Health Systems Development www.worldbank.org/afr/hnp World Bank – Health Systems Development — September 2006 Leadership Forum Mari Kuraishi, Founder and President of GlobalGiving, describes the origins and role of her organization in mobilizing corporate sponsorship for development projects in low- and middle- income countries. 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Privacy Policy 1 Mobilizing Funds for Development In this Leadership Forum, Mari risk, and to make it possible to take a lot more smaller Kuraishi, Founder and President of risks with a decentralized and diversified supply of GlobalGiving, describes the origins initiatives was attractive. and role of her organization in mobilizing corporate sponsorship The flip side to this was that if we could drive down the for development projects in low- cost of entry to the marketplace, we could give local and middle-income countries. organizations and community leaders access to funding they had never had access to before. Just as the GlobalGiving is a marketplace of wealthiest economies is supported by a huge base of initiatives to improve communities small and medium sized enterprises, we thought that it worldwide, and of people interested in supporting them. was worth seeing what could happen if smaller, less well Our mission is to help people—whether community known social entrepreneurs had a chance to try things leaders or citizen-philanthropists—to tap into and leverage out—especially with what in the venture capital world their potential to make a difference, and to do it in a way might be called “angel” investments. where they can hold each other mutually accountable. And finally, there is new literature on decision making I was asked to describe how GlobalGiving fits into the processes by large numbers of people (such as James whole context of the international development industry, Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds) as well as the recognition and on reflection, the easiest way to put it in that context that simple rules and actions can sometimes yield complex would be to explain why we started GlobalGiving, how we results (publicized by Steven Johnson as the phenomenon saw ourselves then, and how our perspective has since of emergence) that gave us some confidence that asking evolved. citizen-philanthropists to make fund allocation decisions was not reckless. But it might even have some interesting As many readers might know, GlobalGiving grew out of logic to it as long as we could present the information and Dennis Whittle’s and my work at the World Bank on set the rules right. The jury’s still out on that, but we are business innovation, specifically the Development definitely analyzing the patterns and trends of fund Marketplace, which debuted in 2000. The initial push for allocation on GlobalGiving. the marketplace—including the internal marketplace held in 1998—was to stimulate innovation around fighting How it works poverty. Coming from the technocratic, government- focused world of World Bank operations, it was Our supply of projects comes to us in two different astonishing to discover that the possibility of startup grants ways. About two-thirds of our projects come to us through (puny amounts by World Bank standards) could stimulate our Project Sponsors, a group of over 40 organizations as much creativity, passion, and commitment as we saw at that we partner with to vet and source projects for us. the first Development Marketplace. Just as the X prize These organizations are grant-makers themselves, stimulated a great deal more than $10m (the actual membership, or operating organizations. In addition, amount of the prize) in research and development on about a third of our projects are sourced openly—we run issues around civilian space flight, the Development competitions to bring in a subset of the organizations that Marketplace was critical in affirming that other people had approach us directly about getting on the site as well as better ideas than what the strategy team at the World Bank sourcing specific projects for corporate or other clients. could come up with. It was also very effective in making the challenges in international development more public— Donors also find us in one of two ways. Some of by the very nature of the public call for submissions. We our donors find us through custom websites that their conceived of GlobalGiving as a platform to connect that employers or associations have asked us to create for energy with the generosity of citizen philanthropists in the them. Other donors find us through search or word of US, specifically by using web technology that could make mouth. international giving more immediate and transparent. We focus on projects rather than organizations to But there was more driving us to design GlobalGiving as a make the giving experience more tangible for donors; we marketplace, though. One was that as operational staff at suspect that international giving gets a smaller proportion the World Bank, both Dennis and I had spent a good of US philanthropy (estimates vary between 5-15% of total number of years working on official, technocratically US giving, which was $260 billion in 2005) because it determined flows of aid. The risks inherent in limiting strikes most people as being both far away and vague. development work with essentially a single client in any After all, when your son comes home with a request for a given country, as well as the limitations of working with donation to his Boy Scout troop’s camping trip, you know clients that were not always capable of delivering on the exactly where the money is going. The idea behind implementation of large scale interventions, whether projects on GlobalGiving is to let potential donors know because they were weak or corrupt, were also weighing on what project leaders plan to do with their money, and to us. The idea of creating alternatives simply to spread the have project leaders report back on what happened. 2 going to projects from the year before that. For most Ultimately, for the marketplace to add up to more organizations we are a supplemental source of funding, than the sum of its transactions, the transactions must although our value and importance to the organization build on each other. This happens naturally in physical increases as their size and scale diminishes. The same marketplaces—whether the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul or picture holds on the donor side. GlobalGiving gives Tysons Corner, VA—but also online, at sites like eBay or smaller donors the type of control and reach that was only Amazon. eBay is greater than the sum of its parts in part available to very large donors with their own staffed because a critical mass of buyers and sellers have created foundations. Our niche—and value proposition—really an online community that help each other. Amazon has rests with lowering the barriers to entry on both sides of leveraged its first mover advantage through incessant the marketplace. It is too early to declare victory, but the innovation and the addition of new product lines. Other trend so far has been encouraging. sites like Flickr have pulled off this trick without a transaction dimension, based on a simple but powerful Several journalists have compared GlobalGiving to eBay, sharing tool that allows for the emergence of a and the most appealing aspect of that comparison is that folksonomy. eBay has been a real engine for small business development in the US. (In 2003, 430,000 Americans Impact so far made part or all of their income on eBay.) Being able to provide that kind of opportunity to social entrepreneurs In the last calendar year, we disbursed funds to worldwide is exactly what we had in mind when we started over 400 projects, and quadrupled the volume of donations GlobalGiving. We should be so lucky. References • Easterly, William. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press, 2006. • Easterly, William. The Elusive Quest for Growth. MIT Press, 2002. • Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner, 2002. • Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books, 2003. • Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday, 2004. Search | Index | Feedback | WB Home © 2004 The World Bank Group, All Rights Reserved. Terms and Conditions. Privacy Policy 3