 This is a hugely ambitious set of global goals to 2030. That's 12 years off. That's a really urgent time frame that we have, less than 12 years. And it's apparent that due to the huge investment gap, the SGGs are unachievable without significant input of the private sector. The public sector on its own can't achieve this. The private sector is needed because it has the money that it's needed for achieving those SDGs. And I want to start with Sarah, because in your role at the Global Innovation Fund, you're trying to bring a venture capital type approach to achieving the sustainable development goals or achieving certain of them. And I'd like you to explain really a little bit about what it means to use a public-private partnership to achieve that and how you hope to invest to meet the SDGs. Sure. Thank you very much. So let me just sort of contextualize, tell you a little bit about the Global Innovation Fund. We were set up with aid money from developed countries to invest in the poorest areas of the world with innovative ideas that sort of change the way we think of doing business in economic development and approaching economic development. So like Sam said, it's a venture capital approach but very much focused on using evidence-based models and looking very intensely at the evidence of what's worked and what hasn't worked in the past and then finding solutions. We're a unique hybrid in this area because we are using grant money from the developing countries, many of them the UK, the US, Sweden, Canada, Australia, and others to really look at sort of one of them the market failures in economic development and trying to fill those market failure gaps. So to that point, we were really set up to try to identify the most promising solutions that will reach the world's poorest to look at creative ways to invest in them, which then our goal is to crowd in other types of capital. So that is private capital and or even development finance capital. And how is it that you identify that you select those gaps? Yeah, so we are in-house also a hybrid team of economic development specialists who have deep decades of experience in the field from the World Bank and governments, et cetera. And we combine that with people like me who've got sort of private equity venture capital investment experiences because our colleagues help us identify what's worked, we'll see opportunities and they'll help us figure out what's worked, what hasn't worked, why it's worked, why it hasn't worked. And so when we look at an opportunity, we're very much baking into it a view of what we need to see as evidence going forward to invest. And we're looking like others for scalable innovations. So what we do, we have an open window. People can apply through the open window for our capital. We also go out and quite intensely and look for opportunities. And we have very close, because we have our funders or the government, we have very close relationships with governments and partners across the markets that we invest in, which are primarily sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. And I can give a few examples if you want now or about the way we invest now or if you want to. Well, I'll bring in Ricardo for a moment. I mean, Ricardo, you're a project management expert. In your role at the UN, we're in charge of making sure that operations delivered, be it removal of chemical weapons in Syria, the building of refugee camps. Now with Brightline, you're talking about project management. So the question for you really is, once you've identified those investments that are needed, how do you make sure that, A, that those development initiatives actually deliver, that they actually achieve what they're setting out to? OK, thank you, Santhin. Good afternoon, everyone. And I operate basically on the opposite side and trying, because, of course, funding is a critical thing when we are trying to implement the SDGs. But there is a lot of things going on in the field that must be in place in order to deliver the results we aim. And also to increase the interest for private sector to join this kind of efforts. And basically, most of you have never heard about Brightline, but Brightline is not a business, it's not a company, it's an initiative. And it's a non-commercial, not-for-profit initiative, trying to sponsor and get awareness on this gap and go into your question. So when you take ideas or take funding or take in a business plan to transform into reality, you need more than money. So there is a lot of things that you need to be aware to get things done. And it's human-based, for example, when you are working in Sub-Saharan countries and this, how do you engage the national government, the national entities, the national players to do that? Because at the end, when your implementation comes to an end, someone needs to inherit that and keep that going. The second, you need to understand also how the volatility plays a role. Because we live in such a changing environment that things change dramatically. For example, when you approve a fund in a different country and, for example, conflict may arise suddenly. And this shift completely the priority of the international community under that specific neighborhood. So all this awareness, so we just published last year a set of principles that we believe that organizations bring forward. And one of them, for me, it's key. It's that you need to understand that. The execution side is as important as the design. So putting things on paper has a lot of value. But take it out of the papers where the benefit comes. And I want just to give you a couple of examples. But one of them that is critical for me, it's, for example, when you build a maternity clinic. The maternity clinic is nothing until babies were delivered there. So the money, everything you do in between becomes irrelevant because you only deliver benefit when you really finish that endeavor. And if we see the massive amount of money that is just destroyed on this journey, and this is exactly what we need to minimize. And this is exactly why Brightline exists today. So these initiatives, these partnerships don't really mean anything if they don't deliver. But what then are the biggest challenges to delivery? What are the biggest obstacles that you find projects face in actually achieving them? Yeah, I can give you some very quick. First one is senior leadership commitment. Commitment to execution. It's not committed just with the plan. Accountability. So people need, and let me use, please, I love to use this example. So when you vote for someone as an officer or as a governor or president, you are voting in a plan, right? You vote because you believe that that person is able, has good ideas, and will be able in four years, five years, whatever, to deliver that. But what happened at the end? So when this person gets elected, there is very few accountability on that because you cannot say come one year later and say, look, I voted for you, but you didn't deliver what I was planning. Now I want to remove my vote for you. So it's different and it's very tricky. So this is what we see many times. You don't have this accountability on delivering the end result because end result takes time. 12 years from now, who will be there, right? How do you assure democratic accountability and transparency in a public-private partnership? This I think is what, it comes to the heart of the, often the critique of the PPP model, is that you have an eroding of transparency and accountability when the private sector comes in. So how do you keep hold of that? Just I want to answer that and I want to just pick up on a couple of examples of how this sort of implementation and accountability is absolutely critical and why a public-private partnership approach that sort of takes a venture capital view of looking at these investments actually solves for some of these, obviously not all of them. But the first is that we're not gonna make an investment without a local entrepreneur who's leading that investment. So that local entrepreneur, so much of our due diligence is actually looking at the who's running it, can they implement, do they have the right team, or do they have the relationships with government and others in the civil society that matter? And because we have public money and public trust that we're investing, we take that due diligence extremely seriously. So sometimes to the point where our investees just get very frustrated, but at the end of it, they say thank you very much because you've prepared us now for getting private capital, right? So we've gotten them kind of to these. The other thing is that it's really critical for us to take an active position with our investees and that is to sit on the board or sit as an observer so that we can make sure that they remain committed sort of to impact. Let me just give you an example on that. We just made an investment, a small investment from a large round in an Indonesian company that it's called Online Podjak and they facilitate SMEs paying their taxes to the Indonesian government which is the source of additional tax revenue therefore for the government and then flows down to the poorest. And we went into the deal with two major names in the private equity venture capital world, Warburg, Pinkas and Sequoia and so on. Why is Global Innovation Fund going into this deal? Well, the company's gonna make money by putting all the other layer, they're embedded in SMEs and they're gonna put all the other layers onto it whether it's payroll and healthcare and all these other things onto the platform but the critical part of the model is the relationship with the Indonesian tax office. So they asked us to come in because we represent sort of the public view, the assurance, the relationships with the government that will help make this successful for both, both sides of it. We want the company to make money, right? We want that, we like the discipline of those private players coming in but it means nothing unless the Indonesian government, you know, tax revenue goes up. And on the other side, how do you incentivize those private players to enter once you've identified that need? So I'll answer this one through another portfolio company example, we have an investment in a company called Babangona which operates in three states in northern Nigeria and it's an agricultural services company that, it's like an extension model but it's really a holistic model. They provide the inputs, they develop cooperatives, they try to increase the profit for the farmers and it had been quite successful and it was looking to get, to take on some debt. It's a very capital intensive business and nobody would lend in the era. They only wanted to lend in dollars, right? Even the development banks, we talk about these DFI's, the development finance institutions that they are risk averse and they do not want to invest in local currency which is one of the problems of execution and where a lot also fails. So actually we decided we would come in and we actually gave a loan in the era which then basically de-risked it and we came in and the subordinate position de-risked it so that the development finance institutions would come in and that's our way, that's a sort of public-private partnership where our role is to de-risk, be carefully select and then the companies and then find a way to de-risk it. We want our money back too if we can but and crowd in that other capital. I'm interested in this de-risking. I mean maybe Ricotta you can take this up. I mean, how and when do you decide to de-risk a project and at what stage? I think that one of the critical aspects when you think about public and private partnership is that the two entities they need to understand each other. So and they need to understand that the government plays a major role on de-risking finance and also making the contact through the government, making the life easier for the project to be implemented in a more challenging environment. On the other side, the government needs to understand that private sector aims money and the money can be also in a responsible way. So and what I see based on my experience is that because I was on the private and on the public is that sometimes the public sector see profit as something bad, you know, that's something that we cannot mix because they are making money on the top of our investment. And then the others see the government as as low as bureaucratic. So but if you want to fulfill the SDGs, there is no way, there is no money and there is no arm in the government that is able to do that. We need a widely support from private sector to do that. And how you this risk? It's building a trust relationship where the government plays its role in supporting. For example, many times investors, they have the money, they have the drive. But for example, they don't have access to the government to do things and they feel unsecured on that neighborhood because something may happen and for example, the government may change directions. But by being partnered with the government, the chances that this happens is reduced. This is a way of the risk in a project when you have an institutional support, for example, from a government or for a UN entity or from a big foundation. So you have this, this power to make things happen. So this is one way you reduce the risk. Can I just add something to that? So the, you know, there's another way for, I mean, for companies who are interested in doing the right thing, right? Within the context of their profit-making entities, et cetera, you know, there is a question around, do you buy, do you build, do you partner, right? So some are building their own initiatives to achieve this and they've got to figure out how to do it and have those relationships and pick smartly and not get caught up into any corruption issues and you can obviously go down the litany of challenges. Some will just sort of acquire another firm that's already doing it and then some, so like go to the partnership model, so talk about these partnerships. For example, Unilever recently announced a partnership with the Global Innovation Fund, which is called the Advanced Fund and they've given us some grant capital that's very focused on achieving, you know, they see it in the framework of what their contribution is to the SDGs. This is the framework in which it's set up and they work with another partner in the UK for very, very risky, super, super risky early stage investments and then they've come to us and we've found others to match the capital. And we're helping to deploy their capital, they trust us because they know we're leaving with evidence that we're really interested in the evidence of the impact and we're gonna go give smaller amounts of money until we determine that the success rate and the bet on having a potentially dramatic impact is there and then we'll find follow-on sources and they themselves may then invest in this or buy, right? So there's this sort of, we're kind of a partner in the deploying their capital but they're really trusting us to be smart, measured and they know that because of our government backing, although we're an independent entity, we're not controlled by governments, but we're government backing, we're gonna be careful stewards of not just the capital, but all the challenges that go around investing to make the lives of the world's poor better. So we're talking about the selection of different sorts of models and different ways and instruments of going about achieving these sorts of partnerships. Does one also determine what sorts of instruments you use according to the different sorts of SDGs you're trying to address? I mean, I wonder, Ricardo, if you're working on gender, for example, if there are different ways and different models that you might want to employ, particularly to achieve greater gender equality or investments or indeed if you're aiming at zero hunger or sustainable energy for all. And this drives me, yeah, this question is perfect because if we see that SDGs, they're super nice and they're super big and if we can implement we are solving probably all the problems we have today. And just by saying that, you already think on what the result looks like right in 12 years from now. There is a good chance, very good chance that at the end we'll do something and we'll not do something. And this MDG was the same. And this drives me to answer your question. Companies and organizations, they cannot try to solve all problems because when you start trying to solve everything at the end you don't solve anything. So what is important is that you keep focus and to get things real, you need to keep focus. So in my experience at the UN, this wasn't because when you go to a country in the sub-Saharan Africa or in Middle East, what do you need to do? You need to do everything. There is lack of education, health, but you need to start with something. So many times when you try to solve a billion problems, you come at the end, they're not solving anything. And this for me is a risk on the SDG. So what organizations need to do my opinion is that they need to see on the SDG what they really think that they can make a positive, impactful contribution and work towards that. If it's water and sanitation, let's work towards that. If it's gender equality, let's work towards that. Instead of trying to do everything and then at the end you don't do. So keep focus. This is the only way for you to move the agenda forward. I mean, these are extraordinary ambitious goals and presumably both the scale of these partnerships and the speed is going to have to accelerate very significantly if we're going to come close to meeting them. From your experience of seeing the MDGs and those UN processes, what's needed and how achievable are these goals? I think that if public and private sector join forces with real intent to change things, we can make a lot of progress. We can make a massive progress. But 12 years is tomorrow. It's absolutely tomorrow. We, I think that we'll do a lot of things but we'll face a lot of challenges. Like MDGs, we did a lot of progress, but we didn't solve everything because if we had solved, we don't need the SDGs, right? So we have already solved that. And most of them are basically a follow-up on what happened on the MDGs. I mean, just to add on that and try to give you our perspective on this is that we're flooded with investment ideas, right? We've got to, the question is then, so how do you pick and why and et cetera? So what we do is we, our focus is not on a particular sector. You could say we invest in every sector but we actually don't invest based on sectors. We actually invest based on three themes and we're looking for solutions that have a potential if successful to actually change the way economic development happens. One theme is providing the poor with better access and service from the government. So the government is a core element in this, right? So that if we can find a way to help a government which we're doing, for example, right now to provide better drinking water, drinking water for those living in the villages. This is something we're doing in Bangladesh and in India right now. It's the innovation. It could be a delivery innovation. It could be a de-risking financial innovation. It could be a financial innovation but something where we're really looking at all the evidence of what's worked and what hasn't worked from the billions of dollars of aid that have gone out the door in the past and saying, all right, is there another way of doing this and if it's successful, what is the path to scale? So that's like for us, we are looking at that lens and then the Indonesian example I gave you before around we call it domestic resource mobilization. How can we find, be innovative in finding ways so that governments have more tax dollars that they can then spend on clean water and et cetera. The other is very much around bringing goods and services to the world's poorest, the last mile delivery problem but it's not just delivery. So it's really having products that they can afford. We've done everything from backing pay-as-you-go models for energy so that people can actually, they can't afford a cook stove or they can't afford X, Y and Z so we're interested in credit models. It's not really about the product, it's about the solution and we can apply that to many different things. And obviously financial services and mobile money and mobile banking is another big area but we look at it because there are a lot of mobile money operators you can go into, this is not why we're doing it. We're looking at those whose product and solution could bank the unbanked, are focused either exclusively or at least partially on that and have deep roots in the poorest areas. So that's our focus. There's a number of places there where there's a really important role for technology and innovation and that clearly links to the kinds of themes at the conference today and that will concern many of the audience. Riccardo, what would you, and we're getting towards the end of the session so I'd like just a kind of a closing thought really in terms of what your advice would be for people in those sectors who are looking for what might be sort of transformative, what kinds of technologies and innovations or what people in those fields could do to try and unlock these partnerships and achieve those social goods. I think that first on the private sector you need to reassess your risk tolerance because if you really want to make impact on countries that need, you cannot come with your I would say European or North American mindset because it will not work on the first moment. On the government side, you need to understand that there is a massive workforce on the private sector that can drive things a lot. A third point is that there is a young generation and that we can see here on the web summit that is really excited about making positive change and we can benefit from that so that what we see a lot today is this drive an interest from people to create technology to help water and sanitation and to connect and technology is becoming more and more accessible. So you go to Africa countries and you have challenges and all sorts but everybody has a mobile phone, a mobile way of paying and this is how they connect and how they do business and this is the use of technology on this very last mile. So this is what I would say from my side. Any closing quote from you, sir? Yeah, I mean, if I really look across our portfolio most of it is tech enabled and then the question is tech enabled for what, right? So because if you're looking at how to reach these people whether it's the government providing services or companies reaching them with goods and services the way to do it is tech enabled and to be aware of, the innovations around using proven technology applied to local circumstances, right? So in India, turns out that we're gonna have to end but you know, you gotta make for one company where you have to have the software that works both on a flip phone and on a smartphone and most people have both but when you wanna communicate them you know, I don't know which one they're using at what time and what you're communicating, right? This is not, that's the applicability, yeah. Fantastic, well thank you very much Ricardo and Sarah. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you.