 You saw just before our break, we were talking about art, about design, what we try to bring to you today is a set of very different perspectives. And in our final keynote, we want to discuss how to transform the un-transformable. And to talk about this topic, we invited Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Yuella. She's a former managing director of the World Bank and two-time finance minister of Nigeria. She's the chair of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, GAVI, and she sits on the board of Standard Chartered Bank, Twitter, and the African Risk Capacity, among others. A remarkable and fearless woman, having been included in the 14-2015 list of the world's 50 greatest leaders, Forbes' 2015 and 2014 list of the world's 100 most powerful women, and Time's 2014 list of the 100 most influential people. We invited Professor Ben-Tabrizzi to conduct these discussions, so Professor from Stamford, and he will be conducting these discussions, so I want just to ask you, if you have questions on this, we'll have some questions at the end, so use the mobile app to ask the questions so we'll have some time at the end to do that. So ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Yuella and Professor Ben-Tabrizzi. It's a privilege for me to be next to what I would call a force of nature and we've had already some conversation with Dr. Ngozi during the break and I'm already extremely inspired, so what I'd like you to talk about, Madam Minister, is talk about your childhood and growing up as a young girl in Nigeria. Well, thank you so much, Ben, and thank you PMI for having me here. Well, I had, I would say, an interesting and diverse childhood. I started out in the village in a village called Awashupu in Delta State, Nigeria today, living with my grandmother. My parents left me with my grandmother when I was a year old because my father got a scholarship post-war, World War II, to go and study in Germany. And so here my mother went and my grandmother brought me up and I think what that showed me was I saw, I think it sort of led to what I did later, what I've been doing with my life. I saw what poverty was like from the village. I fetched water from the stream. I went to the farm with my grandmother. I did all the things that people who didn't have great resources did. So I knew what it was to wake up in the morning and think about the meals you're going to have and how you get through the day with not too much in your pocket. So I grew up in the village, but it was also a delightful childhood with a grandmother who was very loving, but very disciplined. So I saw both sides of that equation. And when my parents came back, I flipped and went into a completely different life. I was almost nine years old by the time they came back. And you know, in those days, in the 50s and 60s, it's not like now where you can jet from one place to the other in a few hours. So for the entire time that we were almost nine years of my life, I didn't see them. So I only saw them when they came back. And by then the two of them were university lecturers at the University of Ibadun. And so I went to live a different life in a university campus. But the next episode has to do with the war. I lived through a war. From the time I was 12 till I was 15, the Nigeria Biafra War. And that was really a defining time of my life as well, where I saw people die from malnutrition. I knew what it meant to have one meal a day or no meal at all, to sleep on the floor or sleep. So it was a really tough and difficult time. So all this made me to understand I'm the kind of person who can sleep on the floor today or sleep on a feather bed and be equally comfortable in both. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Africa is one of the fastest growing regions in the world. And it also has a very young population. So perhaps you can talk about Africa, both its challenges and opportunities to the audience. Wow, that's a lot to take the whole up. Maybe just to capture in a few sentences the essence, because many people don't really know that much. But I just gave a talk at the Kennedy School about can Africa surprise the world? And what I was trying to do there was to review the challenges. Many people think about Africa in terms of the concentration of poverty and the challenges to growth. And it is true that as of now, there are 570 million poor people. And I say poor, those living below the absolute poverty line of $1.98 a day, there are 570 million and 453 million of them living in Africa, so almost 79%. So the image people have is of a continent of poverty. But there's a flip side to this, and the continent of opportunity as well. So when I say can Africa surprise the world, it is sharing with people what are those opportunities that they often miss. It's very interesting. Most of the world is aging. I think 20% or more of the population in Europe is 65 years and older, 17% in the Americas. Think another 20 in the Asia. But in Africa, it's the other way around, 50% to 60% of the population in most countries is 15 to 35 years old. So the demographics, there's a demographic dividend to be won on the continent. There's a chance for increased productivity, which properly harness can really help to transform the continent. And that's one of my arguments. And what will it take? It takes very good economic management. And the continent showed between 2000 to 2015 where it was growing at 4% to 5% a year for one and a half decades that policymakers can manage the economy properly. So what I'm arguing is let's try to build on the successes we've had. We also have many sources of growth on the continent. We cannot do the kind of trick that was done in East Asia with regard to manufacturing because manufacturing value added on the continent is about 10%. And has stagnated, but there are other sectors in services that are really growing very fast and can help to transform the continent. So these are some of the arguments that I put forward. The third piece is technology. And many people don't know the mobile phone revolution. In a population of 1.2 billion, there are 750 million mobile phones. So a lot of services, a lot of are being transformed and people are being included in the economy in many countries in ways that were not before simply because of this technology, not your sophisticated high-end but even sort of low-level technology, what you can do and information you can disseminate through the mobile phone. So I make the argument that okay, internet penetration on the continent is about 20% very low. Among the young people that I talked about is 40% and likely to rise. And these are the people who are going to run the continent. They are more digitally connected, more technology-serving, more willing to take risks. And so based on some of these things I've laid out, I believe that the continent can indeed surprise the world and turn around this cycle of poverty into a cycle of opportunity. Excellent. Thank you. As you know, all day we've been talking about the high failure rates in organizational transformation. You have a much tougher task and that is transforming a governmental institution, not just that but also transforming government. And tell us about how can we actually improve the chances of success with transformation of both the government and the country? Well let me say that one of the things I learned. I went from the World Bank, I had a chance at government two times. The first time in 2003 when I was asked to come and become a finance minister I was a vice president at the World Bank and I resigned and I left. At that time the World Bank was under the president, Jim Wolfenson, who had carried out an extensive program of change in the bank. And I was lucky that I was promoted to be director of institutional change, meaning that I had to help implement many of the transformations that he was talking about and trying to get through the institution. So it wasn't that I read any great books, I was not an organizational guru, but with the knowledge I had I knew it was going to be very difficult at home to try and transform a country. But that's what we set out to try and do. Many people regarded Nigeria at this time as unreformable, incorrigible, corrupt, weak, all the things you can think about, impossible to transform. We thought that with the leadership of the then president, Tobas Angel, and a good diagnosis of what were the things ailing the country, a clear vision of what results we wanted to achieve. So there were two ends of a book, if you will. The first was a vision of where we want to go and who we want to be. The end is results that we could measure to show that change was really happening. And in between was this deep diagnosis, not of the symptoms, but of the deep causes of what was wrong, and then a strategy for implementation and an 18 to really try and implement this within government. So this is what we had. And my story is, I captured it in a book called, which actually brought a lot of props. I don't know if I can read it. I'm very short. So short arms. But it's called reforming the unreformable, lessons from Nigeria. And what I tried to do was to talk about how did this transformation work, where did we succeed and where did we fail? And we had four years. The term of a president is four years to achieve this. So it's not like we had 10 years or 15 years to make it work. And I think that in the four years we had remarkable success because we had a president who believed in the transformation, one who accepted the deep diagnosis of what was wrong, poor economic management, especially macroeconomic management reliance, excessive reliance on one source of growth and one commodity, which was oil, and the need to diversify that. Weak institutions and corruptions, which needed to be plugged in and leak a lack of transparency. And then sort of demise in our cultural values, which had sustained us as a country through the years. So those were four broad themes in the diagnosis we did, and we tried to turn this around. And how can you do it quickly? Most transformations fail. And in the World Bank, where I was before, we had tried to transform, and I think during President Wolfenstein's time he was quite successful in transforming, but there had been other transformations that had not been as successful. And so I knew that transformations, in order to work, you need this leadership, but you also need people to believe that something is wrong. You cannot transform a country or place unless you've got, you know, those who are a bottom up, if you will, as well as a top-down kind of process. So one of the challenges we faced was going out and being communicating and getting people to believe that we had serious problems, we couldn't afford to waste more time for Nigeria to be lagging behind, and we really needed the buying to change things in the country. And so we crafted a story, and I think at the bottom of all transformations, if you really wanted to work, you must carry the people with whom, I mean, for whom you're trying to do the transformation or who need the place transformed along with you, and then you must have a team of true believers who are ready to really lead in the transformation, otherwise it can falter, and thus falter. And the third thing or the fourth thing is that you need results, unless you can show people measurable results that the changes you're making are really leading to something better than you don't get there. So for me, most transformations fail because they take a long time. They don't show results quickly enough. You need some quick wins to convince people to go along on this path, and that was what we tried to craft. And you know, the challenge of transforming an organization is that the people that you're transforming they have job for life. You don't have the traditional carrot and sticks. It's very hierarchical. So how do you deal with that resistance and the lack of motivation, oh, this is the flavor of the month, and they're not serious. We just make sure that the four-year term is over, and then we'll deal with another leader. You know, sometimes when you're doing transformation, a crisis can help. You know, never waste a good crisis. You know, so, so, and I think, let me just take one, just illustrate a little story. And this is within government. You know, I was minister of finance for the first three years, and then I was asked to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And so you're transforming, trying to do a whole of government transformation, which is very difficult. But within that, you know, you also have to convince each ministry and each sector. They have their own particular problem. So you can't just use a broad brush approach, meaning that you've got to sort of analyze what is wrong in that particular sector and to show them. So, so my story with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you know, first of all, it was very difficult for me because I'm a finance person. What am I doing here? But I determined that, okay, if I go there, we're going to have to try and get the people more excited, more looking inside to see what is wrong, and more trying to change themselves. So the first thing I did when I went to the ministry, at that time, they were building a new building for them. It was going to take another couple of years. They hadn't moved in. But I noticed that the present environment, the building they were in, was so unexciting, so demoralizing. You walk in. This is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The first thing I noticed was scattered chairs everywhere as you entered. Guards who were sitting there, lounging and slouching over their desks. The elevator, as you came in, didn't work. My office was on the sixth floor, so I had to climb six flights of stairs. Very good for me because I need the exercise. But you can imagine ambassadors coming to see you and climbing six flights of stairs in a big country like mine. So there were all these outside things. And I found the morale. So what was wrong? The physical environment in which they worked was un-prepossessing. There was no light. Most of the time, there were electricity outages. You know, the rooms were stifling and hot, couldn't receive cables because things were not working. You wouldn't believe this. I mean, I couldn't believe this. And so I thought to myself, how are you going to get people in here to even listen to the big things about transforming and serving the country better when their own particular physical environment doesn't work? So I tried to find out, why is it that this Ministry is sitting in a corner where they don't get electricity regularly, and this is our foreign affairs ministry. So I called the electricity people and heard there were some problems with the transformer in the place. To cut a long story short, I decided something needed to change in this physical environment in order to snap people back because everybody was kind of demoralized, commis-louching into work. So I called the electricity people and said, this was a Thursday on which I went to work. On Monday, we have to solve this problem. Long story short, we managed to find a way to get electricity back into the building. I spent the weekend not going over my papers, but clearing all the rickety chairs I found and buying potted plants. I bought a bank of potted plants and lined the front of the ministry. So when people came in to work, they said totally transformed the environment, the elevators were working, et cetera. They couldn't believe it. And just as I was getting into the running and diagnosis of what we would do, a good crisis came. And this was what I exploited, Lebanon. This was 2006, and fighting broke out in Lebanon. And all countries were evacuating their nationals. But our people were not used to this. If there's a problem in the country, nobody asked, are there Nigerian nationals in this country? What are they doing? They're going to evacuate them, even though we had an ambassador. So with this raging, I did something they had never done before. I called the Middle East division, let's get the ambassador. I called the ambassador. What are you doing? Do we have nationals? He was in shock. Put out the alarm. We are going to evacuate them. He said, but I have no money. I said, don't worry about that. Get the people in, try to arrange, find a plane, et cetera, et cetera. We'll get you the money. I went to the president and said, we've got to evacuate our nationals. For the first time in our history, we were like other countries. We evacuated our nationals. It was on television. It was on news. And other African countries that did not have any means, all rushed, their nationals rushed to the Nigerian embassy and were evacuated along with us. And it became a big story of pride. And I exploited that to say, now we need change. We cannot be working the way we used to work before. Look what can happen when we work differently. Not only can we serve Nigeria better, but we can actually serve the continent better. Excellent. Dr. Ngozi, can you talk about a moment during your period where you were minister both from finance and also foreign ministry, where you almost felt like you needed to give up, where things were so bad, where you were like, I'm just not going to be able to do this? And what kind of, what led you to go back and keep fighting? Well, I think one of the toughest moments in my career and in my life, and Mark, you have never dreamt I'd be, I didn't grow up thinking I'm going to be a finance minister. I wouldn't get involved in any politics. So it was all happenstance. But one of the toughest moments actually was not, was my second time as finance minister. I'd done the first term with money to transform, but not it was, we had a lot of success. I just want to talk about the success. The measurement was prior to this transformation, the country was growing at 2.5% GDP growth per annum. By the time we finished, we were at 6% on average. Can we just hear for this? This is amazing. So we had money to triple GDP growth, and it's all there in the statistics. I love things that don't need any debate, just go and look at the numbers. And so the second time around, when I was asked to come back, I saw that some of the things that we needed to finish in terms of transformation were linked to strengthening and building institutions and fighting corruption, which was one of the plans, and enthroning transparency into government. So that, so that leaders can be held accountable. And this applies anywhere. Where you don't have transparency, there's no way you can hold leaders accountable for change. So I, I went back and one of the things that we were doing as a country, as you see now is still relevant today, we subsidize the price of petroleum at the pump. And you can see the riots all around the world, right? That you have today, because people are trying to increase the price of petrol, the giletion in France, in Ecuador and everywhere. So we were subsidizing, and this was really hitting the fiscal, the finances of the country. We were spending up to 5% of GDP, almost $10 billion on these subsidies. And they were no longer sustainable. But the subsidies seem to be increasing at a very rapid rate. You know, out of sync with what we thought was the growth in demand. And so when I came, I asked the president if we could audit the payments we make, because we would pay importers. We produce crude oil. But our refining capacity only meets about 20% of the needs. So we have to also export and then buy refined petroleum. And so those who import the refined ones, they would sell at a subsidized price and the government would reimburse them the subsidy. And it was this subsidy that was escalating. So I said, could we audit the subsidy payments just to see if everything was okay? And he said, fine. So we audited $8.5 billion worth of payments, and we found $2.5 billion worth of fraud. So the president, president, good luck, Jonathan, then strongly, I said to him, we can't pay. And he backed it 100%. And we told these importers, let me just give you an example of the type of fraud. They said a ship delivered oil or refined oil to the country on a particular day. And of course the auditors went to look at whether the delivery happened. And we found, for example, that a ship that was supposedly on Nigeria's shore delivering oil, we looked at Lloyd's register tracks the movement of all ships in the world. And that ship was not in Nigeria, it was in China. So obviously it was not delivering the oil. So those were the kinds of things. So when we refused to pay, I didn't really think I thought we would have a battle with these people. But what happened next was that on a fine Sunday morning in 2012, November, I got a phone call December that my mother had been kidnapped. So my 83-year-old mother who was coming home from church saw a car entering the compound where she lived with my father in the village. And a young man jumped out of the car and said to her, are you the mother of the minister? And she was very happy. She thought it was someone coming to congratulate her, people would do, your daughter is doing a good job. And the person slapped her and pushed her inside the car and she was taken. So I was in my house in Abuja. My brother called me to say that he had very bad news. My mother had been kidnapped. My father wasn't there because he was attending a conference in another part of the country. And so we thought it was just one of these kidnappings for money. My father came and joined me where I was in Abuja and he said, well, let's get ready because you're the finance minister, it's going to be a very heavy demand. But what happened when they finally called my brother with their demands, it was that I should go to television and radio and resign publicly and leave the country. And I should go back to the US where I had been working at the World Bank and stay there. So it was one of, to cut a long story short, it was one of the worst moments of my life. Because when you grow up, you think of taking care of your parents. You don't think of being the cause of their demise. I left alone. I would have gone and resigned. But my father insisted that I not do so. And he had this joke that he and my mother were really past their life expectancy. So they were no more of use to anyone. So if she had to go, I should not give in. So that was a very, one of the most difficult moments in trying to implement a change and a reform that I ever encountered. The end of the story is good. The president and everybody, there was a huge turn out beating the bushes looking for these people. And at the end of five days, I think the heat got so much. So somehow she was able to escape from where she was. And she's still alive today. I must say that she also has the second book that is called Fighting Corruption is Dangerous, which is really a very courageous book for her to write, and I want to acknowledge you for that. Well, thank you for advertising my books. They are both MIT Press. They are public policy books on Amazon. Yes. Wow. With that, what I'd like to propose is that we open up this for question and answer. I think we are getting some Q&A from the audience. I do have a lot more questions, but I'd really like to also have a chance for the audience to also ask questions. I believe the questions will show up in the monitor when people ask. How could we, I guess the first one is bottom one, okay. How do we, what are some of the sustainable metrics for a successful transformation for a nation? That's a good question. Well, for me, you know, and please bear with me because I'm also an economist by training, very much focused on metrics and results. And for me, I think some of the regular metrics you think about with regard to the success of an economy, I think are valid metrics. So let's start with simple. Is your transformation resulting in two things. Are you growing the economy faster and better? But is that growth creating employment? Because in our economy, it's not just a question of growth. It's creating jobs for the many young people. We talked about the demographics. And so you can have growth that is not job creating. So for me, measuring the unemployment rate, the rate of job creation, just as they do in this country, is very important. Some of the macroeconomic metrics for us that matter inflation rate, you know, we also look at the exchange rate. That's not so important about the stability and level of that in the fiscal deficit. So some of the common economic indicators. But at the end of the day, the issue is, are you touching people's lives? Are you creating jobs? Are you serving them better? And do they have access to better healthcare? Do they have access to better education for their children? Are the roads working better? And you can develop metrics to measure all of these and capture that. So those would be the ones that that focus on. We're getting a lot of love from the audience just to congratulate you for such an inspiring history and story. Can you give advice for young generation that are struggling to find their path and meaning in their life? How could they transform themselves? Well, I hesitate, you know, to dole out advice because I think I myself need advice a lot of times. But, you know, the biggest thing for me that worked for me is believing in your own self. And then asking yourself, but why are you here? You know, and what I ask myself, why am I here? You know, the purpose is, could I do something that would change someone's life? And I often tell young people doing that doesn't mean you have to be in government. You can do it from wherever you sit. Could be in government, could be from the private sector. The private sector side is what I'm doing, making a meaningful change, even a small change in the lives of others. Am I contributing to something bigger than myself? Or is it all about myself? If you're not doing that through your job, through some other work that you're doing in civil society, are you changing something in someone's life? It can be through macro policies, through small actions, but there has to be change. So that's what I tell young people, find something that you can contribute to that is larger than yourself in your life. Great. And the other question was, how do we know when the transformation is over? When is the transformation actually over? Transformation is never over. For me, that's the mistake that countries actually make. That's why you come and need huge reform programs such as the World Bank or the IMF, you know, the World Bank where I used to work, come into a country and say you need a huge reform. No, you have to continue transforming a country and organization yourself continuously. To me, what does this mean? In this era of change, it means continuous learning, always being curious, always trying to find out what is happening next, never being complacent. So for me, transformation is not a one-time affair, it's an ongoing thing in a life. Great. And how can we make transformation more inclusive and more sustainable? I think for me, transformation works best when the people, again, you know, when you do transformation to people, it doesn't work as well. You can do it, but it's not as sustainable. But if you bring people up to agree that they need to transform and include them in actually diagnosing what the issues are and how things need to change and what path they can play, then you have a more inclusive and a more sustainable transformation. So in your organization, don't neglect what the youngest, newest comma has to say because sometimes they actually come in new, can see all the ugly things in the organization that people who have been there for a long time cannot see. So I would include even the young voices in that. While you're saying that I see a young lady going to her boss like this, how is it like to be a member of Twitter board at the same time chair Gavi? Are these two different universities? Yes, they are, but they intersect somewhere. And that's what is fascinating to me. You know, Gavi, you know, the Global Alliance of Vaccines and Immunization is the organization I chair the board whose goal is to immunize all the children in developing countries. We work in 63 countries and so far we've immunized 760 million children and saved 30 million lives in the 15 years of existence, sorry, 20 years of existence of the organization. And that, you know, Twitter, as we all know what Twitter is, but Twitter wants to, Twitter's objective is to enable the world to have meaningful conversations and dialogue, meaningful conversations and dialogue. So to connect people around serious issues. It's not just these tweets, you see, coming, but there are people on the platform having a dialogue about serious issues. And for me, one of those serious issues is how can we have a world where we have access to life-saving vaccinations and there are still children dying because they can't afford to have this? And what can we do to change that? So I'm in an organization that has a platform that can encourage people to have that kind of conversation about how to save the lives of children under five in this world. This is a question that's not being asked, but I'd like to ask you, and that is, you were a trendsetter, the first woman, foreign minister, finance minister, what message do you have for the women leaders and future leaders, if you will, when they're dealing with either a glass ceiling or challenging environments where they like to be able to push through it? I think that the glass ceiling is real and, you know, I've encountered it multiple times, but the only answer I have to wait is excelling in what you do and not giving up in trying to get where you're going, excelling in what you do, making your voice heard, but not giving up. It's very easy to get discouraged when you get to a point and it seems like you can't make it. But sometimes if you look properly, an opportunity may present itself, and that may enable you to break through. What do I mean? I saw one time in my own career, multiple times, there were assignments that nobody else wanted to do because they were risky, they were unpleasant, certainly the men did not want to do it, and I, in one case, was thrown into the assignment. I didn't really volunteer for it, I was thrown into it as a younger person, but I managed to carry out that assignment, this was at the World Bank successfully, and it really gave me the kind of exposure I would never have had. You know, the vice president of the unit in which I got to know who I am because when I was leading this assignment, the president in the country in which we had the problem kept sending messages to the vice president, ministers to come and visit him, and each time they came with a complaint, I was the one holed up to explain why this project was not working, and in the end we managed to clean it up and make it work, and that just kind of gave a breakthrough. That was, and that sort of gave me the visibility, and from then on I went on, so not every assignment I was given was a pleasant one. Not every assignment I sought to take was a pleasant one, but it gave me the afford, I felt I couldn't do it. So don't take it on if you can't make it, but if you can, it can give you that breakthrough. So that's my advice, be a bit of a risk taker. I've taken a lot of risks in my career, and the last one almost resulted in something quite adverse. But the way to breakthrough is to be a little bit of a risk taker, and this applies to both men and women. Great. Thank you so much. I'm going to end, Madam Minister, with this question about what is your vision for Nigeria 50 years from now? 50 years is too long. I mean, Nigeria should be doing much better now. So 20 years from now, you know, we should be a country where my vision is a country where nobody is living below the absolute poverty line, whatever that line is, at that time today is $1.98 a day, you know, where Nigerians have access to electricity, 55% of the people in my country don't have access to constant electricity. That should change good roads, basic services and infrastructure, access to education and health. A country where we are on top of skilling, because technology is going to change everything. So it's a country where people are, young people are agile, flexible, and able to adapt to whatever is coming down their way. Nigeria should be a member of the G20 by this time. We can't wait 50 years, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we need a total transformation that should put this economy right where it needs to be, among the 20 strongest and largest in the world. Wow. Let me acknowledge you for just this extraordinary presentation. This has definitely been one of the highlights of my life. I want to really acknowledge you and thank you for the audience for great questions. I believe Madam Minister will be around a little while after this if you have any other questions. But thank you so much again, really appreciate it.