Category: behaviour change

Sitting Down So Others Can Stand

On 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.

Malala Yousafzai in March 2025.

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.

Redbubble.com

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 By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, Humankind1 Comment
Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang.

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?

bethgoodyillustration

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.

Substack article on analogue living

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 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.

Too Distracted Scrolling to Notice We’re Sinking

On 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

Private Sector Engagement in Southeast Asia: The Moment for Bold Action

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, Equality, International Development, partnerships1 Comment
Vietnam bustle – Photo: http://www.localvietnam.com

For fourteen years, as long as I’ve lived in Saigon, I’ve been blogging about ‘Private Sector Engagement’ – its evolution, its setbacks, and its vast potential to drive social and economic change. Time and again, I’ve emphasized one thing: alliances with business are not just beneficial, they are essential.

Yet, at a time when global companies are facing political pressure to roll back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, there’s a real risk that corporate commitments to broader social impact (including sustainability, worker rights, and responsible business practices) could be deprioritized or abandoned altogether.

With government funding for aid shrinking fast, the question is no longer whether the private sector should play a role in sustainable development – but how fast we can make that happen? Companies must resist the temptation to step away from ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) commitments, or drop impact-driven business models. Instead, they must double down on sustainable, long-term strategies that create both profit and positive change.

Rather than dwelling on the alarming consequences of these funding cuts (which many commentators are documenting well), I want to underscore why this moment demands a shift.

From my work in sustainability consulting, business partnerships, and initiatives with CARE, I’ve identified the following key trends shaping this transformation.

The Rise of Impact-Driven Partnerships

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Southeast Asia has long been philanthropy-driven, with companies donating to social causes without embedding impact into their core business. That’s shifting.

While there’s still a place for sponsorships, more businesses now see the value in long-term, strategic partnerships with NGOs and social enterprises. CARE has always been my “go-to” on this, for examples of the innovations used to secure “win-win” partnerships with corporations – I’ve listed their collaborations over the years with the likes of Barclays, Allianz and GSK as just a few examples.

In Southeast Asia, many other organisations have worked collaboratively with companies. World Vision & Procter & Gamble in the Philippines, for example, ran a Hope in Garbage project, which collected 3.2 million plastic sachets and 870,000 plastic bottles, upcycling them into 1,040 chairs for schools – a great model for sustainability and education impact.

Bangkok’s booming private sector
Bangkok’s local business networks

Here in Vietnam, The East Meets West Foundation, also known as ‘Thrive Networks’, partnered with GE Healthcare to enhance healthcare infrastructure leading to the development of medical institutions, and the provision of custom-designed equipment to hospitals, aimed at improving neonatal care and reducing infant mortality rates. ​

Even in industries like apparel, where brands once relied on short-term worker welfare programs, we now see the co-development of ethical supply chains with sustainability organizations. CARE and the ILO’s early 2000s work laid a lot of the foundations for this, and entities now, such as RISE, are pushing ethical supply chain development even further as result.

Where to from here? To me, the answer is clear. Organizations – NGOs, especially – engaging with the private sector need to move beyond sponsorship requests and, instead, position themselves as strategic partners that bring business value, through such things as innovation, market access, or risk mitigation.

The Shift from Compliance to ESG-Driven Business Models

ESG factors are becoming a competitive advantage, rather than a regulatory burden. Investors, consumers, and governments are increasingly pressuring businesses to embed sustainability into their operations. The result of which is that large corporations are developing ESG frameworks, not just to comply with regulations, but to attract investors and gain consumer trust.

And with this trend, we are seeing multinationals now pushing sustainability requirements down their supply chains, impacting SMEs and local businesses.

Quezon City, Metro Manila – Photo @timbishop

Governments in our region are also starting to integrate ESG into investment policies and corporate reporting frameworks. Both Vietnam and Indonesia, for example, highlight ESG in financial reporting, investment strategies, and regulatory frameworks.

Vietnam even has a “report or explain” framework and Corporate Governance Code which both promote transparency, while Indonesia’s OJK Regulation No. 51/2017 mandates ESG disclosure for listed companies.

As ESG gains traction, the non-profit world can play a more prominent role in ensuring businesses go beyond compliance to create real social and environmental impact. NGOs can add value by training smaller companies on ESG compliance, reporting, and sustainable business models, and also facilitating partnerships that ensure corporate ESG aligns with local needs. There is also room for NGOs to play a role in accountability, monitoring ESG commitments, preventing greenwashing, and pushing for stronger corporate governance.

The Growth of Market-Based Solutions & Inclusive Business Models

Lastly, one of the most exciting trends I think Southeast Asia is experiencing, is the rise of businesses integrating social impact into their core revenue models. Rather than treating sustainability as a cost center, companies are developing commercially viable solutions that also drive impact.

As such “circular economy” models are emerging, particularly in sectors like textiles, packaging, and agriculture. Whilst social enterprises are scaling through corporate partnerships, blending business growth with community impact.

I saw this firsthand as early as 2007, when I worked on CARE’s rural sales initiative in Bangladesh – a project that later spun off as JITA, itself a stand-alone social enterprise in 2012. Since then, the region has only expanded its approach, with more companies exploring inclusive business models that drive both profit and impact.

These ventures, requiring businesses to engage with underserved communities, need cross-sector expertise, opening up opportunities for collaboration between the private sector, NGOs, and impact investors. Organizations that can align their business goals with market-based impact solutions will, in my opinion, have a stronger case for funding and growth partnerships.

Where to Next?

Private sector engagement in Southeast Asia is no longer an option in my view – it’s a necessity. With aid funding brutally slashed, ESG becoming mainstream, and political pressure mounting against corporate social commitments, businesses and impact organizations must collaborate in smarter, more strategic ways.

In the face of backlash against DEI, we must recognize that ESG, sustainability, and inclusive business aren’t just about good optics – they are about long-term business resilience, risk management, and innovation.

Businesses should move beyond compliance and integrate ESG and impact into their core strategy, rather than retreating from it. Whilst NGOs must stop just chasing sponsorships and become strategic partners that offer value.

The opportunity is there for the taking. The question is: who’s ready to lead, and who will fall behind?

Moving Forward. Galle, Sri Lanka – Photo @timbishop

#IWD 2025

On By saigonsaysIn #MeToo #Equality, behaviour changeLeave a comment
https://blackgirlnerds.com/audre-lorde-a-lasting-legacy/

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day and I’ve spent much of my Friday so far pretending no one really cares about events such as “IWD.”

This is an innately male inclination, it occurs to me, given us men have been in the firing line now for an uncomfortable amount of years (is it ten already?) hearing about the importance of women’s empowerment and gender equality.

I have blogged time and again about gender issues, largely because I worked for an organisation whose mission was to empower women, and address the inequalities they face. Aside from being paid money to support this mission, I happened to also fundamentally believe that gender equality was critical for the world.

Perhaps naively, in December 2011, I wrote this piece on my way back from a conference in India, in which I stated I was “hopeful” that women’s empowerment was on the rise. Businesses, I gushed, were hosting conferences on the topic, no less.

“Hopeful”. Not a great statement of mine to re-read. Kind of ironic?

No matter that the UK suffragette movement was the best part of one hundred years old, as I was offering my insights. I was hopeful.

Nor was I put off, at the time, by some of the infamous predictions being bandied around by “the Scandinavian’s” that gender equality would only be realised “in about 150 year’s time”. And that was just in Norway.

Again, I remained hopeful, in Delhi on that trip, that things were changing.

I’d not cared, either, to really listen to those experts in my field who spoke of the “generational change” needed to have any impact on any social norms.

Nor had I accepted the caution presented to me, by colleagues, suggesting that bringing business to the table (this was my job at the time) to discuss women’s empowerment was, in fact, a flawed long-term strategy.

No, I was in India, I had spoken to people at a conference, and I was convinced the tides were turning.

Quite content with my findings, I was excited to fly home to my two daughters. They were not going to have to contend with half the pressures and discriminations dealt with by their mother, their grandmothers, or even their great-great-great grandmothers.

Re-reading my post from 2011, I do want to be celebrating IWD tomorrow, confident that the arc of things has shifted in the direction I foresaw. And, I am sure, over the weekend, I’ll read more about the positive changes that those organisations, and individuals, who do care about IWD, will be posting and sharing.

There have been things to celebrate. However, in my own words, summing up my Delhi trip (and what appears to be something of a get-out-jail-free card) I closed with this:

“ultimately…real change happens when we look within ourselves, and take responsibility for our actions, our perceptions, and place a value on those of others”

Not too bad an ending for a naive hopeful.

Wind forward a few years, and COVID-19 is upon us. The pandemic had horrific consequences for many millions of people. It seems to me that we also came close, during it, to experiencing many similar things together, not all of which were horrendous. We placed value on others during lockdown and, for some, I think that helped partially dilute these normative gender dynamics that have set the bar for our species for so long.

It was a “re-set” for sure. But, not for all, and looking back, not for long.

Today, with another IWD upon us, I can’t express enough how short it still feels we’ve fallen, of even the slightest tilt in the right direction.

Because, it’s still men.

Everywhere, and in charge of everything – men.

They control the world politically, commercially, financially, legally, militarily, judicially, and technologically.

Men run the world’s infrastructure, transportation, and the world’s media.

Men control natural resources and they dominate global relations and diplomacy.

Men head up religion and faith-based institutions, they govern sport and academia.

Men lead construction and real estate sectors, they are in charge of the world’s agriculture and food systems.

The leadership of healthcare and pharmaceutical industries is mostly male. They manage hospital boards, they fund medical innovations.

Even outside our planet, it’s men – who else? – leading our space agencies.

So what, you ask?

Some would claim the world is healthier, richer, more connected, more knowledgeable, more innovative, and more “prosperous” than ever before in our history. Thanks to men.

While others would suggest we’re experiencing the highest inequalities in society (which show no sign of decreasing) and face the most pressing environmental and societal catastrophes the world has seen. Also, thanks to men.

Men giveth, and then men taketh away? What is the conclusion to draw here, as we’ve no alternative model to use as some kind of controlled experiment?

We don’t know what any other dynamic looks like, because we’ve never got close to shifting from what we have always had.

Perhaps I’m perched on the fence of this argument? Which, you could say, is a comfortable compromise for a middle-aged white male like me – trying to learn from everyone, trying to see new perspectives, trying to be balanced. Try, try, try.

There has to be merit in seeking out balance, in remaining curious, in never being satisfied with the answer to a problem. I will stick by that and, fingers crossed, when I read this back in 2039, I’ve not reneged on that aspiration.

But, for today, I cannot wish enough to speed up the tidal changes that I alluded to fourteen years ago, and which Emily Pankhurst fought for last century, and others before her over the millennia.

If it took one thousand more #MeToo’s to fan the flames of the tiny spark which the original campaign ignited, then let’s have those one thousand now, and then one thousand more.

It simply cannot be as it has always been. It must, must shift. More women making decisions, more women taking control, more women shaping our world.

The picture above is of Audre Lord, writer and civil rights activist.

It was she who said:

“They tell us to shrink ourselves, to make space for their egos. But I will not be small so that they can feel big.”

And it was my dear friend, Milli Hill, speaking today in Prague at the launch of her book, who quoted Lord in her own masterstroke of a speech, entitled: A Life Less Apologetic.

It’s Milli’s words that have inspired me today and, in turn, those of Audre Lord and others she cites. More women shaping our world.

I am no longer ‘hopeful’. We need a Revolution.

What next after CSR?

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, climate change, Equality, International Development, Politics, Technology

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RISE to the occasion

On By saigonsaysIn #MeToo #Equality, behaviour change, Equality, HumankindLeave a comment

This week I’ve been working with a global organisation, RISE, that is seeking an end to the oppressive conditions faced by female workers in the garment industry. In the very same week we have seen Iceland, which consistently ranks as one of the world’s most progressive nations, convene a nationwide strike (that included their own Prime Minister) demanding equal pay for women.

This, in itself, should speak volumes to the task in hand for the RISE team.

RISE is a newly established start-up of just twenty people but representing the experience and learning of over a quarter of a century’s worth of engagement in the readymade garment sector, by RISE’s founding partners, to improve the conditions for workers. RISE launched on International Women’s Day, in March 2023, the culmination of several years of planning and investment by Business for Social Responsibility, CARE International, the International Labour Organisation, and Gap Inc.

As a collection of very large and diverse organisations, all offering resources and technical support to addressing gender inequities in an industry that employs 60 million female workers, these founding partners have coalesced around the need not only to collaborate, but to go one step further, and to actually join forces and handover the reins of this colossal objective to a single entity.

In taking on that mantel, RISE has a head start on most start-ups, given the vast intellectual property and knowledge it is able to draw on from each of its founding partners.

The twist, of course, is that the journey ahead, in achieving any sort of equity for female garment workers (given the disparities which exist in a country such as Iceland) is a long one. As so many of the RISE team themselves already know from their own experiences, the path ahead will also be fraught with many complex challenges. Not least is the issue of garnering attention from all of the necessary stakeholders – brands, suppliers, factory owners, governments, consumers, the media and so on – who hold sway over worker conditions, on a topic that no single country of the world has managed, yet, to resolve.

What I saw in Saigon over the past three days, however, in terms of the commitment RISE is making through its incredibly dedicated and specialist team, was inspiring.

In just 7 months, this team has already achieved the goals set by its Board – on programme design, fund raising, communications, and on the overall operations challenge of fusing four different organisation’s strategies into one. In this same span of time the team has grown fast – 37% of them joined over the past few months, and many of the longer term BSR staff involved over the past 4-5 years during the set-up phase for RISE, were meeting in-person for the first time in Vietnam this week.

RISE is already delivering programmes for factory workers in multiple countries, here in Asia, but also in the Middle East and East Africa. They are led by inspiring colleagues, who have dedicated large parts of their own lives and careers to the cause, from North America and Europe across to North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, as well as from China’s mainland.

And I commend whole-heartedly, to anyone interested in this agenda, the spirit and passion I saw in the values, behaviours and actions of the team, both as they set about discussing strategic plans, but also as they spent time forming and learning more about one another.

As the American Anthropologist, Margaret Mead, famously said: “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”

I look forward to following the successes of RISE in the years to come.

RISE Team, Saigon Rooftop, October 26th 2023

Stuck in our ways

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, Equality, Humankind, International Development, Women's EmpowermentLeave a comment
Gaza, 2017. Photo credit: Tim Bishop

I read two things last week, coincidentally connected.

The first was a report from CARE International, offering insights about the impact COVID-19 has had on the local community groups that CARE has been seeking to support for decades.

I commend this report to anyone with an interest in the topic of international development. The analysis is rigorous, yet the recommendations are simple. The tone is calm, but unsettling, given the evidence being shared, which points not to the successes of the international development community, but instead underscores its failures.

It cites how impactful the pandemic has been, in terms of increasing, rather than decreasing, gender inequalities.

It also proposes that far too much potential progress in development is “held back by the deeply colonial approaches” still adopted by global development organisations, including CARE themselves.

Sifting through social media feeds, I then stumbled upon this quote from the novelist and cultural critic, James Baldwin:

“The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive. And it is absolutely inevitable that when a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is suggested that they can or that they must, is panic… And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing human damage.”

Drawing these two “things” together (CARE’s report and Baldwin’s musings) doesn’t take a considerable amount of effort: the traditions to which Baldwin refers, are part of the very reason that international development has failed. The traditions that dictate the colonial influences over how aid has been invested, coupled with the traditions which set the social and cultural constructs that exist on the side of the recipients of that aid, create a perfect storm of incompatibility.

For sure, there are examples of success, and I have spent time on these pages promoting them.

Unfortunately, these are overshadowed by examples of failure, and worse: examples of repeatedly making the same mistakes over and again.

Signing of The Marshall Plan: from http://www.sucesoshistoricos.com

In 1948, the United States committed to the rehabilitation of Western Europe, kicking off the “Marshall Plan” as an investment to help countries after the War.

Many of the recipient countries of the Marshall Plan – Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany and Norway – had, themselves, previous experience of providing aid to countries years before.

Foreign assistance, as a concept, had been around since the 18th century. However, since that time, the majority of the assistance given was from countries such as Britain and France, and predominantly to their respective colonies.

To recap, hastily, on how development has evolved since 1948, organisations (such as CARE International) have invested significant time and energy trying to understand how to most appropriately and effectively assist those “living in poverty”.

Those last three words are in speech marks, because defining who beneficiaries actually are has, itself, been a 75-year exercise.

The World Bank annually grade country demographics and, historically, many aid organisations and government donors use this guidance to allocate funds. Which is why more recently South American countries and now South East Asian ones, are receiving less “aid” due to how they have slowly climbed the World Bank rankings, moving from “low income” to “medium income” economies.

Using economic indicators such as these, some development agencies have prioritised the “extreme poor” as a target group for receiving aid.

‘Extreme poor’ classification. Credit: https://www.slideshare.net/alizayshehzad/sustainable-development-goals-215488797

Whilst others have nuanced their criteria for “poverty” and zoomed in on defining groups of people based on how “vulnerable” or “marginalised” they might be, which then takes into account criteria beyond income.

Over time, and as the international development industry has expanded, more types of people in need are included, in some way, by some organisation, or movement.

In any case, whilst they have been undertaking their deep dive analyses, and designing their ever-complex programmes, these organisations have encountered a slew of cultural and social normative behaviours (again, Baldwin’s ‘traditions’ – to which each community they are assisting is bound and, from which each community is so heavily defined.

For CARE, the gendered aspects of such cultural traditions – whereby men typically dominate decision making and hold the majority of power over women (at home, in the workplace, and in public spaces) – has become the lynchpin around which all of CARE’s efforts have been inspired.

For others, UNICEF or Plan International, for example, their research and development has anchored itself to the challenges that children or young people, respectively, face in society.

Uganda, 2016. Photo credit: Tim Bishop

As many commentators have cited, the evolution of “aid” over the last 200 years has charted a meandering course, undergoing regular modifications.

Take the topic of financing, for example.

Many nations, and large development organisations, have explored what might be the most efficient financial instruments they can deploy: Government-to-Government loans; microfinance programmes; economic stimulus packages; public-private funded initiatives, designed to strengthen economies and improve societal issues.

Each of these examples, come with their own success stories however, without exception, each encountered this same obstacle of tradition on both sides of the equation: the traditional norms set by those investing funds and resources into development, and the traditional norms played out by those receiving the financial “help”.

Given these constraints, it is simply not clear, even today, what types of interventions are best and how these should be delivered.

Is it more appropriate, for example, to stimulate economic growth for a country or, instead, better to understand upfront what is needed by those in that country who are struggling financially and who are excluded from formal systems (ie they lack access to bank accounts, internet, markets, education, etc) and to design an intervention that addresses that need?

Both of these approaches have been tried and tested and, in some cases, combined. However, again, traditional norms create obstacles along the way.

For example, direct budgetary support (a financial transaction between Governments) was, for a while, a popular choice of many richer nations to financially support poorer ones. Yet, this type of support could be all too often undermined by recipient Governments not properly distributing the funds through public services. Instead, many would funnel disproportionate amounts into other areas, such as to the bank accounts of Government officials.

And, when it comes to implementing the second approach (ie answering the “needs” question) this, too, can be compromised by the nature of who makes decisions in society, writ large.

Not exclusively, but typically, all such development-based transactions, and development-based relationships in the past were led by men.

The result of which is that less consideration, over seven decades of international development, has categorically been attributed to those societal issues that would have been selected by women. Women simply haven’t had the opportunity to have an equal voice in conversations about international development in that time. Not in the initial orchestration of The Marshall Plan, nor in the decisions with, and within, communities in terms of where and how the resources should be utilised.

A Village Savings and Loans Association meeting in Tigray, Ethiopia, 2016.
Photo credit: Tim Bishop

It was CARE who established the first ever Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA) in Niger in 1991, a mechanism for women to save and loan money with one another.

This, in turn, inspired the scale up of VSLA platforms around the world, adopted by other organisations too, encouraging women to have a voice inside of communities, and ultimately enabling women to speak out and influence local structures and systems.

VSLAs are one example of how this acutely gendered dynamic and imbalance is shifting. Unfortunately, the pace of change is slow.

Take the issue of unpaid care. This remains a pertinent topic even in the most “progressive” of societies. In the world of business, equal pay and worker benefits are also not yet level for all employees. For many nations, their politicians and leaders have been, and in many cases remain to be, male dominated. As of 2021, only 1 in 5 ministerial positions globally were held by women and, even today, just 17 countries have a woman Head of State, and 19 countries have a woman Head of Government.

These stark ratios are reflected, too, at the local level of the majority of countries – in the political and public spaces of local authorities and community leaders, in small to medium enterprises and local businesses. The patterns are similar, the outcomes the same.

And, whilst today’s inter-connected world has increasingly called out these gender imbalances, in a way that simply wasn’t viable even 20 years ago, Baldwin’s intuition when he writes “They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity” rings true.

Inequality. Picture credit: https://givingcompass.org/article/we-need-to-reframe-economic-inequality

Just as traditional norms hold back gender equality, so too do they stifle advancements made around other forms of inequality.

More than ever, we have been made aware of the economic inequalities of the world – the “1%” phenomenon.

Every country maintains its own version of this and, globally, it would seem that the ratios of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ become ever more extreme with each annual set of data released.

According to last year’s World Inequality Report, “Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities. The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In contrast, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth.”

Armed with such data, it is hard not to side with those campaigning for change. Be that from an accountability perspective, lobbying for more responsible policies and practices adopted by business and by government institutions. Or be it from a more ethical perspective, targeting individual behaviours.

Both make sense, yet both have their limitations when it comes to just how much ground individuals, corporations, or governments, are prepared to concede at their own expense.

***********************************************************

With power comes responsibility, and all too often that responsibility lies in the shadow of a tradition that is extremely hard to change.

Whether you set your sights on tackling inequality, poverty, vulnerability, marginalisation, gender equity, disability, child rights, or other such societal issues, I would argue that Baldwin’s plea for a “higher level of consciousness” remains, simultaneously, a sobering as well as a viable salvation, when redressing some sort of balance in the world.

Although I was tempted to end this post conceding that Baldwin’s call to action might never be fulfilled, instead I would suggest that the subject of ‘consciousness’ gains more traction with each generation.

What if we kept a higher level of consciousness close to heart, and nurtured that sense of what it can mean each day? What if we tried to imbue Baldwin’s words and sentiment into as many interactions, thoughts, exchanges and relationships that we could accommodate?

Do this, and perhaps there may yet come a time where our connectivity with one another sets in train a new sense of what tradition is, what it stands for, and what new outcomes it might reveal.

Placing the future of ‘Partnerships’ in the best hands

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, climate change, Equality, Humankind, International Development, partnershipsLeave a comment

A new dawn for partnerships – Bangkok, March 2023

Last week I co-facilitated a training course for UNESCAP (the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) at the UN headquarters in Bangkok.

This is noteworthy (and the cause of my first post here since May last year) largely because it represents only the second overseas trip I’ve made for work, since I high tailed it out of Laos in March 2020, with hours to spare, before the Vietnamese border police would have had me detained for a fortnight.

Whilst narrowly avoiding being barred for tampering with UN tech equipment in our set up last week (as well as encountering a curious number of delegates who tried to infiltrate our course) the days spent with the 20 participants enrolled on the training was a real privilege, and a further reason for sharing some reflections here.

The course itself – The Partnering Initiative (TPI) Partnership Accelerator – was a distilled version of a longer set of modules that I’d been conducting online, during the pandemic, as an associate of TPI. In engaging previous teams in the content, from international NGOs, through to large corporations, and UN agencies themselves, I’ve come to acknowledge that TPI’s curriculum offers up a comprehensive and water-tight set of insights and tools, to equip most would-be partnership experts out there looking to forge, manage and scale up multi-stakeholder initiatives and collaborations.

Built into our sessions in Bangkok was more than a smattering of theory and frameworks, about how to get the best out of your partnerships, alongside practical exercises and role plays, designed to allow teams to practice such things as negotiation skills, trust building, and experiencing alternative power dynamics.

Last week’s participants had gone through a lengthy application process in order to participate and then, in most cases, had also gone through lengthy journeys from various SIDS (Small Island Development States) in order to physically show up in Thailand.

Fiji, Mauritius, Seychelles, Palau, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste were all represented in some form, during our two days – a constellation of countries covering some of the planet’s most diverse and distributed societal eco-systems.

There are 58 SIDS in total, and one of the resounding pieces of encouragement, that I took away from those engaged in last week’s training, was the appetite and energies they told us their country’s young people felt about the array of sustainability issues that the UN, and others, have carved out across the existing SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).

I was struck not just by the talent and inputs and experiences shared in the room during our course, but by how motivated each participant was to take their knowledge and learning from the course back to their home countries and to disseminate this wider.

Young people, it was made clear, either still studying, or launching their careers in SIDS, hold the key, in so many ways, to unlocking and unleashing the real power that true partnership-working possesses, when it comes to addressing the world’s most pertinent of social and environmental crises.

All too often, cultural and historical norms predominantly practiced by older generations, hold back progress in society. Progress, for example, towards enabling more girls to have access to education. Progress towards offering more inclusive opportunities for local communities to benefit from national and international supply chains. Towards a future where land rights are equally distributed and acknowledged, where political spaces incorporate more voices from those all too often marginalised, where the resources and the influence of the private sector are leveraged in a more equitable way, namely one which benefits the world’s informal economies.

These outcomes, and many more, were the talk of our sessions in Bangkok, and these issues deserve more airtime beyond a brief training course.

From our participants last week we heard that these are issues which should be built more rigorously into school curricula. Their importance is such that we cannot rely on those in current positions of power, set as they often are in their own ways, and blinkered to emerging societal trends, to be the “changemakers” or the “catalysts of change” that they so often label themselves.

It is young people, either of school or university age, or of working age, with whom these issues most resonate.

Tomorrow’s leaders will carry the can for many of the mistakes made since the concept of “partnership” was broadly incorporated into development jargon. Some people in development circles will say partnerships have always been around, but it was, perhaps, only really at the UN’s 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development that the concept of multi-stakeholder partnerships was first coined in a serious way.

In the 30 years since, we’ve seen some admirable attempts to model partnership working. However, we’re just skimming the surface of what I believe can be achieved.

TPI have been hard at it, consulting, designing, sharing and teaching thousands of practitioners since they took on this gauntlet almost 20 years ago. I admire them for that, and for what they have carved out in this space. They are leading the charge.

It is, however, in the hands of the younger generation, in my opinion, where we should be increasingly targeting investments, resources and opportunities to build even wider and deeper the ‘know-how’ about what partnering can achieve, and how it can be done even better. And, on a scale that we’ve never seen before.