I met Philip Berber, Founder with his wife Donna, of the Glimmer of Hope foundation. The interest from the foundation covers the costs of running it. It was an awesome conversation.
With my Board Directorship of Vestergaard Frandsen, I'm starting to learn more about the Aid and Development world. Both from my recent conversation with Brad Herbert who established the Global Fund in 2002 and who is on the Advisory Board of Vestergaard, and from Iqbal Quadir's recent keynote right after mine at the Economist Big Rethink Conference, I'm starting to think a lot more about how the development world reinforces governments cooperating with governments.
Iqbal spoke about how productivity tools enable people, and how that's the best way of getting them out of poverty. He saw that Connectivity is Productivity and Productivity translates to Purchasing Power. He said that there are two types of government/people dynamics in the world - those where the governments manage people [which he likened to Mainframes], and those where the people manage the governments [PC's]. Guess which ones are more successful? first two don't count. Western Progress is the story of the dispersion of power. The story of progress is written by people and edited by governments. Aid is the collaboration of governments by governments for governments. Global progress is the collaboration by people for people.
Indeed "Economics Trumps Politics" is a key theme of my upcoming book.
Berber talked about the business of international aid being deeply broken. Engage rural people to build their own future. "These are people who have understood that it is better to have their kids in school than in fields".
He has built a direct model of aid whereby 100% of donations go to those who need it. A peer to peer platform in this emerging peer to peer economy which we see everywhere else, and which Om Malik wrote about recently. You can donate through A Glimmer of Hope Foundation, not to - and that's the crucial difference.
Berber and Quadir are saying the same thing - coming at it from different angles - people whereever they are basically want to build their own future, and we can best help them by enabling them to make money.
I challenged Berber to outsource his platform and IP [he has a 6 stage process - PRISM] so that other entrepreneurs could pick up his IP, and implement the direct aid model themselves elsewhere.
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Ariadne is now working with Allow, recently covered in the Sunday Times and the WSJ. I first met Justin Basini years ago while he was working for Capital One. We had many conversations about creating the new marketplaces for the exchange of permissioned data. One of Ariadne's investment theses is that the economics of your personal data will revert to the individual, and the companies which organise those business models early will win in their sectors.
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