BY HAYDEN HUBBARD
Hayden Hubbard is a first-year International Development student from Logan, Utah. He likes to play the piano and read anything and everything he can get his hands on, especially during pandemics.
Lord Dr. Michael Hastings of Scarisbrick CBE is the former Global Head of Citizenship for KPMG International and The Chancellor of Regent's University London. He was a trustee of the Vodafone Group Foundation for 11 Years until December 2019 and remains Vice President of UNICEF. He is also Ambassador for Tearfund, a UK-based international relief and development agency and the President of ZANE – an aid agency focused on Zimbabwe. In 2003, he was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by HM Queen Elizabeth II for services to crime reduction in Britain and in 2005, was awarded an independent peerage to the House of Lords. In the same year, he received the UNICEF Award for his outstanding contribution to understanding and effecting solutions for Africa's children. In 2019 Michael became a Governor of the MPESA Academy in Nairobi, Kenya and was separately given the first Stephen R Covey Leadership Centre PRINCIPLE-CENTRED Leadership Award.
Perspectives: How have you helped organizations prioritize their development efforts? For example, you convinced KPMG to invest $9 million in a Tanzanian village, how did you go about that?
LMH: I've come to understand that development prioritization has to be geographical as well as differentiated by needs. If you have a development agency that focuses on bettering education but overlooks the fact that there aren’t female toilets in schools (and, thus, girls don’t attend), the practitioners are missing the mark. They're not going get education if they don't have sanitation. You have to see things in the round.
My good friend, Jeffrey Sachs, is very keen on his Millennium Villages Project (MVP), which we at KPMG followed very closely. His concept aimed to help entire communities where there was a clear need—in the case of Tanzania, the project served 10,000 destitute people living on an island. We at KPMG decided that we were going to invest because the project served more than just one segment of a population—it served the whole community.
When I first visited the island, I noticed that one of the big global NGOs had actually already worked there. In this village of 10,000 people, they had built one toilet. But it hadn't been connected to a water system. So there was a very small building with a toilet and piping, but no water. The NGO that built this toilet then took a photograph and used it in an annual report to say they were building toilets in Tanzanian villages. But it wasn’t really a toilet it was just a little icon of foolishness. So I’ve learned that you have to focus on holistic development- economic, social, personal, spiritual- and give things the arc of time.
Perspectives: A common issue in development occurs when organizations impose their own values and priorities on groups they are trying to help, but ultimately end up doing more harm than good. How have you avoided this issue?
LMH: Making impactful, community-wide change requires time and expertise. There is a lot of chest-puffing that goes on in the development world and I think it’s also important for practitioners to try not to be heroes. I also think it's about mindset. The issue of change is generational. There is no significant society on earth that has just changed overnight––it often takes 20 to 40 years before you really get meaningful change. So, I think we need to keep wisdom at the forefront, learn from others, and avoid puffing.
Perspectives: Many budding development professionals are trying to figure out where and how they can maximize their personal impact. What would you advise?
LMH: Mother Teresa had a great phrase: she said that not many of us are ever going to be able to be great leaders, but that all of us can do small things with great love, and the history of the world is written by the combination of those small things. I think that's a very important perspective and that we should prioritize caring for our neighbors. Maybe that’s someone next door, or maybe that’s someone in a community far away, but it's just a person. And if I can't care for that individual person, how am I going to change the country they’re a part of? Because that country is just full of millions of that person. So, it's very important to have the perspective that the small things we do set the pace and the style for the big things we want to do.
Some of us will get the opportunity to hold macro positions of policymaking and power and spend large amounts of money. But no matter what we do, it won’t be enough to move the whole needle the whole way in a world of 7.5 billion people. However, it is possible, no matter how old or young you are, to do something quite remarkable. We've had this example in the UK of an ailing 99-year-old WWII veteran, Captain Tom, who decided to walk 1.6 miles––one hundred times up and down outside his house––to raise money for the British National Health Service (NHS). His objective was to raise a thousand pounds, but he ended up raising 30 million pounds. Of course, if he had just raised 1,000 pounds, we would have applauded him, but because he galvanized the energy and interest of a country and its people, they donated much more.
So, you never know. You begin something small, and it turns into something substantial. You can start with the micro, and it can become the macro.
Perspectives: Many passionate development professionals find great fulfillment in the development space, but ultimately leave for higher-paying opportunities or less taxing work. What would you recommend to those worried about mission drift and burnout?
LMH: First, I've always believed that no matter what position you are in––from the lowest to the highest, or from the poorest paid to the best paid––there's always room to give. That can be giving money, time, relationships and connections, or giving talents and experiences.
And it’s vital for practitioners to keep that perspective, even if they move from what seems like a meaningful, purpose-driven, society-changing role into what looks like a mundane, operational, high-powered, lucrative, whack-a-paid job. Every one of us can give more of what we have financially, personally, timewise, or otherwise.
Secondly, it is important to constantly keep your primary objective at the forefront of your mind. When you have a clear purpose and are proactive in hunting out the things you need to accomplish, you'll always find more than enough to do. The world is so full of realities and needs, but at the same time, it's so full of opportunities as well.
Perspectives: Is there an organization or project you’ve worked with in your career that is especially meaningful to you or that you feel is a particularly good example for others to learn from?
LMH: The UK-based development agency Tearfund runs a project in Ethiopia called Self-Help Women's Groups. They've got these networks of 22 to 25 women all over the country. If I remember, it comes out to about 440,000 women in total. In these groups, women save their pennies over time, and after a while, have an investable sum of resources that they can decide what to do with. When I visited in 2018, there was one group of 25 women actively involved in the building of a three-story, air-conditioned shopping complex. This is because the amount of money they'd saved was enough to secure them a leveraged loan on a mortgage property from a bank. In total, these 440,000 women in Ethiopia had saved $26 million.
So, when people say the poor need endless help to pull themselves out of poverty, the answer is no, not necessarily. Yes, perhaps if people suffer from major health issues, violence, or extreme starvation they will need additional help from external sources. But, these women in Ethiopia––among the poorest of the poor––have illustrated that sometimes it’s just a matter of using what we have. Rather than disregarding two cents here and there, put it with another person's two cents––keep on doing it, and it builds.
Photo Credit: Free use image from Canva Pro.