Making it Stick - Tackling the Challenges Related to Food and Water in the Developing World
With the help of Booz Allen, a Clinton Global Initiative conference yields strong commitments to action.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s unique relationship with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) is paying big dividends. Leaders from government, business and non-profit organizations – who gathered at the CGI’s recent annual meeting – have agreed to continue working together to find ways to make sure the developing world has enough food and clean water.
That collaboration, begun at the conference with the assistance of Booz Allen, must continue if progress is to be made solving those and other global problems, says Booz Allen Senior Vice President Don Pressley, who facilitated the work groups on both food and water.
“People were proposing joint endeavors,” says Pressley. “It was more than people just exchanging business cards.”
For the meeting, the CGI tapped Booz Allen’s experience and expertise in forming megacommunities™, a type of collaboration in which all three sectors – government, business and civil society – unite to address intractable problems that no single group can solve on its own. Booz Allen executive and senior vice presidents facilitated work groups on a number of issues, which also included health and the environment.
In the work group on water, for example, the 35 or so participants started by discussing their own projects, then almost immediately considered ways they might pool their efforts, says Pressley. “One of them was talking about an innovative water catchment system they were putting on the roofs of poor people’s houses, another was talking about sanitation systems that are very rudimentary but have a great impact on health. As people were talking to each other, the light bulbs were going off.”
Even more important, says Pressley, many of the participants made commitments to work together long after the session was over. “What we got out of this,” he says, “was a pledge to create a social network, and have these government, private sector and non-profit community organizations begin to see where they can bring their interests together. It might be that a project in Tanzania is useful in Ghana, and that a project in Ghana is useful in Tanzania.”
Booz Allen Principal John Larkin, who coordinated the firm’s role in the CGI meeting, says a key challenge was overcoming a typical problem at such conferences – well-meaning people meet, enthusiastically decide to work together, but then go their separate ways with little or no follow-up.
“The problem is that there is often no mechanism for ongoing interaction,” says Larkin. “One of the things we tried to do this year was to create a vehicle, and that happened. Folks agreed to participate in virtual communities through the CGI, and to have ongoing interaction with CGI support staff,” he says.
There were also firm and specific commitments to collaborate, says Larkin. In the work group on food, for example, a number of participants agreed to establish a database on technological innovations to ensure sufficient supplies in the developing world. And, a major U.S. agribusiness company agreed to have its scientists train farmers and agricultural experts in the developing countries.
Many other participants – ranging from the prime minister of an East African nation to the chief medical officer of an American beverage company – also pledged their efforts. “We had leaders emerge, we had action steps, we had commitments to continue engagement,” says Larkin. “That’s what we were trying to get to. These things are always uncertain, but it went according to plan.”
story posted January 13, 2010
