The Impact Room

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Rukmini Banerji is CEO of India’s Pratham Education Foundation.
Founded 25 years ago to teach out-of-school youngsters in the slums of Mumbai, Pratham  has grown to become one of the country's largest NGOs, delivering high quality but low-cost interventions to millions of Indian children.
It works directly with children and youth as well as through large-scale collaborations with government systems using mapping and data to help inform teaching approaches.
Pratham's Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has become a key benchmarking tool for the Indian education system, while its Teaching at the Right Level (TARL), programme, “has led to some of the largest learning gains among rigorously evaluated education programmes”, according to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
In 2021, in recognition of her contribution to the sector, Rukmini was awarded the prestigious Yidan Prize for education.
In this episode of The Impact Room, Rukmini talks about balancing inputs with outcomes, parental engagement, and the importance of partnerships in delivering systemic change.
“Big change doesn't happen because you drop training modules onto a context, or you create an app or you create some kind of an assessment,” she says. “It happens when energised and motivated individuals put all these things together.  That's how real change happens.”
For more on Pratham, visit their website or follow them on social media at @Pratham_India. You may also be interested in this guide from the Brookings Institution about family-school engagement.
The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. 

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

In the politics of migration, refugees are either demonised as intruders or celebrated for their success. But how does this distinction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refugees shape public policies and perceptions? And what is the effect on those who are defined by it?
In the media narratives of the west, refugees are most commonly painted as economic interlopers, with calls for ever-harsher immigration policies to keep them out. Yet, more rarely, we also see the glorifying of refugees deemed to have made good.
In this dichotomy, ‘good’ refugees are those that have beaten the odds, excelling in their host nations by becoming surgeons, academics, or even Olympians. Models of integration, they are feted for their success and held up for praise. Pitted against them are the ‘bad’ immigrants, the unworthy and undeserving, who are castigated for taking up jobs and benefits, and for failing to assimilate.
This polarised narrative affects both policies and public opinion towards refugees, impacting directly on the lives and safety of those seeking asylum.
To discuss this, and to share their first-hand experiences, host Maysa Jalbout, herself a former refugee, is joined in The Impact Room by writers and advocates Abdullahi Alim and Zarlasht Halaimzai.
Abdullahi left war-torn Somalia as a child, and after a short spell living undocumented in a neighbouring African country, was granted asylum and later citizenship in Australia. A former young Australian of the Year finalist and recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Young Leaders Award, Abdullahi is today based in Geneva, where he works for the World Economic Forum, overseeing The Davos Lab and the Africa and Middle East Global Shapers community. Zarlasht was born in Soviet-occupied Kabul in 1982, a country she left when she was 11 years old. After four years travelling overland, her family settled in the UK, where she is now a citizen. In 2016, Zarlasht co-founded Refugee Trauma Initiative to provide psychosocial support to asylum seekers and refugees arriving in Greece. In 2018, she was selected as an Obama Foundation fellow.
Sharing their personal experiences of displacement, and the struggle to navigate a new identity, Abdullahi and Zarlasht offer a raw glimpse of a journey taken by millions but understood by few. They discuss the toxicity associated with the ‘good refugee’ label and give practical suggestions for how policymakers and individuals can help influence change.
The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout.  Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Are global efforts to end exploitation making progress, or are countries and campaigners failing in their fight? Three experts weigh in. 

More than 40 million people around the world today are thought to be enslaved, a shadow economy of coerced labour, sexual exploitation and rights abuses estimated to be generating $150bn in illegal profits a year.

In recent years, there's been a surge in legislative efforts to combat slavery, alongside a rise in philanthropy-funded initiatives lobbying for change.

But are we making progress? Are the new campaigns, funds and stricter laws helping to shrink the scale of global exploitation? And if not, what more needs to be done?

In this episode of the Impact Room, we explore these questions – and more – with three expert guests.

Joel Quirk is a professor of political studies at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, where his research focuses on slavery, human mobility and human rights. Joel also serves as rapporteur to the UNESCO Slave Route Project. 

Nick Grono is CEO of the Freedom Fund, the first private collaborative fund to target the abolition of modern slavery. Founded in 2013 by investment group Legatum, along with partners Walk Free and Humanity United, the Freedom Fund invests in frontline organisations in three continents, helping to eradicate exploitation and advocate for change.

Anannya Bhattacharjee is a leading Indian labour organiser with a long career in advocating for workers’ rights. She is the international coordinator of the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, which campaigns to pay a living wage to garment workers in Asian countries and to secure their right to organise.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Lisa Seitz Gruwell, chief advancement officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, talks knowledge sharing, fake news, and why Wikipedia has a bias problem.

It’s the world’s go-to site for information. Founded in 2001 with the aim of creating a free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is today the largest crowdsourced collection of free knowledge in history, with over 55 million articles in hundreds of languages, all written by volunteers. 

But, in an era of fake news and the explosive rise of social media, is Wikipedia’s model at risk? How can it ensure its crowdsourced content is accurate and unbiased? What is Wikipedia doing to ensure its articles reflect all voices and communities, and not just those in the wealthy west?

In this episode of the Impact Room, answering these questions and more, is Lisa Seitz Gruwell. Lisa is chief advancement officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the US-based nonprofit that is responsible for Wikipedia and its partner sites. She takes us on a deep dive through Wikipedia’s efforts to boost inclusivity and tackle bias, the frontline fight against fake news, and why equitable access to knowledge should be a global concern.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge. 

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Philanthropy-backed competitions involve big money, but do they also deliver results? 

From the Nobels to the Pulitzer, prizes have long been used as a means to recognise extraordinary achievement - and the nonprofit sector is no exception. Today, thanks to a leap in philanthropy-backed competitions, large cheques are being written for the world's best teacher, the boldest refugee response, and ideas to solve the climate crisis, among others.

But as more donors commit dollars towards prizes - and more nonprofits allocate time to competing for them – is it time to ask whether competitions really are an effective way to fund change? 

Is prize philanthropy supporting scale and innovation or simply creating headlines? And – most importantly - is the money really reaching those on the frontline of global challenges, or just reinforcing the status quo?

To discuss these questions and more, we invited representatives from two of the world’s best-known prize philanthropy initiatives to join us in the Impact Room.

Cecilia Conrad is the CEO of Lever for Change, which creates bespoke prize competitions designed to match philanthropic capital to causes. She is also managing director at the MacArthur Foundation, the organisation behind the 100&Change initiative that hands out $100m each year to a single proposal. 

Edward Ma is secretary-general of the Hong Kong-based Yidan Prize Foundation, the world’s largest education prize fund. The Yidan Prize, which awards $4m annually, was launched in 2016 by the co-founder of Chinese tech firm Tencent, Dr Charles Chen Yidan.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge.

Share your feedback on the podcast here.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Hear from Ryan Sturgill, the former director of Gaza Sky Geeks, on the realities of running a tech hub in an occupied territory and the power of learning not to take 'no' for an answer.

Palestine is a country too often associated with conflict. Home to the world’s longest-running occupation, headlines from the region tell a story of poverty, unemployment and violence. But one organisation wants to change the narrative. 

Gaza Sky Geeks is a startup incubator and accelerator that also houses Palestine's first full stack coding academy. Founded in 2011 by Mercy Corps, with seed funding from Google, Gaza Sky Geeks hopes to seed a digital economy that can sidestep trade and border restrictions and unlock new opportunities for Gazan youth.

Ryan Sturgill joined Gaza Sky Geeks as director in 2015, before leaving in May 2021. In this episode, he looks back over six years of running a tech startup in an occupied territory, sharing the lessons he's learned, the power of Palestinian hustle, and the challenges that lie ahead for his successor.

For more on Gaza Sky Geeks visit their website, or follow them at @GazaSkyGeeks.

Note: this interview was recorded in April 2021, before the conflict in June which killed more than 250 people in Gaza and over a dozen in Israel, and destroyed thousands of homes.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge. 

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Unemployment is a global crisis. From Saudi Arabia to South America, joblessness has been described as a ticking time bomb and, in many regions, has been a trigger for civil unrest. 

In this episode of The Impact Room, we are joined by two women who are at the vanguard of finding new solutions to this complex problem.

Mona Mourshed is the founding CEO of Generation: You Employed, a global organisation dedicated to solving joblessness by creating pathways from education to employment.

Maryana Iskander is the CEO of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, a South African-based social enterprise tackling the barriers that lock young Africans out of work, with a goal of region-wide systems change.

In this episode, Mona and Maryana talk unemployment models and why they fail, chasing systems change over scale, and why donors need to listen more and demand less. 

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge. 

Disclosure: Maysa is a board member of Generation: You Employed.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Ellen Agler is CEO of the END Fund, a philanthropy-backed initiative working to bring an end to the five most common neglected tropical diseases. She joins the Impact Room to talk progress, pooled giving, and the decolonisation of global health. 

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) affect more than 1.7 billion of the world’s poorest people, blighting communities from Africa to the Americas. These diseases blind, maim and disfigure their victims, keeping children out of school, adults out of work, and trapping families in poverty. Yet most are preventable or treatable.

Founded in 2012, the END Fund is a philanthropic initiative dedicated to ending five of the most common NTDs. A pooled fund, it invests money in support of treatment and surgeries, as well as to train health workers, educate communities and fast-track progress towards disease elimination goals.

Ellen Agler is the END fund's founding CEO. She's a TED speaker, a published author, and she serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Health Security Advisory Board. In 2019. Ellen was named by Fortune magazine as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Ellen looks back at a decade of the END Fund’s work, and opens up about the challenge of last-mile disease elimination, the value of pooled giving, and activist philanthropy.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge. 

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

The Impact Room is a new space to connect people and ideas that make a real difference to our world. Step inside to hear stories of success and failure from a host of global guests, all working to solve some of the world’s most intractable development challenges. 

From youth unemployment and internet freedom, to modern slavery,  neglected tropical diseases and much more, the Impact Room is a new space to connect people and ideas that make a real difference to our world. 

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. For more information or to get in touch, find us at @PhilanthropyAge.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge