Dr. Judith Rodin's Keynote Address at Acumen Fund :: News :: The Rockefeller Foundation:
President of the Rockefeller Foundation gave the keynote address at the Acumen Fund's 10th Anniversary Investor Gathering.
Through our Searchlight network, we scan the horizon of social challenges and opportunities across four continents in order to identify trends, policies, and technologies that have the power to bring about meaningful change in bottom-of-the-pyramid communities.
And Searchlight also helps identify development challenges we must confront to realize that change.
Our latest report from Searchlight, identifying significant macrotrends, was fascinating. One dominating trend is the proliferation of information feedback loops – from market prices to social media – that are reshaping the ecologies of daily life for good and for ill.
Another is that communities around the world are increasingly experimenting with systems of rules and rulemaking, tweaking and changing how governments work in ways that pose both new opportunities and new challenges when it comes to poverty alleviation and development.
And of course, a trend those of us in this room are uniquely attuned to: that new tools, new designs, and new ways of thinking combine local knowledge and global expertise in new networks that we can potentially tap in powerful ways.
These are critical global trends, but the Searchlight partners also identified how they are becoming manifest in specific, regional contexts.
In Southeast Asia, Searchlight forecasts that the small, informal enterprises that employ the majority of the poor will need to compete with larger businesses in the increasingly integrated and increasingly regulated regional economy.
In South Asia, on the other hand, Searchlight predicts that the major challenge and also an opportunity going forward will be the dramatic increase in the population of that region’s slums over the next two decades.
The sanitation and potable water concerns will be immense, but so will the opportunity to create a participatory planning process for the impending low-income housing build-out in these communities.
Meanwhile, the challenges and opportunities are of very different nature in Latin America.
Searchlight forecasts that corporate infrastructure could provide a platform for investment in social missions and the chance to scale micro-financed enterprises. However, at the same time, there will be an increasing need to create markets and production structures that drive increased wages.
A final region of focus for Searchlight was Africa, where it identified the need for grassroots political structures to advance democracy and to empower women, who bear the economic burden in many African households, and who in some African nations account for more than half of migrant workers.
Searchlight has further illuminated for us the reality and complexity of this historical moment that Friedman so aptly describes, and that we will all confront head-on in the next decade – the inflection point that we are experiencing, and that we must steer in the direction of a Big Shift, rather than a Great Disruption.
Easier said than done… But we do see a path forward. Or rather, we see the continuation of a path that has repeatedly given us safe passage through previous periods of inflection. The path, in a word, is innovation.
Innovations born of new ways of thinking have always pushed global society in exciting and eventually promising directions. Innovation has always been decisive during moments of change, and today is no exception.
We see this so clearly in chapter after chapter of the Rockefeller Foundation’s century-long story, including Jacqueline’s brilliant creation of Acumen.
It was a process of innovation during a moment of great inflection that led to the creation of the field of public health …and the discovery of a vaccine for yellow fever …and the eradication of hookworm in the United States …and the Green Revolution in Asia…and so on....
It has given us tremendous insight into emerging challenges, opportunities, and trends.
But some trends can’t be predicted. They have to be created. They have to be set.
They have to be set by leaders like Jacqueline, and amazing institutions like Acumen. They have to be set by foundations like Rockefeller. They have to be set by investors like you. They have to be set by communities rich and poor…near and far…today, tomorrow, and for years to come.
“You decide,” wrote Tom Friedman. And indeed we must decide, as a global community, to embrace fundamental systems transformation. We must decide to transform education systems around the world, to provide equal access and equal opportunity for student learning, growth, and achievement.
We must decide to develop new ways to measure value, so that we can incentivize the financial transactions that truly improve the lives of individuals, the fabric of communities, and the health of our planet.
We must decide to change how we save and invest capital, from the largest corporations to the individual consumer with modest savings, so that our capital can be put to work to create not just financial returns, but social returns. We must decide.
And thanks to Jacqueline, and Acumen, and the people in this room, I’m convinced that we will.
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