Commitments for Social Change
Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 07:06PM
I was impressed with Craft’s story because I experienced the terror of the roads in Vietnam first hand. On a trip to that country after giving a speech in Singapore, I was walking one rainy night in the streets of DaNang with my assistant, Deborah Shoenblum (at the time, one of my students at Columbia University Teachers College, now a full-fledged social worker, doing good for people), darting among bikes and motorbikes perilously zipping, zigging and zagging in both directions. Sure enough, an older man on a bike skidded in front of an oncoming car and was thrown to the ground, bleeding. No one made a move to his aide, so I rushed to his side and begged a passing driver to take us to the nearest hospital. Driving through dark back streets, we finally arrived at a dilapidated hospital building. After a long wait, he was brought into a room and laid on an old torn, falling-apart chair, that to my shock, as a dentist’s daughter, I recognized as an antiquated dental chair. The instruments were from a similar era. I paid his treatment bill, and tried unsuccessfully to reach any relatives. The experience was traumatizing, and the memory made me really appreciate Craft’s project.
“Helmets are not a sexy issue,” Craft told me (using a catchy phrase he didn’t realize related to a field I knew well). “But in the development world,” he added. “This is a road war of epidemic proportions.” Given that road accidents without helmets cause brain damage and kill more people than malaria and other diseases, Craft refers to this project as the “Global Helmet Vaccine Initiative.”
Craft’s commitment is deep, given that one brother was killed in a motorbike accident and another was hit by a speeding drunk driver. Also, in 1996, he told me, he was a successful and ambitious Ferrari-driving party-going entrepreneur in real estate, steel, oil and gas, but when a big deal went sour, his soul felt “empty” and he had an epiphany: “I woke up one morning and said, “There has to be more in life than this.” I hear a similar story from a growing number of people who tell me, “I want to make a difference in this world.”
The American-born philanthropist has been successful in launching a national helmet wearing law in his beloved Vietnam, with compliance resulting in a 24% reduction in injuries and 14% fewer deaths in one year, despite that people persistently complain that wearing one is “hot and heavy” or “ruins my hair.”
His campaign is now expanding into India and Africa (Senegal and Uganda), thanks to partners like the InterAmerican Development Bank. Of course, there has to be funding, and CGI is an ideal place to bring donors together with do-gooders.
Road safety even got the attention of the United Nations, when Secretary General Kofi Annan launched the World Traffic Report on Road Traffic Safety, and, I remember, Iran’s UN envoy, Mohammed Javad Zarif, Acting President of the United Nations’ 58th General Assembly, chaired a session addressing global road safety.
The CGI exhibit hall, like at most conferences, is a room with booths where organizations and companies addressing global problems like disease and hunger display their projects and network. The exhibit occurs on the first day of the CGI, held yearly at the Sheraton Center in New York City, to bring together heads of state, CEOs, Peace Prize Laureates, NGOs, philanthropists, media and celebrities to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, and to make commitments of their time, talent and/or treasure to make a difference. The three-day conference happens in September to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly when world leaders are in New York.
At the opening ceremony, President Clinton announced new commitments focused on relief to disaster-affected areas in the Gold Coast, Pakistan and Haiti for which he is the UN envoy (and launched the Haiti Action Network facilitated by Digicel Groups’ Denis O’Brien, which I have been invited to join). Commitments have been made worth $224 million to help the country “build back better” (other postings describe my own commitments to that country).
The four topics this year were Global Health, Education, Economic Empowerment, and Environment and Energy. But there was much focus on empowering girls and women. For example, CBS’ Katie Couric moderated a session on Empowering Girls and Women, featuring the female Liberian President, the CEO of Coca-Cola, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton also announced an impressive commitment of $60 million to supply 100 million homes with clean cook stoves, to replace open fires and dirty stoves, and thereby reduce illnesses like childhood pneumonia and low birth weight. Morgan Stanley, the Shell Foundation and the UN Food Program are pitching in. Another project helping women is Stree Mukti Sanhatana’s commitment to train poor women rag pickers.
Mobile phones were also a big topic of discussion, with cell technology being harnessed for economic empowerment to provide access to data to help girls stay in school and farmers get their products to market. Refugees United committed to register families about missing loved ones; Tostan’s Jokko Initiative teaches literacy in Senegal; and Digital Democracy is establishing a text-messaging service in Haiti to connect women leaders and a call center for gender- based violence, and training women to document attacks in camps. I’ve heard that financial transactions will all be online in the future, and the Mobile Money for the Unbanked project is already piloting mobile money platforms!
Celebrities with a cause are always present. In the past, I watched Angelina Jolie address throngs gathered to see her. This year I was in the elevator with Barbra Streisand (in trademark black) and her husband James Brolin. On panels were Ashley Judd (board member of Population Services International) and Ashton Kutcher (co-chair of the Demi and Ashton Foundation). Of personal interest, the former President of my alma mater Smith College, Ruth Brown, now President of Brown, was on a panel about “Investing in Women and Girls.”
President Obama came to the closing session, introducing his wife as the featured speaker, with the most flattering speech I’ve ever heard about a spouse, saying that her popularity outranks his, making him glad he doesn’t have to run against her for an office. The First Lady spoke about her passionate cause: those American troops and their spouses be called upon to serve as consultants and assistants in world projects. The events ended with Clinton interviewing Bill Gates, who has traveled with Clinton to many parts of the world, especially Africa. Many of us were surprised that the billionaire philanthropist was not so optimistic about the reduction of world hunger and the eradication of major diseases, two of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals that governments of the world agreed to address and have been struggling to achieve.
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