 Welcome everyone to CSIS and today's event which is on Corporate Social Enterprise, a business-driven approach to development. This event is part of the Chevron Forum on Development. This is an ongoing series we have here at CSIS that focuses on the private sector's role in global development. I'm Jennifer Crook. I direct the Africa program here and I'll say just a few brief words of introduction before turning over to my colleague Dan Rundy who is co-director of the CSIS project on U.S. leadership and development and William Shryer chair in global analysis here at CSIS. We're going to be looking today at the Niger Delta partnership initiative which Chevron launched in 2010 in Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta to try to tackle some of the region's long-standing challenges. The operating environment in the Niger Delta I think as you all know is an extremely difficult and complex and the region really offers a textbook case of the resource curse. The Delta's oil production accounts for some 90% of Nigeria's federal government revenue but communities of the Delta have been mired in poverty, unemployment, underinvestment in critical infrastructures, and with state and local governments that have been unwilling or unable to provide basic services and security to their citizens. The political economy of oil in the Delta has entrenched powerful vested interests and stymied public investment in economic activity outside of the oil sector and as the resulting sense of grievance and injustice is contributed to insecurity and violence that is morphed in many ways with sophisticated criminal networks with a major oil theft industry and an insurgency that's in a fragile point right now. There's an amnesty that's due to expire. You have upcoming elections in Nigeria in 2015 which have never gone very well in the Delta and which promised to be fairly contentious. In the midst of this, Chevron has launched this new initiative and I imagine that somewhere in Nigeria there's some vast underground bunker that houses the many development plans, the master plans, the commitments, the commission reports, analyses, white papers that have laid out strategies to bring development and security to the Niger Delta. But with the failure of the successive government efforts and top-down approaches, companies have had to step in to fill the gap. And in the past corporate social responsibility in the Delta has largely been understood as kind of a cost of doing business, mitigating reputational risks, giving social license to operate and maintaining good relations with the communities in your immediate geographical vicinity. So building a school or a clinic, funding non-governmental groups to do development projects, funding local community organizations to do traditional programs. These have been important but they haven't had really the transformational effect that gets us the systemic problems that make the Niger Delta such a difficult operating environment. So Chevron has been really at the forefront of thinking about how to tackle this in a longer term, more systemic way. As if a number of companies, but I think Chevron has really been at the cutting edge of this. The notion of corporate social enterprise, I think as we'll hear today, really shifts away from this mentality of philanthropic efforts that are seen as a cost of doing business to something of a business opportunity approach, a corporate investment model that gets at the nexus of social objectives and business objectives. This changes really the incentive structure, which is what I think makes this so very different from all those many models of the past. As you'll hear, and I'll wrap up, as you'll hear, there's been a lot of thinking that has gone into this, a lot of deliberation. And most important, I think a lot of on the ground analysis assessment that I think Dennis has led on the ground to get this right rather than to plunge willy-nilly into yet another development strategy. And I think that kind of analysis, A, it can inform other efforts in the Niger Delta, but I think it also gives us a very good baseline against which to measure some of the impact, the ultimate impact of this kind of initiative. So I'm going to turn over to Dan Rundy. We have a distinguished panel which Dan will introduce, and I'm looking forward to the discussion as well. Thanks. Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks very much. The panel today is on, as we just heard, Corporate Social Enterprise is a business-driven approach to development. We've got, we're going to hear from Dennis Fleming, who's the executive director of the Niger Delta Partnership Initiative Foundation, NDPI. We're also going to hear from Jane Nelson, who's a senior fellow and director of the CSR Initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School and also NDPI board member, as well as my friend Christy Reagan, who's chief of party for USAID Grand Challenges for Development at DAI. I think, as Jennifer mentioned, as the traditional development landscape is changing and the role of the private sector and development is increasing in the elevator, the new approaches are emerging. And I think this corporate social enterprise model, which is designed to align with advanced business objectives, is an emerged model or an emerging model that Chevron has been pioneering. So we're going to have a chance to talk about the NDPI model, but also more broadly, the conversation about corporate social enterprises and ways in which companies are expanding their roles in solving broader development challenges. I'm going to start with my friend Jane Nelson. Jane, can you talk a little bit about some of the concept steps behind corporate social enterprise and how they apply to existing corporate social investments? Thank you. Thank you, Dan and Jennifer. I'm great to be here in your stunning, stunning new home, CSIS. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to start by highlighting five key concepts that I think both underpin the model that Chevron is implementing in the Niger Delta, but I think also underpin sort of emerging good practice in your corporate social investment more broadly. And the first one is a very explicit commitment to both harnessing business disciplines, business skills, business processes and business objectives together with sort of social development disciplines and skills and processes and objectives. And yet we hear a lot about partnerships between different organizations that do one or the other, but this model is actually trying to sort of bring them both together in a single sort of organizational model, which is being very explicit about their needing to be business benefit and business outcomes and also what are the related sort of social and development impacts and outcomes and trying to be rigorous about not just what those are, but sort of the hybrid process of managing and implementing them. So the sort of hybrid, but a very explicit and intentional hybrid approach, which my colleagues at FSG would call creating shared value, but being you're putting it into an organizational structure, not just talking about it, I think is the first thing to look at. The second key concept that I think has been very interesting in this particular project and has relevance for others is an independent governance structure. The way that the program has been set up and the initiative has been set up is that there's actually sort of two foundations, one at the corporate global level, one at the national sort of operational level, and both of them are aligned, Chevron-led, Chevron-supported, they're aligned to Chevron's compliance and governance processes. They've got senior Chevron executives on both of the boards, but they've got a majority of independent external board directors. And if you think about it, that's good corporate governments now on corporate boards of directors. And I think as we think more strategically about corporate social investment, how does one get either independent advisory boards or independent governance structures to increase the rigor and the robustness of decision-making strategy as well as oversight. So sort of bringing independence into the governance structure is the second key concept I think has been interesting. And having a corporate structure and a local operational governance structure is unusual, and we might want to dig that out a bit more. I think the third key concept that has been very important in this, and in some similar initiatives, is a very strong focus on building local capacity and both local institutional capacity of existing community institutions, government institutions, as well as local individual leaders, and not just going for the traditional authorities, but women and youth being two very important focus groups in building leadership capability, as well as the institutional capability. And through support on training on project management, organizational management, so strengthening the institutions, also using technology to give individual leaders and institutions more of a voice, more of an opportunity to connect with each other, and also connecting economic institutions locally with conflict resolution and peace-building institutions. It's a very, very complex, challenging area, but being, again, intentional about your success being local institutions and individuals gaining both the capacity and the voice and the access that they need to be effective. So that sort of local capacity building is, I think, a third key concept. The fourth key concept is what I call broadly sort of taking systems-based, or trying to develop systems-based solutions. And two examples in the case of NDPI. A lot of projects try and support a thousand entrepreneurs, and then they have training, and they even sometimes get access to finance, and then they don't have access to the market. So one of the things that NDPI has been doing in working with the AI is saying, okay, what are several value chains? We've taken cassava and aquaculture and palm oil, which can generate jobs in the Delta, can generate income. And let's try and understand the entire value chain, and then work with local partners, use technology to increase efficiency, productivity, and inclusion along an entire sort of value chain. So you're strengthening a market or a value chain, not just supporting some individual entrepreneurs. And again, that's much harder, it's more difficult, it's slower, but I think that systems approach is needed. A second very quick example of a systems approach is not only doing sort of projects immediately around the company, but using the experience of the projects and the data collected to have a broader regional discussion with government and crucially with government about what does a regional development vision look like, and how do we all work together to do that? So that's a sort of fourth concept, sort of systems-based solutions. And then the fifth and final concept, which, you know, Dennis personally, and I give you real recognition for this, Dennis, have tried to do is in monitoring and evaluation is critical, and we all recognize it's critical. I think a lot of focus on M&E is, you know, what are we measuring and what are the metrics, which is very important, but the actual process of monitoring and evaluation is as if not more important. And one of the things that, you know, Dennis has been a champion of is more participatory evaluation models. And, you know, that's well known in the development community. It's less so in the corporate community. You do it with your consumers and your customers as a company, because you're not delivering it, they're no longer your customers. But actually in community engagement work, making sure that when you're doing evaluation, the community leaders and community organizations are actually involved in both, you know, designing evaluation processes, but also being part of the evaluation process, participatory evaluations. So sort of hybrid models, systems-based solutions is focused on capacity building, your independent governance, and a much more participatory approach to evaluation of some of the concepts that I think are in this model, but I think have important relevance for all social investment models. Thank you, Jane. Absolutely. Dennis, can you talk a little about the Corporate Social Enterprise model in relation to NDPI and its specific structure? Yeah, I think that a way that we've applied this, these concepts of the Corporate Social Enterprise in NDPI, you can find in a range of different ways that we structured ourselves and structured our ability to work with other organizations. And Jane had mentioned the fact that we have two foundations that we've established, and that wasn't actually our original intention. We recognized the value of doing an initiative in this way where we're reaching out very aggressively to the donor community and to the private sector to work alongside us and trying to achieve some social objectives, that it's best to do that at an arms length from the company and from its core business activities. And so we recognize the value of having a foundation and doing that. And then it was mostly because of legal considerations that we recognize that we had to have two foundations, one in the US and one in Nigeria. And it created a lot of challenges for us in the sense that for every project and decision that we do, we actually have to get approved by two boards. And luckily, we find a very strong kind of alignment between the two boards of the foundations and they complement each other. We have one board in Nigeria, which is very heavily focused on the operational issues and on managing the implementation on the ground. Whereas the board for the foundation in the US is much more focused on strategic issues and on donor outreach and making sure that what we're doing kind of aligns with others' interests and activities that they already have planned for that region. So having these two foundations created certainly a level of complexity in this whole model. But we found that this whole concept of having independent governance, for example, made a very big difference where we have four independent directors and three Chevron directors on each of the boards. And I've found that that's really made a difference in terms of how the company looks at the governance role, that the company directors that sit on the boards of these foundations can kind of focus much more on where is the business value, whereas the independent directors focus a lot more on the social value. And that helps us to get the right balance of interest within this model. And so the company has learned through this process that having independent directors on the board is not so much about preceding control as it is about adding value. And that the company decision makers in a structure like this can really kind of let the development experts address the development challenges and issues within the decision making body, whereas the company people can make sure that it's aligned with the corporation's business value that it's trying to get out of it. And this kind of layered or segmented approach to structuring this whole initiative and this corporate social enterprise has extended to the way that we even engage and contract our implementing partners and working in things where we recognize that through our local foundation which has a presence in the Niger Delta in two economic development centers that we operate from there, that we can use those centers in our programs in ways where we engage international partners to come in and bring in technical expertise, but not to take over the entire management of the projects and activities that we're doing on the ground. Instead our foundation services somewhat of a hub or a catalyst for getting together international partners and a growing network of local partners to work together on the interventions that we're doing. And so we find this one is certainly a lot more cost effective in terms of how we're using our local partners, but even more importantly it's building local capacity a lot more quickly. We depend very heavily on our local partners and we're constantly assessing for every activity that we do. How much do we need to depend on the international expertise of our international partners and how much can the local partners handle? And so it's really kind of an adapted approach looking at each individual activity, what is the local capacity and how can we improve that? And then what that gives us is really kind of instead of one big partnership, it gives us a portfolio of partnerships to work within. And we don't ask donor partners, for example, to fund our foundation. The foundation is funded by Chevron and Chevron funds go towards the projects that we're doing, but we work more with the donor partners and others at the project level. We identify where are their overlapping interests and our funding models for working together with donor partners take all shapes and sizes depending on the need that we're trying to address. So in some cases we give some of our funds to a donor partner to do the contracting and procurement and we provide support to it. In other cases we fund projects in parallel where we're us and a donor partner are funding the same organization to do different aspects of the same project. And in some cases we actually fund complementary projects where we're working under a common strategy, but a donor partner is funding one program and we're funding another and we link them up in various ways. So taking this kind of approach to looking at each individual need and how do we piece together the right partnerships to work on it has been a really important learning for us and it helps us to constantly recognize that the structure, the model that we apply needs to arise from the goals that we're trying to achieve, the outputs that we're trying to generate for a specific project. And we feel this gives us somewhat of an entrepreneurial approach to setting this initiative up where we're constantly adapting to the context to the need. We're adjusting our plans as we see new opportunities and we try to fill gaps where we see that they exist in ways that we can be a catalyst for more impact and more development. Jane, you gave a very full description of some of the principles behind corporate social enterprise. Could you talk a little bit about based on Dennis's description, what you see as specific to NDPI, what's new and different about it and or how it addresses some of the gaps that you've seen in corporate social investment? Yeah, I think, thanks, Dan. I think the things that are new and different, I mean, each of the components that I outlined and what Dennis has said are being done elsewhere. And I think it's bringing together that is particularly relatively new about the model. This idea of having this dedicated organization structure, which doesn't have to be set up in this case, an independent entity from the company, a number of companies are setting up internal incubation units. I think you would have thought it might be in the audience for creating sort of shared value models. But sort of having a dedicated unit that brings together these different skill sets and mindsets and the right incentives, I think, is one thing that is different. And the independent board oversight is certainly not common. I mean, to me, I think the two most exciting aspects of the model are using corporate foundation funding and social investment to catalyze making markets work more effectively for the poor and being more inclusive for the poor. And so business is market-driven and so often corporate philanthropy is totally unrelated to markets and making markets work. And so I think that that focus on making markets work and then understanding the link between markets and your poverty and access to income and exclusion and conflict and peace building and you're trying to build linkages between those two. You're just particularly unique and challenging in this context, but as is also in others. So that sort of market-driven approach and trying to make markets work better is one thing I think that's particularly interesting, but not as many other foundations and corporate social initiatives are doing. And then I think the second thing that I'm most excited about is this sort of greater participatory evaluation model. And as I say, I think the development community has done participatory analysis and evaluation and monitoring for a while, but you have companies to be much more strategic in engaging the communities that they work with and the community partners in both design of programs but also evaluating programs I think is exciting. I do want to make one caveat just in case anyone should think in the audience that this is the only thing that Chevron is doing or should be doing in Nigeria and the Delta and that one of the challenges and I think it is a challenge for the initiative is how you align a program like this which is about harnessing social investment dollars to be most effective for development and the company with the companies, human rights programs and risk management and grievance mechanisms with communities and participatory agreements with communities with local content programs, building local suppliers, local skills, and indeed with working with government in the case of the oil and gas industry on revenue management more generally. This is a particularly challenging industry sector and country but so this is one component and one of the key challenges is how you take your social investment and make it as strategic as possible and as participatory as possible which I think we're doing here and then how that links to the other things the company is doing to ensure that it's overall development contribution and footprint is positive at both the national, regional and local level. Thank you very much. Christy, you've been working on partnerships for a long time and DIA has a partnership relationship with Chevron around NDPI. Can you talk about the opportunities that this corporate social enterprise model poses for development partnerships and can you talk also about what are some of the incentives behind joining a partnership like NDPI and as well as specifically from your perspective as an implementer, what's your experience with these partnerships? Wow, that's three. Okay, let me take the first one. What are the big opportunities around this model for partnerships? I see two huge ones and a number of other ones but the big ones I see are it's an opportunity I think to break down the exclusivity and there I say even some elitist qualities that I've developed around a lot of the partnerships. What do I mean by that? You know a lot of partnerships, they're a big donor and they're a big company and it could be Chevron or Walmart or Procter and Gamble but it's like that and there's not a lot of space for others to play and we've all become I think including DIA and other implementers far too passive in the whole partnership model. So I think and I welcome this new model put out by Chevron because I think it's an inclusive model for partnerships and it goes way beyond it. It includes local actors who whenever I've been asked you know why is it just like a big multinational what about the little local actors? People would say well you know it's so hard to get them they don't have a lot of money you got to run around it takes a lot of time. This model has the local actors as critical and I'll talk more about that later about the sustainability. I also think governments have been left out largely from a lot of the big partnership models and this brings government in and it makes a role for implementers also and we're not just their DAI as a contractor and as an implementer. I think one of the things that's been really hard to even convince and tell people about it DAI is that we are partnering with Chevron. Yes we are getting resources and we have a you know we implement and we get money from them but we're a partner and it's different. So I want to say that it's a huge opportunity to have a greater more inclusive model of partnerships. The second thing I'd like to say about this opportunity is that it's it takes partnerships as a model and it actually doesn't just have them at the beginning forming this this entity that then does a project. It actually takes the partnership model and says you know we need to be doing partnerships all along and throughout the implementation of this undertaking. So that means that Chevron is forming and it may bring in USAID and it may bring in DFID and it may bring other donors in and then I'm just coming from a lunch where they're trying to engage a number of other private sector actors at a at a large global level, other organizations, trade associations, civil society, then you get down to the local level and you're using the partnership model all the way along along the value chain analysis and everything else. So you're integrating and actually demonstrating the value of the partnership model not just to create something at the start and get some money but to actually use it to solve the problem and I think that's new and fresh and I think that is really building a more robust model. I think this model also it it really tries to get beyond this distrust of business interests and builds around the business interests. It it really looks at markets and enterprises and the value of of business all the way throughout Chevron's business model as well as local businesses. It it aligns the really the long term corporate perspective with some carefully designed long term very deliberate slower paced program activities. We've not really seen that we are we always hear oh this oil company is going to be there for 75 years but oftentimes their programs are like hyper accelerated you know like they're on ultra caffeine or something. But this program actually aligns that long term perspective with a more deliberate carefully thought out well paced program implementation. And I think another unique opportunity is around the knowledge sharing that this partnership is promoting. This is just a case of it but it happens in the field all the time and they're bringing this model to other donors to other actors to other potential partners to government to implementers and they're doing a lot of knowledge sharing to ask me three questions I'm going to touch really quickly on the other ones. What are the incentives behind joining a partnership like NDPI sustainability. Another I think myth about partnerships is that we thought if we just got Wal-Mart with 66,000 suppliers in their supply chain that that makes a sustainable partnership. That's not it. Actually it's the whole web that happens down here that brings sustainability and so I think this inclusive integration of partnerships is bringing sustainability because it's all the way through it's not just relying because you actually don't get sustainability by having Microsoft or Wal-Mart or Chevron or anybody aligned with a big donor or a couple of donors. We're getting scale and we're getting scale that goes just beyond I mean that extractive industry is notorious for doing partnerships only I learned the term today along the fence line. They're really limited and we'll say oh that you know that mining company will only work in that tiny spot. Chevron with this approach has understood that it has to take the circle has to be bigger there has to be like a regional district approach otherwise you can't enable economic growth which will eliminate poverty which will help address insecurity. It's systemic and it's that's value chains approach are systemic their webs they're not lines and it solves a problem. So I think those are the big incentives and then let me just briefly touch on what's the experience of DAI as an implementer on these partnerships. DAI as I said I've we've often been told you're not in this partnership you're just the implementer. We don't sign the MOUs we don't do anything we're just an implementer. So the integration of us as a full partner this commitment that DAI is making to a long term relationship with Chevron. This was not about money because we started out really small so small that it was embarrassing to talk about DAI who you know does those big multi-million dollar projects but we it has really allowed us to innovate. You can't always innovate on big donor programs and so if there are implementers out there for profit or nonprofit. I think that we need to get out of this contracting modality and think more about what it means to partner how we need to innovate how we can strengthen our our strategic position. I would say that. Our work with Chevron has allowed us to win. A very significant number of the different markets for the poor projects including we've just won the Nigeria project doing if it's M for P work. We didn't win Nigeria different work without doing our work on the ground with Chevron. So you we have to get out of this strict narrow accounting. Oh this is a fifty thousand dollar contract. Oh my God. I can't do that. We have to stop seeing it that way and we have to start seeing it as strategic positioning innovation. And strategic partnerships that we want for the long term. Thanks Christie. Dennis can you talk a little bit of how NDP is implemented on the ground and how it supports economic growth and long term stability in the Niger Delta I think this has been throughout the conversation so far the balance of economic growth and and and managing dealing with this issue of conflict and managing managing that. Yeah the the interest in and what we're trying to accomplish with this this initiative is you know looks really at at kind of the the the interplay between economic development and conflict in the region. And so that had a big impact on the types of programs that we designed to to do and the the role that the foundation plays in in being a catalyst for development in the region. And one of the ways that that we looked at it is we took a real kind of a systemic look at what are the enablers the systemic enablers for economic growth in the region and how does economic growth affect or reduce conflict and how does conflict in turn reduce economic growth. And so we we put a lot of effort into analysis and we reach out in a big way to a lot of different stakeholder partners in doing that analysis figuring out what we wanted to do but also how we could pair our resources with other donor resources to try and and address those those challenges. And so our activities in the field really kind of center around our economic development centers. We have one in Warrie in the western city of the of the city in the western side of the Niger Delta and one in poor Harcourt on the eastern side and those centers don't just do economic development activities. They support all of our program areas including peace building and capacity building and our analysis and advocacy programs. And the idea is that those centers are really kind of a hub for a range of different types of development activities. And so the partnership programs that we have with USAID with DFID with UNDP and other partners are run from those centers. And as we look at the value propositions for market actors in the various value chains that we work within we also look at the value propositions for our donor partners and the development partners that we're working with to say that how can we fill some of the gaps in information that's available in facilities training facilities in terms of coordination and synergies that are going on between different development actors. And we use those economic development centers as a place where all that happens. We have if you go through any of those centers you'll see staff from a number of different implementing partners. We have regular visits from our donor partners and a lot of sharing of information a lot of sharing of training opportunities. We look at who has the best skill sets to offer in particular types of interventions that we're doing with the communities and also with the local partners the facilities that they don't have available. And so that those centers and the kind of the catalytic and coordinating role that our foundation in the Niger Delta is playing has really helped us to not only leverage what Chevron is putting into this initiative in the form of additional funding and support for projects but I think it's really it's in the learning and in the influence where the real leverages is taking place where we're constantly looking at what have others learned what have we learned making sure that we have a good knowledge management system that shares that very aggressively with the different organizations that we work with. But on top of that doing it in such a way where everything is really sustainable that we're constantly analyzing what are the impacts what are the best practices that are being applied in such a way where we can see the impacts and we can scale them up whenever they're showing promise. And so we have a lot of systems and a lot of approaches for doing that and it's really that kind of value not just a strategy but a value that we have in embracing partnerships which enables us to work with all these different organizations in ways that you don't typically see in that region where people are kind of usually off doing their own thing and by doing it through this kind of collaborative model in all the program areas and the various project interventions that we're doing we feel that we get a lot more impact and we get a lot more sustainability in the process. Let me ask each of you this issue of we've talked about roles and responsibilities and sort of the evolution of which it seems as if the traditional roles of governments and the multinational corporations as well as implementers and civil society is being challenged in terms of the challenges that are being presented but also the roles that expectations of what different actors are supposed to be doing. Can you talk a little bit about how NDPI and the context in the NIDU Delta is challenging those traditional roles if each of you could just speak to that because it sounds as if these are being challenged and there's been a response in a variety of ways from the different sectors and you've each touched on them but it'd be interesting to hear from each of you about that. I'll start and take a stab particularly on the government side I'm not sure the roles of being challenged per se by this model and shouldn't be I think there's a real danger whether it's this model or any model and many of the people in the room are more experts than I am on this one either being the substitute for government in remote and I think that's what the challenges and letting government off the hook and yet equally even a large company like Chevron can't completely influence the government but they can influence the government so to me one of the key certainly goals and we're a long, long, long way from getting there but one of the goals is how do you actually strengthen government institutions. How do you crowd in the government? How do you crowd in the government and particularly obviously one of the again big challenges we talk about government at large the biggest issue is between often between national and regional government and you know what particularly in the natural resource sector what revenues go back to regional government and local government and then what capacity does regional local government have even politics and corruption and things like that aside what's the capacity to manage revenues and so working and to some of the policy dialogues that have been happening at the regional level you're trying to create a shared vision and again this has been tried and dealt with before so it might not work but it sort of seems there's a because it's more data driven as well and a lot of research and analysis has been done by NDPI and others you're how does one get a conversation going that's creating a shared vision with government but also with donors and others trying to build a government capacity rather than replace government and likewise you're trying to build and strengthen the both existing capacity but also potential capacity of community-based organizations and you're things like women's groups and youth groups which are which are so important and often don't get the resources they need so to me a key part of the and certainly goal of the model is sort of using this platform to really strengthen and support both government institutions particularly regional and local and community-based organizations both in terms of capacity but also giving the community-based organizations more of a voice in decision-making in these regional dialogues. Dennis I'm sure you've seen this time and time again where the companies look to step in and take the place of government and obviously you explicitly have tried to avoid being sort of caught in that trap way by the way you've designed NDPI can you talk a little bit about a little bit more about how you crowd government in and how you support capacity building because I do think this is this is one of the critical challenges. Yeah capacity building is really mainstreamed into everything that we do and so we look at what are the local institutions that we really need to focus on in terms of capacity building and we work a lot with local civil society organizations and business membership organizations like farmers associations and market women's associations but state and local government are really key element in that and so we do look very carefully at how we can involve the government and engage them in all the work that we're doing and we found quite a lot of traction actually in working with the state governments in the Niger Delta in particular in terms of sharing the data that we have and helping them to formulate some of their own plans and priorities around what economic sectors are they going to focus on what can they do to stimulate economic growth and so I think that where we you know different state governments have different dynamics and some of them are better than others and those that we find traction with we take a kind of a very entrepreneurial approach and focus on where we feel the benefits are and the impacts are going to be the highest and so that tends to lead us to the more reform minded state governments and even individuals within those state governments to understand what government really needs to do to stimulate economic growth and so we see that engagement I think is it really helps to get the government to think about the policy angles and the legislation rather than a heavily subsidized government approach to economic growth which is what a lot of the government entities really think about but I think also where NDPI is kind of challenging some of the roles that people are used to is this role of being a catalyst or a convener of different organizations that role is a lot of people tend to see as either a public sector role or maybe an international aid agency or a development contractor or NGO of some type to be that convener and that facilitator they tend to see the private sector as there to invest and only to invest in a specific market development opportunity and that's where we've been really kind of challenging to say that if no one else is playing that role we will our foundation will step in and try to be that convener because we have that much stronger commitment to partnership and collaboration than most of the other organizations have they all embrace those concepts but they're not structured in such a way to give a mandate to people within their organization to make that a requirement whereas with us it's kind of factored into the very DNA of the organization this whole concept of partnering Kristi I know you've seen this challenge as well in terms of where a company steps in and a government steps back and how you deal with that challenge and obviously NDPI was designed to sort of crowd government and talk a little bit about these how these roles are being challenged and talk a little bit about how NDPI is responding to that. Well on the roles generally I've just been taught a big lesson by my daughter in New York was in performing arts you know it was I have to be an actor or I have to be a director or I have to be a writer but I can't be all those things and oh my God I have to choose and she called me the other day and said oh I can be all those things because it's changed now I can actually write something directed myself and star in it so I thought okay the point of that anecdote is that I think roles are less distinct and they're less rigid and I don't I think they're blurring and we still have a need for all those roles and I don't want to diminish the role of government by any means but I've learned a big lesson working on the grand challenges where I thought you know why am I trying to get non-traditional actors involved in health and education because only the government can provide that and then suddenly I see that these Bollywood guys who put some subtitles in local languages have gotten an 18% bump in literacy or the cell phone provider who is getting data out of classrooms or out of health clinics is having a huge impact on and I realized that so one I think the roles are not as distinct and I think we need to be more fungible and flexible and how we see and we can't just say that's only them that's only them that's only them we need to blur those lines more I also think that we have to allow for non-traditional actors in businesses can provide a social value isn't that amazing but they can and I think the other thing about non-traditional roles and expanding that net is that we have to understand that as we get more actors in that they do need to be mentored they don't all have the capacity to perform in the various pre-mutations of their roles and I think that's one of the things that Chevron's approach has been doing really well and that is taking a long term approach to mentoring I've been working a lot with accelerators lately and I realized that one of their chief complaints is that the mentoring just comes in for a year or two months or one month and mentoring has to be periodic and it has to be over the long term and it can strengthen the different actors roles and I think that is one of the real assets that Chevron has on this approach it is a sustained mentoring and it recognizes that these roles these new actors new non-traditional and traditional actors have to be strengthened in their roles through mentoring through capacity building and there's a long term commitment to that I'll stop Great let's open it up for Q&A I think there are a lot of thoughtful people in the room who've worked on partnerships for a long time and I'd love to hear from a variety of folks I hear I'm gonna let's call on this gentleman here gentleman back there and then let's see and then these three folks first we'll go for these three folks Okay, oh great thanks Chris Jocknick with Oxfam I think this is a really interesting model and of course we at Oxfam are always pushing for more holistic approaches and more collaborations and so of course I think that's all to the good but it strikes me that if you're gonna get to the root causes of poverty in a place like the Niger Delta it's tough to do that without thinking about the resource curse because Nigeria really is the poster child for corruption and inequality and conflict all rooted in a lack of transparency and accountability and basic governance and Chevron has a unique role to play in that because it's been a part of that problem in other situations and because Chevron has so much leverage and voice and influence to address those issues and so my one question is how do you juggle that critical role of addressing corruption and accountability and being a voice for change on that front with the other projects that you're doing there so how do those two things fit and Jane I think raised that but did it so diplomatically that it might have glossed right over the second point is if you're not doing those things if you're not addressing the underlying roots how do you bring on groups that are concerned about those so how can you be a convener sort of a good faith convener when a group like Oxfam for example would have a really hard time collaborating in a context like that if we didn't think we were gonna address some of those root causes and so you're sort of crowding out some of the critical stakeholders if you're not gonna address that and so those sort of two parallel questions this gentleman back here thanks yes and then sorry hi my name is Dan Silverstein I'm a consultant you've talked about everybody who can benefit from what sounds like a really wonderful program I'm wondering about what do your competitors think of this okay and then this third gentleman over here hi David Greeley with Aquaria Global Health I wanna ask a question about sustainability financial and otherwise but just to relate very quickly the story of our organization which with the support of Pfizer set up a similar $50 million program to set up the Infectious Disease Institute and McCarrie University in Uganda enormously successful has all the components Jane that you mentioned plus a policy and advocacy role $50, $60 million other corporate partners got involved now with an independent board independent staff is raising $20 million a year for its operations Pfizer's not putting any money in that's the good news the bad news is it's still very donor dependent it's still receiving all of its money from PEPFAR and the usual grants the government is putting a million dollars all that $20 million a year or the government of Uganda so my question really is with regards to this project it's great $50 million from Chevron and other $50 million leverage with other donors but how can there be financial sustainability and can financial sustainability come about if unless the government itself plays a role including in the finances of that Okay it seems like most of those are directed towards you but I suspect the other panelists will have points of view and some are all of those Okay I guess starting with the with the role of transparency and corruption and these issues which I think we all know plague the Niger Delta and our significant obstacle to overcome and making any real progress it's an area that we don't ignore but at the same time we look very carefully at what role that we can play as an organization particularly one which is funded by an oil company to take a very neutral role on a lot of issues where we can help to facilitate dialogue and mediation on conflicts and issues in ways where we're not seen as taking sides on various debates now we've been working with a number of different activist organizations ones that openly criticize Chevron on a range of policies and issues and we separate that from the work of the foundation we've had a number of organizations that we've been working with that at first said they wouldn't work with the foundation because they saw it as an arm of Chevron they saw that it was kind of sleeping with the enemy so to speak and once they found that our activities our programs were really kind of divorced from the company's role and business activities in the region that we could work on a range of different issues that that was something that they could do that they could accept working with us and it doesn't mean that that's an endorsement in some way on their part of what Chevron is doing and the dialogue with Chevron continues on a lot of those issues so we don't try to replace that or take on that role we are about development and we found that we can work with a lot of activist organizations in helping them to link up with partners and get involved in dialogue with various development actors in the region that maybe they weren't doing so before. In terms of what do Chevron's competitors think of this it's been a bit of a challenge to get different companies in the oil industry to collaborate on social initiatives social investments of various ways there have been some examples of that not all of them have been really good experiences for the companies like we've been indicating in a lot of the things that we've said so far a key element in this approach is just looking at what it is that you're trying to accomplish and figuring out the best means of doing that not always following a traditional approach we find that for example if we want to pair up with other oil companies to do a local content initiative or something that we can use a lot of informal mechanisms and get a lot of influence and we get a lot of collaboration going at the practitioner level and it's only when we go to get into very kind of high profile public partnerships with the companies that it gets a little bit more complicated in terms of addressing the competitive issues and so it's just really how do you engage you know our foundation is open about its support from Chevron but we work regularly with other companies and give them data and guidance and input as to how to do their own economic development initiatives so that they can learn from what we're doing and if we see better development activities going on everyone wins in that process without necessarily turning it into some sort of a formal partnership between a company like Chevron and a company like ExxonMobil or Shell or someone else. In terms of the sustainability it's something that we kind of learned and that we thought about more is that I've never been a believer that sustainability strategy should be just getting others to pay what your initial donor is putting into it. What is the sustainability of the initiative from a point of view of what does it take to keep everything going? We started to notice that if you make a kind of a really clear distinction between NGOs, civil society organizations that are dependent on donor funding and private sector consulting firms and development contractors that are working in the same kind of development space none the private sector ones are not necessarily any more sustainable than the non-profit ones and at the end of the day it's a market system. It's a supply and demand issue and so we look at our own foundation for example from how is it meeting demand? That demand may be from aid agencies and other donor partners that are gonna be giving out grants or development contracts. It may also be banks and private sector investors that are interested in the agricultural value chains that we're trying to support and that if we look holistically at the market for economic development services then that helps us to keep the foundation relevant. It stays within its mission of what it's trying to accomplish but it recognizes that there is a supply and demand equation that it constantly has to be addressing to make itself relevant in the long term and that relevance will help it to survive through either donor funding or consulting revenues or training revenues or any other way of keeping this mission and this institution going. Jane, maybe you could speak to any or all those. I think that you're picking up on Chris's very important point and I apologize if I was too diplomatic about it but there's no doubt that NDPI is a corporate social investment model and I think a very, very innovative one. There's no doubt that Chevron and any other major company in this industry sector has to me two enormous responsibilities in the area of managing the broad macro challenges and one is just asset-based risk management and due diligence and you're being able to demonstrate as Professor John Rugger would say, know and show both your potential negative impacts on human rights and the environment and safety et cetera and demonstrate that you're doing due diligence and you've got systems in place to manage those risks and being absolutely rigorous about that and the operational-based integrity of what the company is doing and obviously the respect for human rights has now become a central component of that and I personally think we're gonna see more of what we're starting to see and Oxfam has written about this, independent panels assessing that as well and your IFC funding now requires that type of process for project development and I think the independent overview process that we were talking about here we'll probably see in the asset-based risk management but so there's that component which each company is primarily and it's operating partners are responsible for and then I think there is this incredibly difficult aspect of revenue management and responsible resource revenue management and to me there's several components there's the transparency piece and again 10 years ago we weren't even thinking about transparency we've come a long way with things like the extractive industries transparency initiative but we all know there's still a way to go and to me what companies do collectively at the national level around revenue transparency there's a lot of opportunity there and Nigeria's got some interesting models beginning to evolve there but there's not just the revenue transparency piece even if there's sort of more transparency and less corruption in the payment it's then what are the revenue management models some of the wealth funds how do you address some of the macroeconomic impacts of Dutch disease et cetera and again it's not an individual company's responsibility but what is industry doing with donors to just again sometimes often just build basic government capacity to set up sovereign wealth funds or other mechanisms to do the macro management of the revenues and then thirdly and in some cases most challenging of all is then the benefit sharing and more and more countries as we know have a benefit sharing agreement between national government, regional government local government and sometimes between land owners and local communities like in Papua New Guinea A, how much money actually gets to where it should get once it gets there how is it managed and that I think then comes back for the companies at the operational level to try and build some of the local capacity but so there's no doubt that the entirety of both the company as well as companies working collectively I think are recognizing the root causes now much more than it's done in the past but we've ways to go in those areas but I think we're beginning to move in the right direction and sort of encouraged by the NGO community being critical as well and I think it links to the question on competitors that is an area, safety is one area where there's every reason for competitors to work together and I think this whole area of revenue management and transparency is another area and obviously very mixed results so far and where we are gonna need more progressive collective action particularly at the country level. Christy. Yeah, just briefly, just on that what do your competitors think of it? I think the real question is because I think that competitors and businesses I've seen if they see something that's working for another business and that's a good model, they're gonna use it. They're gonna try to see how to adapt it. I think the real challenge here on this model is to make it accessible and to frame the opportunity so that other companies, maybe they're not gonna join this cause some companies just aren't joiners but who could employ the model and I think that's a huge challenge that's facing everybody sitting at this table and out there to bring this model and make it accessible. I just wanna say something on sustainability and I know that Dennis addressed the institutional sustainability. I just wanna flag that the real outcome Chevron's seeking here is to improve the lives of 32 million people living in the Delta so that their security and their risk to their business is better managed but it deals with the lives of 32 million people that are pretty poor and I think the very careful selection in the employment and I feel that that's DAI's role and responsibility in working with Chevron on this is to bring a lot of years of experience on how do you address poverty through markets, through economic growth, not through writing checks and handing communities cash and the whole selection of a value chain approach was very deliberate and those studies were done very carefully and they were done slowly because we didn't just go in and do them by the way we actually trained the local capacity to do them and to continue to do them after a DAI would be out and the value chains that were selected palm oil, cassava and aquaculture, catfish, they were selected for growth, they were selected for employment and they were selected for income generation potential and that for anybody working in development that's the heart of where sustainability lies so just for 32 million people living in the Delta whatever happens to the foundations apart from that if these markets work and there's income generation and jobs, there's sustainability there. Just looking at, let's see if I make sure I don't miss anybody on this side, nope, okay. So, okay on this, okay, Tony thank you, sorry. It's a Tony, I'll Tony and then Swimming back here and then Andrew Mack, they should thank you. Dennis, I think if I was 30 years ago to pick the perfect job person of combination of Indiana Jones and a Peace Corps volunteer you've done it between Papua New Guinea and Gola and now the Niger Delta. Tony Carroll Manchester trade and a senior associate here. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the political game. Nigeria has sifting political sands at all levels. Recently a large governor in the Delta split from the ruling party, you have lots of changes and lots of complexities at all levels. A, how do you manage that process and B, how do you build constituencies for your project beyond political spheres? Do you use public media? Do you use engagement at all levels? Because it seems to me the best way to insulate yourself from political change or vulnerability to political change is to broadening your constituency of support. Okay, this woman here. Hi, just to build a little bit on the last comments in terms of, and actually an earlier comment in terms of the actual impact that we're looking for here. Can you talk a little bit about how you are measuring success and what the measures are, maybe the timeline of when you expect to see impact and if you have any examples, anecdotal examples of impact to date? If you pass it back to Andrew. Thank you, Andrew Mack, I am global. I'm gonna actually, I'm gonna make a comment as to something that Christie said and then pick up on something that Tony said. First of all, to Christie, to your point, about the models and being able to port them to other companies and other markets. We worked for years on a Chevron road safety project and one of the markets that we worked in was Uganda. When Chevron pulled out of Uganda, a real testament to how well that model worked was that they were no longer there and all of the other partners stayed with the same model. Once people see it working, it really has its own stickiness, it has its own life and that's a good thing. To Tony's earlier point, you took my point about the politics so I'm gonna ask about the other aspect of it, which is physical security. A lot of what you all are talking about is taking a long view and I think we'd all agree that that's extremely important, especially if we wanna bring in non-traditional stakeholders talking about building their capacity and actually creating the space for them to participate. But when you're talking about a really unstable environment, physical unstable, rebels and the like and when you're talking about a lot of the major underwriters being interested parties because you're interested in stability, you're not necessarily interested in change, how do you address that and how can you maintain yourself more or less if not as an honest broker, at least as an honest partner in that context. Okay, Dennis, again, not directed to you but I'd love to hear from the other panelists on this as well, but please, Dennis, go ahead. Okay, well, I guess in terms of kind of handling the pace of political change and the challenges that we have in working with a number of different government institutions where there is a lot of political dynamics that we need to be aware of and that can affect our programs, I mean, that's a, I think it's an ongoing challenge that virtually any implementing organization faces wherever they're working. You have to strike that balance between working with the government and engaging them to be a partner in the programs and to be supportive of what you're doing and at the same time, not necessarily relying upon them so heavily in your program implementation in ways where if there is suddenly a change of a key public official or a change in political priorities that your project isn't stuck in the middle of that situation and it's an ongoing challenge, but one of the things that has made a difference for this model and for Chevron's approach and what we're trying to accomplish is the fact that we are taking a regional approach and so like even the example that you mentioned in some of the political divisions that have been occurring within the ruling party in Nigeria, the fact is that we have structured our programs and our priorities in such a way where we can shift if there are challenges or problems that are holding back our ability to work with a government partner and get things done. And given the fact that there are nine states in the Niger Delta region, we have the opportunity and the flexibility to kind of put the challenge to them to say that we will work with those states that are the most reform-minded, we will work with those states where we can get enough stability and alignment in policies and approaches to be able to get something done. And so that regional approach makes it a lot easier for us to shift gears, to change priorities and even clusters that we work within based on where we can get the most traction within the government. In terms of measurement of success, we are fortunate to have a lot of really useful guidance out there in terms of the donor community for Enterprise Development Group, which has a lot of guidelines on measuring economic impacts, designing results change, which helps us to identify clearly what we're trying to achieve and the indicators that we're trying to measure. Building up the capacity to do that well takes a long time and we've invested a lot in it, we've made a lot of progress, we have a long ways to go. And I think when it comes to measuring the socioeconomic impacts, the tools and the techniques out there for doing that are a little bit better defined. What we're struggling a little bit more with is identifying the business value. How do you measure the business impacts for Chevron so that we truly get this shared business and social value? And we're putting effort into that, but we got a lot more work to do in that regard. And then lastly in terms of physical security and how we work in this really dynamic environment where we have a lot of these challenges and these risks, and of course these risks affect our ability to do things. We operate in an area where others have been reluctant to go and we've had to structure our programs, our support networks, even our physical facilities in the field in such a way where we can entice other partners to come in and do it. We can satisfy them that we have a good strong ability to identify the security risks and not put our own practitioners and partners at risk. And that's an ongoing challenge. But one of the things that we've found is that in addition to kind of the traditional security resources that a lot of the oil companies use in the area, which we draw upon as well, we also draw upon the resources from our peace building program and the conflict early warning mechanisms that we've put in place with civil society organizations to help us identify where are the hotspots, where is conflict brewing in such a way where these security risks are gonna pose a problem for our staff. And before the other panelists speak, I wanna put Pauline Baker on the spot who's the former president of Fun for Peace, but also is an NDPI board member. If you could just, I'm gonna ask Akari to come up. I'm sure you'll thank me for this later, Pauline, I'm sure, but just given the work that you've done on conflict, I thought it would be interesting just to hear from you given that you sit on the board of NDPI, you have a particular perspective on this issue of the security issue and conflict. Yeah, well, I think I'm glad actually you did raise that because I think, again, one of the unique features of this model is that it recognizes the link between economic development and conflict. And that's very rare for a corporation to recognize that. A lot of people pay lip service to it, but they don't integrate it into their programs. So there is a peace building component to this. And it's doing something remarkable. It's actually building a network of peace agents. Over 300 individuals and organizations have signed up for it. There is a website. There is a tracking of incidents. People are reporting where incidents are breaking out. And conflict usually arises at the local level. A lot of times for peripheral reasons, it's not for anything that has to do with large national issues. It could be resource competition. It could be the dethronement of a local traditional leader. It could be all kinds of things. And that allows them then to track the drivers of conflict and then relate it to the network that they're also building on the economic sector. So it not only helps them in terms of protecting their staff, knowing where the hotspots are, but it also gets, again, to the systemic drivers of conflict and identify what those are, how many of them are economic, how many are not. There are a lot of them that this model will not address, but there'll be some that they will. But what will be left behind would be this network of peace agents, people who are getting in touch with each other, who are collaborating, who are discussing the drivers. And this is really important in the Niger Delta as the next two years arise because there's gonna be a general election in two years. And the amnesty for the militants are gonna expire that same year. So there are two events that are coming up that are gonna increase tensions in the Niger Delta, and there will be a peace network that PIN has created and working with the Fund for Peace that is ready to respond to this and have early warning. And what we have found in those kinds of experiments is that the network usually comes up on their own with interventions of how to stop it and stop it locally by the people themselves. It doesn't have to be a government intervention. So this is, again, another dimension of it that I think makes the model extremely useful. I'd like to hear from Jane or Kristi. Oh, here, here. I totally second that broad, well-integrated partnerships can offer a buffer from the political and at basis for peace and totally endorse that economic growth market-focused activities also are peace strengthening. I did wanna flag one thing about the success. So here's one. Chevron took 12 months to do the value chain studies. Okay, 12 months, let me say it again. That's a success story in my view. Any major multinational corporation that will carve out 12 months to do well-done value chain studies that before they even begin to do an activity is a success story. And I can tell you, my colleague who works on this, who is anyone remembers Jim Grant who used to work at Ron UNICEF, it's his son, and he's got his father's dogged vision and I know Dennis suffers from... My colleagues won't lay down and just roll over and say, okay, Chevron, you wanna do this in a month? Well, okay. No, they're really, our role is to work with and advise Chevron on best practice and Chevron has taken that very much to heart and is very concerned about success. So I think that's a huge success and anybody who knows companies knows that there are very few out there that will do that. Shane? I just, very quickly, I just wanted to comment on the security perspective, which again links back to this question of your heart, the NDPI link with the rest of the company is the use of the voluntary principles on security and human rights. And again, going back to your question about the competitors, that's one other area where there is slowly and painstakingly increased cooperation in terms of local training and putting processes in place to ensure that you're protecting the security of the company's own assets and partners and practitioners. I mean, one's not potentially undermining human rights and security of the community partners. And I don't know if you want to say anything on the voluntary principles. Yeah, Zach, would I? Well, I think we definitely look at them as they apply in a broader context, not just how they apply to Chevron or how they apply to the foundation, but we've been exploring ways to how we can take those principles and apply them to even civil society organizations and others to think about the full impacts of what they're doing, the human rights aspects of other programs that they may be doing. And so that's kind of opened up a new space for dialogue on those principles that Chevron didn't have before. Okay, we've got time for one or two more comments or questions. If not, we can end it here. Yes, just go for this last one. Thanks, Dan. Bill Jordan with ROI3 will be developing apps for that part of the world. You didn't indicate when you started and then when you were really fully operational. So that would be helpful in the context of my question. That is, can you describe, have any, or touched on it here just a few minutes ago though, but can you really describe quantitatively the impact that you've had in the creation of viable economic development, business activity, job creation, and even companies that are providing services and so forth to Chevron? Well, firstly, we started in 2010. We recruited our first staff for the foundation in Nigeria in about August of 2010. And we spent, as Christy had mentioned, we spent quite a lot of time on analysis at the beginning before we really started to get some interventions underway on the ground. From the start of a new institution point of view, we've grown very rapidly by most people's measure. We went from that small beginning with a few people to operating from the Nigerian capital of Abuja to now three locations, including our economic development centers and about 45 staff in the field, or sorry, in the head office and in the field. But a lot of our interventions didn't really start getting going until late 2011, around 2012, and we have a range of different projects that we're getting underway. There is a report, I think, that has been made available that shows some of the impacts that we've had, but because it is early stages, I mean, we do have numbers of jobs created and just under 500 jobs as of this year and a range of different partnerships, but really most of our indicators that we've been able to measure so far are output-oriented, particularly in terms of the number of people that we've been able to train and the businesses that we're working with, but measuring the longer-term sustainable impacts is something we're still working on and with the types of market development approaches that we use, you don't generally start to see those impacts in a significant way until, say, years three and four, and even then, it kind of starts with small clusters and then once you've done your interventions in a way where they demonstrate that they are, in fact, achieving the impact, then you go for scaling up and replicating and all that takes a bit of time. Just, I would just make one comment which is about that Dennis was kind enough to come join us maybe about 18 months ago and so we see this as a progress report of something that's gonna take several years to build on and so I think we're hoping to have you back here in 18 months to give us a further progress support on this. So why don't you all join me in thanking the panel? Thanks very much. Thank you.