HE Abdul Aziz Abdulla Al Ghurair - Future Sustainability Summit 2020

Salam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Your excellencies, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I've been asked to speak on philanthropy on a sustainable week in Abu Dhabi. So my thought is: you may have great climate control, you may have great environment, you may have sustainable energy supply and all that, and I want to say we need to go beyond that. We really need to manage our total ecosystem, and that ecosystem will only work together if we have a peaceful society. That peaceful society can come from harmony. The UAE was a pioneer in creating a Ministry of Tolerance, so I thought philanthropy can play some role to bring harmony in the society, and we have a total sustainable society, environment, and together. Now, I strongly believe philanthropy can play this role. As we know, in the region here, we are very generous with our money. The Muslim community in the world gives billions of dollars every year, some through donations, through zakat, and really that goes to people who need it. But it really does not have impact on the society because we give it with emotion. We need to really segregate our giving out this help from donation, and we should be looking for creating impact on the ground. And then we should really move to a new era of philanthropy. Therefore, I think philanthropy can really do that, and when we do it right and we treat it like a business that we run our business, it has a great impact on the ground. So we really don't need only money from philanthropy; we need their time, we need to know their network, we need to pick their mind, and we also need to get business equipment from them. So this journey, I think, will have a great impact on the people and on the ground when we move from giving our money with emotion to giving money while looking for impact. Now, a lot of people also give us their money, and we think their giving out money is not enough. We need to see philanthropists really give out their time, and only when they give their time do they get attached to the cause, they interact with the people, and they live this total experience. And my experience with philanthropy has had a major impact on me when I went to the field, talked and worked with our partners, and also spoke to the recipients. The program is dynamic; we keep on changing our program and we keep on learning. We are also tweaking our program depending on how we do it on the ground. Then we need to also work philanthropy like we do on our business. So what we do to manage our business: we have a vision, we have a mission, with that objective we monitor the progress, we see the impact, we wait, we change—all this we do in our business. And I think philanthropy should also be run like we do it for business. We recruit best talent to help us execute our programs. In our foundation, we have 24 people managing our foundation. We don't deliver programs; we only design and strike partnership with a provider. We have two PhDs in education, one from Columbia, one from University of Toronto, some with master degrees. You need talented people to manage philanthropy for impact. Typically here, we look for people who've worked with a family and now retired. We trust them, they're honest, and we give them this job to do. And that's completely wrong. Where we need to really bring talent. Now, philanthropy alone needs also collaboration. We need to collaborate together. We need to work with different philanthropies. One can work on environment, some can work on education, some can work on whatever you want to choose. And in the Arab world, we have plenty of philanthropists. They donate their money, but they don't donate their time. So I asked our friends who have this philanthropy business to get together, to meet and collaborate. They say, 'Abdul Aziz, we give money, we don't have time to meet. This is not the best use of our time.' But when the World Economic Forum comes, everybody runs to Davos. They somehow find time to go meet with the WEF. So if we have to take philanthropy as a serious tool for bringing harmony and bringing a stable, sustainable society, we need to give it time, and we need to meet together, share ideas, and tweak our programs. We also don't need all of us doing the same program again. There's so much we can leverage from each other. And I call for Arab philanthropists really to get together, work together, so we can have a great impact on the ground. Ladies and gentlemen, this is my thoughts on philanthropy. I was given five minutes only, so thank you very much.