World Leaders Agree on Roadmap to End Poverty By 2020
Geneva – July 21, 2011
It took years to decide, but last night in Geneva 164 CEO’s of the top fortune 500 companies, many country leaders from all continents, all CEO’s of the top 200 largest aid organisations, as well as US president Barack Obama, agreed on a plan to end poverty on a global scale by working together as one community, while agreeing on one roadmap with an accompanying set of behaviors.
The roadmap involves a clear guide for (profit and non-profit) organisations, institutions, and governments to end poverty by 2020. Although participation is voluntary, it is said that this initiative will become the next global standard for governments and businesses’ social responsibility.
The idea is simple: all existing aid workers, students, and volunteers in the world unite through the Internet in one open software program, where communities can be established for every sub-initiative to end poverty by 2020. Because of the great synergies that are created by working together on a global scale, most aid organisations have already adapted their mission statement from “helping people to keep people alive”, to “enabling countries to become self-sustainable by 2020″. The idea is “crowdfunded” on a global scale by most governments and businesses.
Why Things Didn’t Work Before
Three main reasons were identified:
Firstly, because poverty still exists today it proves that existing sources of funding and aid were not efficiently managed. It was not a lack of overall financial funds. For example, aid organisations typically provide food, shelter, and water to people in developing countries. The direct effect is that -logically- this does not encourage people to think and build self-sustainable lives for themselves. A different impulse was needed … badly.
Secondly, aid organisations weren’t programmed to end their existence. Nothing without a clear deadline in sight is likely to end (Getting Things Done principle, by David Allen). Poverty wasn’t dealt with as a project with a clear ending in sight. The goal of any aid worker should be to end his/her job. Currently though, aid workers (logically) fear to really achieve this objective, because they depend on their income to feed their own families. Absence of one clear goal (= return on investment, or ROI) was also the biggest reason why not yet most multinationals invested 5+% of their annual revenue to a good cause: investing such amounts in something that didn’t guarantee a good outcome was simply just not worth it! Now though, most multinational corporations did not need much convincing: the goal is clear and the obvious direct side-effects, such as the rise of exciting new markets, definitely made it worth the investment.
Thirdly, one global, coherent, and “viral” system to end poverty was absent, as well as few real leaders to take the lead and pave the road ahead. In summary, the world lacked an overall system and mindset to end poverty. These times are now gone.
The Solution
The Internet has brought the issue of poverty “close to home”, directly affecting our lives. With this in mind, a clear project plan was set up in which everyone’s participation is clear. Below a few examples are described:
Consulting firms McKinsey, Accenture, AT Kearney, together with Facebook and Google, have spent two years building and testing a global community-driven software system that functions according to the power of the crowd, in which there is no top-down structure, nor a management. Instead, it is a global network that enables all participating businesses, governments, and aid workers to coordinate themselves via the Internet, while delivering on aggregated mini-goals to actually achieve the main objective: ending poverty by 2020. A so called Manifesto has been written by consulting firm Deloitte, which is a document “in plain English” that explains a desired behavioral mindset that participants can adopt – explaining crowd-sourcing, community driven philosophies, and many other social behaviours in order to make the most out of everone’s participation. All is based on “the power of leaderless organisations”.
Accounting firms Ernst & Young and KPMG have worked together on creating a strong financial model to see how much is really needed to end poverty. It appeared that not much is needed financially in relation to what the western world consumes on daily basis. The bottom line: when all multinationals in the world dedicate 5% of their annual revenues to this cause – now called “social responsibility tax” (SRT) – sufficient funds are collected to complete this project by 2020, or even earlier. *The real definition for ending poverty is that every country in the world receives a real change to become developed and self-sufficient, while not easily able to fall back under the poverty threshold.
It was agreed that a clear distinction between bodies is present financially: the Social Responsibility Tax (SRT) will only be charged to businesses, while governments and existing aid organisations actually use these funds to re-organise, execute, and manage their joint manpower to deliver on project milestones.
Also a great number of machinery and other instruments are needed to build and (after 2020) maintain land and building the infrastructure in the South. Industrial equipment manufacturers Caterpillar, IEM, ABB, and 7 smaller firms delivered on their promise and are currently finalizing with inventorying what is precisely needed for this project. A large number of microfinancing deals will be made -at affordable rates- with governments and villages. Management of all microfinancing is done by UBS bank and Zurich Insurance (called Farmer’s insurance in the USA).
On average, every year 2.3 million graduates are doing an “end poverty” internship or “life changing trip” to build a school or well in Africa, etc. This army of students will be trained and managed on the ground by the global pool of existing experienced aid workers trained by Unicef and 19 other aid organisations with long-standing experience. Employment agency Adecco has promised to handle all overall coordination of the HR, investing their annual 5% SRT in man-hours as well. Addecco shines as it leads by example: they have just set up a temporary “end poverty by 2020″ headquarters in Amsterdam! Of course, Adecco -and all the other multinationals already participating- see the immense benefits of the new economy that is commencing in 2021, which they are helping to create. New and emerging markets do not only provide great chances for interesting investments, but these countries will lead through innovation – which is just plain exiting to be part of!
In Summary
The above described community driven project accelerates and synergises all current aid activity with the tangible purpose to end poverty before 2020. The Internet did not only enable the possibility to globally work together, but also plays a major role in the educational part of this project. The existing human, technological, and financial resources available are definitely sufficient to end poverty. However, because synergies between aid organisations, businesses, students, volunteers, and governments were before not possible as the Internet did not yet exist in its form today. Also, previous similar initiatives always diluted because of its bigness on its own and the never-abundant problems in the world (war, natural disasters, economy, etc). For these reasons “ending poverty” was not a realistic goal before … until now.
