mean that we do more things that were strategic for U.S. interests? Would it mean that we would be more results-oriented? Would it mean that we could bring more technologies and more long-term thinking to our development portfolios and to developing countries around the world? But if our answer is yes, then go to what Dan just spoke about. How do we get there? What do we do in rewiring our minds and rewiring our operations and our organization? Today, we are marking the release of this wonderful program. And you've just heard about all the people who have contributed to it. But many of you have, I see, are resources in this brochure. And it is the first white paper on U.S. leadership and development. So let's think through what the second white paper might say. Can we move this forward? Can we move our thinking to a place where we really create something that is important and meaningful for the United States in leadership? You've been hearing about some good companies. You've heard about Chevron, who has great programs in Angola, helping thousands of smallholder farmers. And they have another one coming in Nigeria. And you will hear the stories of Coca-Cola with Neville. There are hundreds and hundreds of American companies that are like this who in partnership with government and with nonprofit organizations could create enormous value. So how do we do this? So please think with us. We also are trying to think through how to make the case to the American people because all of us know that the economic growth and opportunities for our partners around the world is something that also brings revenues and profits and jobs to America. So it's something that's good for America. And let's think about that one. This past week we have begun celebrating U.S. AID's 50th anniversary. And this week there will be more celebrations. But as you think about the beginnings of U.S. AID and it was born in the Marshall Plan, you see that we have five decades of public-private partnerships to build on. So let's think forward into the future. Let's start at the beginning and let's create something really meaningful for U.S. leadership in the world. Thank you and welcome everyone. Thanks. Okay, I'm going to ask Neville Isdel to come up to the dice with me. We're going to have a conversation. I think that's Coca-Cola up here. If you want the commercial it's Coke Zero. It's Coke Zero, exactly. But we're really very grateful that Neville Isdel has flown up from Atlanta this morning to be with us. And Neville, as all of you know, is the former chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola company, but he's also a CSIS trustee and was really instrumental in helping us launch this conversation earlier this year. And the context that he helped us launch it around is the concept of connected capitalism. It's just come out with a book. It was launched last week. I recommend you all buy it on Amazon.com, which I did actually the other day. It's a wonderful book and it's called Inside Coca-Cola, a CEO's life story of building the world's most popular brand. And there's a chapter on connected capitalism in the book. And there's some very really interesting stories that I'm hoping he'll tell a couple for this audience today. To this conversation, Neville brings several hats. He was, as I said, the former chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola company. He's also a CSIS trustee. He's co-chair of something called the Investment Climate Facility that I hope he'll tell us a little bit about. He was also former chairman of the International Business Leaders Forum. You're currently chairman of the World Wildlife Federation. Vice-Chair. Vice-Chair. Let me start with, at the height of the financial crisis back in 2009, you coined the term connected capitalism as a response to the crisis that you saw out in the world. And you talk about it as well in the book about as the three key elements of the Triangle of Sustainability business, nonprofits and governments work more closely together in the future. There should be an acknowledgement of the strengths each brings to the table. Business brings efficiency and profit, and that's not something of which we should be ashamed. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about both what prompted you to talk about connected capitalism or describe the phenomenon of connected capitalism, but also a little bit about this concept of the Triangle of Sustainability. Well, the first piece was a real belief that to some degree we are facing a crisis of capitalism. And you don't have to go much further than look at people who are camped out in the parks around America to understand that. And I think since the original speech with the Council of Foreign Relations about two and a half years ago, and I think that that situation has actually worsened over the last two and a half years, you've only got to look at the level of trust in government and the level of trust in business. Any of the data will show you that there is a significant level, not only of dissatisfaction, but of distrust. And what I said at that time, what I would say now, is that is undermining the ability of both governments and businesses, but also in terms of the relationship with what I call civil society. It is undermining the trust in the basic system that has brought so many people out of poverty over the last 100 years. And that was the people who are camping are probably not articulating very well a solution. And some people denigrate what they're doing by saying, you know, it's, you know, the one that Lantern ended up being in a hip-hop concert. So, you know, you can find stories to laugh about some of the things that they're doing. But right behind that is a massive, massive amount of dissatisfaction that actually identifies with the outpouring that's taking place in those parks. And we've done a lot to earn that distrust, what the financial system managed to do in terms of chasing short-term profits and not thinking about broader welfare. And also, then you go back to the Enron's and the like. And capitalism has not behaved well. And yet, underneath all of that, there's been something else that's been happening. And that is the breaking down of these silos because one of the problems has been governments be working in a silo, NGOs to some degree have been working in a silo. And, you know, I agree with what you say with the optimism was what happened with regard to developmental agencies working with business. But I think in general terms, still in the silo. And business in a way the same way. And yet, if you put those power together against some of the world's really great problems, each brings something to the party that in a coordinated way can actually make a difference. So let me try and give you a concrete example or examples. And I'm going to move away. Coca-Cola works with the WWF on water. One of the things that that demonstrates is that the Coca-Cola has chosen water as its number one issue when I was there and it's continuing. And that's because it is actually integral to strategy. And when I was asked the, you know, the question from someone with Milton Friedman view about the only role of business is actually to extract a profit and therefore the welfare will flow. And they challenged me on the money that the Coca-Cola company was spending on water. I don't have a bottle here but I picked up the Coke and I said, but don't you think we should worry about something that's a key ingredient? And I have never had the question asked me again because it makes sense because it makes strategic sense. So this is not philanthropy. This is not normal corporate social responsibility. This is moving to look at the societal impact that you have on a very broad basis and addressing the problem. Firstly, you address the problem in terms of your own particular footprint. What are you doing that is damaging the earth? And if you look at the Coke website, there will be water neutral by 2020. So there's a clear goal. The next thing is you have to look at your handprint, your supply chain. And that spreads into things like, I mean, sugar for example is an extremely thirsty crop. What can be done to reduce the amount of water that sugar needs? And there's now a new sugar out there called Bonsucra, which has been developed. The use is 40% less water. Yes, it's initially more expensive, but that again is addressing that issue. And then you have the legitimacy as a business to get into blueprint, which is actually the debate with governments to look at what is happening with regard to water policies worldwide, what's happening with pricing, et cetera. Is it a human right to be free for any usage or is it only a human right in terms of a finite amount that you could give to someone? So I use that as an example because then you're starting engaging all three pieces of the triangle. And when I talk about civil society, it is not just NGOs and governmental agencies, also academia. That's why I'm working with Georgia State University. So it's civil society in its broader context. And if we are then working together against these problems, we are going to connect again with the real problems and issues of society to earn what you might call the social license to operate. And therefore the connectivity that goes back to the old days when the mayor of the town actually was the local businessman and everyone knew that he was really engaged in the welfare of his particular town and of the residents there. People do not look at business and today they don't even look at governments sometimes as actually looking after their welfare. Now the alternative, the only other alternative is a more egalitarian spread and certainly the big disconnect in terms of what the top 1% is earning and the rest and I was part of that top 1%. But I think that is highlighting the problem. But it also is just something that accentuates the frustration. But what we have to do is to be shown to be really engaged with society to build back our credibility which we've destroyed so badly. So that's the broad context. And let me just say one last thing because as part of all of these dialogues, about six months ago I had Donald Atlanta actually was again Georgia State World Affairs Council put it together at Hillingale of Care and Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary Summers, myself on the stage. So representing those three pieces of the pyramid. And I was amazed to hear Larry Summers come out so very strongly and saying that actually the partnership as he sees it and this is the way I see it, between business and NGOs, and I'll come back to some examples of that in a minute, is actually much stronger. That leg is working much better. Only with the developmental agencies do you see it working with government. But in the broader context of government, government is still in a legislative mode and in a punitive mode and not in a cooperative mode. They have not seen where that multiplier can take place. I'll just say the exceptions are the likes of USID, of DFID, which you work with. But those are specific agencies sort of hived off to go and do that work. And the main center of government is not actually engaged in the way that their own agencies are engaged. There were a couple of quotes from the book that I found fascinating. One is that you were trained as a social worker in college and that yet you went into business. And you say here that as corporations evolved, I had a far greater opportunity at Coca-Cola to affect true social change globally than I ever would have as a social worker in Africa. Capitalism now provides that opportunity no longer other lines drawn so distinctly. Could you just... Well, that's about it, but I mean, when my old... Read the book. Exactly. I mean, when my old sociology prof learned I was working for Coca-Cola, he said, and that is exactly what I said to him. But because I do think that to be a 21st century company, so that's another part of my thinking. Society is looking at the values that a business has, the value proposition. They're looking behind the brand. What do you stand for and what do you do? The purchasing decision is just not made on the original proposition of the brand and it's a much broader context and particularly if you're Coca-Cola, where the name on the bottle is the name on the building. They want to know what you stand for. We see that all the time. We see that in terms of blogs. We see that in terms of what comes across on the Facebook pages of companies. And we also see that within companies themselves. And I think the most encouraging thing that I saw as we enhanced the sustainability agenda, and let me just reverse out a little bit. One of the five pillars in the strategy that we did in 2004, 2005, which continues, was Planet. That P, the five P's Planet, came from the top 150 managers saying, this is something we have to do differently going forward. So it's there. And there are many other companies who have come to the same conclusion. And that's where I'm optimistic, because I think we've crossed a bridge as business and realized that the Friedman SQ, the Friedman view, is no longer sufficient. You tell a story about when you were Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola opened a 25 million dollar bottling plant in Kabul and it created 350 jobs and you got criticism from somebody saying, well, you should have spent that 25 million dollars to build a hospital and you had a thoughtful response to that criticism. Well, because the multiplier, you need a hospital and we're not in that business. We don't have any skills, knowledge and expertise in that area whatsoever. But you have to get the engine of the economy going. If you're going to long term be able to provide the services to the overall population. And what we would have done with a hospital would have been something that was philanthropic. What we did with the business was something that's going to be there for more than 100 years and provide jobs for more than 100 years. You're also co-chair of the investment climate facility and I think you've done a significant work through that role and I think your co-chair is the former president of Tanzania looking at the investment climate in Africa in terms of business, the business enabling environment. Could you talk a little bit about that and why that's important? I spent 26 years of my life in Africa. So I've been back there. My fifth time is going to be next week. Just this year? This year, yeah. Fifth time this year. I'll be back this coming week. And I think that Africa is on the move. Largely talking sub-Saharan Africa, but very different changes in North Africa. But I think that's positive as well. But really the investment climate facility is focused on Africa generally. Most of our projects are sub-Saharan Africa. The idea is basically this and it did come out of Glen Eagles in 2005 that by undertaking micro-reform of government process that that is better than some of the top-down World Bank type programs, IMF type programs that are supposed to get through the government down to bringing about change, which would get stuck in an existing bureaucracy which is often corrupt. And that is one of the real problems. So the ICF was put together to try and look at how you can enable the investment climate. In other words, what do we do? We work with African governments with very strong protocols in reforming commercial courts, business licensing, dispute resolution, we do land registration, we do reform of customs. A whole range of these minor interventions, which if you look at, we handed over three projects in Rwanda in June. I was in Rwanda for the handing over the project. One of those projects is one for your registration of your business. You can now enter Rwanda register a business in 24 hours online or it will take you three days if you go through, come in and do the process. It used to take the average person who wanted to register their business. Sorry, it's a leg I missed. By the way, when you register your business, your business registration number becomes your VAT number and it becomes your tax number. So now you don't have to go and see three different agencies. You don't have to line up. You don't have to come in if you write in a rural area, if you can get access to a computer, you can actually do it online. And the average person who had to register business was taking them something in the order of 45 to 50 days effort, but it would take them about nine months time. Why do you have an informal economy? No one did it. And that informal economy then breached corruption. The number of business registrations from being about somewhere in the order of 120 a year is now up in the thousands. It's going to be about 7,000 businesses registered this year, bringing them into the formal economy, paying taxes, paying taxes and taking out bribery and corruption. And it's the view that a whole lot of interventions like that. For example, the commercial courts in Zambia were on a manual system. The clock of the court would record the case sometimes six weeks afterwards. You can imagine the accuracy of the facts. You can imagine the other opportunities to change the facts. It's now completely digital. It's now recorded and digitalized, and it's available to all of the parties, including public the very next morning. There was a backlog on the commercial courts of somewhere in the order of 370 cases, taking about 18 months for the average case to be solved. The backlog is gone, and cases are going through the courts now at nine months, and we're trying to improve that. So those are just two examples of projects that are actually completed and the sort of success that we're able to have. And it's an interesting partnership because I'm representing, as it were, the business side of it, but then Ben, because governments have to contribute 25% of the cost. Ben is the guy who then works with the president if things go off the rails. Well, it just seems to me that what you've been describing are a variety of collaborations and partnerships and that for a connected business such as Coca-Cola, it's become an important skill set to be able to work in collaboration across civil society and government to achieve its goals. And what would you like to see in terms of government? What sorts of behaviors would you like to see government do to be able to respond to the opportunity that companies like Coca-Cola offer in terms of as a connected capitalism enterprise? If you have a very interesting... You don't call it a corporate social responsibility, you call it a socially responsible corporation, right? Maybe as a socially responsible corporation, how do governments take advantage of the activities of socially responsible corporations? Well, let me tell you... I'll put my other hats on, which is the World Wildlife Fund. Vice-chair of that. The World Wildlife Fund, in a way, took a risk in terms of engaging with business in terms of their own community, solving some of the problems. But what they've done is called the Markets Program, and Jason Clay, who runs the program at WWF, and you might want to have a look on the web, actually, on... What do you call it? No, just skate me for a minute. The 17-minute program. YouTube? No, no. Ted. Yeah, on Ted. Jason Clay, if you have a look at that. But what he's done is he's said, okay, and this is obviously on sustainability. What are the 15 key areas that we need to focus on regarding sustainability, and specifically, obviously, agricultural products? But water was one. But palm oil, let me take a non-coca-cola example. Palm oil is another one. And as he's taken those 15, he's looked at the companies that make up around 20, 30, 40, or 50 percent of the global trade in those goods. And he said if the WWF partners with them and gets them to commit to sustainable palm oil, that will almost overnight fundamentally change the whole dimension with regard to palm oil and then be much better able to get to the bad actors because there'll be good actors out there who are going to get the business, and the bad actors aren't going to get the business. So Unilever is going to, I think they are committed by the end of 2015, that there was going to be zero deforestation with regard to palm oil for any of the palm oil that they source. And there was a whole new grouping being put together between a number of NGOs, not just WWF, and actually five of the key users of palm oil in the world representing about 40 percent of palm oil, which is going to have certified palm oil. In other words, palm oil is certified that's not been, has no incremental effect on deforestation. And that we believe is the only way that we're going to save the forest in Borneo because that's been hacked away at a terrible rate. You're not going to stop the acceleration of palm oil consumption. So that group is also working on how you use land that's already been denuded and destroyed, but where there is, there actually are no palm oil plantations so that the virgin forest is not touched. We have time for a couple questions. I'm hoping, I see Christy Reagan and I also see, I'm going to start with Christy. And then I think, Ellie, you've got a microphone. We're going to go ahead and we're going to have Christy ask the first question. Thank you. Henry out of four started us out on such a great no, which was, let's think about what's next. And you, Neville, have said, let's make sure we're focused on real problems. So if I think about Occupy Wall Street, I think about one of the real problems that's flagging is, of course, jobs. My question would be, can you envision the private sector taking the lead and putting together a public-private partnership that is focused explicitly on jobs? And if so, what would that look like? And because Dan Runde is sitting there, I know I have to say, what's a pragmatic, concrete next step to make that happen? Well, you know, you can't just, you cannot create a job if there isn't something to be productively done. They just don't get created out of thin air. So why are the jobs not being created? I think point number one is that the level of uncertainty within business today is such that they are very low to add any jobs to their current base and they are really stretching it with regard to current employees. I think people are working longer and harder and I think they're trying to improve productivity because they're worried about a double dip and they're worried they're going to have to just go into another series of layoffs. So the uncertainty that is there and that is something that is in the hands of the policy makers. But you know, we've just seen another level of uncertainty. There was a report yesterday, but in Europe, the reasons why employers, the reasons why they're not hiring is they don't believe there's economic growth ahead. They think actually there's going to be a decline in the economic growth in the EU and I think that's probably the case and then you've got Greece blowing up again with the referendum. So until we get the macro sorted out, you can't create jobs. And the second thing is that the level of... I mean, I'm not a US citizen and I live in Barbados, I don't vote, so I don't even live here. So I'm watching from afar today and I don't represent any individual company whatsoever. It's a private individual. But I have just seen regulation after regulation after regulation piled on top and to get anything going today in the US to get a start-up business and we know that small businesses are the biggest generator of jobs, not the larger corporations. But the small businesses to get going is much more difficult than if you look across to Asia and you look to Brazil and the like. And I think we're seeing the epicenter of the global economy is very clearly moving east and south because that's where jobs are being created because they can be created much more easily and it's not low wages. It's the fact that this is why we're trying to free up Africa to be able to get the sort of barriers that are out there. But if you just look at what Singapore has done in a deregulated economy with their openness and how they built it, that's how you're going to do it. Then the last thing, and it's a long-term issue, but the jobs that are being created, there was a piece in MPR yesterday that can't find truck drivers. The farmers in Georgia because of what happened on the immigration front. Admittedly this is illegal labor and that's a whole other issue. But they've had crops rotting because people who are unemployed don't want to go work in fields anymore. So there's an expectation issue. But the bigger problem is education. And if we're going to compete in this world, this globalized world, the educational system needs to... And I'm talking about the... Obviously the best universities in the world are in the United States. But it's the next level where the problem exists. And you've got China turning up more engineers every year than just the rest of the world put together. They're going to have that intellectual capital. We've got to recreate that. And it's an issue in Western Europe as well. You'll hear employers saying that they cannot get people with the skills. So a lot of the unemployed people either have got skills that are redundant or they haven't had skills in the... been given the skills in the first place. I want to hear from Moura O'Neill. I don't have a bright answer for you because I think it's a very complex issue. Unfortunately the last question, but Moura. Thank you very much. I'm Moura O'Neill, I'm the Chief Innovation Officer of USAID and a couple of weeks ago we gave Coca-Cola our 10th year anniversary global corporate or global partnership award. So thank you for your leadership because a big part of that. Henry ever gave me one too. But we gave it for the decade. So we appreciate it. I didn't stick around that long. I know, we just built it. But we also believe in continuous improvement I think as any organization needs to. And so what advice do you have for us and for our colleagues at MCC and OPIC and others to looking forward how we can be better partners with private business particularly in the P&L and sustainability area? Well I wish you could persuade the US government to do what the UK government did at Ring Fencing Difford in terms of funding. I think that's one issue and I think the private sector against the individual view should be able to help you in terms of going to the hill with regard to that funding because I think it's I think what we do together the number of programs that we've had we do together they make a real difference. But somehow or other the problem of the debate is that everyone is looking at share of a static pie. Okay? As if that was the battle that we have to have and that's where you get into this jobs being sent overseas et cetera. I know a company that announced investments in China that was attacked. Why are you putting the jobs in China? Well the truth was it was a product that you could never make in this country and profitably make in China because of the freight costs. It had to be manufactured locally and in fact they got factories in different parts of the U.S. because you can't have one factory. In the U.S. you need more factories because of the freight costs. But no one thought about what that employment would mean back at head office in the U.S. in terms of adding jobs back there and how in fact the wealth that's created that was actually distributed how that was going to generate other activity. So it is inevitable that China is going to be the world's largest economy. It's great for us but China to be the world's largest economy because we're going to enlarge the pie. Our share, western Europe's share is going to go down. The issue is how are we going to grab a sufficient share of that growth in order to accelerate the growth of our GDP for our population. That's what it's all about and you've seen countries do that effectively over the, I mean I'm not trying to compare the U.S. with Switzerland but you look at the lack of Switzerland where again intellectual capital is part of it but they have managed to stay relevant and their share has gone down. There used to be in the top 20 funnily enough 100 years ago but I mean now they're number 80 but that doesn't matter to the Swiss. That's the sort of mindset rather than how do we stop China? You don't stop China. You see how you managed to get as much of that growth back into the U.S. but back into the U.S. by intellectual capital not by regulation. We're going to have to stop there. Neville, thank you so much for being with us this morning please join me in thanking Neville Isdell. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. We're going to have a slight set change because we're going to put a couple more chairs up here so we're going to have a little bit of a we're going to just as we put the chairs up I'm going to introduce Holly Wise who's going to make some remarks to provide some context for the report Holly probably more than anyone else has helped see this change in mindset happen in Washington on working more collaboratively in international development and the when I, Holly was my first boss in Washington at USAID and it was her vision and leadership that helped make the Global Development Alliance a reality and I think is the reason that is one of the people that's most responsible for all of us being here in this room today I want to just read a couple excerpts from Dr. Shah's most recent speech because I think it reflects the mindset that Holly and others has helped to achieve over the last 10 years. Let me just read a couple things from a speech from a couple weeks ago. The sectors we most associate with development work healthcare, agriculture, and water are dominated by private sector activity. If we're going to encourage truly sustainable broad based economic growth in developing countries we have to do a far better job of working with private firms be the domestic established or entrepreneurial. I know this is uneasy territory for many in the development community then he goes on and those early experiences working with the private sector earlier on in the 70s and 80s led to a deep mistrust of the private sector by developing countries in the development community alike. As a result our community became far less comfortable partnering with the private sector so today if you're a development expert working in the field you probably understand a longitudinal study better than a balance sheet and you probably know the names of more NGO leaders than local CEOs. But the modern corporation has a much more enlightened understanding about the aligned interests it shares with the development community. And finally he says the development community must step out of its comfort zone and imagine new linkages with private sector firms. I'm not talking about partnership for partnership sake. I'm not talking about corporate social responsibility or charity work. I'm not talking about photo opportunities. Amen by the way. I'm talking about helping support the work in the markets that can deliver profits and create opportunity for women, minorities and the poor. We must partner with the private sector much more deeply from the start instead of treating companies as just another funding source for our development work. In short we must embrace a new wave of creative enlightened capitalism. I don't know if he was reading Neville's book or not but I think it reflects sort of a perspective from government. So I don't think we'd have heard a speech like that 30 years ago from a USAID administrator and I think Holly Wise had a lot to do with this mindset that's reflected I think in those remarks. So I'm going to turn the floor over to Holly Wise to give some additional commentary. Holly the floor is yours. Good morning and thanks Dan as one secretary of state would say well it takes a village so I am so happy to be associated with friends and colleagues who have not only been working on partnerships for a long time but who worked on this particular report that's being launched today and I think it sets the stage not only for some good thinking but hopefully for some good collaborative work over the next year in CSIS and hopefully in the development community as well. Several have reminded already that USAID is celebrating a birthday just now 50 years and GDA the Global Development Alliance also coincidentally is 10 years old just about now. It's been suggested that we've been doing partnerships in some form or fashion over the whole 50 years and then been doing them on steroids for the last 10 years and going forward want to do a whole lot more of that. I think it's important again to ground us in why did GDA come forward and why is there a continuation of interest in this why have other government agencies also started doing this and how does it fit in the context of what other donors and international organizations are doing. When we 10-ish years ago thought about the world in which we were operating we realized that we had a Truman-era business model in a very different environment in which we were working. What was different everything was different in the 1960s when AID was formed there weren't a lot of people in the sense of organizations that were forward deployed who were doing development work there wasn't nearly the FDI there weren't remittances there weren't new wealth foundations there weren't a whole lot of things which had become kind of standard fair even as of 10 years ago and the pie wasn't so big. Dan mentioned that the public sector share we were the majority shareholder but it was 71% of a 5.1 billion dollar pie of U.S. transfers in 2009 that pie was significantly bigger and sliced differently. ODA official development assistance was 13% of a 226 billion dollar pie and in the Truman era when many of the structures of foreign aid and public aid consultation were created as I mentioned there were just a handful of NGOs and now there were a multitude of them way back in 1999 a global estimate was that there were over 2 million NGOs a million just in India alone that probably says a much about government activity as it does about NGO flourishing but it got us to thinking with the emergence of new actors and new resources and complex global challenges this partnership imperative became increasingly evident. So 10 years ago the USAID formed the GDA which was followed several years later by partnership initiatives at PEPFAR and MCC and most recently at the Department of State USAID can claim credit for having put together over a thousand partnerships with 3,000 partners and leveraging $9 billion in resources for now despite some impressive numbers not a lot has changed over the last decade in terms of roles and timing of engagement and the type and method of financing partnerships despite really revolutionary changes in how we communicate in who knows and does what who funds development work externally and how those funds flow there's only been incremental change in the development of incentives skills and mechanisms to engage the private sector there's not been a substantial leap frogging or a sea change in roles and responsibilities of state and non-state actors in the international development game partners are still engaged closer to the end of pipe than at the source of analysis strategic planning consideration of alternatives and framing of approaches partnership is not as you might think it should be the default setting on the international assistance machinery but the assumption that the US government should be the funder of last not first resort the government structures do not share power and voice with agility partners are not co-equals in determining rules of engagement and measuring results we talk about the assets of the private sector technology business processes supply chain networks voice managerial practices people cash cash are we leveraging them on the government side in the most useful way we've been talking for a little while about partnership 2.0 alliances 2.0 lots of software references what's it going to take to do alliances 2.0 where is this 1 plus 1 plus 1 of the public private and not-profit sectors coming together and equaling 7 or 10 or 50 where is that going to come from how is that going to come about what should we be doing in seeking really seeking synergy and scaling and sustainability I would suggest to you that alliance 2.0 requires systems change interagency as well as public-private co-creation and blended financing now there are a few bright spots and as I said a lot has happened and I'm very proud to have been associated with the work that has taken place already and the things that are coming Dr. O'Neill has put together a Google Earth mapping of partnerships across the globe which is a pretty whiz bang little platform and I think that that's illustrative of technology and open source information and inviting people forward that's an interesting thing take a look at that how do we access it there you go a partnership for growth initiative is engaging across agencies state aid TTC, OPIC in four countries El Salvador, Ghana, Philippines and Tanzania the good news here is that it's something like a whole of government approach with a country focus to try and hone collaboration but does this focus does this attention to the deep dive on a couple of countries also have the same effort toward fixing the as I would say issues looking at the way in which they're going to work together both between agencies and with the recipients the African Ag Development Fund is another bright spot for me this involves J.P. Morgan and a guarantee facility that USAID has that will provide equity and support to grow African agricultural enterprises this is a reasonable attempt to blend finance and leverage assets in a different way other bright spots that could be copied or improved upon things like CROTAS the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements of USDA and others that have done things like helped to work with the cocoa industry to map the cocoa genome to do research on plant and pest issues in developing inputs to new products ARPAs these advanced research project agency agreements or setups that allow for sharing of intellectual property and joint R&D and a real blending between government and the private sector with an understanding about commercialization of public-private early investment outcomes and is that how can we mainstream the do more of that in international economic assistance and if you like the idea of that one of our panelists is pretty smart about those sorts of issues but basically we're still talking about a cash business and I think that the important thing is to think about how do we move beyond this cash business with only pay as you go provisions can we use forward contracts as collateral more more readily to leverage impact investment whether in agriculture value change partnerships or reagent supply work in HIV in Kenya these are promising the potential use of first loss risk sharing, credit enhancements term debt and even equity hold the potential to stretch public dollars and use them most strategic catalytic financing is what's going to really leverage internally as well as externally another bright spot is USA's grand challenge for development program which engages in contests like collaboration based on USG wide prize authority granted under the America competes act another bright spot I would suggest to you is the alliance for clean cook stoves which leverages leadership and interagency effort of state AID, HHS, EPA OPIC and others with real money and a rather awesome team of Julia Roberts and Hillary Clinton what I like about this is that it is it has a laser focus there's a technology component to it it has high visibility I can explain it to my mom and there's real money development innovation ventures will attempt to make equity like investments in promising solutions this is another USAID activity now are these bright spots that I'm suggesting to you material and mainstream are they cottage industries and rounding errors on the real money and effort these activities some pilot in nature though I think will help in organizational learning will foster added innovation and build skills, confidence and commitment to new ways of doing business on the government side as well as with their partners and most importantly make a difference for the world's poor but are they still more boutique than big box store so what's the way forward there's some issues and some opportunities for I think that are described very nicely in the report and you will have added thoughts about them but there's some clusters of issue areas that I think are worth mentioning planning, procurement, governance and monitoring and evaluation that's all in planning public and private sector parties are still doing their own analyses not joint studies and then determining activities, action often in isolation how about open sourcing some of these many governmental studies through collaboration with private partners procurement is still a major barrier to alliance resourcing grants and contracts for primary vehicles and these are intended either to transfer resources to external parties or support vendor relationships USAID has experimented with collaboration agreements in minimal fashion but advances in these areas are of paramount importance governance is not well developed someone said there's a lot of attention on the big check or the signing ceremony and then what happens after you're married part is a little less well understood so it either follows a traditional grant or grantee model or it tends to lay out roles and responsibilities in MOU many of the larger partnerships use management reporting and accountability frameworks that are based on UN models not that they're necessarily the best but in the absence of alternatives that's what's tended to come forward so far there's a real opportunity for more thought and more work and innovation here and there's not been a lot of innovation I would suggest in thinking or practice around governing partnerships as opposed to projects and in terms of monitoring and evaluation we need metrics for partnerships not just projects we cannot accept as an article of faith either the government can do it better or the partnerships will necessarily be better faster or cheaper in delivering optimal returns on investment what's going forward is what is the role of central action versus bottom up or localized approaches and what specifically in the realm of operational improvement is feasible and will yield greatest results a lot of this speaks to the heart of what is the role of government to me the key challenges and opportunities are three procurement reform innovative finance and whole of government action not talk messaging and the photo op with the big check of the Clinton global initiative it's about listening to external voices in analyzing operational issues and putting our most able soldiers minds and muscle to the wheel of change enterprise wide action to develop new tools and techniques will be best matched by local application in countries regions sectors in shaping delivering and celebrating partnerships that really move the needle on development we need whole of government action leveraging whole of society as the you come commander in chief refers to it using smart financing instead of grants only money and a tired do d procurement based procurement rule book and the US government needs to pay to play USA ID has relaunched GDA with some fanfare but like the the partnership initiative at state hasn't planned and I know of to allocate any new budgetary resources to it partnerships are not alchemy and substantial and sustainable activity and results are only going to come from real investment of additive resources making a core business just like we want the private sector to do not a hobby at the French mandating increases our new activity in this way without additional resources in the environment in which all of the agency's work is not going to bring things forward if you ask for increasing alliances or new behaviors without the all the wherewithal to do so it becomes a creative accounting function not a development undertaking I'm joined this morning by some very smart panelists and dear friends who've worked on these issues and can offer insights and help set the agenda for what more study and work needs to be done please join me in welcoming my colleagues to the podium Drew Luton, Jerry Denson, Dennis Whittle, and Jane Nelson Drew is one of those injured soldiers who put his shoulder and his leg to the wheel of development so he's sitting on the end how did it happen the answer is no more rugby okay you're supposed to ask me if I ever played rugby before I know the answer to that question already do you all know all of these grand people and shall I just quickly introduce them maybe we'll do that Jane Nelson does so many things she's been a banker she has been an NGO board leader she has done teaching she has done work at Harvard that I've been pleased to be associated with and she leads the Global Social Responsibility Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government and Jane Nelson Dennis Whittle used to be a world banker and then he wasn't he started Global Giving which is an eBay for development type platform that has to some extent we think turned development processes and an engagement of the public with development issues on its ear in a good way and now he's the father of a new a new three-year-old from China welcome Dennis Derry Denson has a long and distinguished career with government and then has joined the private sector and she comes to you from the Initiative for Global Development which is an interesting opportunity to aggregate corporate involvement and voice and focus it in various ways on international issues Drew Luton also comes to us from originally lots of places but USAID where we work together happily for many years and he is now with Booz Allen Hamilton I want to ask each of the panelists a couple of questions and then open it to your questions as well so maybe we'll start Jane are you happy to start with you? All right so Jane when we think about a lot of our conversation it's been first so happily with Neville Isdell talking about from the corporate perspective why they engage in partnerships and how they see the world and what might be the way forward for them and then I've talked a little bit about from the inside out in terms of government or how we see government and their the US government in their role Jane has a unique experience in looking at the UN system and looking at other donors as well and I wonder if you could comment on what from the perspective of other donors and international organizations do you see looking at AID and PEPFAR and the OGAC and the Department of State and MCC how do you compare and contrast their experience and what would it mean if AID and these other organizations really wanted to move forward in a significant way on partnerships and sort of scaling and sustainability to me I think there are five big opportunity areas for US AID state and US government some of which other donors are already doing and some of which I think the US is already leading in and you touched on most of them in your opening comments but I think they're worth reiterating and the first is if we're serious about scaling is this whole area of catalytic financing impact investing to innovate financing whatever we want to call it but the sort of this blended value financing models where US government can use discrete amounts of money to catalyze private entrepreneurship new technologies et cetera whether it's with established companies and technologies or new emerging companies and technologies and I think the work that Mara is now doing with the development innovation ventures the invitation to innovation that MCC have started the great work that Rob did at OPIC there are already some variables which just need to be developed further I don't think we've done enough to look at the lessons well I've certainly seen not enough public work done on the lessons from different innovation funds and challenge funds and I think some of the most interesting scaling that's happened has happened through different innovation funds and challenge funds so you look at their financial deepening challenge fund which helped some of the catalytic financing both for EMPESA and SafariCom in Kenya and equity bank in Kenya they have another challenge fund which is for the food retail sector so they're quite specific about the types of challenge funds they have which I think helps to both focus but also provide more of a platform for potential scaling so first that that whole area of challenge funding create a financing and sorry Jane would you suggest that Difford would agree that having first of all challenge funds are a good thing secondly having them focused either sectorally or regionally is a lesson they've learned and would recommend to those that might listen on this side of the ocean I'm just not sure enough analysis has been done to sort of compare these different types of creative financing models I think that's one of the areas we've really got to focus and an area which we're just beginning to see emerging and I think it's great potential for US aid and the US government to take a lead is the sovereign wealth funds and as some of the newly emerging countries have their own sovereign wealth funds we want to do more in development are there opportunities for financing part of this that's very very quickly secondly I think there's more potential and GDA led in this in these sort of global framework agreements with companies that are either big footprint players or have scaling technologies and you mentioned that the Coca-Cola partnership just won the award where you know that wasn't a project based partnership it was a strategic alliance in numerous countries around a particular area or US aid working with Chevron and Angola and now Nigeria or working with Cisco systems and Microsoft across a lot of countries how can we be more strategic with the companies that are the biggest footprint players and go beyond sort of project based partnerships and I think we can learn a lot a lot and I think the leadership from the US aid side is greater there than probably other donors I think a third area where there's great potential again the US already played a role but could play more of a role isn't convening these system level platforms that address systemic challenges and one of the best examples that the State Department was involved with the British Foreign Office a number of years ago with the voluntary principles on security and human rights where you got groups of companies together to address a systems challenge that no one could address on their own or the extractive industries transparency initiative or never mention the round table on sustainable palm oil or the global alliance on clean cook stoves I think these coalitions can both help to sort of improve the enabling environment and or they can make market systems work better in a particular challenge area and so I think that convening role of government which UN has done reasonably well but I think bilateral governments can do even better often is another area of potential forcefully you mentioned it these sort of technology innovation platforms and I'll leave Dennis to sort of pick up on that but actually using your technology as a platform to facilitate innovation competitive bid challenges on particular technologies etc where anyone in the world can can apply and we can get ideas from everywhere and we can also source finance and technologies from anywhere so technology platforms is the fourth one and then the fifth and you mentioned it I think there's great potential to do more in specific countries around not only whole of US government but whole of donor community and so as part of the whole aid effectiveness agenda the sort of country ownership agenda and I think we've got four great countries with the partnership for growth where there's a strong domestic private sector there's quite a lot of foreign investment there's reasonable coordination both within US government also between the US and other donors and then I think the potential to just focus on those four countries and see what could we do to work with the domestic organized private sector as well as some of the key foreign investors in Ghana, Tanzania I'll solve it all in the Philippines and see if we can have a more joined up platform in just those four countries would be another interesting way to just explore new opportunities for scaling South Africa has a great model called the business trust where there's six government ministers six corporate CEOs have come together around a sort of shared development agenda and you know there's a few other models like that around the world and could we experiment with that at the country level where business is part of the creation and sort of setting a development strategy for the country but the donor community helping to facilitate that and I think the US government prepared a very important role certainly in those four countries. Excellent range of examples and suggestions thank you for that Jane and it also brings forward this tension between the global and the local when our framework agreements or broad partnerships that are multi-country or issue specific that span the globe utilized and when is the deep dive where a lot of US government assets are organized on a decentralized and country specific basis and how to how to marry the two well Dennis from the perspective of both your work at the World Bank and why did you leave the World Bank anyway I don't remember okay and the work that you did with for the last ten years it's also the anniversary of global giving I think and your graduation from there you've suggested that this is somewhat of a paradigm shift and you probably don't use that corny language but in terms of rethinking who's smart and who cares and how do you bring them together and make more from work that can address global issues you want to tell us a little bit about what you've learned and what you think the US government could perhaps do more in partnership well in response to your question about is this on by the way about why I left the World Bank most of us here who have been in the aid business for many years remember it was constructed around the idea that you needed to bring experts together and expert agencies to study the world's problems and come up with the answers to the problems and fund the problems and implement the problems and in the late 1990s Jim Wolfenson the president of the World Bank asked me and a couple other people to experiment with different ways of finding solutions to the world's problems and so we created something called the development marketplace where for the first time we allowed anyone in the world with a good idea without regard to who you were to come into the atrium of the World Bank pitch your idea to a jury panel not only of World Bank experts but Daimler Chrysler save the children and World Bank experts together and buy for funding and the outcome of the five million dollars that we spent on that event in 2000 I believe was greater than the outcome of a billion dollars I had just spent in Russia through the top down methods so long story short a couple of us decided to leave the World Bank and create a marketplace try to create this marketplace where anybody in the world could propose an idea and anybody in the world could help fund the idea you didn't have to be an aid specialist and this seems like this seemed like a crazy idea at the time and we were it was pretty lonely out there until we ran into Holly over at USAID who said you know what I've been thinking along the same lines and I want to help you guys get this up to speed and running and so Holly and her colleagues at GDA provided about a million dollars of funding to global giving at the beginning and we've now leveraged that to raise over 70, 75 million dollars from 220,000 individual donors and probably 50 or 60 corporations they have all bonded together to fund 5000 projects in 100 countries in the last few years so hopefully a very good return on investment couple things picking up on what you said and what we've learned first want to talk about the whole of government approach I just ran over here from the World Bank where there's a meeting going on on impact investing and when I saw Mora over here I was reminded how hard it is for World Bank and USA just to talk about these things and a whole of government is also a whole of aid agencies as well and one of the big issues is breaking down these boundaries and getting the procurement situation under control and this is sounds trivial and it is fundamental to progress in the field so we could have a whole session on that I won't bore people with that but it's really critical the second thing that's really struck me is how the businesses we work with bring a new mentality of risk taking and innovation to the table it takes 58 ideas in a company on average to result in one successful product to get one successful product to the market and companies just know this and so they're constantly ideating and trying things and experimenting things and a lot of things don't work a lot of products don't work that's okay stop it, do something different get feedback from the market, stop it, do something different don't kill the people that tried it encourage people to try things very different mentality but if it took you three years to design the project and four years to procure it and then you're going that's a little bit of a the clock speed of that is just too great and I'm so struck by our corporate partners, Dell, Ford you know, Gap etc etc etc how they will try things on global giving but they don't abandon it, they just try it again it's really striking to me coming out of the aid business finally and this is what I want to emphasize is what I believe is a fundamental shift happening and Neville alluded to it in his talk with business originally we had sort of greenwashing you put your people that you couldn't fire into foundations and had them do you know the fancy brochures you know it then came something a little bit more sophisticated corporate social responsibility which is the idea that sort of the anti-freedmen idea that corporations had to give back to society and then most recently we've seen some big successes with what Neville described as kind of strategic investing in your supply chain essentially but water is a fantastic example of that for Coke I think the next phase that's coming is meaning about 25 or 30 years ago Peter Drucker said there are now hundreds of millions of people in the world who have enough stuff physical consumption of stuff is no longer the constraint on welfare for hundreds of millions of people and he said in his sort of way that most people including me couldn't understand back then meaning is the binding constraint on happiness and will be the binding constraint for markets in the future and when I first read this I thought that's kind of crazy and yet I assume that you are here because it's meaningful here's a guy who lives in Barbados he's risen to the heights of corporate life he doesn't need to be here but presumably and we haven't met so I'm just guessing he's here because it provides meaning for his life and I'm seeing this in so many of the companies we work with where companies are having trouble attracting and maintaining employees if the employees aren't doing something meaningful and your colleague Indra Nui a couple of years ago when they launched the Pepsi Refresh program Pepsi was giving away $20 million less strategically from your point of view but giving away $20 million domestically she set up at the launch dinner with her lieutenants her top managers and she gave the business case for it she gave the branding case for it etc but at the end of her speech to her top managers who are these tough guys most of them are tough guys but I just want to say one more thing she said I had dinner last night with my 26 year old daughter who works for Environmental Defense Fund and I told her what I was going to be doing today and for the first time in my life my daughter looked up at me and she said mom I'm really proud of you I'm proud of what you're doing and Indra who's a tough cookie herself said that really hit me like a freight train my daughter was proud of what I was doing and there was not a dry eye among these tough guys in the house when she said that she addressed to align Pepsi with the with meaning for her employees and for her staff we're also seeing this with customers customers don't want to just buy commodities anymore increasingly they care about the fact that Coke is doing good out there that's part of Coke's brand and Nike today just launched a big competition around the girl effect that we're working with them on and Nike's done its homework and they know that investing in girls around the world has the highest development returns you can probably have so they're trying to align their brand around that and they're helping match money that their clients are giving and basically help their clients, their customers access something meaningful so meaning is the new frontier I think and ten years ago I would have said that was too soft of a term kind of wonky or whatever now we have former CEO and chairman of Coke sitting right in the front row giving a speech like that at a conference like this and I really think it marks a big turning point so that was wonderful thank you so what should government do if you've got this platform that allows people, companies and others to come forward and click and pay to causes individuals that they want to support is there an interface or does this mean that government should get out of the way well I think what GDA did to facilitate what I just described has got to be one of the highest returns I've ever seen on an aid dollar and you all came in at that point with risk capital global giving was this fledgling little idea with three circles on a sheet of paper it's embarrassing now to think about it let me be clear they didn't get a million dollars on a sheet of paper right Jim by the time we met Jim we were in no but at the beginning seriously at the beginning I can't overemphasize this to have an agency and people within the agency that are willing to nurture things to get it to the point where it's not just three circles on a sheet of paper so it can pass Jim's muster it's incredibly valuable and catalytic and it depends on people this happened because you were there Holly and then Dan followed and Jim was you guys were operating on the same wavelength with different strengths and Jim's watching the back of the agency which is his job you're out there pushing pushing pushing it was about the people involved and you can have as many innovation funds as you want etc if you don't have the right people running them you will not have innovation so government can do it by hiring the right people first and foremost and helping develop facilities that allows those people to express some of the support for things well that's great to hear that that leadership is good I would suggest it's probably not sufficient and Drew maybe jump to you for a second to talk about well like the Marines we need a few good fixes what in particular do you see as the constraints to government being a better partner and or doing this partnership work with more agility and impact thanks I'm not going to let you turn away from leadership quite yet because I think leadership drives how operational decision making will take place and how it falls in line I think it's very very important that leadership take a stand and say we want certain things done or to organize a strategy set priorities so that the people that run the organization day to day week to week can fall in line behind it and then the question is does the framework of rules, regulations, laws culture support going in leadership's direction and the answer that we found with GDA was yes to an extent but it wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been leadership saying we want to do this it started with actually before Andronatio with Don Pressley and Secretary Powell and then Andronatio's picked it up in a big way and provided you all with the ability to do the types of things that Dennis said there were resources available and there was a willingness following direction from leadership to make it happen I say this because the people that run organizations from a contracting officer perspective, program planning perspective legal perspective at least in the USAID context and it's the case for other organizations they're all busy doing everything else that they're supposed to do and unless they're told less priorities are established it's it's hard to turn the attention to how to carry out those priorities so an example of this that happened it actually happened before GDA it happened with respect to the US government contribution to the GAVI alliance back in about 2000 early 2001 this was a high level commitment from the government from the US government to contribute to the Gates Foundation led alliance the Gates Foundation was putting up $750 million for this vaccine program the US government contribution was going to be $50 or $60 million a year but GAVI looked all different it was we were giving money to the Gates Foundation well no, not exactly, it was this multi-party initiative it took someone from on high saying go do it go make it happen, go figure out how to do it work within the existing way you think about things and make it happen we did it, we did it legally and so on so it's I say that because it is important to push what can be gotten from the system as much as possible I tend to think stepping back from that how far can you push within the existing system I tend to think that there's having just said all that and that's important to make progress it's important to understand that federal agencies when they award contracts when they award grants they're operating not just framework of rules and regulations that they made up themselves they are working in a framework of rules and regulations that come from OMB that come from the Congress that are government-wide requirements and it's difficult to operate where we were able to do a lot it's difficult to do everything that we've been talking about here and that the report talks about and that we envision as possible if we're within that framework for that reason I think it's going to take some again leadership saying here's what we want to achieve and then crafting some exceptions in policy in legislation that will be above the agency level to say this is what we want you to do and go do it and as you were saying resources and staff to do it because you know permission to do things is one greater permission to have more latitude to relate in a world where technology and breaking down of stove pipes among sectors is is new and continues to reinvent itself is one thing permission is one thing but people that are charged with going to do it and some flexible resources in this grant if they haven't set aside some money up front for the Global Development Alliance Initiative to look for good opportunities so that's a long way of saying we can do a lot within the system but you can't expect it to take it all the way and I think it's going to take some thinking about what those changes will be in the context of what the priorities are and what the strategy is so the potential for some whole kind of innovation around the business processes and I think that that's an important important message in terms of representing both government and the private sector that's not a hard job the when you were at MCC I know you tried to advance more private sector collaborations some would suggest that's difficult when there's a lot of money on the table already and when it's a government to government type relationship and the private sector to some extent understands the vendor signals they don't understand so much other things and now in your role with working with private sector organizations you see an opportunity to aggregate demand or focus it and also do some lifting for government and how's that going or what specifically do you see as something which government could do more differently in order to enhance these partnerships with private sector thank you first of all I just want to thank you and Dan for writing this long over these studies and and asking this very important question that you posed why is it that we have political buy-in from the president on down to do to make partnerships a more fundamental part of our development strategy and why is it when we have a number an increasing number of companies interested in using partnerships as an entry strategy in frontier markets why is it that it's still somewhat marginal activity in government agencies and what I want to do is actually take it to the 2.0 level and ask the next question why is it that the types of the partnerships that we're seeing are not necessarily what folks in this room would consider partnership nirvana in terms of scalability replicability sustainability and what I want to do is pose a theory and then walk through the thinking of a company that's genuinely interested in doing this to try to illustrate what I'm trying to get at here and the theory is that even though there's clear recognition among the development agencies on the private sector is good, the broad based economic growth is a worthy policy priority the dots still have not been connected between our development programs and what we know are the most potent drivers of economic growth which are foreign direct investment and trade I would argue that you can't get to scalable, sustainable, replicable unless you engage the core business of a company's strategy and you can't do that the government can't do that unless their tools and models are set up to attract private capital and the models that we have right now aren't built for that they're still holding the private sector at arms length they to a large degree there's no process built in to bring them in on the ground floor of project development there is still interestingly I would say no concerted effort to highlight the sustain of the commercially viable opportunities and I think the tools that the government has at the ready to do this really are still stuck, they're not particularly creative they're not flexible they're not coordinated and they're not targeted in a way to help a company actually to provide the tipping point for the company to make an investment the commercial investments the commercially viable investments that we're trying to talk about here so I would even go so far as to say that there is no silver bullet obviously but if the government were to start acting like a minority shareholder the minority shareholder that it is that a lot of these bureaucratic obstacles would start to dissolve so let me illustrate with the thinking of a company and this is a company that is willing to take lower profit margins for some period of time willing to take greater risk willing to experiment with new models to get at the bottom of the pyramid but is looking at an opportunity with the US government as a way of creating a market of actually leveraging resources the first thing they hope is that the questions that the government is asking are the right questions and having the company try to fit its strategy into a set agenda a set government agenda that is set in stone that they are actually asking the question how can what the private sector is doing already how can the government increase the developmental impact of that particular investment so looking at having room in the model for existing corporate strategies and the synergies that can be created between US government and corporate strategies exactly and that implies a number of things that implies a different set of expectations in the conversations with the country partners an expectation that they will look towards sustainable partnerships an expectation that they will leverage the resources where they can and providing the resources to help them do that not just telling them to do it giving them the ammunition in order to do it in the same way that the government expects that procurement practices will be squeaky clean that they will be monitoring an evaluation that they will be progressive gender policies the US government puts their money where their mouth is on those priorities but they haven't quite gotten to that point with the private sector it also implies this systematic process that holds hands with the company from the beginning to the end in the project development process and that still the enlightened individuals and the government agencies that we all know and love are trying very hard to do this but they still quite haven't gotten there yet but the hope springs eternal with the partnership of growth countries and the second compact countries that means greater reliance on informal advisory groups which I think can do a number of things to point toward the sustainable investment opportunities it can get at this very important conversation that is still largely lacking where the company says I will make an investment here but for that and that gives the government the information they need so they can target their resources in a way to attract the private capital it also I think largely overlooked can be a very effective policy prod if you have the private sector at the table I think there's nothing more compelling to a government that is genuinely interested in bringing investment into their country to have an agency with a checkbook coupled with a couple of investors at the ready that are willing to make an investment if particular regulatory issues are addressed the second thing that this hypothetical company wants to see is they want to they're hoping that the government is thinking in terms of opportunities and not just constraints and there's a couple of issues there first there's the question of just finding the bloody opportunities there's a transparency issue and I know both MCC and USAID solicit for partnerships but I think you all point out in the paper that may not go all the way for a Fortune 100 company that may be the beginning of wisdom but it's not the end but I think there's actually a more fundamental a structural impediment insofar as the commercially viable opportunities may not appear at all and I'm talking about MCC here but I'm a little nervous because the same model is being replicated in partnership for growth countries as well and that is that the once countries decide what sector they're going to invest in how they're going to use the resources they go through what is called a constraints analysis the most binding constraints to macroeconomic growth and the operative word there is macroeconomic and nine times out of ten what results from that analysis are public infrastructure projects it is no coincidence that the eight billion dollars that MCC has committed in the last seven years has been largely not leveraged with the private sector but has been a number of commercially viable projects to work with in the first place so what's needed is to now let me just be very clear I'm not saying that there's no need for the government to play a role in public infrastructure projects everyone knows that's a major constraint and of course they should go there but if we have as a policy goal there needs to be room in the business model to try to find commercially viable opportunities and right now it just doesn't exist in that particular model but now it's not that difficult to fix I think you can again back to an informal advisory process I think if you have this conversation if you supplement the constraints analysis with real time information on what it will take for a company to invest alongside a development priority it can go a long way the third thing now so let's assume that a company has found an opportunity it's participated in a process and it's structuring a partnership the next thing they need is risk mitigation and again the tools are there in the US government but they're not targeted in a way that can actually be this tipping point that a company is looking for in order to make that investment decision and when I'm talking about risk mitigation it's anything from capacity building to first loss guarantees to just knowing where the bloody road is going to go so a company can invest alongside it and it's very difficult for a company and most of the time I think let me go back to our hypothetical company they're interested in sourcing from a feed the future value chain but what they need is behind the gate behind the farmer's gate capacity building that can get at some of their volume and quality issues that they need to solve in order to get these products to market and they're not particularly confident that they could just go to the government and get that help that could be targeted to their specific investment and I think part of that is a cultural issue it's anathema for the government to be helping one particular company that's going to be making a return on their investment we still haven't gotten over that hurdle and then the last thing wait, let me fantasize for a minute and there's one other dimension to the risk mitigation aspect and that is that God forbid the tools that the government has would actually be coordinated across the government and coordinated up front I know I'm a wild girl but let's just say that for an energy investment in Ghana or Tanzania that you could combine a USTDA feasibility study with an MCC grant that could bring down the tariff structure to make the project more commercially viable with some targeted capacity building that could be very appropriate for the project and then you put that in an RFP and you went out to the private sector I bet you dollars to donuts you will get a number of interested companies in participating and leveraging that investment that would enhance this developmental impact and then the last thing is the hope that there would be a focus on the demand side of the equation and all of this and there I think we've seen a number of times that if you have a buyer guarantees if you have a buyer already set up in a particular market we've seen it with Cargo we've seen it with ADM we've seen it with Costco but then the rest of the supply chain it's not easy but it's much easier for the rest of the supply chain to fall into place especially the critical link of financing and there's been a number of examples where it's worked there's also been examples where it hasn't even been tried and there have been real implications for the number of beneficiaries that resulted from a particular project so I'll stop there well she tells a compelling story from the firm perspective about what it takes and among other things this interagency a whole government response and having risk mitigation and bringing you closer to the process and engaging early you also talk about the concern that government has about picking winners or implicit subsidies and some of it has to do with process and some of it has to do with culture of engaging with the for-profit sector one of the things that you spoke to indirectly is this advisory function and a lot of government agencies are constrained by fuckas and you have a happy day if you don't know what a fucka is but it's basically an advisory it's an authority to have an advisory body because you're not supposed to just call up the private sector and talk to them directly and but this consultation and how do you invite others in and have that conversation what spaces do you do it in and how do you do it safely is certainly a going forward concern most importantly I think you talk about the listening and the early engagement so we want to listen to you and hear some of your input and questions to the panelists so we'll pass around the mic if there are a couple of folks that want to raise their hands who has the mic there's a question there it's on good morning thank you again also to CSIS for organizing my name is Julia Royg and I work for an international NGO called partners for democratic change and I actually like to hear the panel discuss a little bit more about that third leg of the triangle because I do think that the aspect of partnerships and civil society organizations needing to be a part of the agenda sending is very important especially with regards to the lack of confidence and mistrust in many of the countries that we work in and I would also like to ask a little but I know that we're kind of at a bird's eye view in this discussion but in our experience the really effective partnerships and then we're providing access and convening power at this country level with GE's local operations and the local NGO not the international NGO and the local government working together to set the agenda so I'd like to hear maybe just briefly about that because I don't think it was touched upon in the initial comments thank you anyone want to comment on the third sector I absolutely agree with you and I think one of the areas where and the US government in general and other donors have been able to help is you'll never mention the round table of sustainable palm oil actually funding will a wide life fund in this case but there could be any NGO to provide that convening space and a relatively neutral space for companies to come together with governments and other NGOs the voluntary principles was the same thing EITI was the same thing so I think funding international NGOs to provide platforms for the collaboration is one way I think for the secondly actually building the capacity of the domestic NGOs so that they are better able to engage with business and indeed with their own governments so I think some of the work that the US government's done on transparency you're supporting domestic NGOs in countries on budget transparency in country is a great example of sort of the donor agencies building the capacity of NGOs in a way that improves the overall enabling environment in that country not only for hopefully sort of more open society but certainly for a better enabling environment for business so that would just be you know two examples but I think that local capacity building of local NGOs and local business associations producer associations which are constituted NGOs you know small hold of farmer associations I think is another area where the donors can play an incredibly important role to enable those small farmer associations or small entrepreneur associations to link with the cargals and the GEs and the coca-colas so there will just be some thoughts but I absolutely agree with you. Great. Okay, I have another question at the back I'm sorry this is my care. Yes I work in the private sector and this has been a wonderful discussion on the overarching issues that we face at the policy level and the strategic level my question has to do more with the nuts and bolts solution to my corporation has come up with what we believe to be a very viable public-private partnership idea however the resistance that we're receiving from a department of state point of view and the reason for the question is I'm hoping Mr. Estelle as well as you all can answer the question about strategies to deal with a level of mistrust or a concern that our motives are strictly driven by profit you know with your bottling company you know building something there that has we're willing to take as you said the risk of a long-term investment for return on the other end but we're running into resistance that says well you're only doing this because you want to make a buck do you have any ideas for dealing with that sort of a focus well first of all you know get over it there's a little bit of I would suggest that you're going to hear that and you will hear it again and you'll hear it even in the best of circumstances there are those that people who work for the government generally work for the government for a reason it's because they've they've chosen to do that they know how to do that it may be part of a chapter but basically there's a lot that that makes them concerned about the motives of others and particularly with the strong regulatory framework in which they operate it so they don't come by it except through a lot of training and admonishments I think that part of it is the language that we have to develop in terms of being able to articulate what this win-win concept if you go in and talk about who you are and don't talk about who we could be together that's not going to advance very much the understanding and so I think that the conversation about what are the metrics going to be what is success going to look like or as opposed to that which you could do by yourself otherwise the presumption is that there's subsidy that this is picking favorites that this is inappropriate and it's not government's core functions not their responsibility so I think part of it and that's again a very general answer but is to be able to define what the alignment is with what MTC or AID or the Department of State is really all about and in most cases it's there it's just important and incumbent upon those that are coming to government to describe what it looks like it's exactly that being able to explain how you're advancing a public purpose in what you propose and how you'll know that you have when you have done that and explaining that in all of its ramifications the other is that if you're proposing to do this on a contract basis with the government it's hard to do a non-competed contract if it's of any size and that'll be a challenge for them as well so think about just think about how you're approaching that but it is what is the overlap they're there to carry out a public purpose how are you helping the State Department in this case carry out the purpose that they are charged with carrying out and if your argument if your approach supports that then they ought to hopefully be at least listened and profit is a good thing because profit sustains activity maybe even more of the same they need you to be a going concern and it needs to be it needs to make sense for you not just to be a philanthropic activity if you're well positioned with them please Hello my name is Andrea McDaniel and I'm with the Aspen Institute and we are organizing a public private partnership that focuses on job creation and entrepreneurship in North Africa so we're building a coalition of private sector partners and foundations to do that and our model is locally driven locally owned where we are asking local organizations in North Africa to identify projects that need U.S. support and given that we're a public private partnership we are we were seated by the U.S. State Department and we continue to have an active role we're hearing from our our local partners that there is a there is a real desire to have U.S. private sector expertise we understand entrepreneurship and job creation but there's a reticence to be affiliated sometimes with the U.S. Government and sometimes that's rightfully so other times it's just a generalized suspicion because of not knowing I'm wondering if the panel has any questions about the role of the U.S. Government and public private partnerships given the public diplomacy challenges of the current day and by the way for those of you who are interested under Basha plug we are hosting a conference in Marrakesh where we're looking at public private partnerships in Morocco and all of North Africa that's taking place in January and you can contact me to learn more about that and we're recruiting people to go and participate with us but I'm curious to hear the role of the U.S. Government given public diplomacy challenges I guess Jane you might want to mention outside government I think a lot of times we hear World Economic Forum or elsewhere companies like Coke saying people forget that we aren't the U.S. Government in other words we're carrying our brand has the flag wrapped around it and with that comes challenges and opportunities I guess as a non-American here on the panel there clearly is a challenge I'm not sure there's an easy answer I think one of the ways to get around it again is that you're emphasizing that local ownership piece as much as possible both the local government the local business community and NGO community and then also partnering with other donors and again it's hard enough to have a whole of government to treat it alone with other donors but I think those are the two best strategies for addressing that and as much as possible I think also working with local academic partners I mean we've talked a little bit about academic partners today but I think they also help to sometimes diffuse sensitivities on the political and for the public diplomacy front and just being sensitive to the issue which you very are Very good we've been talking about how the private sector is adding sustainability to the US government activity but it can work the other way as well there's also the value that the government brings both the local government and the US government to the sustainability of a particular partnership so that's definitely something that should be highlighted as well as the risk mitigation dimension to it Great I would suggest to you that there are US government representatives here today they are they're interested in reform they're interested in doing the right thing they're interested in engaging with the private sector they are listening and we have I want to thank them for their first of all sharing about what the constraints are and where they currently operate and how they plan on moving forward but also their continued willingness to be in this conversation and to take on board your suggestions we have an agenda of work ahead of us in terms of being able to as a third party advocate suggest ways in which we all can pull up our socks or do things more or do things less but want to thank them for their openness and their willingness and thank them for their service and I want to also thank my colleagues and panelists for their perspectives and their willingness to be involved in these operations going forward as well it's important work, we're not done we're just sort of getting going and I think there's a lot of exciting impact that we can look forward to in the future and Dan do you want to take anything in closing? Alright, read the report and stay in touch with us in terms of thoughts that you have going forward Thanks so very much