Bringing the United Nations to Hacking for Humanity at Columbia
“We need to put our egos aside and be willing to learn and co-create together.”
“Investing in competitive entrepreneurship empowers the vulnerable to be an agent for SDGs, not just recipients.” Chantal Line Carpentier
Last weekend, the Columbia University community was honored to have Dr. Chantal Line Carpentier as the keynote speaker for our inaugural Hacking for Humanity and the Planet cross-campus startup hackathon.
Dr. Chantal Line Carpentier is Chief of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for the New York Office of the Secretary General (UNCTAD).
Chantal Line coordinates UNCTAD’s input into financing for sustainable development, science, technology and innovation, and monitors progress on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) processes. She is particularly interested in the role of micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSMEs), entrepreneurship, and gender equality in achieving a green, resilient, inclusive, and connected economic system.
Chantal Line gave us an insight into the work that UNCTAD does, the trends of how the UN views and incorporates entrepreneurship, and how the Columbia community (and other non-state actors) could collaborate. She emphasized the importance of collaboration, frugal innovation (which is an excellent counterpart to growth hacking), and how entrepreneurs interpret the UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) as business opportunities rather than solely as societal debt as others do.
It was fascinating to hear Chantal Line provide her insights into how the UN now views entrepreneurship as an agent of change within UNCTAD and its other agencies to deliver its mission, in addition to serving as an empowerment framework for recipients to create jobs for marginalized groups.
The following are some highlights of her presentation to our gathered academic community:
“We have been working on entrepreneurship for more than 30 years at UNCTAD. We knew from the get-go how important it was for developing countries not only to create jobs for economic development but also for structural transformation. We started [center-based programming to support entrepreneurship behavior] in 1988 in Argentina and now it has been rolled out to more than half a million people in 41 countries where we have Empretec centers. Almost 50% of graduates from these groups are women.
We realized that governments saw entrepreneurship as important when there is a crisis to create jobs. They would do piecemeal approaches such as putting money out for SMEs and entrepreneurs or creating programs to procure from them. But they were not addressing systemic issues. So we developed, for decision makers in developing countries, an entrepreneurship policy framework and implementation guide to help them address the whole ecosystem that is needed for entrepreneurship at the country level.
Of course, you have to formulate first your national entrepreneurship strategy and then optimize the regulatory environment. The entrepreneurship education and skills development need to be aligned with that. [Everything needs to be aligned and on-board such as] the technology exchange and innovation you need to bring to that entrepreneur, the STI (Science, Technology, and Innovation) ministries, and the access to finance (facilitated by the finance ministers to create the awareness and network effects needed).
Our first foray into inclusiveness was for youths [the countries asked for guidance to address high unemployment in this group]. Then our work expanded to include migrants and refugees because we have so many migrants in the world, as well as economic and environmental refugees. We worked with the IOM (International Organization for Migration) and the Human Rights offices to develop a policy guide on entrepreneurship for migrants and refugees. We recognize that there is so much talent in these camps and people now spend their lives, or part of their lives, in these camps. They can actually develop this entrepreneurial capacity to help their camp, to help their citizens, but also to help the host country (once they get to the host country).
It has only been since 2012 that we have started negotiations on entrepreneurship within the UN’s Second Committee, which covers economics, finance, and macroeconomics for development. This resolution is every two years. UNCTAD produces the Secretary General report, which looks at improvement and new programs governments put in place, international organizations provide, and the innovative approaches the entrepreneurs are taking. In 2016 with the adoption of the SDGs, this resolution became Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development. In 2018, the resolution was on inclusive entrepreneurship, youth and women entrepreneurship. In 2020, with the exacerbation of problems due Covid-19, member States recognized that we needed to integrate entrepreneurship in all of the work of UNCTAD and all the UN agencies and programs. [Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development UN Resolution 2020 A/RES/75/211 Adopted by the UN General Assembly .]
We need to start documenting and improving the ability of social and environmental entrepreneurship, especially post Covid-19, and especially for youth, women, and vulnerable groups. I don't think that comes as a surprise to anybody.
Where do we have entrepreneurship in the SDGs?
The SDGs are very supportive of inclusivity. SDG 4.4 education targets aim at increasing the number of youths and adults with skills for employment in a decent job and entrepreneurship. We also have 1 [no poverty] and 5 [gender equality], which involve the empowerment of women as entrepreneurs and traders. This is an area in which UNCTAD significantly contributes. And it is also in SDG 9 [industry, innovation, and infrastructure] and 8 [decent work and economic growth]. It [entrepreneurship] is also related to integrating these SMEs and financial services into the global value chains.
After the adoption of the SDGs, it became pretty obvious that we all needed to work more together and differently. The Secretary General has mentioned that we have a triple crisis right now and I would say we have a quadruple crisis.
We are waging war on the planet. We have climate change. We have pollution, including in our oceans, as well as biodiversity loss crises. And we have an inequality crisis.
We have a social crisis that has been exacerbated by Covid-19 and the unfairness of the recovery. Covid-19 has affected us all equally, but the ability to respond is very asymmetrical between individuals within countries and across countries. That is obvious when you look at the stimulus packages that have been put out there. Only 10% come from developing countries where only 10% of the population has access to the vaccines.
We need to have prosperity for all. We can't have advancement only for one group at the expense of the others and the planet. And with this in mind, it is not surprising that it is the entrepreneurs that first started looking at the SDGs as business opportunities and not as problem of cost.
If you have an entrepreneurial mindset you look at these SDGs and you see 785 million people lacking basic drinking water services. That is a business opportunity. 3 billion people are without basic hand washing facilities, 700 million practice open defecation, 4 billion are without access to the Internet, 10 million have fallen ill with tuberculosis, and 4.5 million have died of Covid-19. There are 840 million people without access to electricity, and so on.
These are business opportunities. We have convinced the Second Committee [Economic and Financial] of the UN’s General Assembly to not only see entrepreneurs as an agent that can actually increase jobs and economic growth, but also as an agent at the sectorial level if we raise awareness and provide capacity building for them to be an agent of change to help us innovate and address SDGs 2,3,4,6,7, 9,11... plus others.
The innovation comes when you look at the synergies and trade offs to advance these SDGs as an innovative affordable solution that reduces the use of resources and the impact on the environment. That provides affordable access and equitable opportunities for all.
The bottom-up, pro-poor innovation from developing countries does not get funded because they are not documented. We think of high tech innovation coming out of Cambridge and Silicon Valley. That gets funded. We need to document the frugal innovations that do more with less for more people and have a different business model, which is basically high volume, low cost as opposed to low volume, high cost or high price.
What we are seeing now is a real interest, a growing interest in frugal innovation. The business opportunities are there but the problem that I see is that everybody right now is trying to solve these issues on their own instead of partnering. I get so many people that walk in my office and tell me that they have the solution to water (SDG 6) and another one comes and has the solution to SDG 7.
My first question is: Did you look at who else is working to solve this issue? Have you talked to them? Try to collaborate and co-create. We now have so many people trying to solve the problem but not looking at what already exists. These issues are so complex and we are not going to get there unless we co-create, work together, and get the financial institutions (private or public), the entrepreneurs, the local authority, local NGOs and civil society organizations, as well as the international organizations, and universities [to work together].
We need to put our egos aside and be willing to learn and co-create together. This is one of the things that I really hope for from Columbia: that the next step will be (and you might already be doing it because Columbia is doing great stuff) to ensure that you teach the ability to partner, the ability to feel comfortable in a market where the risk is more elevated. Develop case studies for developing countries. Right now, only 14% of case studies in business schools feature developing countries.
UNCTAD offers concrete support to entrepreneurs in developing countries. We have an eTrade for all projects where we try to facilitate and add capacity of developing countries in e-commerce. We realized that women, not surprisingly, face different and greater challenges than men.
We created eTrade for Women, where we have advocates from each of the developing country regions of the world that are role models in their region in the digital space. And they are role models for [other] women. We give them access to the decision makers so they can help change and implement policies to allow them to be the agents of change. We have Women in Business Awards for women graduates of our EMPRETEC centers that I mentioned earlier. We have developed a partnership with Entrepreneurs’ Organization to match them with women entrepreneurs to mentor them and help them thrive.
It's a pleasure to be here with you. I look forward to seeing what comes out of your work, and hopefully we can add to the discussion later.”[1]
Thank you so much, Chantal Line!
I think the most important takeaway from Chantal Line’s keynote address is that we need to collaborate with everyone, beginning at Columbia. Collaborate to take advantage of this beautiful diversity that we have on campus and globally.
And with these new mechanisms that we use on a regular basis to connect, there are no limits. Now, we really can have these diverse, cross-functional teams with individuals on different sides of the world.
An aspect that has personally attracted me to entrepreneurship is that it is extremely liberating and empowering. I have been involved with entrepreneurship for refugees in urgent situations. One of our winners of the annual #StartupColumbia competition four years ago was Five One Labs. The founders, Alice Bosley '17SIPA, Patricia Letayf '17SIPA, and Sophia Burton '17SIPA, were very concerned, as I was and still am, about the Syrian refugees. So they went out and created this Entrepreneurship Center in the Kurdistan region of Iraq to create opportunities for them and other displaced people. It has terrific programming and has a tremendous amount of success getting mentors from all over the world participating. I am one of their mentors. The Five One Labs team is planning to do the same thing in Greece. And we all know that these human crises do not end.
Entrepreneurship is a wonderful opportunity for these displaced individuals to empower themselves. But it is more than that. These are extremely talented people who are coming up with incredible innovations that we are using, from our vaccines to many other innovations that we take for granted. It is very much a two-way street in terms of empowerment.
Stay tuned for more posts about the lessons learned at Columbia’s inaugural cross-campus startup hackathon, Hacking for Humanity (and the Planet).
[1] Hacking for Humanity Keynote Speech by Dr. Chantal Line Carpentier is slightly edited and abridged.
Joy Fairbanks is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School. She was the lead organizer with the Tamer Center of Social Enterprise of Columbia’s Hacking for Humanity.
Joy evaluates early stage startups, advises founders, and creates programming for entrepreneurs globally. She writes about startup success and innovation ecosystem builders at FairbanksVentureAdvisors.com.
