To put this female versus male diversity deficiency into perspective at senior levels in Corporate America, among chief executives of S&P. 1500 firms, for each woman, there are four men named John, Robert, William or James according to the New York Times.
There’s been a lot of talk these past years about the need to have more women in leadership roles, yet progress is slow.
I believe it is because we haven’t gotten to the source of what’s really getting in the way: our inherited bias on gender. And I’m not just talking about the perception of women in the workforce, but the one we women have about ourselves, which stops us from taking on things we are not highly certain we can deliver on.
And here’s someone that is doing something about this (hint: you can too)…
In speaking with Dr. Amel Karboul, who was the Former Minister of Tourism in Tunisia, is an Author, Speaker, Philanthropist, and non-profit Business Leader (who was one of few women to hold a top government position and took on extraordinary responsibilities in her career), she explains how she would often push the women on her team to take on roles that they didn’t know how to do, which would, ultimately, lead to their growth.
Not only does Dr. Amel Karboul stand for more female leadership but is focused on nurturing and empowering the next generation of leaders towards a sustainable future. In partnership with the Education Commission team, Dr. Karboul has played a leading role in a major global initiative engaging world leaders, policymakers and researchers, and she has developed a brilliant and compelling investment plan for achieving equal educational opportunity for children and young people, which you will hear more about in this episode. (The financing model is fascinating and is also impact investing!!)
Tune in to the full episode to learn about:
Connect with Dr. Amel Karboul:
Dr. Amel Karboul’s biography:
Amel Karboul nurtures and inspires a new generation of responsible leaders, teams and organizations to create breakthroughs in their thinking, to transform themselves and to work towards a just and sustainable future.
Together with the Education Commission team, she has played a leading role in a major global initiative engaging world leaders, policymakers and researchers, and she has developed a renewed and compelling investment case and financing pathway for achieving equal educational opportunity for children and young people.
Karboul has also built The Maghreb Economic Forum (MEF) as a non-partisan think- and do-tank, and with her team she has engaged a new type of conversation between public and private audiences and nurtured new solutions for education (including de-radicalisation), employment, leadership and gender equality. She also co-lead the establishment of first democratic society in Arab nation, began economic reform and created and deployed effective pioneering digital media engagement between government and citizen on very limited budget as cabinet minister.
Karboul published her book, Coffin Corner, outlining a new leadership culture suited to the complexity and dynamics of the 21st century. Nominated as one of ten leading young African politicians, her professional brand is first and foremost that of a highly intelligent, well connected, creative and inspirational go-getter with a track record of making things happen.
Karboul received a Master’s degree with honors in mechanical engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and holds a Doctorate in Coaching and Mentoring from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. She has held leadership roles at numerous firms including Mercedes-Benz, DaimlerChrysler and worked in senior consultant roles at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Beratergruppe Neuwaldegg as well as visiting faculty at DukeCE. Her two daughters, meditation and yoga keep her sane.
Dr. Amel Karboul: More money doesn’t always lead to more learning. That’s why we really need more money in education. As I used to say, pouring more money in a broken system does only fund more inefficiencies, because often, we don’t think and act in results and learning outcomes are results.
Tanya: That’s Dr. Amel Karboul, Foreign Minister of Tourism in Tunisia, TED speaker, nonprofit founder, and author that is focused on nurturing and empowering the next generation of leaders towards a sustainable future. In partnership with the Education Commission Team, Dr. Karboul has played a leading role in a major global initiative engaging world leaders, policymakers, and researchers, and my personal favorite, she’s developed a brilliant and compelling investment plan for achieving equal educational opportunities for children and young people, which you’ll hear about shortly.
Often as the only woman sitting at the table among other male senior leadership, Dr. Karboul stands for women empowerment and is fiercely committed to evening out the playing fields.
Though, Amel, your career path has been interesting, to say the least, management consulting, executive leadership coach, Minister of Tourism in Tunisia, and now leading in the nonprofit sector. Can you bring us through your journey just so people can get a sense for who you are and what you’ve done?
Dr. Amel Karboul: It’s interesting. Sometimes you see the red threads backward and never forward. I think reflecting, there is one common pattern that is both transformation and both taking an idea that exists only on paper and make it happen. It actually started with my first job. I engineer by training, and started in Germany and started working in Mercedes-Benz. One of my first big projects there was that there was a big management consulting firm that was there and talked about supply chain management. I’m talking about ’96 now; no one talked about that at that time. Basically the time was that the world is getting more complex; it’s not any more that the Mercedes engineering created those amazing cars and just throw the plans over the fence to the suppliers who then just implement and create the parts but that it’s going to be more about co-creation and co-development and working in a larger network to develop the future innovations, which today sounds so normal.
That was called innovation management. It was on a piece of paper, and then I had my first boss who asked me, “Would you be interested to do this, to take this role? We have this PowerPoint presentation and basically, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Would you like to take this role?” Funnily enough, he offered me another role of something much more established. I was like yeah, let’s do that. I don’t seem to be the person – actually if you do fast-forward 22, 23 years farther now in my currency role, it is the same. There was a piece of paper, two pages written about the idea about paying for results in education and using innovative finance and doing something really game-changing. Then Gordon Brown and Sir Arnold Cohen and [0:05:09] asked me would you like to take this and make it real?
I don’t seem to be the super creator who comes up with the idea and neither the person who then runs the thousand – that company but in between that phase, and it’s funny. I just reflected on this recently and I felt like yeah, this seems to be my sweet spot. There is an idea somehow on paper and then to take it for a few years until it becomes real.
Tanya: That’s really amazing. Can you talk about what you’re most recently up to in the nonprofit sector?
Dr. Amel Karboul: Yes, so actually this is my dream job, to be honest with you. After Mercedes, I had really this long career mainly in the private sector even in my consulting career as an entrepreneur focused on transformation. Then I had this, let’s say – you know the movie The Matrix when you have this red or blue pill moment? I had such a moment. It was 2013. Egypt was just this surge of people. Syria and Libya were going down chaos. We had in Tunisia two politic [0:06:22], which was the first ever in our history, probably. The Prime Minister called me and said, “You want to come and build the first democracy in the Arab world? You have two hours for your decision.” He suggested the Portfolio of Tourism, which is depending on how you count, 8 to 12% of Tunisia’s GDP. I was the first woman and the youngest cabinet member to lead an economic sector.
In those two hours, I knew that I will do it. It was a calling, more or less. It was an amazing mission. It was a bit mission impossible, mission impossible, and the whole world was watching us. It looked – wasn’t always sure we’re going to manage. I think having then succeeded to finalize the transition and to have elections, and now recently we had the second free elections, and to have a moment – I still remember in February 2015 where our government gave power to the next democratic and free elected government, which may sound normal in many Western countries but in the Arab world, still actually today, quite rare. It was a very emotional moment.
To be honest with you, when I came out there, everyone told me, be careful. It was like a 24/7 crazy 18 months, and everyone said be careful because you’re going to find yourself in some dark hole. I was like oh, not me. I meditate for 20 years. I’m very self-conscious and self-reflective. I use the code. I’m going to be fine, and I wasn’t.
Tanya: Isn’t that always the case? When you think you’re there, that actually is now my cue to know wait, I actually don’t have it all together. It’s the funniest thing, yeah.
Dr. Amel Karboul: The good thing is I met afterwards – in conversation with my Prime Minister, who was in a similar situation, and I met other minister, heads of states, especially in very intensive – like when they leave and we talked about what happens. I found myself really in a mid-life crisis, spiritual awakening, whatever. In a way, it was that intensity. I mean, there were moments, to be honest. I would walk in the street in Tunisia, and people would just come to touch me. I was like okay, I’m not Jesus. I always was telling myself, this is not about me. These are their projections about power, whatever. I was trying to psychologically keep myself sane despite being so extremely into the public eye.
To be honest, I entered two type crisis. One was from that intensity to being home. I came to London because my children were here in their schooling, entering a home where they continued their normal life. Then you come back and you’re like, what I’m going to do now? The second piece beyond the intensity is in a way, I felt like – I know it sounds very arrogant today but I felt like at that moment I ticked all the boxes and I was 41. I’ve done it all; I’ve been an entrepreneur and saw my company. I’ve been minister and the spokesperson of the government internationally and we managed this, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for the transition, and I felt like oh, my God, but I’m only 41. What I’m going to do with the next half of my life?
At that time, I lacked that vision, and I had to go through some really dark moments, to be honest to find out what to do. I’m very, very grateful to Gordon Brown, the previous UK Prime Minister who was the UN envoy for Global Education who invited me a few months into it to be part of the Education Commission, which is 27 world leaders from many previous heads of state like Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, or Felipe Calderon, former President of Mexico, many other Peace Prize winners, Kailash Satyarthi from India to civil society leaders, etc., and then the idea was that okay, education has been really the often worldwide climate change and [0:10:52] much more on the international agenda. There is a huge learning crisis out there and can we support; can we do something?
That was the lifesaver in a way. I started as a commissioner, which was more a board role, and two years later in summer, 2017, I took on this role, which is about implementing parts of what we recommended. It’s a long answer, but in a way it’s also a dream job because parallel to – so part of those dark moments when I was thinking okay, then I have a [0:11:29], so one was working on the commission and the other one I said yes to was an NGO, a think-and-do tank in Tunisia which called the Maghreb Economic Forum and the idea was to take it for two years to bring it more into – bring new funders, strategize and high-risk SEOs. I said yes to these two years. On one side, the commission work and this work with the Maghreb Economic Forum – and I always thought my cabinet minister role during a transition was the most difficult role, but I found out it wasn’t. Leading an NGO or a nonprofit is.
Everything I’ve learned in my whatever, almost 20 years currently up to that point about what makes an organization successful I couldn’t implement You get restricted funding to do activities for projects and if, in the middle of the thing, you find out these girls you ant to support in education don’t need actually coaching but they need menstrual hygiene. You find out you can’t do it because you’d have to go back to your funders and do a lot of bureaucratic hoops to change the activities. You get 7% over – you can’t – you don’t get money to invest in HR and finance and IT. When I think back of my first job at Mercedes and I felt like why did Mercedes build this most amazing innovative cars in the world is not just because of the engineers. When you enter the company, there is a culture like we had the best canteen. We had the most healthy food. Even the plants we ordered for the offices – the offices looked nice and comfortable. It’s everything. Even the HR systems, the training we did – so this culture of innovation and excellence went through everything we did. You were embedded in it.
I discovered that the nonprofit sector was funded in a way that undermines its impact and that actually no surprise that none grow, even in the biggest country like the US, none grow beyond tens of millions and you’ll very rarely hear about merger and acquisition between NGOs, so they’re kept poor and unprofessional. Sorry to be so maybe [0:13:40], and they live from this amazing personal power of many of their founds and people. This has also limitation if you want to get systemic and structural change.
In a way, those two years where I felt like I muddled a bit through and muddled even more through because I felt like I was failing every day in this NGO in Tunisia but having this light bulb of working with – going round in the commission but actually today looking back was really important because in 2017 after I – the commission work in terms of the research we’ve done and advocacy was done was more finalized, my two years’ commitment for that NGO was finalized, and it was in the summer of 2017 thinking okay, so two years ago, I pushed away that question, what I’m going to do with the next half of my life. Now I have to ask myself again.
Actually, I even hired a firm in London who helps leaders through transition phases, and they told me give us 15 names of people who’ve worked with you in the last three years and we’re going to talk with each of them. We’re going to build something which they call the leadership brand, so to understand who you are and what you stand for and what are you areas of strengths and where can you be also happy. I thought hm, let’s do this. They said the process takes six months, and I felt it would take me a while to find something. I thought maybe to combine my private sector/public sector and NGO experience and knowing that most of the global challenges we have today can only be solved in – across these sectors and honestly, Tanya, I felt like it’s going to take me a year to find something.
Then the company sends those emails out saying we want to interview you about Amel, and then someone answers and says yeah, I’m happy to give the interview but I don’t want to lose you to another job. Go and meet Sir Arnold Cohen [0:15:40] and his – the godfather of impact investing. He has this amazing idea to bring together impact investor, private sector, NGO sector, governments to solve the education crisis. I was like, oh my God. This was one week into my one year search.
Dr. Amel Karboul: I go to the south of France in the summer where he lives and meet him. Yeah, two days later, I said yes.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Yeah, in a way it’s – be careful what you ask for. You may get it. It was, again, one of those ideas. It was almost an empty piece of paper, just an idea, paper, and the last few years have felt like building the plane we’re flying, yeah.
Tanya: I really want to drill into the premise of what you do now, which is the education crisis globally. In one of your talks – I believe it was a TED Talk – you said, “By 2030, nearly half of the world’s young people will be failing to learn,” which is an outrageous statement. I mean, not what you say’s outrageous but if that actually is true, which I’m sure you’ve done a lot of research on, how is it even possible in today’s world, in the information age? Can you talk a little bit about what’s behind that statement? How was that calculated? From what perspective are you looking at when you say people will be failing to learn?
Dr. Amel Karboul: Actually, it is probably more than half, sadly, because it’s – the number we counted is you have around 250 million who are out of school completely.
Tanya: What age group is that? Do you know?
Dr. Amel Karboul: This is – we count until, let’s say, end of – not secondary but the first part of secondary; let’s say basic education which is around 14 years of schooling – not 14 years. It’s six years – wait, six years primary plus four years so it’s ten years.
Tanya: Ten years old, so by ten years –
Dr. Amel Karboul: Ten years of schooling, so it depends when you see – first of all, there are 250 million children who are out of school completely who’ve never been to school or let’s say been to school one or two years and dropped out. These are – they get zero education, zero learning because they’re working in farms or mostly they are in rural areas. Many of them are refugee children. Many of them are girls. Many of them are children with disabilities. These are children who basically have not been in school at all, which is quite a lot. Then if you add to 250, you have probably around 500-something, so you get to the 800 million of children who either won’t finish primary, who won’t finish junior/secondary schooling.
I pulled the email out in preparation that had all those numbers but because I closed my email – not for it to be [0:18:54] we having our podcast. I’ll have to find it again, but I have the numbers both for primary and secondary. The thing is failing to learn means also that our children – I mean, the numbers are really shocking. If you look at the World Bank last numbers, in south Southern Africa, 93% of children leave primary school without minimum proficiency levels. In some country means that up to 93% of the children, for example, at the end of primary school can’t read a paragraph for meaning. Probably over half of them can’t even read a word.
It’s been ignored. The learning crisis was not out there at all. When it goes to numeracy-ism, it’s similar. This is really a sad story because it devalues also the value of education. Some we’re working on one project now and one project in northern North Ghana, and some parents take their children out of school because they’re basically not learning anything. They’re asking themselves why should they be in school. While I agree that 21st Century skills and critical thinking and all of these things are really important, I do believe if a child – reading is such a basic skill. You have to be able to read something to critically think about it. You have to – it helps you to read a prescription. It helps you to read the description on a seed packet. Everything in life is to be able to have some form of future starts with literacy and numeracy. Obviously it goes with life skills and 21st Century skills.
Sadly, the research is now five years old. It rather become worse than better. Whilst we have done a lot of progress in access means bringing children to schools on the learning outcomes, it’s very dismal. Today, the good news, if you want to say good news, is this is shared. This is shared also by education ministers and presidents all over the world that countries know that they’re not achieving learning, that the kids are going to school and they’re not learning and that they know this is one of the priority to tackle now. I think the Education Commission and the learning generation report has been very influential in getting those numbers out and bringing the learning crisis to the G20 and the G7 and giving it actually an international voice.
Tanya: One of the things you mentioned in your TED Talk, which I couldn’t agree more with and I thought was very well-stated, is that our biggest asset is an educated mind. Within this context of a declining or growing failure to learn globally, I’d love to know your thoughts on what is driving this. What’s fundamentally broken about this system?
Dr. Amel Karboul: Yeah, I mean, a few things. One is – I think the first one is the performance of the system. In a way, more money doesn’t always lead to more learning. That’s why while we really need more money in education, as I used to say, pouring more money in a broken system does only fund more inefficiencies. Often, we don’t think and act in results, and learning outcomes are results. I give you two very concrete examples. We were as a team in Ghana two weeks ago, in the northern Ghana, and Ghana is an amazing country where the President and the Education Minister and actually the whole government are investing in education extremely strongly, and they’ve been innovative and they’ve been pushing. We have a lot of what’s been our first partner, and we are extremely grateful and humbled, actually, by their efforts.
I did not – now we go in northern Ghana into a school where there is no furniture, so the children are sitting on the hard floor. There is no door, so which means overnight, animals can come in and actually destroy quite a bit of things. There isn’t an NGO that comes and says yeah, we have some funding. They were like great, we need a door and we need furniture. They said yeah, but our funding is only for toilet blocks. Because hygiene and menstrual hygiene and ability for girls to go to toilet, we all know this is important. They said we have already two toilet blocks. The NGO says sorry, we cannot – the money we have from our funders is only for toilet blocks. Now this school has three toilet blocks but no door and no furniture.
This is how education has been working while it’s input and like oh, you have a country to introduce textbooks, $70 million textbooks. Check the box they have been delivered to these schools. Then you go into the schools two years later and you find most of them are in the cupboards of the head teacher offices and have never been used.
The way we pay for education is maybe – I don’t know, Bill Gates, I think, said in a recent speech, “Education is today where [0:24:14] was in the beginning of the ’90s is that we haven’t really looked at the results and are we achieving them and what it takes to achieve them.” We’ve been paying for school buildings, paying teachers’ salaries, which is most of the budget of all education of the world, but we haven’t really looked closely at results. You have to understand, more than half of the world’s countries don’t even have standardized assessment to measure children’s learning. If you don’t know if they’r elearning, how are you supposed to do the right things to get them to learn? These are performance management, even if it sounds like a technical word, but knowing are we actually achieving the results we want to achieve. We don’t even know most of the time, so we are working in the dark. That’s one of the reasons.
I think the other reasons are that also – that we spend more money at the upper end of education than lower end. We spend more money for students to get to universities and higher secondary school and we spend too little for early childhood, for example, education where we know up to the age of five, actually their brains’ development are the most important and the return on investment, if you want to call it like that, is the highest.
Tanya: Yeah, bang for the buck, absolutely.
Dr. Amel Karboul: The bang for the bucks is ten times for a child up to year five and much lower in the later, but we still spend – and then the children who make it to higher secondary and university are more from better off families. We actually spend more on the better off children than on the others who would need it more. That’s actually not just in developing country; also in high-income countries, so all over the world, we spend in the wrong way for children.
Maybe the third and alls important thing is we really lack a lot of innovation. I think education is the least reformed institution of the world. If you take a doctor from a hundred years ago and put him in a hospital today, they’re probably able to do nothing. Think a hundred years ago, no antibiotics, no sterilization, no radiologists, nothing. If you take a teacher from hundred years ago and put them in a classroom today, guess they’ll be able to do up to 80, 90%, and that tells you a lot, that actually we haven’t reformed education. You go in the middle of town in a concrete building divided into classroom that all are same size and you enter – at the ring of a bell, you enter with 30 other kids, or 40, or in some countries, 80, who are born the same year than you, and then every other hour, an adult comes in and tells you about photosynthesis or the human body if you’re lucky that a teacher comes in. When you hear this, you feel like laughter, isn’t it? It sounds like industrial revolution, cookie-cutter approach while we today know that actually every child learns differently. Every child has different growth sparks.
There are some innovations out there. There is this amazing NGO in India called Pratam who – NGO teaching at the right level. For example, the future will be that you are with children who are not the same year than you, age than you, but who have similar learning needs than you. That’s actually make that more or you’ll have artificial intelligence that gives you the access to content while your teacher will have much more time to guide and coach you to make sense of this new information because the future jobs, at least the highly skilled and well-paid ones, will be not about repetition or knowing but [0:28:09] about creating new solutions. Each roles will change immensely, but we’ve been really slow. For me, the education sector is – I mean, I entered this adventure September, 2015 with the Education Commission, so it’s four years, but I’m still in – sometimes shocked how little innovation do we have in this sector.
Tanya: This actually brings up something where even now, a lot of leaders in Silicon Valley, prominent figures, are really questioning whether a college education is something to be invested in. MBA applications have decreased 7% this year. I know what – you’re talking about globally and the primary education and so forth, but there’s also the repercussions of what you’re talking about of having a really antiquated system even in high-income countries like the United States. It’s this idea of cramming and remembering, memorizing is just not sufficient for the challenges of today.
Dr. Amel Karboul: No, definitely. I think the innovation may there not even come from the US. I don’t know. I was invited to [0:29:35] foundation on an event where there were a few leading universities thinking about what is the future university. I felt like some of these big university are so entrenched in the way they work, so maybe some – in a similar way struggle with reform. I think sometimes innovation could come from elsewhere, for example, from Africa. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the African Leadership University which is founded by a friend of mine, actually, Fred Swaniker, and he’s an amazing leader in the world of education.
He told me this very interesting story. When they take students in the first year, they don’t do the subjects, like engineering or business. What they do with them is a lot of project work, collaboration work. They do a lot of soft skills. They do some analytical skills, like data analytics, to understand something. The first year is basically really more a generalist into the 21st Century skills, if you want to say like that, mixed between soft and project management – soft skills, project management, and analytical skills. He said that these young people, after the first year, they go on internships to the Unilevers and McKinseys, some very amazing also top companies.
They found out that some of them don’t come back. They got offered a job because they were so amazing. The company says like, no, you’re great. Whatever contents you need, you learn on the job. You know how to present. You know how to work in a team. You know how to deal with conflict. You know how to do basic analytical stuff. Then he was surprised, and then it inspired him. He’s like, “We have so many young people in Africa and elsewhere who finish university and can’t find jobs. What if we take that first year of the African Leadership University, make it from nine months to six months, and then offer it to people who have been unemployed for a while despite having college degrees?” They started the first pilot with, I think, hundred young people, and all of them are now employed.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Some of them have been seven years looking for a job. It’s really like – and this is really not [0:31:55] because it was like almost an unintended consequence of the program they’ve started. In conversation with Fred, because in the project I’m leading right now, we’re looking not only in primary. We’re looking now in the Middle East at – again, when we say pay for results, mean we don’t pay for the college or just the skill training. We want to pay when people are employed and make it more demand-based.
Really this conversation is if we really want to scale and innovate, it’s not about building more campuses. We felt like is building campuses the right thing now? It’s like investing in a landline when people bring the iPhone. Is there a completely new form for university or life-long learning? Because in Africa we have such a lack of universities and we have such a big demographic change, I mean, in the next 6,000 days or 5,000 days probably, like we have 1 billion young Africans entering the job market, yeah? Are these going to be innovators, leaders of the future, or roaming unemployed citizen becoming a security and migration crisis?
We really have a – we, I mean globally, because this is definitely not an African problem, a role to play here. Maybe because we sometimes don’t have those established universities also, the way to be able to innovate, like mobile payment in Kenya or other ways. Sometimes we can innovate. We are really looking how to build the university of the future. Maybe it will come from Africa and not from the US.
Tanya: Mm-hmm, yeah, possibly. You know what? Frankly, I hope so. Just in speaking about all of these sort of issues that you’ve identified, how is that being addressed? How do you actually change that?
Dr. Amel Karboul: In the work we’re doing now, I’m leading the Education Outcomes Fund for Africa and the Middle East. It’s basically putting philanthropy and aid on its head. What we’re doing is saying, look, we have this huge learning crisis, which we’ve talked about. Secondly, many governments know they can’t solve it by themselves. They need the private sector, and they need the civil society and the NGOs to support them. While we still believe that governments have accountability to offer great basic education for everyone, many of them know they won’t be able to do it themselves. However, they don’t really know how to cooperate with private sector and civil society when it comes to human capital. It’s easy to do a PPP, public-private partnership, to build a bridge or roads for infrastructure projects, that people know how to do it but not really for like [0:34:47] or how, it’s more tricky.
The question was for us, how can we achieve learning outcomes? We don’t want to start another project or initiative that ends up paying for a toilet block where you need more. How can we do it in a way that involves these government, private sector, and civil society in a way that they can work well together and everyone incentivized to reach the outcomes? These two take together, we’ve created the Education Outcomes Fund, which builds on the premise that we pay for outcomes. For example, in Ghana, we’re taking the Northern Ghana, and it will impact 200,000 children where around half of them are out of school today, so they will be going into remedial training, which is piloted and have shown it works. I give you an example. Amira at 12 years old, never been to school, and then went into this remedial training for nine months, integrated at public school and state school, and actually outperformed her peers, went into technical training for textile, and now has a job and is economically independent, which is fascinating. It shows it’s never too late to give the child a future, even if they’ve been for 12 years old and never been to school.
This is what we’re doing. We’re giving them a second chance in life to go through remedial learning and then integrate schools. We make sure that it’s not just they integrate to drop out the year after but to stay there. What we’re doing is the five-year program, and then we say we’re going to pay you at the end of the five years when the outcomes are achieved. Now, Tanya, if you were leading an NGO, and you say, yeah, I mean, I have experience maybe, and I’m willing to come and work with these children, and integrate them, then I’ll say, Tanya, see you in five years; I’ll pay you when the outcomes are achieved, and these will be verified by a third evaluator. You’re going to probably have a slight problem, which is like, how are you going to pay for the next five years? How are you going to pre-finance this program?
This is where the genius idea comes where the private investors or impact investors comes in, and they will give you, Tanya, the money. They will also performance measure. It’s almost like a copy of a private equity or venture capital deal. In a way, they invest in you and in your organization, help you achieve the outcomes. Once in five years – I’m simplifying this – the outcomes are achieved, and the third-party evaluator says, yes, those 200,000 children have been through remedial training and have learned. We say we pay you and the investor the money back plus a certain return.
What is life-changing for you, Tanya, as the leader of this NGO, is that if I as the donor was giving you the money, we go back to my experience after my government’s model where you have to bill every coffee cup you drink. You have to tell me today what are the activities you’re going to do over the next five years. If those activities don’t work, it’s going to be very challenging for you to change completely. If you feel you have to invest in a finance tool, then it’s going to be a nightmare. Actually the investors give you money like they gave Facebook or Twitter on the first day they invested them. They give you the money, and if you need a new IT system, and they think that will make you able to achieve better those outcomes, then you’ll invest in a new IT system. If you think those girls need menstrual hygiene rather than coaching, then you’ll do that. If this school needs a door and not a toilet block, then you’ll do a door.
In a way, the funding you get is super flexible. It’s also long-term, because most funding for nonprofits in our region are for one year. If you want to hire 12 people – I mean, I could have hired amazing Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans to come from London, Paris, New York, to come to the Maghreb Economic Forum and work. Because most of my funding was always for a year, who’s going to leave his job in London and come for such a short contract? We also want to invest in these people, say okay, you have a five-year contract. You have a long-term contract. You have flexible money. You have an investor on your side who’s going to work, maybe challenge you, but in a way empower you and hold you accountable for the results versus what’s happening today is holding you accountable for activities that may or may not reach the results. That’s actually quite a big game-changer for everyone.
Tanya: That’s a huge game-changer. I love it because now you’re bringing the rigor, the business savvy and the rigor of the private sector into the social not NGO sector. Instead of having that rigid sort of tunnel vision of delivering toilets or building new schools, you have the outcome right in front of you, that ultimately it’s whatever the outcome is, learn, or be employed, or whatever. There’s a thousand different roads that you can take to get there.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Yeah, not only different from region to region, it can be different from village to village, yeah.
Dr. Amel Karboul: In education, there is one example in India which is with an NGO called Educate Girls. Safeena Husain, the CEO, has been amazing. They started doing it there, and they’ve been very successful. They’ve just won the Audacious prize for that. I think she just has a TED Talk and trying exactly this system. Their project at that time was a $250,000 pilot. What we’re doing now in Ghana is we’re doing a $30 million project, and then hopefully increase this in South Africa, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, but also Jordan. These are some of the countries where we’re starting to work now.
You would find it interesting because actually this would be the most attractive for the side which we outcome-funded, for the people who pay for the results. Actually they only pay if the results are achieved. If you look, UBS did just a survey with ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and 80% said they do philanthropic work, but only 20% are happy with the impact they’re achieving. We’re going to them and telling them, and telling government, and telling big aid agency, look, if you do this, you only pay for outcomes. You have a 100% result guarantee, because if the outcomes are not achieved, it’s the investor actually who loses their money. They still find it risky. It’s really interesting. Actually it’s zero risk, but it’s risky because it’s a way of doing it completely differently. They have to give up a bit of power, because now they give to those organization money, or they build a school, and they can follow up every stone. To tell people who live locally, who we feel know the best – because sitting in London or New York and deciding what’s best for a village in rural Ghana is kind of quite an arrogant standard of things. Rather to trust these people, empower them, and to tell okay, you will find out, you will know it’s the best. We will hold you accountable for the results but not for the activities. We take a step back after we define with you the outcomes and let you actually do is a huge change. I discover probably much more than I expected it two years ago when I started this journey.
Tanya: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, this concept of if you give somebody fish versus teach them how to fish, you have very different long-term outcomes. By really investing in them and sort of trusting them, you allow them to step into that gap of where they are and where they need to be in a really supportive and powerful way. I love this. What about the impact investors that you were mentioning, the people that go in and actually put the money – sort of like the venture capital model – put the money in to fill that gap between year zero and year five before you guys come in and really deliver that actual funding? Where are these people coming from? Is there liquidity, actual significant investment going into this sector?
Dr. Amel Karboul: I mean, there is a huge change among investors. First of all, there are a lot of Millennials now inheriting, and there are a lot of women inheriting wealth and coming into wealth. They have a different ethos when they invest. They don’t want to invest just for financial returns but also for social returns. There are some policy changes, like big pension funds in Japan and Netherlands, where they have to invest a certain percentage, even if it’s small, even if it’s 0.5% or so, into social and financial impact. That’s kind of substantial amount of money as well. There are also foundations which with their endowments want also to invest.
Really now we’re seeing more and more commercial. Munich Re, for example, is a big reinsurance. They’ve reached out to us and say, we would be interested in investing there. There are more and more commercial investor. There is a huge move really for this around UNGA, the UN General Assembly, now. In September, I was invited by a dinner organized by the FT. They have a new newsletter, I think it’s called Moral Money. The woman who edits it, she said that a year ago she struggled to get it through with her board. Now it’s there, and it’s I think one of the most successful starts of a newsletter. I sat in a room with 10 or 12 of the biggest asset managers in the world. I mean, the guy next to me, they were managing $1.3 trillion, just crazy money. I think that that dinner wouldn’t have happened a year ago – two years ago, definitely not, but not even a year ago. There is a huge movement now. There’s a huge pressure on all the Australians out there. They have to make change, from climate change to health education, so there is the pressure.
Now, on the other side, when it comes to reality, will this money flow from commercial investor? I mean, what we’re seeing now is from our investor – for example, at UBS, Optimist Foundation is one of our supporters but who are also interested to invest, have been at the forefront of this in terms of innovation, but others are following. I think it’s still kind of a stretch for them. I’d say the ask from investor for this product is bigger than what we can offer. I think that there are a lot of investor out there, but they will have to learn also how to work in certain regions or with those providers that we work with. I think there is a still learning curve ahead of us.
Tanya: Just out of curiosity, from a pure financial standpoint, do you have any idea of – and maybe this is too early – what kind of returns the impact investors that are going in and filling that gap between zero to five years are seeing?
Dr. Amel Karboul: Yeah, I mean, depends on – I think, in the India example, they got I think 10 to 15% ROI, which is not bad at all, to be honest.
Tanya: That’s great. That’s really good.
Dr. Amel Karboul: The UK, we’ve seen between 3 and 7 or between 3 and 10% annual. In a way, there have been different ways to look at this. In the UK, sometimes to make a [0:46:50] link to say they can’t have more because it’s always a political question. The problem is here some people don’t really understand this. They say, oh, you’re taking public or aid money, philanthropy money, to pay returns to investors. Actually, that capital has a cost. It’s clear.
Dr. Amel Karboul: I mean, they are actually taking also the risk of non-delivery. It’s almost like if you paid for an insurance. Plus if you achieve more and better outcomes, we show that actually at the end, your cost, including those returns, are still lower than if you input-funded the project.
Tanya: You also now have partners who are vested in seeing your success and achieving those outcomes.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Oh, yeah.
Tanya: The accountabilities and the conversations during those five years are very different than if somebody just hands you the money.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Yeah, and I mean, I’ve talked with CEOs of those NGOs who’ve been on the receiving end of this type of contract of results-based finance, and some of them have been really good, and they moved from very good to great. They all say being part of this transformed the way my own organization worked, transformed the way we look at results, transformed the way we measure, transformed the way we work with our beneficiaries. Just to give an example, like in the India example, for example, they were seeing that what the investor and the performance managers’ results were less good than what they actually as NGOs were measuring. They were like, why is this discrepancy? We don’t understand this.
Then they found out, actually they were testing the girls, so in this case it was about adults and girls. They were only testing the girls who came to the school. The control group was all girls. They found out actually the girls who didn’t come to school, they weren’t testing them, weren’t looking at them; they weren’t having them learn. In a previous, let’s say, normal program, they would say this is an externality and we just – yeah, we just write it off. Because they are paid for the outcomes and they wanted the outcomes to be achieved, they started doing home visits, understanding why these girls are not coming, making some learning assessments at home, changing the program, etc. This is really one of the really good NGOs.
In a way, they found out – and another example from the UK which is amazing, when working with foster children who is especially more, let’s say, children with more needs, they tend not to stay long in a foster family and change. They found out, for example, if you give the child the possibility to be both in an institution and in the foster family, like going for sleepovers or for weekends and back, having a transitional few months where the child is in both, it increases dramatically the chance for this child to thrive in that foster family and stay longer. The state so far wouldn’t pay for this. Why should we pay for institution and for the family on the same time? Doing this different type of contract result based on anything, the investor said, yeah, sure if this really increases the way that we achieve outcomes, yeah, why not? I’m willing to invest and to pay for both and because they achieve the outcomes.
There is a systemic therapy that helps with it. In London, you only have it every six months, this training for therapists. In the US and Florida, it continues all over the year. Fly to Florida and a hotel costs probably even less or the same than taking a hotel in London but sending public therapists to Florida for a training would have been a scandal on the Daily Mail or whatever newspaper. Because it’s done differently, the investor said yeah, sure. I mean, I don’t want to wait six months. Let’s get them to Florida and get them – so you become really pragmatically solution-focused or there are amazing families who can deal with children with a lot of difficulties who comes from abusive and drug-addicted parents, etc. There are very few of those. There are very few of those family who can deal with the most – let’s say – I [0:50:58] difficult but children.
Then for example, you could pay them independently if they have a child or not because either you can pay them for a month or two because they don’t have a child because you know that in two months, they can take that child Today, you can’t do that in the normal space, so those family get easy children, which is such a waste because actually for those other children, you won’t find that family. Being able to pay them all the time and giving them ad hoc because you know when you need them – so this is a total different type of working. It’s that result based on this, and I talked with the NGOs. Social services were working with this and they said this transformed totally the way it worked and moved success rate from 20 to 80%.
Tanya: Honestly, I absolutely love this conversation because you’re right; it changes the way people approach a problem which fundamentally impacts the outcome, period. This is really powerful. Just to conclude here, having gone through what you’ve gone through and seen what you’ve seen, what has been one of the most important leadership lessons that you’ve learned in your life?
Dr. Amel Karboul: The human side of leadership is really the most important one. In a way that – for me, honestly, I think I’m in a different place right now. I feel much more comfortable maybe being a leader. People give their heart and energy to work with you because they know you care and that making yourself vulnerable as a leader and being humane is one of the key strengths, and it’s actually a lot of courage. It’s been something that I’ve been thriving to do, and I think I probably will learn much, much more over the next years, but I feel like I’ve reached a nice place where I can live it.
I think it’s been the feedback from my team. Yesterday, we had a – I invited the whole team to my home here in London and cooked for them lunch. We worked the whole day from home, my senior team of six, seven people. One of them came from a hedge fund and earned three times what he’s earning right now. We were asking how do you feel, and he was like, “Great,” and he’s like, “It’s much better when I worry.” I was like, “What do you mean? How is it?” I’m surprised there are still organizations like that, to be honest, but he’s like yeah, “No one asks you how you are.” Even sitting together around a lunch table and saying everyone talks about what they appreciate working here or what they appreciate within the senior leadership team and what could be different. He says it’s not a conversation he would have ever had. In a way, I think this – yeah, making yourself vulnerable because it is tough to get feedback.
I’ve been 12 years before I was in government and after my private sector industry experience, I was an entrepreneur company that was helping organization through transformation and change. I had a lot of leaders go through 360 feedbacks, etc. Then doing it for yourself is a different game than coaching someone doing it. Putting yourself out there and asking your people to give anonymous feedback on what they see your strength, weakness, and what you could do better and then entering those conversations. From a senior leadership level, it’s very rare. I think as a cabinet minister, I was the only one who did it. I’m not boasting about it. I’ve been supporting people doing this, so I would have been very hypocritical not to do it myself.
I think this is for me the biggest lesson, the human side of leadership. The other one is also life happens while we are making plans. I see it more and more and more in a way that those nice PowerPoints we do with those nice arrows and the nice milestones – politically, things are changing so fast and society-wise that it needs a total different type of leadership there to where we are almost awake and connected and allow our people to be also in those local areas and listen and take decisions under a lot of uncertainty again and again and again. Keeping that vision, what we want to go, but knowing actually that we don’t know and knowing that tomorrow will be completely different is a totally different type of leadership than I saw and did in the ’90s when I started my career.
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely, keeping that inquiry open all the time to see what needs to happen in order to effectively deliver on the outcome every day as a renewed inquiry would really help keep you connected to the speed of change as opposed to, like you say, come up with this great strategy and railroad right into the middle of nowhere with no result or diminished result. I get that.
Dr. Amel Karboul: It means a lot of maturity on both sides, not only on the leaders’ side but on the other side because as a leader, if you say I don’t know, which we actually all don’t know if we’re honest, it needs on the other side colleagues, followers, whatever – who can live with that who wants to be – take also their decision and take risks and can live with such a leader. There is this big movement now towards populism and autocratic leadership because I think the world is changing so fast, so people feeling unsecure and unstable and project their wish for stability and taking autocrat of someone who tells them that they know and actually they don’t. Some people just prefer to have someone tell them they know.
I think about Germany when this refugee crisis happened, and there was a moment when they didn’t know how many people entered Germany. I lived for a while in Germany, so when you live in Germany, you have always to register so they know exactly who in Germany is where and whatever, who lives in the exact numbers. There was a moment where they didn’t know, and this was – everyone was freaking out. It was like, my God, for three months you don’t know how many people are in the country. It’s not the end of the world. When I think in Tunisia when the Libya crisis was, we had over a million refugees, which for a country of 12 million, it would have been 16 million refugees entering Germany, 16 times as much as actually happened in Germany, and we still didn’t call it a crisis. In a way, maybe this is also another strength of Africans is that we lived so – we didn’t have that phase of stability/uncertainty and so maybe we are more adept to live with uncertainty, which is actually for today’s world a great skill.
Tanya: Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything that you think would be important to talk about that we haven’t?
Dr. Amel Karboul: I’m frustrated by the under-representation of women in leadership positions. That’s something that I really personally think is a disaster.
Tanya: Oh, yes, absolutely.
Dr. Amel Karboul: It is something that for a long time in my career, I didn’t even want to talk about or do because I felt like I’m living it. I have two wonderful girls and I said I have children. I take on leadership roles. I live it; I don’t want to talk about it. The last years, there were two incidents that pushed me to take a more active role. You will laugh. One was when I was running my consulting firm. Was a client who called me and said – pharmaceutical company. “We’re trying to get more women in leadership roles and we’re not succeeding. Can you help us?” It was like, come on. I can tell you another colleague who’s working on this topic. I’m not a gender expert. He’s like, “No, please, please. I know you ask the right questions sometimes to come and find out with us why we are not achieving this result.” I said okay, give me the weekend to think about it.
Exactly that weekend, my daughter was playing in a Hansel and Gretel. She was, I don’t know, maybe five or so, fairy tale. Then in that Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, they took the blond girl to play Gretel and then they took a darker-skinned girl to play the stepmother, the mean stepmother. Already in that sense – and then if you look at – I discovered in those fairy tales that women are always mean. There is a stepmother or witch in there, and if they’re good, like the good mother, they’re dead. I don’t know. I sat in this fairy tale and felt sicker by the moment. I thought my God, this is like the stories we’re telling our children. These are the stories we’re telling our girls, that there is a Prince Charming that’s going to come and save you and whatever.
I don’t know. It never happened to be before, but that weekend, I don’t know. I sat there and was like, I’m in the wrong movie. This is a wrong story. This isn’t it. That actually made me make the decision. Monday I called Michael [Eiden] and I say I’m doing this. He’s like, “What changed your mind?” I said, “A fairy tale from my five year old, but I won’t tell you more.” I said, “Where do you make your decisions about the position?” He’s like, “Yeah, there is a bi-yearly, every six months, we do a meeting where we go through CVs of our top potentials and discuss.” I was like, I’m going to go and sit on that meeting.
I sit in this meeting, and it’s women and men, top executives, who go through the CVs of their high potentials. It goes this way: “Peter is leading marketing for Germany, did it really well, so I think he can become leader of marketing Europe of worldwide.” Then half an hour later, you have, “Tanya is leading marketing in Malaysia, and she’s doing great work. We think she could do marketing in China.”
Dr. Amel Karboul: After sitting there for six hours, I stood up and told them, “You know what I discovered this year – this day is that you promote men according to potential and women according to performance.” They said no, it’s not true. I was like, there you go, and I brought them all the examples. Actually in that meeting, they were a mixture of ashamed and shocked that they’ve been living this pattern and that was the start of a longer project. This was actually for me transformational, so I started really looking at this. I ran pro bono three-hour workshops that I called Fighting Dragons and Monsters where I work with younger girls but also sexist [1:02:29] about what are the inner but outer barrier. This is a topic I’m really passionate about. When I was minister, I had the first cabinet that was equal and 50/50%.
Because I’ve learned this with my client, it’s funny that I could do things that I would not have done differently because imagine, I was minister, the youngest, the first woman. I had a lot of pressure for me to succeed. When I wanted to hire people in my cabinet, I would tell them okay, this is the challenge and we want to do it. All the men said great, yes, we were waiting for someone to ask. All the women I asked said no to start with. It would have been ten years ago in my career I would have not taken them because I would have said oh, my God, Amel, you’re under so much success pressure. You want people to join your senior team who are super think they can do it. You won’t take people who have doubts.
Because I went through that process, I knew that actually you have to force women into jobs because women think – performance [1:03:34] they think they have to have done it to be able to do it. You know what? No, you can’t do a job until you have done it. I’ve never met anyone in my life who could do a job before they have done it. You can only do it after you’ve done it. I’ve learned something, that you have to force women to take roles if you believe they have the right potential, obviously, and the right competencies. Those women I interviewed, they were the final interviewee. They had the potential and they had the competencies. I had to force them. I said, “I don’t care. You can do it. You can’t do it today, but no one can do it because you haven’t done it. You will be able to do it in two years when you’ve done the job.” I literally forced most of them into the job, and it was, with one exception, all amazingly successful. That’s something that I’ve told my prime minister because when we were in government, we were only two [1:04:24] minister and he told me yeah, all the others didn’t want to. They said no. I said, “We have to train more leaders understanding this, that we carry a 5,000 history on our back that we think we can only do things after we’ve done them, and that’s why we need people to force us to do things.” That’s why I believe it’s sometimes a clue to other things. When you have the right competencies and potential, it’s a totally different way to lead women than to lead men today.
Tanya: You know what? What you’re saying is so relevant. I remember – and I might fudge the numbers a little bit, so don’t quote me on it, but something around when men and women are going for a new job opportunity, if men look at the responsibilities required, if they can fulfill 10 or something, 10% of it, they feel like they can totally nail it and take on that responsibility, that job. Women so long as they know that they can fulfill 80, 90% of it, they’ll go for it. It’s like these inherited biases that we have ingrained in our brains and in the practice of our society that we have to dismantle with practice. I love your suggestion of empowering and even, frankly, forcing girls to get out of their own way. It’s not even like we’re bad or it’s a bad thing. It’s just that’s one of the things that we don’t even know that we don’t even know that’s influencing our behavior and really getting in the way of us being on an even playing field.
Dr. Amel Karboul: But all the same time also being honest with them, telling them it’s going to be hard because you’re going to be judged also in a different way. I’ve used this – there is – I think Columbia Business School, there’s this case study about venture capitalists and they use the same case study. She’s a woman and they changed – they called it Howard, put a man, but actually it’s the same case study, exactly the same words. They give it to students and then half of the students get the real one and half the students get it with Howard. Then they ask them about what do you think about this leader. Then you get the Howard people say amazing leader, would love to work with him, would love to go to golf with him. The students who get the exact same case study with a real name of the woman, they say yeah, amazing, very competent but not sure I would be friends with her. Not sure I would do – I feel like she’s tough or she’s something.
In a way that the more successful women are, the less liked they are. Success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. You have to know that. You have to know that you’ll be less liked. I think you have to know that you’ll have your friends and your family to count on and that you will encounter a lot of – from media showing your shoes that are not clean after a meeting to comment on your clothing at the time or judging you based on total different things or finding you’re too tough if you’re result-oriented or too soft if you’re – you’re always something wrong It’s just success and likability are so negatively correlated for women. In a way forcing them but telling them that truth and telling them that we women tend to be liked, there is another ways. To say don’t – you won’t maybe get your most biggest emotional support there. You will get it – create yourself a closed circle of friends, women friends and family that will support you through that. We really make it very tough for women who are in big positions. I’ve experienced it on my own skin. It’s really [1:08:29]. Yeah, I guess it is what it is, and I hope we suffer and the next generation will suffer a little less.
Tanya: Yes, especially since you have daughters. I also have three daughters, and that is top of mind. I’d rather be the generation of being the force of change so that my daughters have a little less fight to do.
Dr. Amel Karboul: They don’t have to choose between being successful and being liked.
Tanya: Yes, exactly. Well, Amel, honestly this has been a really, really eye-opening conversation for me and I so want to acknowledge you for the stand that you are in the world for education and for women. Thank you for your time.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Well, thank you very much, Tanya. I enjoyed very much our conversation, and let’s hope our five daughters together will all be amazing leaders for change in this world.
Dr. Amel Karboul: Okay, all the best.
