Good Will Hunters

Welcome to Episode 66 of Good Will Hunters, from the Development Policy Centre. Today’s guest is Virisila Buadromo.

Virisila is a Pacific feminist and political activist, who co-leads the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights for Asia and the Pacific, which is a rapid grant making facility to support female-identifying activists who need urgent assistance. Prior to joining the Urgent Action Fund, Virisila was at the helm of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement for 14 years.

Virisila recently presented at the Australian Aid Conference, on the topic of donor funding for women and girls throughout the Pacific. She also appeared on Q&A in November 2019, alongside former guests of this program, Minister for International Development and the Pacific Alex Hawke and the Honourable Enele Sopoaga, former Prime Minister of Tuvalu.

In this episode, Virisila and I discuss human rights in Fiji, and whether climate change is used to deflect scrutiny away from other issues, including the treatment of women, girls and marginalised groups. There is very little media coverage of human rights issues in Pacific Island Countries, in particular in Fiji. Rather, when we discuss matters affecting Pacific Islands, we almost exclusively discuss climate change.

But, climate change is a vulnerability multiplier, meaning any social issues that already existing will only be made worse as the climate crisis intensifies - in the case of Fiji, this is a worsening of the situation of women and girls. But, Virisila and her colleagues tackle the issue everyday, and most recently published a paper on why donors are giving so little to local women’s organisations in the region, and why the same organisations are struggle to manage the stringent accountability requirements of donors. But the money is urgently needed, as you’ll hear in this episode.

We also discuss conflicting notions of feminism, the fake news epidemic and imposter syndrome, plus ways to create platforms that allow other people to speak their truth, in particular non-English speaking women in the region. This is an important episode and will shine a light on some heavy issues, that require more reporting - I know we’re inly skimming the surface but I’m eager to share these insights with you and spark an important conversation.

You will have heard me say at the outset of this episode, that Good Will Hunters was being presented from the Development Policy Centre. Many of you would know that the Development Policy Centre is in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the Australian National University. It is a leading global think-tank supporting the international development community, by undertaking research and promoting practical initiatives to improve the effectiveness of Australian Aid and contributing to better global development policy.

We’re so excited to be entering into this partnership, to further strengthen dialogue and research on aid and development in Australia, and give voice to more experts from throughout the region. You’ll be hearing more about the partnership and the Development Policy Centre in the coming weeks, and I welcome your input on how we can continue to be the leading media platform dedicated to aid and development, globally.

Links:

Urgent Action Fund for Asia and Pacific: https://www.uafanp.org

The Development Policy Centre: https://devpolicy.org

QANDA Pacific: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izIVV6cDBms

Enjoy,

The GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 65 of Good Will Hunters. In this episode, I’m chatting to Eric Peck, the Co-Founder and CEO of Swoop Aero, a company revolutionising access to healthcare, by providing on-demand aircraft, or drones, to deliver urgent medical supplies to rural and regional areas.

They’re currently deployed in Vanuatu, as well as a couple of other countries which you’ll hear about in this episode. I’m not going to tell you too much about their story - I want to let Eric tell you for himself.

What I will say, is that this episode is really important. I have worked in the Pacific over the last 6 or so years, and I’ve visited some really remote and rural places, particularly in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. Some villages that I’ve visited are only accessible on foot - they might be a 3-day walk from the nearest town, or in the case of some of the Pacific Island Countries, they may be a three-day boat trip from the nearest medical facility.

And yet many of these countries have some of the highest rates of infectious diseases int he world. It’s scary. It’s frightening as a visitor, and it must be even more terrifying as a local, knowing how hard it is to access even the most basic of medicine. Which is exactly why what Swoop Aero does is so important.

Eric tells some heartbreaking stories in this episode, one in particular about Mungau Dain, the lead male actor in the hit-film Tanna, who shortly after travelling the world promoting his film, died because he couldn’t access antibiotics in his village in Vanuatu.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/obituaries/mungau-dain-dead.html

But, Eric also tells amazing, inspiring stories that make me optimistic about the future of rural healthcare.

After you listen to this episode, check out the Swoop Aero website - you’ll see a lot of media online about what they do and also about how they’re proudly backed by venture capital.

https://swoop.aero/about-us/

I’d also love to hear from you about your thoughts on the episode, and your experience accessing basic goods and services in remote and rural areas. Remember, Good Will Hunters is a community and I love seeing our community come together and advance these important conversations.

Before you go, make sure you’ve subscribed to Good Will Hunters on iTunes or Spotify to stay up to date with the latest news in aid, development and impact.

The other place to stay up to date is the Australasian Aid Conferenced, hosted by the Development Policy Centre at ANU. This year’s conference is on from 17 - 19 February, in Canberra and tickets are on sale now. I’ll be there, I’ll be conducting a whole lot of interviews and I’d love to meet as many of you as possible. Visit the Devpoliy website to secure your ticket today.

This episode is sponsored by Spark Strategy. Learn more at https://sparkstrategy.com.au

Enjoy the episode,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 64 of Good Will Hunters, our Third Impact Investment Masterclass with Rosemary Addis, and the fourth time we’ve had Rosemary on the show.

Rosemary is one of the world’s preeminent impact pioneers. She has helped to shape the system to deliver innovation and investment that benefits people and the planet. Her global portfolio includes Trustee of the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment, Senior Advisor to United Nations Development Programme’s SDG Impact and she has been an expert reviewer for impact initiatives of the OECD and World Economic Forum.

Rosemary’s 30+ years track record spans sectors, disciplines and geographies from a global legal career with Allens-Linklaters and Kirkland & Ellis NY, where she ranked among the world’s leading lawyers, to the first Social Innovation Strategist for the Australian Government and member of the Social Impact Investment Taskforce established under the UK Presidency of the G8 where she was invited to represent Australia as the only participating country from outside the G7 and EU. She was founding Chair of the Australian Advisory Board on Impact Investing, for which she remains an Ambassador, and is founding Chair of Impact Capital Australia and Impact Investing Australia, Impact Investing Asia Pacific Market Builder of the Year (2018).

We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We start with the state of the nation here in Australia, in particular the bushfire crisis that has faced our country this Summer. We talk about what the crisis means for leadership and for investment and the way we think about funding social change. We discuss the Social Impact Investing Taskforce and the opportunity we have to shape a better enabling environment for impact investment.

We then discuss the review of our policy that is underway, including innovative financing opportunities and measuring progress against the SDGs. This includes discussion of the Pacific Infrastructure Financing Facility and one of my favourite programs, Investing in Women. Lastly we discuss what’s happening globally, including the launch fo the Impact Investment Institute in the UK and the Davos Manifesto 2020. Rosemary and I chat regularly both in these episodes and outside of them about why impact investment is so important for our aid sector.

As Rosemary and I acknowledge in this episode, we’re in an environment in Australia where our government funded development spending is very unlikely to increase in the short-term, however we are having a refresh of our aid policy where we can all contribute to the discussion on what a great aid program looks like. Impact investment presents an opportunity to sustainably fund the sector for greater impact. All organisations that I chat to are actively considering impact investment, so I hope these episodes are, and continue to be, an opportunity to learn more about impact investment and how it relates to our aid sector.

Also, tickets are now on sale for the Australasian Aid Conference, from 17-19 February at ANU in Canberra. The conference is run by the brilliant Development Policy Centre, which you heard about a few weeks back when I had Stephen Howes on the show. I’ll be at the conference, I’ll be interviewing a lot of the keynote speakers, and I’ll be hosting the Conference dinner! I would love to see lots of you there, so if you haven’t bought your ticket already, get on to it!

https://devpolicy.crawford.anu.edu.au/annual-australasian-aid-conference/2020

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 63 of Good Will Hunters, recorded at the Pawa Liklik NGO Forum in October 2019.

I’m loving the opportunity to air these episodes from the Forum with you, as we confirm our interview line-up for the coming months. We’ll also be airing two new interviews before the end of January, and then kick-off our full interview line-up from February onwards.

So - today’s episode is a panel discussion on monitoring and evaluation. You’ll hear three speakers - the first is me! And the following two are former guests of this show - Stephen Howes from the Development Policy Centre and Georgina Camp from Huber Social. I chat about some basic questions to consider when discussing M&E, Stephen discusses the roles of academics and how they can assist with evaluating your international programs, and Georgie discusses the research methodologies employed by Huber Social. This episode is a great one for anyone looking to understand M&E for international development organisations better.

I always love speaking at conferences and especially having the opportunity to meet our listeners!

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 62 of Good Will Hunters, recorded at the Pawa Liklik NGO Forum in October 2019.

You’ll hear three speakers in this episode discussing partnerships between donors and NGOs. Emily Fuller, Director, Mundango Abroad, Emily Wellard-Baring, Senior Philanthropy & Non Profit Services Manager, Perpetual and Luke Branagan, Director of Philanthropic Services, JBWere. They discuss private, strategic and corporate philanthropy, providing great insights for any organisation looking to grow their donor network, or diversify their funding sources.

We’ve got a few more episodes to air that were also recorded at the NGO Forum - I’m really excited to be sharing them with you all, and to be able to preserve some of the great learnings of the event.

I also wanted to add that we have a pretty huge year ahead of us here at Good Will Hunters - I’ll share more about it with you in the coming weeks, but one thing I will say now is that you’ll see and hear a lot more guests from our region - I’m committed to amplifying different voices and creating greater diversity of thought and experience on the show. There is so much in the works and I’m basically bursting to tell you but we’ll have to wait just a few more weeks.

I also want to say a huge thank you to our loyal listeners and also a big welcome to our new listeners - this show is for you - and so I really welcome any feedback you have. My inbox is always open and I love to hear from you.

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 61 of Good Will Hunters, recorded at the Pawa Liklik NGO Forum in October 2019.

You’ll hear three speakers - Mat Tinkler, Director of Policy and International Programs, Save the Children, Sophie Jenkins, Partnerships and Performance Group Leader, Mary Mackillop Today and Brayden Howie, CEO, Action on Poverty.

The discussion focuses on the challenges and opportunities orgs face partnering, consolidating and merging. I’ve always loved the example of Save the Children - they’ve made some high profile acquisitions in recent years, as well as launched a couple of social enterprises to diversify their revenue. We’ve had CEO Paul Ronalds on the show, so if you’d like to hear more about consolidation you’ll find Paul’s episode on our website and all of podcast platforms. Mary McKillop Today and Action on Poverty have also had interesting experiences with mergers and partnerships and I trust you’ll find the commentary of Mat, Sophie and Brayden insightful.

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 60 of Good Will Hunters. In this episode, I’m chatting to Bridi Rice.

Bridi is Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Australian Council for International Development – Australia’s peak body for aid and international development. Prior to joining ACFID, Bridi was a Senior Manager at Ernst & Young, delivering strategy, policy and project advice for domestic and international governments on social justice matters. She also worked in Papua New Guinea for three years as the Australian Government’s Senior Legal Adviser on anti-corruption and money laundering.

Bridi has over 12 years’ experience in human rights and international development, having worked in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Vietnam, Uganda, Qatar and the Pacific. She is currently completing postgraduate research with La Trobe University on counterpart perspectives of expatriate advisers in Papua New Guinea. Bridi is an emerging leader in the sector who is passionate about the intersection of development and human security – putting humans at the heart Australia’s international development cooperation program. Bridi is a regular speaker to diplomatic and conference audiences in Australia and abroad.

I had the great honour of working with Bridi throughout 2019, and she is strikingly candid, articulate, and knowledgable. She’s a wealth of insight and experience, and she shares a lot in this episode, so I hope you enjoy it.

As we go to air today, much of the East Coast of Australia is on fire. I myself wad evacuated from my Summer holiday in the town of Thredbo, in the Southern Slopes of NSW. As we drove up the Hume Highway to Sydney, being diverted on and off the road by the Emergency Services personnel, it was abundantly clear that this is not as business as usual. This is a new era of environmental damage for Australia, as over 9 billion hectares of our forests burn, far outnumbering other recent fires we’ve seen internationally.

As we debate how we can provide more resources to our fire-affected communities and to our emergency services, we also remain in the middle of a debate over the future of our aid policy. When the need is greater at home, it can invoke debate over how we prioritise our spending. It’s a topic I’ll be bringing up with some of our guests in the coming weeks.

We’re on the look out for new sponsors. If you’re a fantastic, socially-conscious, for purpose organisation, and you’d like to share your great work with over ten thousand listeners across 56 countries, then please get in touch!

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 59 of Good Will Hunters, with Nigel Spence, the Outgoing CEO of ChildFund Australia.

Nigel retired from ChildFund at the end of 2019, after 14 years with the organisation. Under his leadership, ChildFund has expanded its programs to children and young people in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea, and commenced new operations in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Timor-Leste.

Nigel is taking some time off to continue his studies into child protection policies in Vietnam, before continuing his work in the social sector in Australia. You may recall a few weeks back I aired the talk that Nigel delivered at the Pawa Liklik NGO Forum organised by the Kokoda Track Foundation in Sydney in October 2019. In this episode Nigel and I dive a bit deeper into some topics that are very important to our sector, including Sport For Development, our Aid Review and Child Sponsorship.

In this episode, you’ll hear Nigel and I talk about ChildFund’s work in the area of sport for development. It feels like sport and aid programs were once an unlikely pair, but in recent years many NGOs in Australia have implemented sports-based programs as a means of building relationships in communities, teaching vital skills, combating non-communicable diseases and more. In fact, Australian Aid has been funding sport for development programs since 2009.

According to the DFAT website, sport is a vehicle to achieve development outcomes in areas such as health, gender and disability inclusion. In my view, sport has it’s own inherent benefits to communities but it’s also an effective means of outreach and relationship-building, and has flow on effects to other development programs. As a country that provides itself on sport, it also makes sense for sport to be part of our unique aid identify.

In this episode we also discuss why economic growth doesn’t always equate to widespread poverty reduction, despite popular belief that the two go hand in hand. Countries in South East Asia especially exemplify that increased economic growth alone doesn’t result in improvements nationwide to the wellbeing of communities. This part of the discussion gets to the heart of why economic growth doesn’t always justify decreased aid support.

The other topic I particularly like in this discussion is child sponsorship. ChildFund continues to have child sponsorship as an element of its fundraising and outreach strategy, however has diversified into several other funding streams as well. Nigel and I chat about how child sponsorship has evolved as child protection laws are tightened, and how exactly ChildFund administers sponsorship funds.

So - where do you sit on the sport for development agenda and should it play an even bigger role in our aid policy? Where has economic growth not equated to widespread poverty reduction and how do we rewrite this narrative? And lastly, how do we build connections between Australians and people in countries our aid supports, with respect for cultural nuance and identity?

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 58 of Good Will Hunters, with Bob McMullen!

Bob was recommended to me by another one of our former guests, Rosie When, the CEO of WaterAid. Rosie and Bob have worked together, including through Bob’s role as the Chair of the Australian Water Partnership Advisory Committee. Bob was elected national secretary of the Australian Labour Party in 1981 and directed the ALPs 3 successful election campaigns in the 1980s. Between 1996 and 2007 Bob held a number of Shadow Ministerial positions including Shadow Treasurer, Shadow Minister for Finance and Small Business and Shadow Minister for Federal and State Relations, and after the election of the Rudd Government in November 2007, he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance.

Bob is now a member of the high-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, which was mobilized during the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Crawford School of the Australian National University. I interviewed Bob when I was in Canberra a few weeks back.

In this episode, you’ll hear us discuss aid to Africa and the Middle East and why Australia is uniquely placed to support sustainable development in African countries in the areas of agriculture, water management and even mining. We also discuss Australia’s relationship with the multilateral development banks, including the World Bank which regular listeners will know I always like discussing, and we also talk about disability and why it constitutes Bob’s proudest achievement from his time in public life.

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team

Welcome to Episode 57 of Good Will Hunters with the Honourable Pat Conroy. Pat is the Member for Shortland in NSW. He is also the Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific, the Shadow Minister Assisting for Climate Change and the Shadow Minister Assisting for Defence.

Pat has held the portfolios since June of 2019. In this episode, Pat responds to the comments made by Minister Alex Hawke on this show a few weeks back. We chat about the intersection of our aid program and climate change, the consequences of reducing our aid budget along with our presence in many regions of the world, the focus on infrastructure in the Pacific, matters of natural security and regional stability, and a lot more.

As you would know, it’s a really pivotal time to be discussing aid and what our new aid policy should look like. The ALP and the Coalition have different perspectives on our aid program, and I hope that through these episodes we can unpack what those differences are and contribute to a more informed debate on how we can maximise our impact overseas.

Enjoy,

Rachel and the GWH Team