Andreas Widmer argues that economic development and humanitarian aid are distinct activities: humanitarian aid is crisis-focused and can create dependency if prolonged, whereas economic development requires accompaniment (empathy) and empowerment rather than takeover (sympathy). He criticizes external aid practices that impose solutions—often led by outsiders—and presents his approach via SevenFund: finding and doing business with successful local entrepreneurs in Africa to create sustainable prosperity. The talk mixes analogy, critique of the aid community, and personal background to justify partnering with local entrepreneurs rather than prescribing solutions.
Chapters
Good afternoon, everybody. These things are never really made for me. I want to take the half, half of my time to actually just set a few terms and then say a few things that hopefully will create some discussion among us. There's this. There's a sense in here that a lot of people are concerned about poverty. Whenever you talk about Africa or any emerging market, people talk about poverty and development. And I would like to just differentiate between two things. There is something called economic development, and then there's another thing called humanitarian aid. And those two things are completely separate. Even though if you look at how we work and how we do as countries in trying to help others to develop, all we do is humanitarian aid. And then we apply that often to economic development with quite disastrous results. I once took a class on counseling, you know, spiritual counseling. And there is an ancient rule in all the faiths that they say that in a crisis situation you approach the person with sympathy. That gives you the right to take over. And when something really hits the fan and you're in danger of killing yourself because you just lost your child or your spouse or something, the counselor is able and allowed to take over because you're in such a crisis situation. When you. However these crisis situations is generally known in these circles, should be five sessions, no more. You know why? Because it's a very dangerous thing to do if you do take over. If you guide them with sympathy, there is a danger of codependency developing that you're starting to act in the other person's place. You're actually violating their dignity. So after about five times, you should stop and somebody else needs to do the long term counseling to actually develop, to help them look at the patterns in their life and help them grow and find their way in there. No more sympathy, no more taking over. But the word is empathy. There you take empathy, you are with the other person. You accompany them on their path. You do not take over, you do not interfere. They, because that violates the person's dignity. Can you all see the parallel between economic development and humanitarian aid here and how we principally violate what's going on in Africa by doing economic development as if it was a humanitarian aid. And let's face it, look at us, look at us up here. This is the representation of the American aid community. It's four white guys, middle aged white guys, and one lady from the government who's going to tell Africa, who's going to tell Africa what to do and tell Africans what to do. Now is that sympathy or empathy? I told you, I'm going to say a couple of things just to check. I'm not middle aged. Okay, fair point. I'm an entrepreneur. I've been in the high tech. I had a very blessed career in the high tech industry. I'm originally from Switzerland and in America I met one of my best friends, Mike Fairbanks over there. And he verbalizes with all kinds of frameworks and he verbalizes things that I always felt in my gut as I did business and as I grew companies. And so the two of us got together and started this foundation called seven. And there's really only two of us, but the Seven has to do with one of his frameworks. And what we do is instead of telling people what to do, we find entrepreneurs who are already doing well that have already figured out how to do this. Because you know what? There are tons of maggots in Africa. The question is to find them in and then hold them up. Don't look at me, look at her. She figured it out. And all these other entrepreneurs, they're the ones who figured it out. They don't need me to tell them what to do, but what they do, what I want to do is I want to do business with them. And I think this is where I'm very happy to have this group here today because I sense that you all want to do business with them. And that is exactly the way to create prosperity.
