From Sweatshop Scandals to System Change: The Long Arc of the Garment Industry

On May 16, 2026 By saigonsaysIn #MeToo #Equality, behaviour change, Humankind, International Development, partnershipsLeave a comment

April 25, 2013. Two victims amid the rubble of a garment factory building collapse in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In May 2013, I posted the above photograph on this blog. It was taken by photographer Taslima Akhter, at the site of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Two garment workers, unnamed and unidentifiable, found in a final embrace, buried together in the rubble of a factory that should never have been standing in the first place.

I wrote at the time that questions about “accountability for how the global garment industry is governed” had been being asked for more than twenty years, and wondered how many more years needed to pass before unnecessary lives stopped being lost.

That was thirteen years ago. The question, uncomfortable as it remains, is the one I keep returning to.

The global garment industry’s accountability crisis didn’t begin with Rana Plaza. It had roots stretching back through the 1990s, when sweatshop scandals (involving major brands and poor factory conditions across Asia and Central America) ignited public fury and, eventually, action.

Many companies found themselves in the crosshairs of campaigners, investigative journalists, and increasingly their own consumers. The industry’s response slowly evolved into something more structured. Codes of conduct were written. Auditing regimes were established. Corporate Social Responsibility departments were stood up. A whole apparatus of compliance mechanisms began to proliferate. Much of it well-intentioned, some of it genuinely effective, but quite a lot of it ultimately insufficient.

Rana Plaza, on 24 April 2013, was the industry’s most shattering moment of reckoning. Over 1,100 workers died when the building complex in Savar collapsed. Cracks had been reported. Workers had been told to return anyway. In the days that followed, the labels of high-street brands from across Europe and North America were pulled from the rubble alongside the bodies. The world, briefly, faced what it had been buying.

What followed was a genuine step forward: the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety was signed by over 200 garment brands and trade unions, establishing an independent, legally binding mechanism for factory inspections and remediation. It was unprecedented, and it illustrated just how much the threat of accountability (public, legal, reputational) could shift industry behaviour when applied with sufficient pressure. But compliance, even when enforced, only goes so far. You can mandate a fire exit. You can’t mandate dignity, or opportunity, or a living wage, through a checklist.

This is perhaps an important, central failure of the past three decades: the garment industry became very good at measuring problems but considerably less good at solving them. Audits, assessments, surveys, and reporting frameworks multiplied. Brands invested in supplier scorecards. NGOs published league tables. Governments (particularly in Europe) began legislating on due diligence and supply chain transparency. All of this produced enormous quantities of data about where things were going wrong.

What it didn’t produce, reliably, was sustained improvement in the lives of workers – the overwhelming majority of them women – who make the clothes. The gap between knowing and changing turns out to be vast, and it’s one the industry has been navigating ever since.

And that navigation looks different depending on where you are. The compliance frameworks that emerged in the wake of Rana Plaza were, in many ways, a response to one specific context, and that context remains one of the most complex in the world. Bangladesh’s garment industry is vast, politically entangled, and still grappling with pressures that other sourcing countries have had more time, or more favourable conditions, to begin addressing.

Applying a single industry logic across Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, and beyond (countries at very different stages of this journey, with very different labour environments and political realities) has always been one of the harder problems, and it doesn’t get talked about enough.

The RISE Team, in Yogyakarta, April 24 2026

This is precisely the space that RISE – Reimagining Industry to Support Equality has been working to occupy.

RISE focuses on low-income workers in garment, footwear, and home textile industries: the people at the base of the supply chains that clothe the world. The overwhelming majority of those workers are women, and RISE treats that fact not as a footnote but as the central organising reality of everything they do. Gender isn’t a thematic add-on for them, it’s the lens through which the whole supply chain is read – because you can’t meaningfully improve conditions in these industries without confronting the power dynamics, the wage structures, the management behaviours, and the cultural norms that shape women’s experience of work within them.

Their ambition is broader than programme delivery. They are trying to shift the conditions under which change happens (the incentives, the relationships, the industry norms) not just run workplace interventions and hope for the best.

I’ve had the good fortune of working with RISE on a couple of occasions, since their establishment in 2023, including facilitating a workshop in Yogyakarta last month. I’m currently collaborating with their team, and many of their members (brands including Gap, Target, PVH, Lululemon, Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, VF Corporation, and others) about future initiatives and strategies.

What has struck me, sitting in these recent discussions, is a.) how much the industry has genuinely evolved and b.) of course, how much remains stubbornly unresolved.

Many brands have been investing seriously in supplier relationships, worker wellbeing programmes, gender initiatives, and sustainability commitments for years. And yet the fragmentation of effort across the ecosystem remains a persistent problem. Brands often run parallel initiatives. Suppliers can be subjected to multiple, sometimes conflicting, audit regimes. Civil society organisations and worker advocacy groups operate in adjacent spaces without always connecting. Standards bodies proliferate.

Everyone, broadly, is working toward similar goals, although often not talking to each other. RISE occupies a distinctive position in this landscape, and that is very exciting. It is neither a traditional implementer of programmes, nor a standard-setting or compliance body, nor a pure advocacy organisation. Instead, it an entity that connects across all these roles. Its value, as I’ve heard members describe it again recently, lies in being close enough to workers to have real credibility, while also being capable of convening brands, suppliers, and civil society around shared approaches. Raising standards across an industry that spans dozens of countries, and wildly different contexts, requires something more nuanced than a universal framework dropped from above: it requires meeting each context where it actually is, and that is something RISE and its partner network in-country is seeking to do.

In terms of what else can be built from these positive early achievements of RISE, I’ve also heard frank recognition of where further work is needed. Impact measurement remains an area of increasing expectation for example. Not just evidence of activity and reach, but demonstrable outcomes. And then the role of suppliers (ie the factories themselves) comes through clearly as under-utilised. For too long, the dominant model has positioned suppliers as recipients of compliance requirements and programme delivery, rather than genuine partners in transformation. That needs to change, and RISE is actively thinking about how to make it change.

Many factories see enormous value in RISE’s approach, precisely because it is collaborative and implementation-oriented (involving practical guidance, peer learning, and workplace-level problem solving) rather than the audit-and-penalise dynamic that has characterised too much of the industry relationship to date.

And, when gender is taken seriously at the factory level, that means something quite specific: it means looking at who gets promoted and who doesn’t, how grievance mechanisms actually function for women in practice, what management culture looks like on the factory floor day to day, and whether the structures in place genuinely enable women to progress or quietly work against them. These are not things an audit captures easily, and they are exactly the kinds of questions that require the kind of sustained, trusted relationships RISE has been building.

There is also a growing demand from both brands and suppliers for a clearer business case, and while that can sound cynical at first blush, it’s actually just realism. Programmes that can demonstrate operational value, worker retention, reduced absenteeism, improved management practices, and a genuine return on investment are programmes that survive strategic reviews and budget cycles. The moral argument for treating workers well is not, on its own, sufficient to drive systemic change in a commercially-driven industry. It needs to be reinforced by the commercial one. This is uncomfortable to say out loud, but the people working in this space are increasingly saying it plainly, and they’re right to.

The broader context for all of this is a global environment that feels considerably less hospitable to progress than it did a decade ago. Trade is increasingly politicised. Tariffs and sanctions are reshaping supply chains. Climate disruption is hitting the regions across South and Southeast Asia where most of the world’s garments are made. Investors are nervous. Governments are looking inward.

In that environment, the risk is that corporate sustainability commitments (many of which are genuine and hard-won) get deprioritised when financial pressure intensifies. Suppliers then get squeezed on price and battered by geopolitical volatility and so have even less bandwidth to invest in the kinds of workplace transformation that RISE and its partners are working towards. This makes the question of scale more urgent than ever.

Proof-of-concept programmes that work well in a handful of factories, or one country, are valuable but insufficient. The industry is vast, and the challenge is how to move from demonstration to systemic change. In a nutshell: how to shift markets and influence policy, not just run good projects in favourable conditions.

I still think about those two people in Taslima Akhter’s photograph. I knew very little about them at the time, except that they went to work one morning in April 2013 and didn’t come home. The garment industry has changed since then, but it has not changed enough.

The architecture of accountability is more developed than it was. The commitments more explicit, the conversations more sophisticated. Ultimately, the number of organisations genuinely trying to make supply chains fairer, safer, and more equitable has grown considerably. We must salute this progress, but also then turn more attention to what organisations such as RISE are doing. RISE is bridging the gap between worker-level reality and industry-level ambition, and after only its first few years of operations, it has galvanised some exciting momentum across its membership, to move beyond compliance to something more akin to genuine transformation.

This work is patient, relational, unglamorous, and, if done well, potentially profound in its effects. The arc from those 1990s sweatshop scandals to where the industry is today has been long and uneven. The people trying to shift it in the right direction deserve more support, more visibility, and frankly more urgency than the world is currently giving them.

The Pendulum Effect in Corporate Culture

On March 10, 2026March 10, 2026 By saigonsaysIn #MeToo #Equality, behaviour change, International Development, partnerships2 Comments

Trends have a habit of swinging like pendulums. First something is ignored, then it becomes important, then it becomes very important. Eventually it becomes so important that everyone talks about it endlessly – until the backlash arrives and people pretend they were never quite that enthusiastic about it in the first place.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) went through this earlier in the 21st century, swinging through a melee of definitions and frameworks for quite some time. The moment that started to shift CSR into a new paradigm came in 2011, when the Harvard Business Review published Creating Shared Value by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer. Their argument was simple but powerful: companies should stop thinking about social impact as philanthropy and start seeing it as strategy.

In hindsight, I think this marked the moment when social responsibility stopped being a side activity and started edging toward the core of business strategy. I remember 2011 particularly well. It was the year I moved to Saigon and began attending – and occasionally speaking at – CSR conferences in Bangkok and Singapore. Suddenly everyone was talking about CSR being all about partnerships, collaborations, and how business could create both profit and social value at the same time.

CSR over here in Asia was cresting its wave back then, associated as it was with Porter and Kramer’s theory and less with the previous bolted on, and rather tokenistic, CSR practices. Much of the old, PR-centric ways began to lose their shine, finding themselves repeatedly accused of greenwashing.

While CSR still exists today as a function in business, I’d say those companies using it have nuanced how they describe it so that it comes across much more as a business model, rather than as an add-on. Which is what it was always intended to be.

However, a fair number of years before COVID-19 was to strike, CSR was nudged aside by ‘Sustainability’. Riding into town like a gun-slinging John Wayne, and charging through the swing doors of every industry, blasting away the many offshoots of CSR that had come before it, Sustainability was the word of the moment.

Sustainability earned its spurs pretty quickly and still enjoys the spoils of a period that spans at least the last decade. Many larger corporations will tell you they’ve had sustainability strategies for longer that that, however it’s hard to always find compelling evidence for this.

As all-consuming concepts go, Sustainability covers a lot, and I don’t see it going anywhere for a while. More recently, it has been accompanied by its trusty side-kick: DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) galloping from pillar to post, infiltrating HR departments and budgets with training modules and policies.

To be clear, the business cases for all of these ideas have been well made. DEI has one – linked to ethics as well as business performance – and, as the constant digital transformation of our lives further advances, the blanket understanding of these concepts has gradually grown to a healthy level.

For a while there, particularly in the United States, the corporate world embraced DEI with extraordinary zeal. Statements were issued, targets were set, teams were established. Corporate websites began to resemble small manifestos about fairness, representation and opportunity.

None of this was entirely unreasonable. Businesses operate inside societies, and societies have been wrestling with these questions for a long time. But, as often happens when corporate enthusiasm meets social justice, the pendulum swung rather hard. I remember a period when DEI programmes multiplied rapidly and the language surrounding them intensified. Companies competed to demonstrate how committed they were to the cause. In some cases this then meant that initiatives became quite narrowly targeted – and occasionally clumsily implemented.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review suggests that it wasn’t long after this, and in line with Trump’s second term being launched, that the lawyers started arriving. More than a hundred lawsuits have now been filed in the United States challenging corporate DEI programmes. Critics argue that some initiatives may themselves constitute discrimination, particularly when opportunities are reserved for specific groups.

Over the past year and a half, the tone has changed. Large American corporations have begun scaling back, rebranding or simply speaking less about DEI altogether. At the same time, it seems clear that a more conservative policy environment has taken hold in Washington and across parts of the Western world.

Does this mean the pendulum has swung back? I’m fairly confident that this latest pivot does not mean companies have decided diverse teams are a bad idea. Having spoken with various CEOs this year, many working in Asia, I’d say quite the opposite. Plenty of executives I’ve spoken with still recognise that organisations perform better when they can draw on a wide range of perspectives, experiences and skills. So, perhaps the problem was not the goal, but the packaging.

It often feels as though both the NGO and private sectors share a curious fetish for acronyms and jargon – one that tends to clutter the simple ideas sitting behind the labels. In my experience, what most organisations actually want is something much simpler. They want teams that work well together. They want leaders who understand different perspectives. And they want workplace cultures where people feel able to contribute.

These are not especially radical concepts. In fact, they have been the basic ingredients of effective organisations for about as long as organisations have existed.

Which brings me back to Asia.

I’d posit that the pendulum swing here has been far less dramatic than in the West. One reason may simply be that the region has approached the topic with a little more pragmatism. In many Asian workplaces, diversity is not something that needs to be invented or theorised about – it is simply the daily reality of operating across languages, religions, ethnicities and generations. That tends to shift the conversation away from ideology and toward something far more practical, namely to help people collaborate effectively despite those differences.

While some large companies operating in the region have adopted DEI frameworks, the conversation has generally been more pragmatic and considerably less theatrical. Which, in turn, might be a fortunate position for them to be in now because, as the Western corporate world recalibrates its language and tone, I think Asian organisations will find themselves slightly ahead of the curve. Rather than importing culture wars from elsewhere, companies here can focus on how they build strong teams in complex, diverse workplaces. The task is not to invent diversity, but simply to manage it well.

Optimistically, the next chapter of this conversation may look straightforward, and devoid of quite so much ideological framing. Instead, placing more emphasis on leadership, collaboration and culture. And if organisations find themselves needing a little guidance navigating this gently rebalanced pendulum, well, there are the occasional small consultancies out there ready to help.

Take mine – Coracle Consulting – for example. We spend a surprising amount of time helping organisations think about precisely these questions: how teams work, how leaders lead, and how workplace cultures evolve. No acronyms required.

The pendulum will keep swinging. The trick, perhaps, is learning how to stay one step ahead of it.

The Butterfly and the Hurricane

On January 16, 2026 By saigonsaysIn Humankind2 Comments

I’ve been listening to The Rest Is History lately and, in particular, snippets from various episodes discussing the First World War.

Aside from the irony that it’s taken me thirty-two years since leaving school – and leaving behind two underwhelming history teachers in my wake – to finally get to grips with how WWI was staged, is not lost on me.

During the late nineties, the first time I encountered Franz Ferdinand was on the dancefloor of nightclubs around Clapham Junction, assuming they were simply a catchy, alliteratively named band who knew how to bang out a chord. I’m now suspecting their infamous chart-topper Take Me Out was penned with tongues firmly in cheeks (by their own admission they chose the name because it sounded like something that could “blow up the world.”)

In any case, there are two takeaways that stuck with me while listening to the podcast.

The first being that, if ever there was a story that presses home the old adage that “the flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane,” it is the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, on 28 June 1914.

What began as a botched plot – a missed bomb, a wrong turn, a paused car – ended with two gunshots fired almost by accident on a street corner.

As the podcast hosts infer, Ferdinand was not even the most enthusiastic standard-bearer of empire, nor a particularly popular figure at court, yet his death proved enough to unpick a continent. Within weeks, Europe was at war.

The archduke and duchess in the car, the morning they were killed. Sarajevo, June 28, 1914.

The First World War did not erupt solely because of one man’s death, of course, but without it the fuse might have burned far more slowly – or fizzled out altogether.

Sarajevo (also, up until now, a place about which I had very little intel) was a charged stage for such a moment to play out. It sat at the fault line of empires, religions, and identities. Austria-Hungary controlled Bosnia at the time, a symbol of occupation to many Slavic nationalists. The Archduke’s visit on 28 June was seen by some as provocation, by others as opportunity.

That the world’s twentieth-century catastrophe should hinge on a wrong turn beside the Miljacka River feels bizarre in its randomness.

And yet, listening to the story unravel while weaving through Saigon’s morning markets, it struck me how often history turns not on grand designs, but on small misjudgements and human impatience.

My second takeaway came via Stefan Zweig, also discussed and quoted on the podcast. Writing years later, with what can only be described as bitter clarity, Zweig reflected on how war momentarily dissolves the smallness of individual lives. He described people being “drawn into world history,” purified, if only briefly, “of all selfishness” – their private anxieties submerged beneath a sense of collective fate and shared urgency.

That sentiment stayed with me, perhaps because it is both unsettling and persuasive.

Crowds outside Buckingham Palace and Berlin Cathedral in August 1914 as war was declared.

I’ve read before about the apparent inevitability of conflict and, awful as it is, history suggests it has been one of the few forces powerful enough to collapse social divisions and align purpose. In doing so, it can be a reminder for people that they belong to something larger than themselves.

As conflicts around the world continue to grind on today, it seems we’re still not ready to invest in ways of creating that same level of solidarity – one I suspect most people would willingly sign up to – without first tearing something, or someone else, apart.

I finished the episode, and stepped back out of the Saigon heat, and I felt that thing (that I suspect I was supposed to feel back in the classroom when I wasn’t paying attention to my history teacher) where it’s so damn obvious that history is not some distant, sepia-toned abstraction, but something that unfolds in ordinary places, on ordinary mornings, through choices that feel inconsequential but which prove to be quite the opposite.

For a while now, commentators have been writing about history repeating itself. That is a chilling prospect, made more so by the idea that it so often feels familiar while it’s happening.

The hurricane always needs its butterfly. The unanswered question is whether we’ll ever learn to flap our wings more deliberately.

Sitting Down So Others Can Stand

On December 1, 2025November 30, 2025 By saigonsaysIn #MeToo #Equality, behaviour change, Equality, Humankind, Women's EmpowermentLeave a comment

Those of you familiar with my writing will know I love the chance to hat-tip an anniversary.

As well as today being the first day of the last month of the year, it is also 70 years to the day since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama – and was arrested for it.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks – both arrested in 1955, both changed history.

Back in 2018, I spent time in the United States for work, travelling through the South, visiting museums, memorials, and sites of the Civil Rights Movement. It was one of the most affecting trips of my life.

I wrote about it at the time, and re-reading that text over the weekend reminded me how fortunate I was, back then, to have a job that enabled me to make that trip in the first place.

It dawned on me too that, since leaving CARE International in late 2019, some of my focus has – perhaps inadvertently – shifted.

While with CARE, I was afforded daily access to issues of social rights, well-being, injustice, gender inequity – a myriad of interwoven concerns that constantly reminded me of my own privileges.

Since becoming a freelancer, it feels like I’ve turned much more inward: to the work at hand, to the immediate need to secure the next contract, the next rent payment. And this has often been at the expense of expanding my understanding of those deeper issues I knew so well, only a few years ago.

On that 2018 excursion I met some incredible people – one of whose work was introduced to us when we visited the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, which he founded. His name is Bryan Stevenson, and he’s an American lawyer and social-justice activist, who has spent decades challenging racial bias in the criminal-justice system.

Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx in the movie adaptation of *Just Mercy*, 2019.

In his book Just Mercy, Stevenson writes about the many hundreds of young Black men he has defended. I remember his staff showing us around the Institute, and wearing T-shirts with a quote from Stevenson emblazoned on the back:

The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat that day in 1955, she lit a fuse for a year long boycott that ultimately overturned segregation on public transport in Montgomery.

Her defiance is remembered as iconic. Hers, like Luther King’s, was a moment that changed history.

Rosa Parks’s story and legacy suggests to me that bringing about change is rarely born from comfort. It comes instead from friction, from disruption, from relentless organizing. Sometimes, as in her case, from all of the above combined.

Revisiting this, I’ve read more about how, at the time, many mainstream newspapers and officials framed Rosa Parks as tired, weak, and elderly: a harmless “grandmother figure” whose feet simply hurt.

That narrative was constructed deliberately to make her protest easier for the wider public to digest. In doing so, the narrative then became easier to sanitize, and easier to depoliticize.

But the truth is more powerful. Rosa Parks was 42 years old – not frail or dithering. And, as she later said:

The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Long before that bus ride she was already a seasoned activist. She was trained in non-violent resistance, she was connected to organizers, and she was committed to racial justice.

By 1955 she had been deeply involved in civil-rights work and had supported earlier landmark cases of injustice – including the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine Black teenagers wrongfully accused of rape in 1931.

Scottsboro Boys jailed with their attorney Samuel Leibowitz, 1932.

Their rushed trials at the time – complete with all-white juries – and their near-execution, exposed the brutal racial injustice of the legal system, and very likely shaped Parks’s understanding of what it meant to fight for justice.

Her refusal on that bus was not a spontaneous act born of fatigue. It was a strategic, courageous choice by someone who understood exactly what was at stake – as well as how much work still remained.

I don’t know how much Rosa Parks, or any of her peers at the time, believed there was an alternative route to justice than the one they took. What seems more truthful is that their actions were born out of necessity and fierce conviction. They acted not because it was safe, or convenient, but because it was right.

Today, at the beginning of the end of another year, I’m struck by how easy it is, in our everyday lives, to drift toward comfort. We focus on earning, and planning, and surviving – this is what we do, these are the things we use for structure, and for our milestones.

And, while I don’t see how to get around some of these inevitably important components in one’s life, I do wish personally I’d spent more time of late listening and learning from those others out there, who have leant hard into the practice of intentional solidarity.

I’ve found myself proactively turning away from reading more about some of the ongoing turbulence in the world. And in doing so, missed opportunities to be inspired by all the many other “Rosa Parks figures” in the world: individuals, often far away from our lives, bravely doing things differently, guided by resolve, endurance, and principle.

One of them is Malala Yousafzai. Even now – years after surviving a brutal attempt on her life, and years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize – she continues to remind the world why education is not a privilege, but a right. When I first learnt about her story she immediately inspired me to write about some of the issues she stood up for.

Looking her up now, it’s thrilling to read that through her ‘Malala Fund’ she continues to supports girls, particularly those in conflict zones or under oppressive regimes. She is helping them complete their secondary schooling, stand up for their rights, and ultimately claim the futures that too often are denied to them.

Although she has repeatedly spoken out about the dire situation facing Afghan girls, this year she went to Tanzania to convene activists around a range of similar issues – from girls’ education and child marriage to digital inclusion and climate justice.

To me, Malala is another history changing icon. In some ways, she stands as a bridge between the legacy of 1950s civil-rights movements and the contemporary realities that my work with CARE also brought to life for me: global inequality, gender injustice, and the woeful disenfranchisement of entire generations of girls.

I’m very grateful for the chance to regurgitate some of the lessons I took from that US trip seven years ago, and to commit more in my life to reach beyond convenience, to pause, to read, and to listen much more to voices I don’t normally hear.

Just because we’ve got used to the media peppering us with images and stories of characters who couldn’t behave LESS like those I’ve written about here today, it doesn’t mean we have to take any lead from them, or from what they represent. If, instead, we have to go back in time to find better role models and more worthy solutions to social inequalities, then so be it.

Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malala Yousafzai: these should be the trend-setters of today, the influencers in our lives.

I will always applaud them, and all the many others out there like them – people who refuse to accept easy comfort, when it comes at the cost of justice.

You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.

Rosa Parks (Feb 4, 1913 – Oct 24, 2005).

Smarter Machines, Slower Minds?

On November 20, 2025November 20, 2025 By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, Humankind1 Comment

I woke up this morning to news of Nvidia’s latest impressive stock surge – yet again confounding its critics and the doom-mongers convinced the AI bubble is moments from bursting.

It doesn’t surprise me. AI’s galloping pace is unmistakable, and its technologies are now running wild through the day-to-day interactions and transactions of businesses and organisations. Supply chains, customer service, drug discovery, industrial design, logistics – AI is under the bonnet of so many things we rely on.

Perhaps more striking is the shift and uptake of AI not by organisations, but by individuals. An ever-growing majority of the world’s population now uses AI in some form. To keep things in perspective, here’s the rough scale (pulled up using ChatGPT, naturally): there are 5.5-6 billion people online; roughly the same number using smartphones; and close to a billion already interacting with AI tools – often without even knowing it.

Whatever definitions countries choose when reporting AI usage, it’s getting harder to maintain the fantasy that AI is niche or peripheral. It’s mainstream.

And, although we talk about AI as if it has “just arrived,” it’s been with us for far longer.

The field traces back to the 1940s, when Alan Turing first imagined machines that could think. I re-watched The Imitation Game (the movie about him) on a flight this summer, and was far more absorbed in the storyline than I remembered being when I first watched it ten years ago. Back then, AI felt like a curiosity, whereas now it feels like the backdrop of our lives.

From Turing’s wartime code-breaking machines, the formal study of AI began in 1956, then wandered along for decades before suddenly accelerating in the 2010s with deep learning and the rise of powerful computing. What looks like a “sudden revolution” today is really just the latest chapter in an 80-year experiment.

ChatGPT arrived only three years ago. Its exponential uptake (1 million users in five days, 100 million in two months) made it one of the fastest-adopted technologies in human history. Generative AI went mainstream so quickly that many formed opinions on it only after it was already shaping our routines.

I use AI a lot in my work, and try to treat it as something that expands my thinking rather than replaces it. It’s easy, though, to feel the seduction of outsourcing increasing amounts of the boring brain stuff we deal with to a machine.

When I heard friends first using it to write emails and text messages, I remember thinking: this surely won’t last. And yet here we are. AI now writes, translates, analyses, drafts, refines, designs, and increasingly does it frighteningly well.

If everything we have to do becomes effortless, what happens to the mental muscle we use when things are hard? What happens to reasoning and curiosity? What about our memories and about our accountability?

Earlier this month, the New York Times posted an article called How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’. The Harvard Gazette ran a similar piece last week, and The Guardian and MSN picked up coverage of Nataliya Kosmyna, an MIT Media Lab scientist whose recent study of Chat GPT made waves.

All raise similar worries – some calling it “brain rot,” others “cognitive atrophy.” Kosmyna and her fellow researchers found that users who leaned on AI for writing tasks remembered less of what they had written, and showed diminished activity in brain networks tied to attention and reasoning. One educator interviewed described AI as “a brilliant assistant, but a terrible replacement for struggle.”

This feels about right.

And yet, the same research argues that, used reflectively, AI can make us more creative, more productive, and even more curious. The key distinction is, perhaps, intention: it’s not the presence of AI that dulls us, it’s the absence of our own engagement.

I’d noticed my own habits shifting in that direction, and so took a step back. In doing so I felt myself pushed in the opposite direction: towards more reading, more handwriting, and more analogue time.

I wrote about this over on Substack earlier this year, Rewinding With a Bic Pen, because I felt that slowing down into the older rhythms of writing was helping me stretch my attention, rather than scatter it.

However, at the same time, I’d say that AI has made me much more efficient in my work – researching, planning, synthesising ideas, prepping workshops, threading insights into reports. Using AI has meant I can carve out more time, not less, for other things that matter. It’s a perfect conundrum if you ask me: not classically good or bad.

My daughter’s school is, understandably, trying to protect students from AI – or at least slow it down – and I don’t feel nervous about their classroom experiences being compromised. But the truth is unavoidable: their world will be steeped in AI whether we delay it or not. The question isn’t how long we can hold it back – it’s how well we can teach them to use it with care and curiosity.

I definitely crave simpler times, simpler tools, simpler choices. I find myself saying this more and more. Although nothing in the rulebook says we can’t keep hold of the simple things while still letting technology widen the possibilities around us. The analogue and the digital can coexist.

In the end, I’m personally on board with AI. I see its risks, and I also see the enormous potential for good (plus the way it has already nudged me back into more deliberate, thoughtful habits.)

It’s hard to sum things up. Particularly when I’m nowhere near understanding or predicting AI’s evolution, nor the financial ripples a company like Nvidia is casting across global markets. The numbers are too big for me to take seriously. When I see speculation about Elon Musk edging closer to “trillionaire” status, or Jensen Huang’s net worth doing somersaults, I tend to scroll past it and simply go off to make myself a strong cup of tea.

In the end, AI is a mirror that reflects our cravings as much as our creativity. It shows our hunger for ease, our impatience, and our distractibility – in those moments, we look like one vast Pavlov’s-dog experiment, staring up, waiting for the next treat. But it also reflects our imagination and our ability to build astonishing things.

It holds both truths at once.

And so, arguably, the real question isn’t whether AI will be good or bad, but who we choose to become while using it.

Your Application Has Been Unsuccessful

On November 6, 2025November 6, 2025 By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, International DevelopmentLeave a comment

I’ve been remiss posting on DefinitelyMaybe, having thrown my efforts into a weekly Substack instead – a decision that has yet to yield fame, fortune, or even a single sponsorship from a running shoe company.

In the meantime, no one’s mentioned my absence here, which I choose to interpret as proof that after twelve years of waffle I’ve covered everything there is to cover in the world of development.

Sadly for you, reader, I have not even scraped the surface of our sector’s bleak, lunar landscape.

It’s been an odd year, working freelance in development and humanitarian affairs. One of my last rants here was about Elon Musk’s DODGE experiment, following Trump’s cheerful levelling of USAID’s $40 billion portfolio. I can’t bring myself to post a photo of either man this morning – Musk currently awaiting a trillion-dollar stock decision, Trump berating New York’s newly elected Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Today, I want to talk about the future of job applications.

The email above is verbatim from an INGO that rejected me for a “Head of” position. I get emails like these a lot and am comfortable sharing that. It was a rather whimsical application to be fair, given the last six years I’ve been in the market for short term consultancies rather than full-time roles.

However, even with my freelancing I’ve probably only struck gold three times, after spending hours crafting pitches to advertised assignments. Ironically, the most lucrative of those was also the most haphazard application I submitted – a lesson in randomness, if ever there was one.

Most of my consultancy work comes through word of mouth. For that, I’m sincerely grateful. I intend to keep going, not least because my track record with formal applications suggests remaining solo may be wise.

It makes me wonder: is there really no better way for organisations to find people than the tired ritual of CVs and cover letters?

I write this, of course, while still mildly irked by that latest “thanks, but no thanks” email above – copied and pasted as it so often is in the first person, yet unsigned at the end, it felt like a passive-aggressive ghost of correspondence, glaring at me in my in-box.

As this isn’t the first, nor the last, rejection I’ll receive, I did want to share some of the inadequacies I see in the overall recruiting paradigm we have to wade through in the development sector.

Standing Out in the Crowd

Firstly, and as usual, I have no idea what part of my application failed the test, based on the email sent. Was it tone? Experience? Am I too old? Too informal? Should I have omitted my perfectly reasonable demand for sixty days of annual leave and a 25% pay rise each year?

Certainly one can ask for feedback, but some rejection emails even come with disclosures like this other one I received:

“Due to the number of applications received and reviewed, I am not able to give individual feedback at this time, though I do encourage you to consider and apply for one of our consultancy opportunities in future.”

Recruiters tell me the challenge now is volume. Every LinkedIn posting draws hundreds of applicants within hours. Many are AI-generated, indistinguishable from spam. In that flood, it’s little wonder HR teams can’t respond personally. The process has become automated compassion. Efficient, yet entirely devoid of empathy.

And sometimes the role was never really open at all. The ad is window-dressing for an internal appointment already made before your polite rejection hits your inbox. Everyone knows this game.

The Human Touch

When I was recruiting for CARE in London twenty years ago, the process felt clunky, but sincere. Applications came by post, HR filtered the pile, and you spent a weekend reading twenty or thirty of them, scoring each against the criteria. You’d imagine who these people might be, wonder how they’d fit, and inevitably be surprised when you met them.

“He’s nothing like I thought he would be,” we’d gush after the first interview, perhaps a tad disappointed. Then the second candidate would arrive, and we’d instantly revise our judgment of the first.

I want to be careful here, harking back to these times and to any over-reliance on the in-person interview. There’s a strong argument that you’d be just as well to flip a coin, rather than judge two candidates battling it out in 45-minute interviews. I’ve seen plenty of people ace their interview but then turn out to be terrible at their jobs – and vice versa.

That said, while my old team’s deliberations about candidates could be chaotic and subjective, at the same time they were undeniably human deliberations. We’d agree, disagree, wind each other up, have a laugh about it all, and then take a punt on someone. It was a messy chemistry of people trying to imagine other people in their world.

While an interview is only one piece of the puzzle, I hope these deliberations still play out in some teams because it feels instead now that many just outsource that time and imagination to algorithms. Which results in extra pressure on candidates to hit the right keywords, and on recruiters to do the same with the right filters. I think the combination of which can mean people, at times, feel unseen.

Technology was meant to create fairer hiring practices, however I’d argue some of the stuff that used to make it feel more real – the chance for surprise, or for discovery, or for seeing someone as more than a list of verbs and achievements – has been lost as a result.

In Trust We Trust

Truly one of the best litmus tests for success here is trust. Someone who’s seen you work, who believes in you, or introduces you to someone else – that format can work really well, and is devoid of an algorithm and a cover letter. This way of doing things is also, clearly, not comprehensive enough of a format on its own to work for everyone.

There likely isn’t one silver bullet that comes close to solving the dilemma of how to best fill all the roles out there, and all the needs. We will have to use the internet to advertise. I just think our systems for doing so have taken out some of the vital aspects of what used to be there. CVs written by ChatGPT, and rejections by chatbots – where do we go from here?

Perhaps the future of hiring is more about a ten-minute audio pitch instead of a cover letter? Have any organisations out there experimented with short paid trials? Or could claim they host interviews where candidates ask as many questions as they do as recruiters? I’d love to hear from anyone on this.

For me, anything that reintroduces more elements of curiosity, risk and humanity into the exchange would be refreshing.

Viability vs. Visibility: The Tragedy of Modern Leadership

On May 29, 2025May 29, 2025 By saigonsaysIn Uncategorized1 Comment

https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-elon-musk-doge-sec-target-conflict-2032567

Just been reading that Elon Musk is stepping down from his role at DOGE, the government department set up to save the US economy from wasted spending.

I’ve briefly shared my view on DOGE and on Trump, and I mentally flit between one day wanting to write more about how both entities are impacting the world (negatively, in my opinion) and the next day simply wanting the whole circus that is the US Republican administration to fall off the face of the earth.

If only there were some decent Democrat spokes-people out there, these past five months, to counteract the daily ordeal each of us faces when we read the news. Lucky enough I found this guy, Harry, to be a helpful and passionate critique of Musk and Trump.

There’s very little in this piece he posted recently with which I disagree.

The one thing I’d add to this latest piece “news” about Musk leaving DOGE is that, aside from the long list of grievances one would be well justified to level at Elon Musk (Harry covers this neatly, so I don’t need to), and aside from his general awkwardness with everyone he meets, and how he communicates, the thing that sticks most in my throat is his inability to collaborate.

His purchase of Twitter/X has only made his individualism and ego even more pronounced.

Forget the viability of something anymore (be it, say, the “truth” or simply the credentials of one’s EV business) many social media sites have together reframed what is important for society and that, it seems to me, is not viability, but visibility.

Misinformation thrives in these online spaces. Very complex ideas and hypotheses are flattened out into bulleted “top tips”. Twitter, in many ways, is a platform which has gamified shortened attention spans and praises individual’s visibility and their brand.

Which, of course, offers the perfect ground for performers like Trump and Musk, who pretend to be leaders, but act more like ham-fisted Copperfield illusionists. All accountability is removed. All sense evaporates as soon as they start speaking. They don’t answer questions, they gaslight, they lie, they rinse, they repeat.

While Musk claims to build for the future, with neural interfaces and colonies on Mars, he is a caricature of all the shitty habits and traits that we’re collectively adopting from spending too much time, ironically, scrolling through Twitter feeds.

It’s well documented that many people find it ever harder to hold their attention on simple tasks and activities. Young professionals, in particular, embrace more performative ambitions about what they want to do as individuals. It feels, a lot of the time, like there is a fading appetite for collective progress, as folks rush about in a melee of self-made busyness and unfinished projects.

As Musk bounces from city to city, flexing his enormous bank account in front of politicians one day and Silicon Valley the next, we watch as climate plans get drafted annually at COP Conferences, before being routinely shelved. We observe social justice campaigns that trend for days, before being eclipsed by celebrity gossip or some other geopolitical outrage.

Musk is a symbol for these contradictions. His own portfolio reflects a restlessness where the next ambition supersedes the existing one. Bored of this project now, move on.

Perhaps all of this is inevitable, given the world’s richest man is able to sway the markets with a single tweet, and can basically say or do what he wants today, and then pay for the damage afterwards, knowing that tomorrow we’ll all have moved on to the next click-bait article.

Musk is not alone, of course. As Jeff Bezos floated into Cannes earlier this month, in his $500m schooner, the irony was not lost on those who’ve followed his outspoken support to address climate change. And let’s not forget his Blue Origin space flight debacle. No, let’s.

Whichever of these wealthy elite you handpick for analysis, you’ll find the same paradoxes. The allure of the solo operator, at this echelon of society, remains powerful, there’s no doubt about that, and especially in a world that feels increasingly ungovernable. But the actions and behaviors of these individuals, forging ahead, indifferent to consensus, and chucking U-turns on a weekly basis, smacks of ending up brazenly erasing the work of thousands of others.

And, this approach fundamentally ignores the necessity of institutions, of partnerships, and the wholesome bindings of community. All of which are needed if we’re to arrive at long term solutions to global problems. We don’t need Musk or Bezos to do that.

You can tell me that Musk is responsible for cutting edge technological breakthroughs but, even if I choose to believe that, the nature in which he is conducting himself does not sit well with me, nor fill me with anything other than fear.

Musk, Bezos, Trump: these characters are in the headlines all the time, and they dominate how we think about change because of that. That’s a red flag.

Change that the world urgently requires is slow and deeply collective. We need sustained cooperation, and instead we run the risk of remaining stuck in a loop of promising beginnings and spectacular distractions.

Too Distracted Scrolling to Notice We’re Sinking

On May 7, 2025 By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, climate change, Humankind, International Development, partnershipsLeave a comment

Northern Vietnam, photo credit: Tim Bishop

In 2025, the world feels perpetually distracted. Elections, wars, AI, celebrity scandals — global attention ricochets between urgency and noise. Today it’s one crisis, tomorrow another. And we all scroll on.

And yet, a slower, more existential threat escalates beneath it all: climate change.

Especially in Southeast Asia, the impacts are already reshaping daily life. I’m guilty of tuning out, and I know many others do the same head-in-the-sand routine when they skim stories about rising temperatures or shrinking icebergs.

If climate change is so serious then why aren’t we acting like it is?

Southeast Asia is on the frontlines of climate risk. Jakarta is sinking by as much as 17 centimetres a year, one of the fastest rates in the world. In Vietnam, over 50% of the Mekong Delta’s land area is projected to face saltwater intrusion by 2050, threatening not just agriculture, but the food security of tens of millions.

Saline intrusion is already choking rice production in the Delta, while intensifying heatwaves and droughts disrupt water supplies. When these come, droughts disrupt water supplies, and you don’t have to be studying GCSE geography like my daughter (who knows more about this than I) to appreciate what then transpires from a biodiversity perspective: that everything is gradually disappearing.

The IPCC (our collective authority on the matter) warns the window to avoid catastrophic change is ‘brief and rapidly closing.’ That’s not hyperbole — it’s scientific consensus. And, still, climate continues to feel like a background hum, rather than breaking news.

The private sector must play a more central role to Southeast Asia’s adaptation and resilience efforts. Governments alone can’t foot the bill or engineer every innovation. Yet, despite growing interest in green investments and carbon markets, engagement remains patchy.

Vietnam’s 2025 Carbon Market Forum and the P4G Summit were welcome steps. These meetings offered the usual fare: policy frameworks, optimistic keynotes, and lots of “roadmaps.” But translating these into real action remains a challenge.

I’ve worked for a long time promoting sustainability and, in particular, getting business to the table however, let’s be honest, when it comes to climate change, aside from a few regional giants and climate-conscious smaller businesses, most private sector entities are still unsure what climate action means for them, or how to act without sacrificing profitability.

The colourful urban skyline of Quezon City, Metro Manila. Photo credit: Tim Bishop.

So, I think my call to action on this would, ideally, be quite broad (the ownership of the issue should be everyone’s) however it is here is where I think international NGOs (like my former employer CARE) should step in — not as saviours, but as agencies that can help shape the systems that exist within the private sector, and which relate to climate change.

CARE doesn’t treat women’s empowerment and climate action as separate goals. Instead, they have developed programmes that integrate them through market-based, locally led interventions, tackling environmental threats and economic inequality at once.

In Vietnam, for example, HerGreenVenture supports women-led enterprises with training and green finance to adopt low-emission farming and scale sustainable technologies. In Cambodia, CARE also runs community recycling programmes that help women turn waste into income and reduce landfill pollution. And in Thailand, CARE’s eco-tourism projects led by women are creating jobs while preserving forests and coastlines.

What links these diverse initiatives is a belief that resilience is built from the bottom up.

CARE’s core strategy is clear: gender equality isn’t a side note, it’s central. Women, particularly in rural and informal economies, often bear the worst climate shocks while themselves holding the keys to adaptation. Give them access to green finance, leadership roles, and supply chains, and resilience becomes lasting.

We’ve been warned for years, but action has lagged far behind awareness. Climate experts might point to progress — but, from where I sit, I don’t see enough.

If you’re a business leader, why not starting by asking: how is your company contributing to climate adaptation today? Not just ESG compliance, but to real-world impact.

If you’re in government, how about checking the extent to which you are creating the right conditions for innovation, for inclusion, and ultimately for scale?

And, if you’re an INGO or donor, let’s have more discussion about whether you are building systems or simply just running programmes?

We may live in distracted times. I find myself fighting this day-on-day myself. But, distraction doesn’t make the climate crisis less real — if anything it just makes it less seen.

The question is no longer if it’s serious. It’s whether we’ll start acting like it.

Dili, East Timor: Photo credit Tim Bishop

Turn Debt into Hope

On April 3, 2025April 3, 2025 By saigonsaysIn Equality, International Development, partnerships, PoliticsLeave a comment

https://walletgenius.com/loans/why-debt-relief-plans-might-be-better-than-debt-consolidation/

Do you remember much about what you were doing twenty five years ago? Maybe you can recall how you spent that final New Year’s Eve of the 20th century?

Fun fact, that specific NYE, with only an hour left until midnight, I found myself responsible for introducing an old school friend to the woman who turned out to become the love of his life.

Anyway, while some of us were downing drinks and match-making at a bar in South West London, others were galvanizing global attention about world debt, and its impacts on least developed nations. The Jubilee 2000 movement led that charge at the time, their efforts leading to the cancellation of over $130 billion in debt for 36 countries.

A monumental effort which enabled nations to redirect funds toward critical sectors like health and education, offering millions a pathway out of poverty. But, fast forward to 2025, and the call for debt justice still resonates, only things have got worse.

I’ve been working recently with Caritas International, and have come to know about the launch of their “Turn Debt into Hope” campaign, urging the cancellation of unjust and unsustainable debts that, to quote from their website, “hinder nations from investing in their futures.”

From some quick research it seems that, back in 2000, the total external debt for the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) was approximately $150.4 billion. External debt today, for the 31 poorest, high-risk countries, has now topped $200 billion. We’re seeing the highest burden of debt in 30 years.

This increase means that even more substantial chunks of money from the world’s poorest governments are being diverted away from public sector needs and, instead, allocated to repaying these debts.

When you then consider other ‘crises’ that encroach upon a country’s economy – be it the slow onset ramifications of conflict, or the rapid emergency of an earthquake (much like the one Myanmar experienced a week ago) – it becomes impossible to see how these debts will ever be repaid.

In the aftermath of a crisis, economies dive, job losses occur, inflation prices scupper spending, and a whole myriad of other economic outcomes conspire to spiral a country out of all control.

Waking up this morning to the news of Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs (which includes a 10% baseline on all imports, and higher rates on key trading partners such as China (34%), the EU (20%) and a whopping 46% here in Vietnam) it is obvious these escalating trade tensions will only lead to market volatility, to fears of a global economic slowdown, and the inevitably unequal impacts of that on so many of the world’s developing countries.

It’s a brutal, cruel economic conundrum, because it is the most vulnerable communities who face the highest threats.

As I’ve been prone to highlight here many times before now, I believe the role of the private sector to be key in these debates. And yet, too often, these conversations happen without the private sector in the room.

That needs to change. Companies are increasingly recognizing that their long-term success is intertwined with the well-being of the communities in which they operate. Engaging with initiatives that promote economic justice, such as “Turn Debt into Hope”, aligns with corporate commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

By advocating for, and participating in, debt cancellation measures, businesses can play a role in contributing to the creation of more stable and equitable global markets. All of which, ultimately, benefits everyone.

Twenty five years ago, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set out a charter, with a fifteen year timeframe. The MDGs sewed into their narrative this inference about partnership and the role of the private sector, however it’s been a slow process to bring business to the table.

Genuine collaboration takes time, and today we need to keep banging this same drum, hoist up this same flag, and loudly promote why multi-stakeholder collaboration, that includes business, can be instrumental in addressing both immediate financial injustices, while also laying the groundwork for sustainable development.

The principles that the 2000 Jubilee Campaign champion are more pertinent than ever. We’re experiencing an era marked by economic uncertainty, by geopolitical tensions, and by ongoing climate crises. Debt cancellation is a crucial lever for promoting stability and prosperity, and we cannot wait another quarter of a decade for action in this space.

The children of my old school friend, who met his future wife on New Year’s Eve in 2000, are already in their twenties. Theirs is the generation now grappling with the implications of a world that procrastinated over its responsibilities.

Do please consider donating to any of the organisations currently providing humanitarian assistance to communities in Myanmar affected by the earthquake – here is one.

Why Companies Must Double Down on DEI

On March 25, 2025 By saigonsaysIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I have been working with companies for twenty years in a bid to involve them more in the delivery and improved impacts of international aid.

What started primarily as a resource mobilization effort, for CARE International UK in 2006, soon evolved into something more integrated – global banks providing accounts for village savings groups; insurers offering rural communities $1 policies for health coverage; and even beer companies investing in research to understand the link between alcohol and domestic violence.

Throughout this time, I saw how the emergence of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies into the corporate world helped usher in new modes of leadership. CEOs began talking about putting “people and planet before profit.” HR departments prided themselves on equal opportunities, and invested in understanding workers’ rights and needs.

This shift toward a more inclusive, values-driven model of ‘Business 2.0’ was slow to take hold, but many of the world’s largest companies led the way. At least, they talked a good game. And, sometimes, talking is where progress begins.

DEI Under Threat

Today, however, we are navigating a world increasingly shaped by geopolitical instability, shifting aid flows, and rising nationalist rhetoric. DEI is under threat – not just from external political pressures, but from internal forces like budget cuts and boardroom fatigue. Yet, walking away from DEI now is not only a moral misstep, in my opinion it’s bad for business and bad for society.

The first quarter of 2025 has already seen drastic cuts to development aid. Alongside this, DEI commitments – once publicly celebrated – are being quietly shelved. Still, inequality persists. Marginalized groups, particularly women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities, continue to face systemic barriers. The need for equity in the workplace and beyond remains urgent.

Companies have long positioned themselves as leaders in social responsibility. I know this because I’ve spent countless hours in corporate boardrooms discussing the merits of my host’s latest DEI framework. I’ve attended conferences, facilitated panels, sat in workshops, written blogs, and led site visits from the northern provinces of Myanmar to the remote islands of the Philippines.

I’ve seen the important impacts of DEI on company culture, factory floors, and the communities indirectly touched by global supply chains.

The type of leadership that I’ve witnessed in this time, and that prioritizes values-driven business (one that sees the “win-win” for company and society in driving a stronger DEI agenda) is not a “nice-to-have.”

It is, more than ever, core to innovation, resilience, and long-term growth. Numerous studies have shown that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones. Inclusion drives creativity, better decision-making, and market expansion.

According to McKinsey: “Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity outperform those in the bottom quartile by 36% in profitability.” Organisations prioritizing DEI enjoy “up to 50% lower staff turnover”, says the Living Institute, which in turn reduces the high cost of recruitment and onboarding.

During my time with CARE International, I worked closely with companies who shared similar data and positive anecdotes about the way DEI commitments they had made were taking hold. Also while at CARE, I learnt more about micro and small businesses. Globally, these account for 90% of all enterprises and over 50% of global employment, according to the World Bank and the United Nations.

Imagine a world where these businesses adopt inclusive practices – the ripple effects through supply chains and local economies could be truly transformative.

Where to Start?

If you are a business seeking to strengthen your DEI commitments, why not start with the basics:

Embed DEI in your core strategy – don’t relegate it to CSR.
Publish annual DEI metrics and be transparent about both progress and challenges.
Ensure inclusive hiring, equitable pay, and diverse leadership pipelines.
Advocate publicly for inclusive policies, even when it’s uncomfortable.

In times of political pushback, I don’t believe ‘neutrality’ is a favourable option for the private sector. Companies that stay silent send a message that rights and equity are negotiable. Silence, in my experience, can be both reputationally and ethically compromising which, during uncertain times, is not ideal if your brand and reputation is under the microscope.

DEI is not a passing political trend.

It’s a human and economic imperative – one that businesses must continue to champion with courage, data, and intent.

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