Principal Voices London Round-Table - Debate Report

Following successful debates in Singapore (February) and Beijing (May), the third Shell-sponsored Principal Voices round-table took place on 7th September, 2005, in the spectacular surroundings of London's Foreign and Commonwealth Office - a venue which, as moderator Richard Quest pointed out, has seen more than it's fair share of robust discussion over the years.

Held in front of an 80-strong invited audience of business leaders, academics, civil servants and NGOs, the debate focussed on international economic development, and in particular the role of business and the private sector in stimulating and driving such development in the world's poorest regions.

The topic is a broad and complex one, and a two-hour discussion was never going to adequately cover all the issues involved - nor was it intended to. Rather, by bringing together four 'principal voices' with very different areas of expertise - healthcare economics, pharmaceuticals, micro-finance and mobile telephony - the event was designed to explore in depth specific elements of the overall picture, and in so doing to try to draw some wider conclusions about this most crucial and challenging of subjects.

After introductory comments from CNN's Richard Quest and co-moderator Michael Elliott of TIME Magazine, the floor was taken by Dr. Kurt Hoffman of the Shell Foundation, a UK registered charity devoted to harnessing the skills of the business world in "trying to think through new ways of addressing the needs of those two billion people who live on less than $2 per day."

As well as welcoming the audience and telling them something about the work of the Foundation, Dr. Hoffman also emphasized the appropriateness of London as host-city for a debate on this particular topic, home as it is to initiatives such as Make Poverty History and the UK Commission for Africa.

The session was then opened to the four 'principal voices.' Questioned - and in some cases provoked! - by the moderators, each member of the panel described their own particular experiences of working in the developing world, discussing some of the challenges they have faced, and offering their own unique insights into how to confront and overcome those challenges.

Ethiopian-born development economist Dr. Solomon Ayalew began by discussing disease and healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa - and especially the need to shift the focus away from curative care and more towards prevention - before moving on to a broader overview both of some of the problems affecting his home continent, and some possible solutions to those problems. In a wide-ranging and challenging analysis he homed in on two areas of particular importance: trade liberalization, and the promotion of accountable, democratic governance.

"Development is not just about economics," he explained. "In Africa development is more about politics. In the last 30 years this is the only region that has actually gone backwards in real terms. All assistance has failed, all efforts have failed.

"We have to accept that one of the biggest problems in Africa is that our social structure is not ideal for development. Democratization is one way of addressing this."

As CEO of international pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, Lars Rebien Sørensen has extensive experience of operating in the developing world, notably in the field of diabetes care (there are, he pointed out, five times more people with diabetes in developing countries than with HIV/AIDS)

Picking up on some of the points raised by Dr. Ayalew, he emphasised the need for a greater emphasis on preventing diseases rather than simply treating them once they have been contracted.

"We need to find a way to help developing countries....move from catastrophic emergency care to prevention."

Widening the discussion, he then offered a fascinating and frank appraisal of the role of the private sector in helping to promote and encourage sustainable development, insisting that business had a crucial role to play in such development; that it should be working more closely with governments and NGOs; and that it was perfectly possible for companies to generate profit while at the same time working to alleviate poverty and deprivation.

"I am convinced that the private sector can play an important role. I think we have to understand.......that we are primarily intended to create profit for our shareholders and that's the role we should play.

"At the same time I am delighted to work with NGOs. It is highly motivating. And through working together, and also with governments, it is highly enriching for private companies."

As Citigroup's Global Director of Micro-Finance, Robert Annibale is uniquely well-placed to talk about an initiative that has, over the past thirty years, proved one of the most innovative and effective means of encouraging economic growth among the world's poorest communities.

As well as offering an insight into how micro-finance actually works, and the transformative effects it can have, he described how Citigroup's involvement in the area - it is the first major financial services company to actively embrace micro-financing - has been driven as much by hard commercial interests as by altruism.

"It's about doing the right thing," he said, "But also about good business banking. We're demonstrating that you can, on a sustainable commercial basis, bank low-income people."

Expanding on this point, he emphasized that while philanthropy and altruism both have a crucial role to play in encouraging development, the process will be ineffective and unsustainable unless it takes account of commercial realities.

"If you want to reach millions of people that need access to basic financial services......you need to show that you can do it in a commercially sustainable way. Without that, it stays at the very small scale that unfortunately we've seen for far too long."

The debate's fourth 'principal voice' was Rob Conway of the GSM Association, an umbrella organisation representing over 600 GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) operators around the world.

Although mobile telephony is not something one immediately associates with poverty reduction and sustainable development, Conway, in a highly thought-provoking contribution, revealed the enormous influence that access to mobile communications can have on economic re-generation.

There are, he explained, over four billion people on this planet who have no access to communication, have never made a phone call. At the same time, 75-80 percent of those people are covered by a mobile system. While acknowledging that for most of those people handset cost remained prohibitive, he insisted that prices were coming down, and that access to mobile phones could - and did - help create an environment in which economic growth is stimulated.

"The phone is not a panacea," he admitted "But what it does do is act as a stimulus, kick off the cycle of economic development."

Not only that, he argued, but by facilitating communication - whether verbal or by text message - mobile phones can also play a key role in encouraging greater political transparency and debate.

"I think that some governments have come to conclude that facilitating the take-up of mobile phones is actually one of the foundation stones for the democratic process."

The views and perspectives of the panel served as a springboard for a subsequent debate from the floor, a lively and challenging affair with numerous comments and questions from members of the audience.

Dr. Kurt Hoffman, for example, picking up on both Lars Sørensen and Robert Annibale, argued that the private sector needed to find more ways of 'transferring its skills, it's business DNA, into civil society.' Andrew Jowett of NGO HarvestAid, meanwhile, suggested that the whole aid programme had 'got it seriously wrong', and that far more emphasis needed to be placed both on creating new economic opportunities, and in investing in teaching people the necessary skills to make the most of those opportunities.

"I just don't see a significant portion of the aid programme where I work in southern Africa going right to the bottom," he said, "To the poorest people who need it most, who have the potential to do great things for themselves and really position themselves to take advantage of new opportunities."

While numerous other issues were raised and discussed - everything from how to harness the financial power of diaspora communities to ways of promoting and sustaining growth in conflict zones - the point that came up again and again, and that proved to be the over-riding theme of the whole discussion, was that the business community has a crucial - and often under-exploited - role to play in helping to alleviate extreme poverty by encouraging economic growth and development.

Aid programmes and government intervention are important, of course, but until the private sector is brought on board as a key component of the development equation many of the fundamental issues involved in extreme poverty will remain unresolved.

As Richard Boulter of the UK Government's Department for International Development put it: "Have we yet convinced the development industry that the business of development is business?

"I see this forum as a part of answering that question, of getting people in the corporate sector to find out how they can work more closely with governments and aid organizations."