Tag: partnerships

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

On 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 poor factory conditions across Asia and Central America) ignited public fury and, eventually, action.

Many brands 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 issue of the past three decades: the garment industry became very good at measuring problems but 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, 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.

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 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 (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.

Garment workers in Bangladesh in 2023

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. Very little was known 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 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.

Sustainability rides into town.

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.

President Trump and the War on DEI

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.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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.

Viability vs. Visibility: The Tragedy of Modern Leadership

On 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.

Nice heels, cowboy.

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 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 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.

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

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.

Quality over quantity: taking a new approach to partnering

On By saigonsaysIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The adage about “quality over quantity” is, perhaps, a useful moniker to attach to the behaviour of much of what has defined the last 30 years of Western society. If only more people invested less on satisfying their own need to consume and amass money.

I remember Oxfam’s hard hitting inequality campaign about the 85 people on the bus earning more than half the world’s wealth. Suitably appalled at the notion, I carried on with my life. The Panama Papers brought out a similar reaction, and I maybe spent as much as 15 minutes spluttering into my morning coffee about that one, before moving onto the next item.

Is it possible we are becoming immune to these well articulated and researched realities, when they’re plastered over a Guardian front page, because these issues are too enormous for us to do anything useful about? In which case, have the last 18 months helped curate reasonable conditions for the world to begin what many have called a “re-set” – when it comes to consumer greed and wealth – or does lockdown, instead, simply reinforce individual survival instincts?

I see zero changes in the status quo – the richest in the world continue to set the conditions for life as we know it, the dividends of which are only enjoyed by the people on the bus.

I also see no chance of this status quo changing in the next ten years. The role of China in that time will surely be one of the decade’s defining legacies however, in the meantime, whilst as individuals we can make daily choices about how we conduct ourselves, who we support, and how we “show up” in the world, this post focuses on the coalescing of organisations and institutions.

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Partnerships. Collaborations. Multi-sector platforms. Shared value.

These are all buzzwords. In particular, but not exclusively, they’re used across the international development industry, bandied from website to website, embedded in keynote speeches from Washington DC to Ho Chi Minh City.

In the non-profit world I’ve inhabited, for nearly two decades now, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve spoken about each of these these words and phrases (or been lectured to about them) I, too, would have been tweeting moronic selfies from space by now.

In spite of what feels like a decent collective effort, by many in the public, private and non-profit sectors, I simply don’t buy it that the majority of those organisations, pontificating and evangelising about their partnerships, are actually properly invested in them, and committed to partnering, operationally, in the ways that they say they are.

Given the UN helpfully convened and framed a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the world, six years ago, a good starting place to find evidence of how organisations have been partnering with each other, to support the SDGs, can be found via http://www.sdgsinaction.com or directly through their app. There are some great insights here, and it’s a good way to start to familiarise yourself with each of the Goals, and behind which specific organisations are rallying.

My daughters learnt about the SDGs at primary school. A positive marker of progress, in my opinion, in terms of how the issues of poverty and social and environmental injustice have become mainstreamed through education, and through easier access to information.

Still, I’m skeptical that organisations are only just touching the edges of potential, when it comes to truly partnering with one another.

Having worked with UN agencies, with large International NGOs, smaller non-profits, and with a range of corporations, in different regions of the world, I see the attention to detail lacking. The processes and systems for partnering are not in place. The commitment to rigour – in brokering partnerships, in their execution and in their assessment – are all below par.

Why is that?

1. Many organisations bolt-on these partnering skills to the responsibilities of already “very busy” people;

2. Others don’t secure the buy-in from important decision-makers, which usually results in under-performing partnerships;

3. And, categorically, too many organisations are prone to talking a good game in public about their reasons for partnering, but then oversee (or are forced to oversee) a compromised reality, when it comes to what their organisation is able or willing to invest in that partnership.

Like other things in life, practice makes perfect.

Organisations might do better securing all the resources, time and energy that they do have, into a smaller number of partnerships. Even starting with one. Managing just one partnership really well could have far-reaching and longer lasting results, than managing five mediocre ones.

The Partnering Initiative is a great outfit for those organisations looking to upskill in this area. They offer tools and policy guidance for setting up partnerships, as well as examples on good and bad practice.

There are other good resources out there, too, for those organisations ready to reframe and reinvent how they conduct their partnerships, and especially for those whose objectives are not exclusively designed for the 85 on the bus.

My tip, is to shoot for quality over quantity: make one partnership truly count for something, and this will pay valued dividends in the future, to those who deserve it more.

Gender Equality and the role of business

On By saigonsaysIn Uncategorized1 Comment

For the past eighteen months, Coracle Consulting has taken on several client assignments, respectively seeking to tackle a common goal: how to best engage the Private Sector on the subject of Gender Equality?

Tackling outlandishly sized issues, such as the emancipation of women and girls, can be an equally daunting as well as inspiring proposition.

There have been notable public advocates for women’s empowerment, who have given traction to the surrounding causes, and possible solutions to redress, gender equality, and to bring more attention to the disparities that have always existed.

From the suffragette movement that influenced the British Government’s position on introducing womens’ right to vote, through to the more modern day, global ambassadors such as Malala Yousafzai, speaking out for young girls and their right to an education.

Very rarely, however, through the archives of campaigns and individual acts of sacrifice, in the fight for gender equality, has the private sector surfaced as a likely protagonist and champion for women’s rights.

If, by “private sector” we assume a definition that both includes profit-making entities, as well as the market systems within which they grow these profits, there has been a vacant chasm of inactivity and ignorance between how the private sector could impact positively on gender equality vs. what it has historically, and actually, done.

Although there are more women than men in the world, the trillions of dollars of revenue and capital flow connected to global markets are almost exclusively governed by men. Men monopolize high level political spaces, they monopolize multi-national corporation board rooms and, in the majority of countries still, the purchasing privileges of any one given household.

To turn this trend around, or at least to begin the process of re-calibrating the direction of this metaphorical ship, will take generations. However, that process, slowly but surely over the last decade, is underway.

This post won’t focus on the contrasting examples of progress seen from one country to the next. For every success story and anecdote of gains made and celebrated in one context, another more chilling chronicle of discrimination or vulnerability can be told from somewhere else.

Instead, we want to share Coracle’s recent experiences of how to best influence and engage an ever growing queue of companies, eager to take seriously their role in the pursuit of a new norm when it comes to treating men and women equally. To capture some of what we have learnt, the following lessons are shared, for those looking to invest in running their businesses in a more gender responsive way:

1. Don’t shy away from auditing how your existing business is performing in terms of addressing gender (and other diversity) issues. One of the most effective ways for the private sector to change, is through the influence that comes from within the sector itself. Just as companies react to how their peers innovate new products, or leverage technology, the same rule applies when one company actively publishes their progress to develop new policies and practice around issues of inclusion. It’s better to be a pioneer and fail a few times before making progress, than to aim for mediocrity at best, or at worst, remain enshrouded in antiquated operational past-times.

2. Work with others who can ensure you get the basics right. A myriad of recent research and tools have been published by institutions including the UN, USAID and international NGOs such as CARE International, that offer step-by-step guidance for companies when it comes to how to initiate and implement more gender responsive behaviours and outcomes. Becoming familiar with these is one minimum task for a company, but forging partnerships with NGOs and CSOs over a longer period of time, to collaborate more fittingly with experts is also going to significantly accelerate a company’s journey, both in defining standards and then designing long term plans for enacting these.

3. Create spaces and platforms for women to share their perspectives and suggestions on how to change the status quo. Female employees, women producers in a company’s supply chain, female customers and consumers of company products – where are their voices in your company’s strategy? If a company is dis-connected from its own eco-system of stakeholders, and their data and research excludes the perspectives of women writ large, then whatever changes are made will always be compromised.

4. Find the money and resources to make the changes to your business lasting and meaningful. Do not consign issues of diversity and gender equality to be the mainstay of a suitably titled “Corporate Social Responsibility” manager, or else farm them out to your human resources department. The CEO of your company, or equivalent, should be accountable for this, with no exception, and if your company tracks its operational progress using a catalogue of measurable indicators, these should feature gender-related criteria across all aspects of the company’s operations.

5. Don’t fall into the trap of making “socially responsible” decisions because you have been advised this will enhance your company’s reputation. The fact is, there is a way of balancing positive social and environmental impacts from your business, alongside growing your company’s revenue. The sacred “win-win” scenario does exist and an ever increasing number of companies – from the largest to the more discreet start-ups – are curating their strategies based on this very triple bottom line objective. An exciting legacy can be left by the private sector when it comes to environmental stewardship, social impact and financial profit making.

How your company chooses to embrace designing, and seeing through to fruition. a more blended set of outcomes such as these, is up to you.

Coracle’s commitment will always be to offer you our ideas and our experiences from collaborating with non-profits and the private sector for the past twenty years, and are aim will always be to inspire your business into action.

For more information about how Coracle can support you in this regard, feel free to connect with us at http://www.coracleconsulting.net or email timbishop@coracleconsulting.net 

Covid-19 requires us to put partnerships front and centre

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change, International Development, partnershipsLeave a comment

polman
Paul Polman and Peter Tufano

Yesterday, in an interview with Peter Tufano from Saïd Business School Paul Polman concluded that covid-19 had “shown the gaps that exist in our society”, and that a “global crisis like this requires a global response”.

Polman, who stood down from running Unilever at the end of 2018, is a seasoned businessman when it comes to discussing sustainability issues. Under his leadership, Unilever helped lead the charge, on behalf of large corporations, in defining why pursuing a “shared value” agenda (coined as such by Porter and Kramer in the Harvard Business Review almost a decade ago) might end up being more than just a newfangled public relations exercise.

From designing a unique global sustainability charter (The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan) for their business operations, and investing in their own accountability frameworks and evaluation metrics for this, through to chairing the private sector group who influenced the UN’s shaping of the current Sustainable Development Goals, Unilever’s ten year sustainability trajectory under Polman paved the way for many other industries.

Way before this last particular decade, many of Unilever’s brands had more than dabbled in the “CSR” space. One of the first tie-ups I learnt about, when I joined CARE International in 2006, were the hand-washing initiatives led by Dove soap in south Asia, and which engaged local CARE teams in finding innovative ways to distribute health messages to rural communities.

It was clear to me, during my initial years with CARE in London, that Unilever had an omnipresent feel about it as a company, in terms of its presence on the sustainability scene.

When I joined the WSUP management team in 2008 for CARE, Unilever were one of the most active private sector partners, determined to prove that the answer to global water-sanitation issues lay in the collaboration between government, private sector and civil society working together.

And then, by 2010, CARE had launched JITA, a rural sales programme in Bangladesh that relied on everyday products being sold by local tradeswomen. No surprise, then, that Unilever had pioneered the earlier pilots to JITA, adapting certain products for harder to reach communities (also no surprise that it was Professor Linda Scott from Saïd Business School who championed a significant investment in measuring the impacts of JITA’s work).

Indeed, in the arena of the emerging partnerships and collaborations, which I saw take shape during those years, Unilever were front-runners.

Moving to Vietnam in 2011, I spent more time in the Asia-Pacific sustainability arena, only to find a similar dynamic out here, with Unilever once more driving the debates and popping up at conferences and seminars to lead the examples of good practice, particularly when it came to partnerships and sustainability.

So, in many ways, Polman’s insights yesterday fell well in line with what I would expect him to say about the current covid-19 pandemic.

Words are easy – real and sustained action tends not to be so.

The tension with putting words into action is not a new phenomenon. I’d be the first to challenge a lot of the work that companies put out there under a sustainability banner. To me, we’ve a long way to go on the topic of forging genuinely meaningful and long lasting partnerships between different organisations and especially when it comes to multi-national companies.

It seems to me, though, that covid-19 has somewhat re-written the script, not just for how businesses might engage in societal and environmental issues, but how every organisation engages.

Every conversation that anyone in the world is having today is in some way influenced by covid-19. It has changed everything. Forget starting any new chapter headings, we all need to learn a new language to read this particular book.

And that is, perhaps, why I found Polmans’ words so inspiring.

Already, covid-19 and the new realities it has brought upon society, simply must now be a catalyst for changing the way organisations work together. Somehow, before old habits and models and behaviours are allowed to creep back in, we must foster long-term commitments by government, private sector, and civil society to actually be the global “responders” that Polman is insisting are required.

In the interview, Polman cites some immediately comforting examples of where health, tech, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing sectors have collaborated together to address the pandemic. The world is rising to certain aspects of the challenge it faces.

Many commentators have been quick, also, to recognise the very positive way in which these recent months can help shape a healthier society in the future. One where larger numbers of people make choices not geared towards satisfying their own desires or needs.

Also in the mix, as the realities for the world’s poorest and most marginalised population groups come sharper into focus, is a greater awareness about the extent to which covid-19 will almost certainly end up further increasing the world’s inequalities – inequalities that have for so many years exacerbated the vulnerabilities of those living with very little prosperity and facing constant injustices.

As Polman mentioned yesterday, every year 8 million people die because of cigarettes, and 7-8 million because of air pollution. That the fatalities for which covid will be responsible won’t reach such numbers, further highlights perhaps the complacency that exists about the sales of tobacco and the number of regulatory controls that effect air quality.

I listened earlier in the week to someone on the radio talking about the many millions of people the world over who, for reasons of old age or disability, have been self-isolated from society their whole lives. That radical re-thinking about the digital and virtual nature of providing services and products – be they educational or health related, or other – is now well underway because of covid-19 is both exciting and deeply revealing.

Does this mean covid-19 embodies some type of perfect humanitarian storm of circumstances, out of which new alliances, partnerships and cross-sector collaborations will be forged? Did the world need the “re-boot” that I’ve read some people describe the current circumstances as?

Time will tell.

To quote Polman from the start, this crisis like none other before it, is “showing our society’s gaps” – for everyone to see. Acknowledging these gaps is one thing. Finding the right, long term solutions to them is another.

Polman indefatigably believes that the right type of solutions will only be found if the world works together.

And, at this point in time, I can only whole-heartedly agree.