I did not know that women use 20,000 words every day, while men use only 7,000.
But I did know that half a billion women worldwide are still illiterate and 41 million girls are shut out of school gates because of poverty and prejudices.
This video makes a strong point about the advantages of female education in the developing world.
Educating girls is important and makes a lot of sense in both economic and geopolitical terms. Is the solution to the problem of female illiteracy going to come from governments? Or is social entrepreneurship going to provide the answer?
This week, I will be following the live video streaming of the Skoll World Forum on Social Enterpreneurship broadcasted from Oxford and I’ll be looking for ideas.
There was a time when talking about communications for NGOs would elicit big yawns.
Not any longer.
Check out this YouTube video produced by Avaaz.org, a global campaigning organisation. It features a talking fridge “sent back from the future”. “Coldy” talks about the importance of supporting green technology.
EU regulators in Brussels are expected to decide tomorrow about new efficiency standards for fridges, TVs and other household appliances.
Avaaz.org feels that the strong rules needed to cut Europe’s pollution are running the risk of being weakened by industrial lobbyists.
It is using the video to collect signatures for a petition. It was able to reach its target of 50,000 in one day.
There is something powerful about a YouTube video. It is perfect for bringing the cause of a NGO to life.
Times have changed. Social media have pumped new energy into NGO communications.
I am leaving for Paris tomorrow where I will attend the Arab International Women’s Forum conference , “From Partnership to Prosperity: Women in the Arab World, France and the International Community”.
The program is exciting. It includes great topics like how to help women leaders manage an internal investment portfolio and the formation of biotechnology clusters in the Arab World.
She rose to fame during her years at the TB clinic of the Harlem Hospital Center in New York.
While working with poor and socially isolated patients, she developed a new approach based on a family dynamic that would help them complete their treatment. Within one year, the TB treatment completion rate at the clinic had jumped from 11 to 89% and El-Sadr became famous for her “surrogate family approach”.
Reading this got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great to use social media to create surrogate families to support socially-isolated AIDS patients?
The potential implications of this project are mindboggling.
In India, a computer scientist, Dr Sugata Mitra has come up with the idea to give internet access to the illiterate children living in a slum next door to his modern, air-conditioned office.
He placed high-speed computers in a wall separating his part of town from the slum. Within hours and without instructions, the children started to browse the web. They were quick to figure out how to point and click.
Dr. Mitra is convinced that computers can bring prosperity to the world’s poor. It was his Hole-in-the-Wall project to inspire Vikas Swarup, the author of Slumdog Millionaire, the book that became a multi-Oscar-winning movie.
Half of India’s population (1 billion) is illiterate. 350 million among them live on less than a dollar a day. We can only begin to image what would happen to India’s society (and to those of other emerging economies) if Dr. Mitra is right.
The survey found that, while trust in business dropped dramatically in the Western world, it increased in emerging economies.
In China, the “trust in business” score rose from 54% to 71% among 35-to-64-year-olds. In Brazil, it climbed to 69% from 61% a year ago.
It is exciting to hear this.
It underscores one of the most important points of our book:
Multinationals from emerging economies are reshaping world-wide industries. They are also developing new communication practices. We believe these will soon dominate our way of working.
Another important finding from the survey is that 60% of the respondents “need to hear information about a company 3 to 5 times before they believe it”.
Richard Edelman’s advice to corporations is to start forging partnerships and looking for public engagement that fuels trust.
This is great news for CSR practitioners. Corporate citizenship will finally be taken seriously.
I bet you never thought culture would do this to us.
The best definition of culture I have ever heard is that it is the most difficult thing to talk about. It is no more than a feeling you have about how things should be. Culture does not go through your brain, it goes through your gut.
In our post-subprime world, culture is gaining a whole new meaning. As Dov Seidman wrote, “culture has taken on greater significance. Today it is the measure by which companies are judged”.
Employees, customers, suppliers and investors are going to judge companies on the basis of the cultural environment they are able to create in and around them. In order to do this, they will have to master new dimensions:
•Emerging economies are introducing new business practices and new ways of building relationships in a corporate context.
•The interactive web and social media are creating a new culture, one that goes beyond nationality and ethnic groups.
•People are looking for a new model of capitalism. Corporate Social Responsibility and social entrepreneurship are no longer fads. They are here to stay. I believe they will play a big role in shaping the corporate behaviour in the years to come.
•Women were never part of the economic system that failed us. This is probably why more and more businesses are now trying to figure out how to tap into the female economy and its potential.
It feels as if we had just boarded a time machine ready to catapult us into a new era.
And the Year of the Ox (the sign of leaders) starts on Monday. I love Chinese New Year!
The founder of Cobra Beer said that companies have to move behind cliché terms and live CSR like a brand.
It is all about the way how an organisation deals with people. How do you let innovation happen in a company? Are you creating an environment where people are encouraged to come up with new ideas?
In his speech, Lord Bilimoria singled out each member of his management team. He told their stories and spoke at length about their different contributions.
You don’t often see this in presentations. Usually management is thanked in bulk.
I am talking about the financial sector loosing its glamour.
Last night, I went to hear a talk by Prof. Paul Collier at the Ismaili Center. He teaches economics at Oxford. Until recently, he used to see his students aspiring to work for big banks in the City.
Not any longer. Now, he believes, they would much rather work in the new cool sector: social enterprises.
As a former financial journalists, who jumped horses to concentrate on NGO relations and Corporate Social Responsibility, I was delighted to hear that. I enjoyed a moment of blissful self-validation.
And social entrepreneurship is one the main subjects of my book.
It takes me a long time to get going in the morning. So I have a number of mantras I chant under the shower.
“I live an enchanted life” is one of them.
Last week I saw it come true during my trip to the US.
I had a series of enchanted moments that made my stay in California and Colorado very special and took away the stress of the past month.
One day, I entered my hotel room in Denver while the maid was cleaning it. The book on my night table, Three Cups of Tea, the incredibly moving story of Greg Mortenson’s work, caught her eye.
“What’s your name?” she asked and added “mine is Ida”.
There was this light in her eyes. Was it because we care about the same things?
The next morning, I was the only passenger on the shuttle bus back to the airport. The driver, Samuel from Ethiopia, bought me coffee and talked to me about spirituality.
I was delighted to see that CSR, a real passion of mine, is drawing so much interest. I am particularly happy that the people in my session were so interested in the case study I presented about Grameen and Danone.
Given how fond I am of Prof. Yunus, I can talk non-stop about Grameen.
At the end of my trip, I spent a couple of days in Napa with my friend’s daughter, Lana.
The day before I left we made a card for my mum and drew a rainbow on it.
And guess what…I woke up the next day, went outside and there it was…this enormous rainbow…the biggest Lana and I have ever seen.
Ramon Olle, CEO of Epson Europe, was on a trip to China. While visiting one of the company’s factories, he noticed that, in spite of the fact that the factory had no work at that moment, the workers were coming to the canteen every day to eat lunch.
“When you in Europe cancel your orders, our workers can’t eat so we have to keep the canteen open,” remarked someone.
That was the moment when rows of figures on elaborated spreadsheets turned into real destinies making Ramon realise just how interconnected we all are.
Ramon was speaking last night at an event organised by IABC Netherlands in Amsterdam.
He talked about the importance of values for corporate leaders and communicators.
Employees have to be perceived as human beings. “I believe that a person has both a material and a spiritual dimension, without limiting spirituality to faith or religion.”
Problems start when we try to solve problems with processes. “When employees come to the office in the morning, they bring with them all their personal desires and worries and those of their families. We cannot pretend these don’t exist. We have to look at people in their entirety.”
Ramon has been noticing that, although marketing efforts are more and more geared towards the individual (with personalised messages and e-mails), we keep treating employees as a bunch, forgetting the complexity of human beings.
“Good communication is one that focuses on messages that people want and need to hear. These have to be short, simple, crisp and transparent.”
If we send out a complicated message in a multicultural corporation, we risk confusion and misinterpretations because employees will use the ‘filters’ of their respective culture to decipher it.
This remark reminded me of something Professor Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank told me: we can present what we do in a simple way, one that is easy for others to understand, all the rest is a product of the ego. It is the ego that makes us believe that, if we create something complicated, it will look ‘good’ and people will think it is more valuable.
Ramon believes humility to be a core corporate value, one that should be promoted more strongly. How inspiring and refreshing!
Ramon is the author of ‘Engel bei der Arbeit - Führen mit Werten (Angels at the workplace - Leading with values) published in German by ATHENA. An updated version of the book is about to be published in German, Russian and Spanish.
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