A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  At this point, some companies are looking beyond the risk-reduction argument, and seeing in equitable community development an opportunity to grow ‘shared value’. This term coined by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, reflects the view that business and community interests can be in sync. In particular, Porter and Kramer argue that businesses should search for those opportunities where value can be created for business by improving community well-being.

  Like BHP’s malaria example, the Australian-based bank ANZ, offers another case as it expands throughout the Asia Pacific. Its community development work in places such as Fiji, American Samoa and the Cook Islands focuses on financial literacy training programs. Cynics might well say that in educating people about the workings of small business loans or mortgages it is just expanding its market. On the other hand, who could deny that better informed people are more able to benefit from services we take for granted in the developed world? What is wrong with prospering along with a community empowered by greater skills in budgeting, saving and money management?

  Neither of these cases should be viewed as corporate philanthropy; both are investments with returns to community and the business owners being measured and celebrated. The contribution that Porter and Kramer make with their ‘shared value’ concept is that it legitimises such investments— community work motivated by considerations of what is good for business, and not just the work motivated by philanthropic altruism.

  Rio Tinto is now the majority shareholder in the development of the Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia. When fully operational, this mine promises to account for between a quarter and a third of the GDP of Mongolia. The successful expansion of Rio Tinto Copper is intertwined with the economic development of Mongolia and its people. You can’t have one without the other.

  Back to the Grand Prix analogy. With so many companies now focused on community development, could we see more in the way of partnership? In other realms of economic activity, we see collaboration between noncompetitor businesses as a path to improved shared profitability. Is there any reason we should not see it in community work?

  Let’s say a company is developing a new mine in a community that has seen little development. The resource company recognises that the huge boost to economic activity will raise many challenges. Towns need to be built, and the influx of workers needs to be managed. As money moves into an economy that had little reliable money supplies, let alone banks, people need to be equipped to handle it. Should a resource company try to engage with all these problems, relying on just itself and the government? It might think to partner with NGOs or UN agencies. But what about other companies?

  The Grand Prix model might suggest to the resource company that it could contact a community-minded bank such as ANZ, point to the potential of the community, and encourage it to invest there, too. The community would then benefit from the first company employing and paying staff, and the second one accepting deposits, providing training, and extending credit as appropriate to those who could use it to build wealth. Why not then encourage a third company, a health company, to serve the growing healthcare needs of the community in a shared value model — that is, setting goals and measuring outcomes for the community as well as setting itself up to operate profitably?

  If companies join forces to build communities, rather than trying to go it alone, communities are better served. When benefits are wholly dependent on one party’s continuing commitment, they are at the mercy of any catastrophic event that damages that party. With more partners comes more stability. Communities grow healthier and more productive, and progress comes on many fronts. The companies on board benefit, too, from the faster progress that comes with shared commitment.

  Do We Ditch Aid? I’m not saying that we should ditch foreign aid and only look to the private sector. We need both. We need the private and public sectors to understand their role and hold themselves accountable. True partnerships and collaboration between public and private sectors and community organisations will need to be fostered in new ways if we are going to close the wealth disparity in the world.

  When looking at the development of an undeveloped economy, we need to ask ourselves which part of economic development is best conducted by the public sector and which is best conducted by the private sector. While many may think it’s not the role of the private sector to get involved, if 53 per cent of capital flows from OECD countries to the developing world pass through the private sector and if BHP Billiton is already the third largest development agency in Australia, then how can we deny collaboration with the private sector as a legitimate mechanism?

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  Concluding Thoughts

  “To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.” Anatole France

  A Warning About Aid – It Will Change You

  Many people approach me today asking for advice about whether they should or should not enter the Aid world. When one goes into Aid work, the things that you see and do will change you so much that they create a division between you and your family and friends. Returning home is not an easy transition and more needs to be done to prepare aid workers and their families for the departure but also, and more importantly, for the return. Aid work has many rewards, but one should not underestimate its costs either.

  Psychological trauma is part of being an aid worker. It can come from a

  specific incident such as witnessing an atrocity, or it can build slowly over time. For me, the memories of the little girl, Maria, in Yugoslavia, or the feeling in Ntarama Church in Rwanda inspire emotion and sadness; they are scars on my soul. The experiences in the aid world change a person much in the same way that the horrific experiences of war changes a soldier, in both a negative and positive way. The need for ex-servicemen and women to come together collectively in clubs such as the Returned and Services League for mutual support is well known. Old soldiers need to gather together and tell old war stories in part to relieve themselves of tensions and experiences that stay with them their entire lives.

  Aid workers are often like soldiers. They see some horrendous things, make some difficult decisions and often stay longer with communities they serve and can be just as strongly affected and traumatised by war and disaster. More needs to be done to help the transition home.

  Knowledge and Moral Dilemmas – Tools of the Aid Trade Effectiveness in aid comes down to personalities, judgements on moral dilemmas and politics. It shouldn’t, but it does. When people get on well, collaborate and worry about the objective to bring the world out of poverty, an enormous amount can be achieved. Leadership is key and it all too often is lacking.

  Life has a lot more ‘grey’ than ‘black and white’. In life leaders often have to choose between the least bad of bad options. Rarely does one chose between good and bad. Choosing to follow a bad option because it is the ‘least bad’ of available alternatives, is often confused with, but is not the same as, thinking a chosen option is ‘good’. One choses the least bad because it is a kind of utilitarianism: the least harm to the fewer people, as compared with the greatest good to the greatest number.

  Take the war in Iraq. People forget that two choices available were to have a war and remove Saddam Hussein or to not have a war and keep him in place. The real choice wasn’t between ‘good’ (peace) and ‘bad’ (war), it was a choice between Saddam in power (bad) and American-led invasion (bad). Both were bad options.

  In 1994, during the height of the Bosnian conflict, aid workers often faced a staggering moral dilemma – and this story is true. Local militia (of ethnic group one) would approach an aid worker and say: “See that village down there (full of ethnic group two)? Well, we are going to ‘ethnic cleanse’ it. Will you bus the people out, please?” The aid worker could succumb to the request, become the tool of ethnic cleansing, lose the neutral status of the aid organisation in the eyes of ethnic group two and, consequently, be refused access to other areas where populations may die through lack of food and
other aid. This is not a good choice.

  Or, on the other hand, the aid worker could refuse to bus the people out. The result would be an immediate attack on the village and the aid worker may watch perhaps hundreds of people die. This is not a good choice either. And here lies the heart of a moral dilemma. With this dilemma there is no ‘better option’ to choose. On several occasions young delegates of aid organisations had to choose the ‘least bad’ option. In other words, they had to choose who would die.

  In 1994, the world had advance warning of the Rwandan genocide. The world ignored the pleas of General Dallaire, the UN force commander, when he asked for a mere 2500 soldiers to stop genocide from happening. The world said ‘this is not our war’ and refused the request. Just 100 days later, up to one million people were dead. That is 10,000 a day, every day, for 100 days. That was the cost of non-intervention.

  In 1992, the Europeans (especially the French and the Germans) said to the US that Bosnia was a European problem and that the US should keep out. ‘We will fix it,” they said. For three years, they tried and failed, and 250,000 people died before the US intervened. That was the cost of nonintervention.

  The Verge of a New Choice? We are on the verge of something new and interesting. When looking at a macroeconomic level, the countries that have effectively pulled themselves out of poverty have done so by putting a focus on development investment supplemented by development aid, not the countries that have put most of their focus on an aid-driven agenda.

  There are clear comparative advantages with the private sector in some areas of economic development, and the public sector in other areas. There are particularly difficult issues that need to be examined in looking at the role of the collaborative sectors and the leadership that needs to be shown around the difficult issues.

  What do you do if a government genuinely doesn’t want to help its people? Do you continue pumping aid into a flawed system? While the United Nations is clearly needed for a political meeting place between nations, is it the best place for developmental assistance? For emergency assistance, how do we replicate the authority given to the UN cluster approach by the Pakistan Army, when the UN system itself doesn’t wish to have that authority?

  There is a lapse in leadership and a lapse in quality dialogue globally which is not manifesting itself in Australia alone. While we saw tremendous change in 2011 through the Arab Spring and other revolutionary uprisings, we have paralysis by analysis in many of the developed economies. The richest country in the world according to the International Monetary Fund, is Qatar with a per capita GDP of US $88,000 a year. The poorest is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a per capita GDP of US $329 per year. The wealthiest people in the world are 267 times better off than the poorest on a national basis. Yet, individual wealth disparity is even higher. Australia has a balance in the economy better than many other countries in the world. Would it not be good to ask what Australia is doing well rather than simply calling for the destruction of capitalism as many of the Occupy Movement protesters have asked for? Could we not make Australia even better? Could we then not provide a global model at which the Europeans and Americans seem to have failed?

  I started my journey hoping to use my skills for the betterment of other people. I chose the public sector through the mechanisms of the Red Cross and the United Nations. This path has taken me to many countries, but as I gained seniority the realisation dawned that the world’s generalisations of who are the good and bad guys are often wrong, or misguided. While many in the UN are good people, many others are bureaucrats in a system that protects itself, often at the cost of those it is intended to serve.

  If we wish to break the cycle of poverty, then new partnerships are needed. A well-motivated private sector company can do more long-term good than a poorly trained but well motivated aid worker. Our task is to alter perceived stereotypes about private sector ‘greed’ and public sector and aid world altruism. We need to work harder at identifying the good players, be they public or private sector, and acknowledge them. We also need to remove those in the public sector who are just too inefficient or ineffective to justify the huge amounts of public money they spend. This will take time, dedication and skill. If you have the skills and desire to play a role in altering perceptions and changing thinking, then this would be using your skills for the betterment of other people. Are you up to that challenge?

  About the Author

  Andrew MacLeod was born and raised in Melbourne. He has a BA degree and LL.B degree from the University of Tasmania, and a LL.M degree (Shipping and Human Rights) from the University of Southampton. He worked as a Marine Litigation Attorney in Melbourne, Sydney and London before being recruited by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), for whom he worked as a Red Cross Delegate in the former Yugoslavia and later Rwanda during the 1990s. For his work he was awarded the Humanitarian Overseas Service Medal in the Balkans (plus bar for the Great Lakes), the Australian Defence Medal and the Silver Medal for Humanity from the Montenegrin Red Cross.

  He later worked as a Senior Adviser on Disaster Response for the Unit

  ed Nations and was Chief of Operations in the United Nations Emergency Coordination Centre in the international response to the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. That earthquake response is recognised as one of the best-run natural disaster response operations in history, keeping 3.5 million people alive through a Himalayan winter, in some of the most difficult physical and political terrain.

  Having coordinated massive relief campaigns, negotiated with military dictators and terrorists, Andrew MacLeod is often asked to speak about his experiences in Aid and draw lessons in leadership. Author, photographer and speaker, Andrew MacLeod was a Board Member and Foundation Chair of the Principles for Social Investment and a member of the United Nations Expert Group on Responsible Business and Investment in High Risk Areas. He remains a senior executive in the resource sector, a patron of the Australian charity Swags for Homeless, is on the advisory board to the Big Issue Australia, is an ambassador for the Victorian Youth Mentoring Alliance and an ambassador for ‘Welcome to Australia’.

  Committed to health and fitness, and in particular swimming, Andrew won a silver medal at the World Masters Games in 2002. He put his passion for swimming to good effect volunteering to help national swimming teams in the developing countries in which he has worked.

  Email: Andrew@macleod.com Web: www.andrew.macleod.com

  About the Author 235

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