Video transcript
Teymoor Nabili
Our topic for discussion today is youth unemployment, and the challenge of creating sustainable livelihood pathways for young people across Asia’s developing countries. And a major challenge it really is. Almost 90% of the world’s young people live in low-income nations, many of them here in Asia, and despite efforts to integrate them into the workforce, in a positive and a productive way, unemployment rates are stubbornly increasing year on year. And of course, the pandemic has exacerbated that problem considerably. In India alone, for instance, the country has seen a 40% increase in youth unemployment just in the first half of 2021. So why are existing solutions not translating into actual jobs or improving employability? And how can we better organize funding and resources to tackle the problem? Well, my guests today have both been at the forefront of efforts to tackle youth unemployment. For more than a decade, they’ve been working to bring creative solutions that address the brokenness within their local ecosystems. And they are Abha Thorat-Shah, and Veronica Colondam. Veronica is the founder and CEO of the YCAB Foundation, which is a social enterprise group based in Indonesia. And its mission is to break the generational poverty cycle, using financial inclusion as an instrument to enable education. Abha is a founding member of the British Asian Trust, which was formed by a group of British Asian business leaders to tackle the widespread poverty and inequality in South Asia. Abha leads the Trust’s social finance work across South Asia. You can get greater biographies and descriptions of both women’s foundational work and their organizations in the Money Meets Mission web page, but I’ll let them give you a little better sense f how they operate and what they do, and how they come to this conversation. And so Veronica, I’ll begin with you. Tell me about your engagement with youth unemployment. Tell me about how you are working to address it, and particularly the relationship between your financial approach and the problem at hand.
Veronica Colondam
Thank you for the question. YCAB Foundation began in 1999, that’s 22 years ago, to focus on education for youth at the bottom of the pyramid. We’re trying to help them come back to school, those who drop out, or those going to schools that are not good, low quality, to at least get them jobs. So that has been the mission for us – to use education for sustainability. But we’ve been trying so hard by creating “free school”, 80-cents-a-month kind of school, vocational, continued study and all of that, but then they still drop out. So the question is why? They drop out from mainstream, they come to us, and they drop out again.
Teymoor Nabili
So your approach has been to try and break that cycle, by giving them an education and putting them on a different path, but even that’s not quite enough to break this cycle.
Veronica Colondam
Not enough. It took us a decade to actually learn that there is a connection between the economic issues at home and their education. Because education can be free but going to school is never free. We combine the economic empowerment for their mothers with the condition that they keep their kids in school. So it’s that financial inclusion kind of approach to enable education. We got that going since 2010, and we see the results of it, where, from the economic perspective, we can help these mothers to leap $2 per capita income per day to $6, which is a little bit, almost aspiring middle class. By World Bank standard, its 7.75 in Indonesia. So we try to bring them there. And we track the education of their children. The higher they go, usually, the better job that they can get at the end of their education, to contribute at least $2 per capita income into the household income.
Teymoor Nabili
So a combination of education and financial inclusion for the broader family unit, to help them move out of that poverty cycle. We’ll get into some of the details of how that works in a moment. Let me just give Abha a chance to tell us a little bit about the British Asia Foundation, and how you see the issue of that unemployment we just mentioned, in India in particular, where the problem is becoming so great.
Abha Thorat-Shah
Absolutely, thank you Teymoor, and Veronica absolutely aligned with what you’ve just said. The British Asian Trust has been running since 2009, and tackling unemployment and addressing root causes of poverty are absolutely core to our work. Coming to the issue of unemployment, you talked about the statistics of unemployment rising. The corollary of the issue is there’s a huge skill shortage as well. Industry regularly says there aren’t enough skilled labor to meet the jobs that they need. So on one hand, you’ve got unemployment, on the other hand, you’ve got demand. So what’s going on? The trust does three things to address that. One, we focus on making sure the right financial tools are used to address the problems, that the financial tools incentivize the right collaboration. If industry has demand, and there is supply, what’s going on that can make finance enable those two to come together? Second, we really, really focus on what we call collaboration. One of the big issues in India is the lack of demand-driven skill training program, and really driving that is at the core of our work. Third, we fund what it takes. Sometimes it could be skill training, sometimes it could be financial intervention, financial inclusion interventions, as Veronica said. At other points it could be social and emotional learning, it doesn’t matter what. At the end of the day, it’s about joining up all the dots to address what is clearly a misalignment issue in the sector. It’s not that there aren’t enough people, or there aren’t enough jobs. It’s about getting both of those to work together.
Teymoor Nabili
So both of you are focusing in the initial instance, on the financial aspect of bringing some kind of sense and inclusion to the problem. But both of you have also highlighted the fact that it’s a much deeper problem than simply getting finance. The question, I suppose, as you put it Abha, is joining the dots. So tell me a little bit about how that process works. What have you, during the course of your work, found about what works when trying to join those dots?
Abha Thorat-Shah
I’m happy to tell you how we approach it. Where we start is what is the outcome we want to have. If we want to keep someone in a job, not just give them a job, keep them in a job for six months, the outcome is clear for us. So we define our goals. And then we finalize and incentivize on that basis. We talk to employers to find out what doesn’t keep people in jobs, and then work backwards from that. The core of our social finance work is a drive towards funding outcomes over outputs. So for example, we won’t fund a training program, we will pay for the intervention once the person has been in the job. By changing financial incentives, we find that all the little inputs and all the steps taken for that sort themselves out, and industry is able to change and pivot its program as required. The minute you just fund inputs, you commit yourself to the “units of things funded” as against the kind of outcome you have. So the real focus of our work is funding outcomes. And we find that sort of like a magical moment where all things and all the dots start aligning towards the end goal that you’re meeting.
Teymoor Nabili
It’s an interesting distinction, or at least an interesting specific function, funding the outcomes. And I’m wondering what that means. It seems like you’re specifically saying, it’s a contrarian position almost, to how other people look at. Is that the case? Are you doing something different to where the other people do it? Do they fund other things?
Abha Thorat-Shah
A great question. I don’t think it’s different. I just think it’s an evolution. Outcomes are always seen as being nebulous and difficult to achieve. We are at the forefront, but we aren’t alone in this move. You know, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundations, Investment Fund, UBS Optimus, several people have been saying to me, we’ve been talking to each other for some years and say, if you’ve been funding inputs, and nothing’s changing, by changing the incentives, can we change the sector? And yes, we are doing something different, but it’s not brand new in that respect. People have been trying for some time. The complexity is there is a risk in funding an outcome. Because what you pay for is activity, usually. How does activity get paid for, we needed to find solutions for activity to get paid for, so we could focus on outcomes. And that’s where we use investor capital to do that, so that eventually a government pays for an outcome or a philanthropist pays for an outcome.
Teymoor Nabili
Veronica, I suppose what this adds up to is really trying to reconcile the funding and the KPIs that are expected by the funders and the outcomes, as Abha puts it. How do you approach the management of expectations and the measurement of outcomes?
Veronica Colondam
For us, we simplify the outcome in terms of the increase of income that we track over time. So that’s probably the most important component, because we assume that the better income the mothers have, they will have more ability to keep their kids in school and provide better food on the table and savings. That’s on the mother’s side, that’s the financial empowerment side. On the education side, keeping the kids in school is harder with Covid, with all this access to technology, and internet quota, and all of that, but we’ve managed to keep them in school. And we changed slightly our approach from setting up like a physical school to definitely online school, but we also approach through a scholarship kind of system. It’s way cheaper for us to do that instead of to set up a school. So I’m glad that Covid has given us the direction how to do this. But that’s from the program side. Throughout time YCAB also set up as a venture. So we have a venture company that invests in, not the ultra-micro level, but the SME-level businesses run by women. And we actually invest in young women under 35, and in very promising businesses. So it has to have a few layers at play, where yes, we’re addressing the ultra-micro, but we need to empower the SME, that definitely work with the ultra-micro women. So this is women for women kind of program. We launched this with AVPN, the Indonesia Women Empowerment Fund last year. So this is just kind of a beginning for but we are excited with looking at the model that women empower women.
Teymoor Nabili
Tell me about the financing process, though. We’re talking about money meeting mission – when you are raising money for these processes and for these solutions, how do you frame that conversation? And how do you convince them that their money is working properly? Do you find that they have a different perspective on these things?
Veronica Colondam
Well, we have to agree before we start the conversation with them that we have the agreement and what KPIs look like, what success looks like for them. But of course, in the case of YCAB, we are a social enterprise. So the foundation can definitely take philanthropic money, and the company can take investment money. So there’s two different conversations at the table, speaking with impact investors and speaking with grant-making organizations or CSR companies. CSR companies tend to be in a way kinder, more patient, because it’s philanthropic money. But investors, they want everything. They want the financial return, they want the impact. But we kind of simplify that part on the impact side, that we agree that the increase of income would be the key to success to the program in terms of economic empowerment. So we keep it simple. And it’s a different conversation for giver and investors.
Teymoor Nabili
You mentioned the gender issue there, and you’re very active in that perspective. Tell me a little bit more about how you are approaching gender in this context. Is there a difference in youth unemployment between the genders?
Veronica Colondam
With Indonesia, I don’t know India, I’m sure there’s similar data. I mean, our domestic product is around a trillion dollars. So about almost 70% is actually backed up by the SMEs and 80% SMEs are women. If you look at the data, majority of them are under 45. So youth, okay, not so youthful. But I see the trend in our group, the women that we work with, currently around 50,000 families that are women that we work with, we look at the ability to access technology, as part of their doing daily business. And it has increased since the pandemic, because it is not by choice that they want to be savvy, they kind of have to, if they want to survive. So that’s what I think is promising. And women are really big, in this “pie” of job creation, I think. Not only that they themselves but then when they’re empowered they’re able to hire their neighbor, their relatives, to help them with the business. So we look at it as also job creation, when they are women entrepreneurs. Even at that bottom of the pyramid.
Teymoor Nabili
Abha, about how does the gender issue fit in to your calculus? What about the role of women in general? And how do you define mission with men and women in mind?
Abha Thorat-Shah
Well, first, let’s just look at the stark numbers. 47% of women lost their jobs as against 7% of men in the pandemic in India. That itself tells you about the sort of huge impact of the pandemic on women. On the other hand, the pandemic gave us an opportunity to reimagine how women can be in the workplace. Women can work from home now using digital technologies, they can run businesses, and sell wares using mobile technologies. So in India, we saw a flowering of ideas because of the pandemic. Unfortunately, bad events also teach us how to come out of it, hopefully. But we also saw that the biggest and the largest impact was on women. So finance and mission can come together by doing a couple of things. First, addressing the barriers. Can technology, for example, enable us to really address the barriers? Barriers of women having to go to the workplace facing violence on the way. Is technology one way of doing that? Really programmatically financing those barriers. Secondly, of course, my whole “outcomes” mantra. Are we financing the right outcomes? You asked Veronica a minute ago, “what’s the challenge with giving?” The challenge with giving is every buyer is buying a different outcome and collaborating on the same currency of outcome. And often we often use the SDGs, or the Sustainable Development Goals, as our currency. It’s a huge part of the buying conundrum. And if we can get people onto that same page and say, we’re buying the same thing, you suddenly have this moment.
Teymoor Nabili
Sorry to interrupt but that’s a big if. Tell where that conversation is right now. Are you anywhere near being able to bring everybody together on that same platform?
Abha Thorat-Shah
It’s always complicated. Somebody wants to buy learning outcomes, someone wants to keep a child in school. Eventually, it’s a question of where the market is, and whether you can go back to what we say, what is enshrined in the SDGs. The simplest currency for us is what the world has agreed is the outcome we need to be purchasing. The complexity is what is the unit of measurement on that. And there’s a lot of brilliant people working on that, far better than me. In women’s cases, while employment and income might be one, one intermediate outcome actually, many gender activists would tell you, it is about when a woman has a baby or what then she’s able to say no to violence in the household, or make financial decisions for buying property. Now those are the outcomes you’re aiming for. You may not be able to measure them. But you can measure as Veronica says, you can measure employees staying in a job, an employer creating a conducive workplace, those become intermediate places. So it is a journey and not a destination in one shot.
Teymoor Nabili
What about the variable of countries and cultures and governments and regulations? Veronica you’re principally based out of Indonesia, but you’re also operating in a number of other Southeast Asian countries. How do you find the differences in the different environments? And are the challenges different? Or are they much the same?
Veronica Colondam
India and Indonesia, we share a very regulated at the charitable, philanthropic level. We are probably the two nations who do not give tax deduction, for example, to our donors. So that’s really will screen the type of givers that will be attracted to support us. But I guess we are navigating our ways. That’s why the kind of social enterprise in Indonesia, when you talk about structure, is in no existence. There’s no such thing as a, for example, CIC in the UK, but we just have to navigate between having a dual structure – the nonprofit foundation and the for profit, which is a company. It’s just a management group type of thing. Then we have to be really careful in how we do our books, because both got audited, and that’s very sensitive in our case, because the tax is not quite friendly to the social enterprise. Not yet. I’m on the road to change that. But it will take time.
Teymoor Nabili
It’s not just a matter of the regulatory system and the taxation laws and stuff like that, Abha. What about the cultural element? What about the way the labor market itself is organized? And how the infrastructure of these activities is created? What are those elements like?
Abha Thorat-Shah
Absolutely, let me first talk to you about enabling regulation, and then come back to the structural challenges. The main regulatory opening up that happened in India was when they passed the CSR regulation, and this made it mandatory for government, for all corporates to give 2% of their profits, I think it is, towards development activities. That created a sort of energy in the development sector that nothing else has. So there is good regulation as well. And India has been at the forefront of that CSR regulation. Similarly, the activity I see in the grassroots of social entrepreneurship in India is also second to none. I see better ideas out there than any other place that I’ve ever worked in. I would say that as an Indian, but genuinely there is a flowering of enabling conditions that allows that. Third, the government is open to private sector participation. While it’s complex, it’s opening its doors to working collaboratively with the private sector, philanthropic, and other places on large development challenges, recognizing that nobody can go at it alone. So that’s sort of the regulatory environment. There are challenges but there are opportunities. In terms of the structural barriers in the sector that we’re talking about, unemployment, 90% of people employed are in the informal sectors in India. And that itself creates a structural barrier of addressing the needs of those millions over there. And with that, you can only do that through the government, because the government has its tentacles everywhere. And working on innovative programming for those organizations, selecting your outcomes jointly with government and saying here’s what we’re incentivizing for is the only way forward.
Teymoor Nabili
Veronica, you were talking a lot about helping the individuals involved – getting them into school, helping their social and community situation to enable the broader infrastructure of support. But what about from the job market perspective itself? What about creating more employment opportunities? What about a system and the employment infrastructure that exists? Are there issues that are particularly problematic within those contexts?
Veronica Colondam
I think Covid just made it a bigger problem exponentially. We had an opportunity, just an example of kind of investee that we are investing in – it’s a job portal. Pre-Covid, we came in, they had around a million users. During Covid the demand for jobs increased 11 times. So because a lot of people lost their jobs and with the work from home kind of approach, only limited numbers of employees can maintain their jobs. So we see that demands just increase. And in the job portal that we invested in, we focus on those without university degrees. So you can actually see the numbers of people with very low education looking for a job. Our user profile is definitely under 30, and youth unemployment is a real issue for Indonesia. Education, unfortunately, it’s a long-term kind of activity, vut that is the only hope to change this because in one of our vocational centers, the batik-making class, it just kept on running during Covid and kept creating jobs. Compared to salon and weaving and sewing classes, the batik is very resilient, maybe because there’s a cultural element to it. But what I like about it best, we invest in the education for like only a short time – four to five months – and yet our students are able to create batik, and to sell, and they can actually make five to seven times the minimum wage in that area. And they become able to create jobs because batik, by its nature, you can’t make it yourself, you have to make it as a group. So the group effort – collaboration – I think that word keeps coming back, Abha has been saying collaboration at the top level, regulators, the UN and ourselves as implementer, of course collaboration between givers, philanthropic givers, or impact investors too. This is all money meets mission. And at the very bottom, actually collaboration between the kind of industry, I think this is very niche, but I see the potential very resilient throughout Covid. And this is the job creating vocation that we think is very promising.
Teymoor Nabili
So we’ve been talking a lot about the difficulties and the complexities of the environment, and making the connection between not just the money and the mission, but all those different elements and points of influence that Abha was talking about. Let’s talk about what you have learned from your decades of experience in trying to reconcile that complexity. Abha, obviously there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of employability given everything that you said so far, but are there basic lessons, are there basic rules of engagement that you have come across that you think are worth maintaining every time you come to a new project?
Abha Thorat-Shah
The question is like asking a parent whether there are rules of parenting that work. And the answer is no. But then you learn along the way, and there is wisdom, and the wisdom deepens. I’ll tell you a small story for a second, if I may. Many years ago, in a village, there was a farmer who was working in the field I was I was visiting. His son, on the other hand, was sitting at the doorstep and sitting around, and I said to him, there’s your old father, he’s working. what’s going on with you? He said, well, I’m educated, I don’t do that kind of job anymore. But there’s no job for me. So his aspiration after education was for a better, or a “proper” job as against the job his father did. There was a lesson I learned that as we educate and skill and enable, you have to recognize we’re talking about human beings and their aspirations. And underneath all this design is a person who desires a different life; a woman who’s employable or skilled or trained, maybe going back into her household and having to deal with the dynamics as well. And if I keep coming back to that young boy who was sitting there as his father labored and felt he was too good to be laboring like that anymore, I will always keep myself honest and straight. And I think as parents, that’s the only truth in so many years, I tell myself, think about that young man, am I actually enabling or disabling him?
Teymoor Nabili
But that reality applies to almost every single country in the world, doesn’t it? I mean, no one in any country, be it very developed or very undeveloped is going to want to do the really boring horrible, menial tasks.
Abha Thorat-Shah
In the UK, we don’t have people getting our food to our supermarkets right now.
Teymoor Nabili
So what is what is the answer to that? I mean, what did you tell to that boy, and how can you address an issue where on the one hand, you’ve got this really positive development, where the youth are coming in with an education or an expectation and ambition that exceeds those of their parents, and yet they’re not working?
Abha Thorat-Shah
It’s the dignity of labor. I think for me, the underlying piece of this is there is dignity in labor. And when I see a partner on the field, who really takes the dignity of labor, I still remember brilliant agriculture partner of ours, talking about goat insemination and saying that she was making it cool for young women to be making sure there’s goat rearing going on. But she made it a cool job, she put it in the press, she sorted it out. There’s something about the dignity of labor, Veronica talked about batik, which changes the dynamics of how the next generation looks at it. Some things are always going to be uncool. The youth are the youth, you can’t change that. But if we can generally believe that every bit of the labor market is dignified, and we see that every activity has that dignity, I think we will make people work with those partners who get the problem with all the jargon on one side.
Teymoor Nabili
How about you, Veronica? Are there reliable strategies, tools, techniques, attitudes that you have, you have come across during your work that makes you think okay, this is a good approach?
Veronica Colondam
I learned we have to manage our expectation and have that mental readiness. Because anything can go wrong without proper communications with the target group that we want to reach. Sometimes what works for us, what is good for us, is not good and does not work for them. So I think we need to have that needs assessment really addressed, because it’s very important. So we are responding to what they need in that particular area. So communications for me. Number two, definitely collaboration at every level. Because it’s not just collaboration for money but collaboration for support. Ro get your program, no matter how good it is, if the community there, the leaders of the community don’t like you, you’re done, you’re gone. So that is very important. You have to have that. In Indonesia, we call it socialization, we socialize what we do and get the buyout from them, the support, that’s very important. And at the end of the day, I did mentioned about managing our own readiness. I think we have to deal with the mindset. I think Abha said a little bit about that in the beginning, that we can only at the end of the day help those who want to help themselves. We cannot force what we think is good for them. They have to want to fight it. So I think the fighting spirit we need to get from them. Without it, there’s no change, no development can happen. So that’s what I think. And I think that mindset, is the biggest challenge for our students. They come from a very poor background. For them to be in a workplace, to be able to actually say something to their superior, it takes a lot. So that work readiness training that we give them at the end of the education, very important. For example, giving a CV and then shake the hands, you know, and have that confidence, little things like that, they just don’t know how to do.
Teymoor Nabili
Let’s look at the same question from a different perspective. We’re viewing this from the perspective of the situation on the ground. Let’s turn the lens around for a minute and look at where the money is coming from. Let’s look at the funders themselves, the donors themselves, where you’re getting the finances from. You work with a lot of givers; what are the lessons and the messages that you would like to share with respect to that relationship and that collaboration? And how can we use those relationships and the money itself to improve the situation that we’re in.
Abha Thorat-Shah
The lesson is the same I think. Focus on the goal, not the steps to the goal. The first bit is about the givers. They are also facing their own challenges – aid budgets are lower than they’ve ever been. My colleagues at the FCDO in the UK- which is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – are more stressed today because their budgets are lower than ever before. They’re having to make choices today as they face the huge problems of Afghanistan and Syria and post-Covid. I think givers are as vulnerable and as affected by the pandemic as the person on the ground, maybe in a different way, but their entire way of doing development has been challenged in the last so many months. My only lesson to them is to keep it straight, to focus on the outcomes, I’ve said that before, to work with others, to not sweat the detail because there’s a big huge problem here. There are good solutions and if there is an entrepreneur trust them and just really go with them. Because eventually for scale you need to trust the person on the street, the person doing the work. You can have all the stuff but if that doesn’t work, you know the programs don’t work.
Teymoor Nabili
Obviously there is an enormous call on those givers for funds. And often that might be a stress on them. But what about a situation where givers do have funds, and perhaps the meeting of their expectations and the projects that they’re being offered, maybe there’s an imbalance between them? Veronica, have you come across problems where you are just simply not able to cross the gap between the existence of money and the project that needs money?
Veronica Colondam
Luckily, we’ve been filling the gaps. Usually, we’re already pre-screened by our donors or givers. So they kind of have that mission alignment from the beginning. That’s very important. And of course, you cannot cheat on time. Being present for a long time, kind of gives that trust. So I think what I learned from working with funders and givers is just how we have to deliver what we promise.
Teymoor Nabili
You’re saying that there isn’t actually ever a problem where there isn’t an appropriate project to be funded. Because that’s where I was coming from on this. I mean, in other cases, where you do have, particularly in the sustainability world, you do have a lot of venture capitalists coming in and saying, well, we have money, but the projects that you’re offering us simply don’t meet our criteria.
Abha Thorat-Shah
Yeah, I think when that happens, you ask are your criteria too high at a time of complexity? That would be my first question, are you trying to get to your aim of the best possible investment and ticking every box in one minute? Or are you saying here’s my journey, and step one, I might compromise on three things but in two years, I’ll be there. Because currently the product doesn’t exist, what I want to do. I’m happy to be gently challenging on that while trying to sort the system out as well.
Teymoor Nabili
Okay, I mentioned there for a minute sustainability, and I just want to bring in the issue of the climate, sustainability, the SDGs, CSR in a corporate context. These elements are becoming a major part of the conversation, and I’m wondering to what extent they impact not only the givers on your side, and whether it’s feeding into the source of funds and potential funds, for you guys? Or if it’s not even relevant in the context of the youth unemployment conversation?
Veronica Colondam
No, it’s very, very relevant. I mean, the gender lens is big on youth unemployment for us, because I guess, naturally, since we work with mothers, the SDGs became very relevant. But the climate change part, maybe we’re not so much into that. Our donors, our givers, they kind of prescreen us, and they kind of know the kind of SDGs that they want to work together to deliver together with YCAB.
Teymoor Nabili
Apart from, from your perspective, is the landscape, the challenge that you’ve been facing, particularly changing in the modern day? Or are the problems fairly consistent?
Abha Thorat-Shah
The problems remain consistent. The landscape is changing. You cannot ignore the climate today. Younger people will not ignore climate. So it is definitely one of the trends of the future. I mean, if I talk to my own children, they’d rather fund you know, the oceans than they would fund a poverty program, which I often argue with them about. So you are seeing a trend and change and it is coming and we’ve got to be prepared for it. In the sector that we’re discussing, green jobs is definitely on the conversation with several donors. We’re understanding how sustainable jobs can be there. It’s not about any job, it’s about how that job is sustainable as well. And that discussion, I’m seeing an evolution in that. It happens as societies move, as problems become more layered with interconnections with climate. You see refugee problems, with refugee problems you see unemployment, and these are all linked to each other. Those linkages can be made, especially with unemployment, you can see in Bangladesh, we often see that link, and there’s some brilliant work that can be addressing both those issues together. Absolutely. They push us to think beyond our layer-one problems and finding solutions as well.
Teymoor Nabili
It’s not just a cultural question or not just a flavor of the month question, I suppose. Is there actually a significant impact from these new ideas? Where are the existing models of funding, the kind of work that you do, being impacted?
Abha Thorat-Shah
SDGs have been around for some time. There’s nothing new there. We are committed to them. If anything, we’ve gone backwards on them in the last 18 months or so. So the commitment to SDGs has been in the sector for a long time. CSR has had huge positive trends for India, the Indian giving context, definitely. The question of green financing is going to change things, I don’t think it’s changed it to the extent that we are going to be able to see in India. So I think a couple of those challenges, a couple of those opportunities have been presenting good finance and new finance in a long way. The other thing which I worry about is, as challenges become more complex, how to prioritize within that, how do they make sure they don’t forget some of the quieter issues – child poverty, child protection, those sorts of issues that sit under this, and it doesn’t move, like the wind, as fashionable causes sometimes do. And when you work for many years, we see causes coming in and out of fashion. And hopefully that doesn’t happen, and we continue to stick to a core, the core requirement as well in the development conversation.
Teymoor Nabili
We’ve covered a lot of ground. Let’s finish off with a sort of a positive look forward. We began by talking about how the unemployment problem has not only not gone away, it’s become worse. And of course, fingers crossed, there will come a time when the pandemic side of that problem begins to fade away. But we still have the systemic side of that problem. Give me some hope, both of you, if you would, that we are on a path, a trajectory, towards being able to dig into that problem and eat away at the size of the problem.
Veronica Colondam
I’m an optimist, so there’s always positive note coming from me. With the use of technology, the way it penetrates the bottom of the pyramid layers, we can definitely deliver better and stronger programs for them to help them, you know, digitally. All what we’ve done so far, in Covid, it’s been all successful in the sense that it’s actually cheaper to embrace this community. So technology is definitely hopeful, very much for me, in order to touch the lives of those at the bottom of the pyramid. And of course, the ESG rating for companies in Indonesia, they start with energy companies and, I think what Abha said, it really encouraged this whole development world, and Gen Z, they don’t want to do anything without impact. So, so very helpful. For me, it’s a bright light at the end of the tunnel.
Teymoor Nabili
I’m not sure what ‘Gen’ we’re up to these days. And I think we’re running out of classifications for each subsequent generation. But Abha let’s finish off with your thoughts on what the ‘Gen Next’ is going to be facing and whether we are making progress towards the goal of solving the unemployment issue in the developing world.
Abha Thorat-Shah
I think my answer is sort of middle ground. I wish I was as much of an optimist as Veronica; I am sometimes, not always. But systemic solutions have always existed. What we have today, I think, with climate and the pandemic, are burning platforms. We have to act now and do it quick. And put things aside and differences aside to do it. Solutions have always been there. It’s about things that really work. You know, India has some of the best laws in the world. It’s about making sure they work. And to my mind, what these two burning platforms do is make it a problem today and make it a problem of now. And if we can embrace that I’m an optimist.
Teymoor Nabili
Well, once again, thank you both for your thoughts and your contributions today. It’s been great talking to you.
