Alliance Online - June 2008

Urgent need for social investment in an unequal world

Barry Smith

EVENT 5th GIFE Congress on Private Social Investment: Local Experiences, Global Transformations
Date 2-4 April
Venue Salvador, Brazil
Organizer GIFE

The opening session of GIFE’s 5th national congress in Salvador, capital of the State of Bahia, Brazil, set the tone of dynamism and creative flair that characterized the entire event. Master of Ceremonies Wellington Noqueira (Brazil’s well-known ‘Doctor of Joy’) arrived on stage to a fanfare of music, riding a push scooter! Wellington – an Ashoka Fellow who pioneered work in Brazilian hospitals using the transformative power of humour through clowning – immediately broke the ice with a capacity crowd of almost 800 participants, inviting them to open hearts and minds, giving in to the magic of Bahia’s vibrant, diverse culture.

The theme of the congress, ‘Local Experiences, Global Transformations’, registered the remarkable development of Brazil’s private social investment sector and its readiness to take its place on a global stage. The conference mirrored the dramatic growth of Brazil’s economic clout and political influence. Taking advantage of the WINGS Coordinating Committee Meeting, convened in Salvador in conjunction with the GIFE Congress, the programme featured a full day devoted to international perspectives from visiting WINGS delegates and lively exchanges between Brazilian and global practitioners.

By all accounts the biggest, most brilliantly organized and successful GIFE congress to date, the event was attended by a cross-section of corporate social investors, private philanthropists, civil society, development agency and government representatives. Having recently attended Trialogue’s landmark corporate social investment conference in Johannesburg (November 2007), I was struck by the parallels in themes and debates. Both events put the spotlight on multi-sector partnerships, collaboration, transparency and accountability, monitoring and evaluation, sustainability and impact on public policy. Symptomatic of the growing self-confidence and enquiring mindset of the social investment communities in Brazil and South Africa, both gatherings provided a platform for voices from regional and global practice.

In his opening address, keynote speaker Bob Dunn (President and CEO of Synergos) called for the bar to be raised for private and corporate social investment – to embrace a systems change approach, mobilizing all available business assets for the public good, working in innovative partnerships and acting decisively on the social responsibilities that must increasingly underpin the business ‘licence to operate.’

As in Southern Africa, the word ‘philanthropy’ does not have the same meaning for Brazilians as it does for North Americans and Europeans. At the GIFE congress, the talk was all of ‘private social investment’. As in South Africa, the dominant private social investors are businesses, especially larger corporations. In both countries, there is a marked growth in the volume and developmental aspirations of corporate social investment, as well as a diversification in the forms of private social investment – from family foundations to community foundations, rights-based funds, venture philanthropy, social enterprise and centres for social innovation.

Parallels with Southern Africa

Listening to the speakers and debates in Salvador, I reflected on the similar patterns in the ‘balance sheet’ of opportunities and challenges for private social investment in Brazil and Southern Africa. Speakers highlighted, for instance, the Brazilian tradition of looking for ‘band-aid’, short-term solutions at the expense of root causes and systems-wide solutions; the failure, all too often, of resources to reach the grassroots community level where they are most needed; weak interactions and collaboration around public policy and ‘scaling up’; weaknesses across the board in evaluation and measurement of impact; and a fragmented social investment and ‘giving’ sector.

On the opportunities side, speakers reported a growing and increasingly outward-looking corporate social investment sector that is moving beyond its silos and comfort zones while Former First Lady Ruth Cardoso stressed the invaluable development contribution being made by Brazil’s very active, heterogeneous ‘third sector’. Research presented by IDIS, the Institute for the Development of Social Investment (IDIS) suggests that Brazil, like South Africa, is a nation of givers (in a survey conducted in four cities it was found that 75% of citizens are donors, often through their religious organizations). Robust sectoral associations, networks and support organizations have emerged, such as GIFE, Ethos, and IDIS, as well as a nascent independent grantmakers’ forum with a strong social justice perspective (convened in collaboration with Synergos). As a dynamic emerging economy, Brazil has both the resource base and the human potential to mobilize a powerful private social investment movement.

Like South Africa, Brazil has one of the highest rates of social and economic inequality in the world, as well as a high correlation between race, ethnicity, class and poverty status. For both countries, the problem is ultimately not about resources and money. It is about how to mobilize and invest resources more effectively, and how to combine private social investment with the assets of other sectors to tackle the structural patterns that perpetuate poverty and inequality.

Overcoming social exclusion

As we convened in Bahia, the most Afro-Brazilian region of the country, part of the less-developed North-east, it was striking to observe that while issues like education, economic development, youth and the environment attract much deserved attention, private social investment responses seem less developed in respect of race, ethnicity, gender and identity-based social exclusion. The recent emergence of new grantmakers like the Brazilian Fund for Human Rights, which joins other established rights-based foundations like the Angela Borba Fund for Women and Girls, presents new possibilities for collaborative efforts to engage with the stubborn realities of social exclusion. The GIFE congress devoted a well-attended session to the global movement of community foundations, a form of inclusive, place-based social partnership that is being pioneered in Brazil by initiatives like Instituto Rio and Instituto Comunitario Grande Florianopolis (ICOM).

As Valdemar de Oliviera Neto (‘Maneto’) of the Avina Foundation remarked, Brazil like Southern Africa is still struggling to find effective ways to build social integration, trust, dialogue and cohesion through meaningful popular participation – especially to ensure the inclusive participation of the poor in private and public social initiatives. A growing Latin American network of innovative, multi-sector city-based planning initiatives, like Rio Como Vamos and Nossa Săo Paulo, offer exciting opportunities to nurture more inclusive citizen-based visions for integrated development.

The seven faces of philanthropy

Analysing the current engagement of individual Brazilians in philanthropy, research presented by IDIS proposed a typology called ‘the seven faces of philanthropy’:

• the ‘faithful/devotees’, driven by a religious charitable impulse;
• the ‘communitarians’, driven by their associational life and attachment to community;
• the ‘redistributors’, driven by a sense of obligation to share some of their wealth;
• the ‘dynastic donors’, motivated by family reputation and traditions;
• the ‘socialites’for whom giving is fashionable or fun;
• the ‘altruists’, driven by personal moral values, often giving anonymously;
• the ‘social investors’, a newer breed looking for impact at scale, measurement, professionalism and collaboration.

Becoming social investors

Marcos Kisil, President of IDIS, proposed that the challenge (and the opportunity) is to lead citizens down the road to engagement as ‘social investors’. Speaking from an international standpoint, both Ingrid Srinath (CRY India and Secretary General-Designate of CIVICUS) and Elkanah Odembo (Ufadhili, Kenya) summoned delegates to join hands with global partners to enlarge our vision of social investment. In an interdependent world, marked by the stunning growth of wealth in the midst of grinding poverty and inequality, social investors must be driven by a shared sense of urgency. The remarkable economic development of countries like Brazil and South Africa will ultimately be unsustainable unless we work to shift fundamentally the balance of citizen participation and social benefit from the few to the many.

From the windows of our hotel, the awesome urban vista of Salvador’s Atlantic coastline included a clear view of the favelas and shanty towns that lie below the proliferating high-rise developments of Brazil’s third largest city. As I write now from central Cape Town, a few short miles from our own sprawling townships and informal settlements, the urgency for private social investment to link local experiences with global transformation couldn’t seem more real.

Barry Smith is Senior Director, Southern Africa, Synergos Institute. Email bsmith@synergos.org.za

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