Raj, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live.
DR. SHAH: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, I’m excited to talk to you, and of course, I had a sneak preview of your book. And I’d love to start by asking, what inspired this particular book?
DR. SHAH: Well, you know, at the end of the day, I feel like sometimes we don’t aim high enough when we’re trying to tackle some of the toughest, most persistent challenges of our time. The truth is, I really think this book and some of the experiences I’ve had and some of the people I’ve gotten to learn from can inspire us to be more ambitious in tackling climate change, in addressing hunger and poverty, in fighting pandemics, and so much more. And the key is really having a big-bet mindset. I’ve learned from some household names and also some–from some people I think most of our viewers would not have heard of, and I’ve seen that folks who are out there trying to actually solve problems as opposed to just, you know, doing good, being good enough, can make a huge difference. And I learned that working with Bill and Melinda Gates more than 20 years ago when we didn’t say let’s–how do we vaccinate a single village or how do we reach a few additional kids with basic medicines? The challenge was how do we eliminate unnecessary childhood death. What’s the most efficient way to do that scale, and how do we do it on a global basis? And 20 years later, a billion kids have been vaccinated, almost 16 million child lives saved.
I learned it in government when I had a chance to work on emergency responses, fighting pandemics and addressing hunger in the aftermath of a global food crisis, and I see it again here at The Rockefeller Foundation, where we’re able to do some extraordinary things with partners because, you know, we’re trying to solve big global challenges like, you know, accelerating the energy transition in low-income countries.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So define for me a little bit of what you mean by big bets and how not to get caught up in the quibbles that can affect how we think about big bets.
DR. SHAH: Well, to me, big bets are our efforts to actually solve big global problems, you know, so it’s literally set stepping back and saying, you know, if we’re trying to tackle climate change, are we willing to just accept that the world will warm to 2.5, 3 degrees because that is what the United Nations is about to produce this big–this big stock-take analysis and they’ll claim that that is the most likely path? Or are there are things we can do to actually dramatically reduce the level of warming and the level of climate impacts? And then you go and try and find kind of fresh and innovative solutions that can do that.
In our case, we’ve invested heavily in bringing the renewable energy technology revolution to some very poor countries in the world, and people don’t think that these countries are huge emitters now because they don’t consume a lot of energy and they have relatively small economies, but by 2050, they will account for 75 percent of global emissions. And if we don’t prevent those emissions, there’s no way we will save our climate and our planet. And then we bring people together in unlikely partnerships and alliances, try to measure results in a very disciplined, businesslike manner, and persist, sometimes for decades until the job is done, and that approach, that big-bet approach, benefits from having the ability to make that long-term focus and that long-term effort real.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I want to take you back to one of the anecdotes you talk about early in the book, and that is your experience treating leprosy in India. And there’s a realization, kind of an epiphany, I think, for you that 700 million people were hungry, didn’t have enough food. You didn’t have enough ragi balls and I guess those little nutritious millet balls to hand out, so people were going to go hungry. Why was that such a key moment for you?
DR. SHAH: Well, for starters, I was a kid basically–
DR. SHAH: –just out of college, and I was about to go to medical school, and I really wanted to save the world. And I really believed that, you know, it was wrong and unjust, as I still do, that so many people die of simple diseases and so many people die of basic malnutrition at a time when food is so abundant in so many parts of the world.
So I traveled abroad after school and ended up as a volunteer for an extraordinary doctor, Dr. H Sudarshan, who was–who built this whole nonprofit service platform in a rainforest in South India and was literally going door to door in villages in a very poor tribal community looking for cases of leprosy, tuberculosis, epilepsy, things that they could provide medical support to. And over decades, he actually eliminated leprosy through his efforts and through his team’s efforts, but what he found was that most families they went to door to door were actually hungry and kids were malnourished. And so the kids who were severely malnourished, we would take in the jeep and take back to the central clinic, and they would get these targeted feeding programs and get access to nutrition, which were just these millet balls, which you point out are ragi balls. And it felt good to be able to provide a solution to a child who right in front of you is emaciated and hungry and then see them recover. That was very heartwarming.
But the hard part for me was seeing–was seeing that, you know, okay, we’re helping a few hundred kids in this context, but learning that there were 7- or 800 million kids like them around the world suffering from hunger and wanting to come up with solutions that might have much greater reach and much greater ability to end that at scale.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Raj, you’re talking about a number of people who have been influential including this doctor and, of course, Bill and Melinda Gates, and also, I just wanted to mention to our audience that Patty Stonesifer was the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when you started. She’s our interim CEO here at The Washington Post and also sits on the board of The Rockefeller Foundation, correct?
DR. SHAH: That’s correct and you’re very lucky to have her as the CEO there right now. She’s an extraordinary leader, and I write about some of the things she taught me back when I used to work for her.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You do, indeed, including the blank page.
But one of the things I really wanted to ask you about is the sense of optimism that pervades your book, the can-do attitude. How important is that, and is that something natural, something that you can learn?
DR. SHAH: Well, I think that’s–it’s everything, you know, and I feel so fortunate because at a place like Rockefeller, people are coming to us from around the world in local communities and in university settings, scientists, businesses, with ideas to solve amazingly difficult problems. So on any given day, I get to learn about, you know, new approaches to measuring malnutrition that could expand access to targeted feeding for a couple hundred million kids who otherwise suffer, and if we could do this, they would–you know, we would really help them dramatically. Or I get to see new battery chemistry technologies that are being developed that can improve stationary energy storage in developing countries, which will change the math. So instead of those countries relying on coal and fossil fuels to grow their economies over the next few decades, they can rely on renewable energy sources and use more effectively the renewable energy they have.
It’s hard to be pessimistic when you see that all day long.
DR. SHAH: And so it’s a great thing, and I try through the book to really help readers see what’s possible from those exposures, all the way back to when we reshaped the global vaccine industry in an effort to really dramatically accelerate the saving of child lives.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Okay. Raj, I’m going to allow you to accuse me of being guilty of small thinking, but how do you make sure that these big ideas don’t get in the way of being practical, practical solution. feeding those kids one by one?
DR. SHAH: Yeah. So, in practice, you know, you got to set these big goals, but then, of course, the actions we take are extremely practical and step-wise, right? So when we set up a global effort to vaccinate every child on the planet, there were about 104 million kids born every year. Probably about 65 million or so were already getting vaccines, and so that left, you know, 40-plus million kids that we needed to reach on an annual basis. And we started that effort by partnering with colleagues like UNICEF and the World Health Organization and the World Bank that were critical institutions in 70 countries where these kids were not getting access and just working with them on helping governments set the goal of vaccinating every child, helping their local health ministries have access to resources to hire people and build out safe immunization and expand access.
And it doesn’t work right away. It started–you know, it only started to work four or five years in, but that was twenty years ago. And now we can say it was a big success.
And, in the same way, we just launched a big effort to bring renewable energy to a billion people that live effectively in the dark. They don’t have enough electricity to power their homes with a light bulb and a small appliance on an annual basis, and we’re–we start in–we start small. We’re reaching probably 5- or 6 million people right now with these solar mini grids and some other technology platforms. But we really do believe we have pathways to scale to reach a billion people over the next two decades.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Raj, you talk from the perspective of somebody who’s been with Gates, USAID, The Rockefeller Foundation. You have access to the biggest thinkers around the world. Most of our audience don’t have that sort of access or privilege or way of approaching things. What can individuals do? How can they listen to this conversation and come away feeling more equipped to tackle the big problems you’re talking about?
DR. SHAH: Well, I think the first thing individuals can do is actually like learn enough about core issues that you’re passionate about to avoid getting stuck in the cynicism of the moment.
You know, if you just read with all–I mean, I love The Washington Post. I read it all the time.
DR. SHAH: But if you just read the newspapers on a day-to-day basis, it’s easy to believe that, you know, climate change is an unwinnable fight that–where we’re already quite behind. You have to dig a little deeper to study what are the solutions. How can renewable electrification be a genuine solution that will reduce the amount of carbon emissions next year or year after that, year after that?
So the first thing I’d say is just learn enough to become a genuine optimist about what’s possible. The second thing–and I really believe this, and I think many of the stories in the book are about building unlikely partnerships and alliances. I think it’s easy to get stuck if you are just a government person or just a private-sector person or just in an NGO environment. I find the most optimistic and the most effective leaders are people who can speak multiple languages, because it’s often at the intersection of business and public-sector engagement that you can do really extraordinary things. So I’d say become proficient at and open to lots of different approaches to solving a problem, and then, ultimately, find a way to do it, you know, whether it’s through your work, through your job, through your voting, through your community activity. There’s so many avenues today to be involved in public service and in social service. You don’t just have to run for election somewhere to make a big difference. And I see that in young people, in particular, that just instinctively get it.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And I think when you meant speak multiple languages, you mean speak business language and speak tech language and speak everyday language, right? We’re not talking literally about French and Hindi and–
DR. SHAH: That’s right. We’re talking about truly multiple languages.
I’ll give you an example.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Great.
DR. SHAH: When we–you know, in the–at the beginning of the Obama administration, we were just coming through the financial crisis of 2008, and that had actually pushed a hundred million people back under the hunger poverty line. And so you had–the cover of The Economist had a photo of a young girl in Haiti eating mud cakes, and a mud cake is exactly what it sounds like. You’re taking grain and mixing it with mud because it offers more satiety to a young child so they don’t feel as hungry, and that’s just wrong. And so, you know, we created large-scale programs to tackle hunger and poverty in the most efficient way possible, which was instead of giving people food during an emergency, letting them invest in their own agriculture and their own food production and their own social safety nets to save as many lives and lift up as many of those girls as possible. And when we did that, we did it with the private sector. You know, you can’t–agriculture as a business is, in fact, a business everywhere around the world.
So, yes, we worked with governments. We put public resources through USAID into that. We mobilized billions of dollars from around the world and created a program called Feed the Future, but the program relied on local seed companies, on local farmers, on local entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector. And we know now, looking backwards, that about 100 million people over the last decade have been sort of moved out of poverty and hunger as a result of both Feed the Future and the seven or eight similar programs that other G-20 nations contributed to and created as part of that global effort to fight hunger. That makes a big impact.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Right. So, Raj, in taking on these huge problems, are there certain moments you’d look back on and they have been revolutionary in either presenting bigger challenges than you expected or changing your way of thinking very dramatically, surprising you in some way?
DR. SHAH: Well, the biggest surprise for me was sort of day one in my career on this path. You know, I grew up in suburban Detroit. I–my parents are Indian immigrants. I thought I was either going to be a doctor or an engineer and didn’t really appreciate that you could do something besides one of those two things, and one thing led to another. And I ended up working with Bill and Melinda Gates when they just started their foundation.
And Bill would constantly ask this question: How much does it cost to vaccinate a child? And it was part of pushing our thinking out of the details of the day-to-day and getting us to do some basic math to figure out is it, in fact, affordable and possible to vaccinate every child on the planet.
And I’d say that practice of asking simple questions is something I then tried to replicate leading the Haiti earthquake response under President Obama when we would say, okay, what’s actually happening here?
And so one of the big lessons I’ve learned is simplicity and asking simple questions can yield breakthroughs, even at the highest levels of government and business management, and I never would have expected that because I always thought, you know, the more simple a question, the more–the less expertise you’re demonstrating while asking it, and in fact, the opposite proved to be the truth.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Of course, a huge strap and take that into the climate world now, which you’re so involved in at Rockefeller. Take me to the simplest questions. How do we address this sprawling problem, the sprawling global problem that doesn’t respect borders, just like pandemics don’t respect borders? What are the simple questions?
DR. SHAH: Well, I think actually the first one is, how are we doing? And the truth is, despite all the commitments at Paris and despite all of the history of the global climate fight, we’re actually quite far behind. And I think people don’t appreciate that as much, because we focus so much on this temperature number, that we don’t get into the complex data around what’s actually happening with ice sheets melting in Antarctica, as I think The Post has very effectively reported. Landmass the size of Texas and Alaska is lost permanently in that context. That has huge consequences for ocean temperatures and fisheries and the 1.4 billion people that depend on fisheries around the planet to get enough protein to, you know, lead a nutritious and healthy life. So I think one basic question is, how are we doing? And the answer is we’re not doing anywhere near as well as we need to be to protect ourselves.
A second simple question is, what is our best chance to reverse course, to actually protect our planet? And that is–the answer there is, I think, pretty clear, and a lot of different analysts and agencies have published this, but it’s basically accelerating the energy transition, absolutely as quickly as possible. And right now, the big fight has to be in the emerging and developing world, largely because the United States, Europe until the Ukraine war, and China have, in fact–they were trending in the right direction. The U.S. is now joining that trend, thanks to the IRA and investments made through the Biden administration programs.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So The Rockefeller Foundation–and correct me if I’ve got these numbers wrong, but I think you’ve committed a billion dollars over five years to fight climate change. I’ve got two questions. One is, how are you prioritizing where you spend that money, and how did you make the decisions?
DR. SHAH: Well, maybe I’ll ask–answer the second one first. We made that decision because our mission since 1913 when we were founded was to find those areas of science, technology, and innovation that can, with greatest impact, lift up the most people around the world, and as we looked broadly at what was going to happen over the next several decades to human opportunity, human vulnerability, and human development, it became quite clear that climate change was the single greatest threat to pushing 1-, 2-, 3 billion people into a state of deep uncertainty, insecurity, fragility, migration, and suffering.
Just to give you one statistic, you know, on hunger, in about the–in the late 1990s, about 14 percent of the world’s population was hungry. By 2015, we had successfully gotten that down to about 7 percent. It’s climbed up again to about 9 percent, is projected to blow past 14 percent again in a number of years in the future. We could have as many as 1.4 billion hungry people relatively soon, simply because of the pressures that climate change is causing on the global economy and the global agricultural and food system. So we said, okay, this is the area where we have to both prevent climate change and support those communities that are going to be most vulnerable.
And then we started looking for solutions, and the biggest one that we’re putting the most into right now is around renewable energy. And we’ve helped develop with 40, 50 private entrepreneurs around the world, different types of renewable energy solutions from mini grids that are solar battery installations for rural communities to metro grids that can power a whole township in, say, the eastern Congo. And we’re bringing power and electricity via these commercial operators to communities that have never had electricity before, have depended on diesel generation or heavy fuel oil or are dependent in the future on coal, and we hope to displace all of that coal, heavy fuel oil, and diesel with a technology that is going to lower the cost of power and let these communities plug into the modern economy, create jobs, create opportunity, and create a more stable planet.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I’d just like to ask a little bit more about the foundation itself because it was founded on fossil fuels, right? That’s how the money was made. Does that give your particular foundation an extra responsibility to try to promote the change towards more sustainable energy?
DR. SHAH: Yes and yes. We were founded, of course, on the Standard Oil fortune. You know, when John D. Rockefeller Sr. created this institution, it was before there was an income tax, before there was such a thing as federal government, social safety nets and the like, and it was really a very unique enterprise. There was–there really was no such thing as philanthropy, philanthropic institutions, and he grounded the institution in the concept of scientific philanthropy, which, frankly, is just the 1913 way of saying big bets.
DR. SHAH: It was what are the areas of science and innovation that can really transform the planet and did successfully in the fields of public health and agricultural research, in particular. So that’s absolutely our history.
Then you look to our future, and we really believe–for the reason you identify and because the sector should lead more, we feel we have to be out front. So a few years ago, we divested fossil fuels in our endowment. I think we were the second institution behind the Rockefeller Brothers Fund–
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Mm-hmm.
DR. SHAH: –to make that judgment and that decision. We have, as part of our climate strategy, said we’re going to walk the talk. So we’re embracing a net-zero commitment for our operations and a net-zero target for our endowment in order to–you know, to really do our best to walk the talk in terms of how we manage our resources and our operations.
And we’re committing a billion dollars of philanthropic expenditure to the kinds of innovative solutions that can leverage private investment and really accelerate the climate transition broadly.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Raj, we’re hearing from our audience, and I want to ask one of the questions that’s come in. We’ll try and get a couple in during the day, but this one comes from Joseph in Florida, and Joseph asks, “How do you suggest that private industries best coordinate with governments around the globe to make the most effective attack on climate change?”
DR. SHAH: Well, Joseph, I think that’s a great question. I think at the end of the day, we–what I love about the question is that it implies that you need government and private industry working together, and too often governments have said, “Look, we don’t trust private industry. So we’re not going to partner with private industry on this endeavor,” and private companies have said, you know, government should just get out of the way and not be a big part of the go-forward. And neither of those work.
You know, we just rolled out an effort to reach almost a quarter of the population of Zambia with distributed, renewable solar electrification, and in order for that to work, we needed to identify private developers who want to build out these solar installations. And we had to work hand in glove with President Hichilema and the government of Zambia to change regulatory policy and to restructure their public investments to make those commercial operations viable commercial businesses over time.
No country on Earth has really achieved universal electrification using any technology without public and private sector working together, and so a lot of what we do is bring those unlikely partners together in projects all around the planet.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You made a couple of references earlier on to us not meeting goals and how dire that could be. Some of those goals were created when you were in government, the so-called “Sustainable Development Goals,” the SDGs. Were they overly ambitious? Were they unrealistic? The danger, if you don’t meet goals, of people throwing their hands up and saying, you know, forget the whole thing.
DR. SHAH: Yeah, there is. If you look before 2000, there were no goals.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Right.
DR. SHAH: And, as a result, you know, you had kind of years where there was investment and progress and years where people focused on other things, and there was a lack of progress, and there was no visibility really on the aggregate impact on child health, on child hunger, on pandemic risks, on girls’ education, and on energy poverty.
You know, then in 2000, they created a set of goals called the “Millennium Development Goals,” and we restructured them in 2015 to be the Sustainable Development Goals, and 200-plus countries signed on and said–including the United States–and said, “We’re going to track and publish progress on these goals and indicators,” because of the basic idea that underlying these goals is a very, very simple thought. And that thought is that basic human dignity and opportunity is a universal right and is our best path to reduce violence, instability, and conflict in the future.
And, you know, so I absolutely think society is much better off having goals that are grounded in that observation. I think we’re better off, whether we achieve them or not on a day-to-day basis, tracking the results and publishing them on an annual basis, and I go all the time and sit with heads of state all around the world and talk about their progress on a particular goal or lack thereof and use that discussion as a way to frame the kinds of solutions and partnerships we’re able to create and the accountability framework we’re able to put forth to hold people accountable. So I think it’s absolutely essential.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So how much is tackling and potentially solving the climate challenge a model for taking on other huge global challenges? And, obviously, you’ve been involved in pandemic or infectious disease response, but I’m also thinking about things like misinformation, these huge issues that cross national borders and require some sort of inventive approach to address.
DR. SHAH: Yeah, they do require inventive approaches, and that’s the point. I mean, I think if we say that, okay, we’re just going to live in a world that has all this misinformation, we are undermining our democracy, undermining our public health, and undermining the health of our next generations of young people. Whereas if we go out and say, “No, that’s not acceptable. We’re going to stamp out misinformation,” and we put real resources and focus into it, we will find the kind of innovative solutions that help us do that.
You know, The Rockefeller Foundation invested heavily early on in March, April, May of 2000–before America had a testing strategy for covid-19 in scaling up massively the diagnostic capacity in this country on the basic observation that if you can’t test for and understand where covid is, we were going to be locked down in our homes much, much longer than we were or should have been.
And when we did that, we actually came up with lots of ways to work in communities around the country, almost entirely with local leaders who had inventions and ideas that were, you know, not considered on the cutting edge of public health but made a big difference if you’re trying to reach the Black community in Atlanta through pastors and religious leaders or a Native American population on Navajo Nation through their own leadership and the community health workers there that were so much a part of the solution. So a lot of inventing solutions is about listening to those we serve in the moments when it’s most important and then scaling up their ideas.
But if you don’t give them the chance to innovate against the goal, you’ll just live with status quo as it is.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So just one more question about climate, is there a key innovation that you see that that–in the climate world which gives you optimism for humanity’s future? Just one specific example.
DR. SHAH: Yeah, stationary energy storage. It sounds sort of–
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Tell me more. Tell me more.
DR. SHAH: Okay. It’s the most exciting thing, and in fact, we’re going to the COP, which is the big climate–the big climate conference, and building a coalition of dozens of countries that are coming together that today literally cannot get access to batteries. And I know it sounds surprising maybe to your viewers, but, you know, most of the stationary–most of the energy storage supply chain on a global basis is deeply constrained by mineral access and manufacturing capacity and is geared towards the electric vehicle industry.
But the real breakthrough will be when we have large-scale stationary energy storage for grid systems all across the planet. It will transform the ability of those grids to take renewable energy on, to their grid, and use it for a broad range of baseload purposes. And when that’s a likely outcome, it will just change the game in terms of what’s possible for both energy access and clean energy future. So that’s the thing we’re most excited about.
When we look at companies around the world, I mean, there are great new chemistries coming out of Stanford and on the West coast of the United States. There’s some important new technologies, flow batteries from the Breakthrough Energy Coalition that they’ve invested in. There are unique partners in Boston, in the middle of country that are doing it, and there are manufacturers now trying to scale up those chemistries in India and Latin America and I hope over time in Africa, because every part of the globe is going to need this technology. It’s mission critical to the–to having a safe and habitable planet in the future. And we’re right now just at the cusp of seeing what these things can do, and so the foundation is working to help countries access these new technologies in a reasonable time frame and at the right price point.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So a bit of a switch of topic, but I wanted to ask you about Ukraine. I think the foundation highlighted Ukraine in one of its Matter of Impact reports. What did you find? What should we know about your findings?
DR. SHAH: Well, you know, a few things I’d say. I first went to Ukraine in 2014 after the Maidan Square massacres and walked and toured with Mayor Klitschko at the time, who was new in his role, and it became apparent to me right away that it was young people, civil society, and local communities in Ukraine that were already then, you know, preparing for this moment. And I think that’s why–by the way, Ukraine has outperformed everybody’s expectations because of their resolve, their toughness, and their determination to build a nation that’s true to their values.
I think as a foundation, we’ve been able to support a range of efforts, from some basic humanitarian efforts to support for civil society organizations that are documenting atrocities to help with other types of efforts to help Ukraine be a part of the global food security solutions, because they’re such an important partner in the global food system. But I’d say the big picture for me in Ukraine is that this has been something the Ukrainian people have prepared for, are committed to, and the United States, the rest of the world, and the philanthropic partners who can work directly with local civil society operators in Ukraine, now is the time to act and to support their efforts.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Raj, how do you apply your big-bets thinking to Ukraine? Where are the big, simple ideas?
DR. SHAH: Yeah. Well, I–you know, obviously, Ukraine is in the middle of a conflict, and I’ve worked in Afghanistan and Somalia and Libya and so many settings that are either currently under ongoing conflict or just coming out of it. I think the world sometimes forgets the single greatest opportunity–and this would be the big bet when that time comes–is to prepare for and execute a reconstruction of that country’s economy and infrastructure in a way that lays the groundwork for the next 50 years with success.
What people don’t realize is post-conflict, whether you’re in Mozambique or Afghanistan or Somalia, those first few, I’d say, 5 to 7 years post-conflict are the fastest-growing economies in the world. An economy can grow 15, 17 percent a year. It’s also the growth is defined by external engagement; actually, in a model created by the Marshall Plan in reconstructing Western Europe after World War II.
So I think the big bet for Ukraine would be the world being steadfast and helping right now create the plans and programs and resources so that we invest in building Ukraine for Ukraine when this conflict is largely no longer debilitating for efforts to rebuild infrastructure.
And the reason I highlight that as the big bet is so often our political attention moves to the next issue, and you see the level of investment precipitously decline. And it’s like the last scene of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” for those of you who remember that movie, but it happens over and over and over again. So we’ve got to do the right thing now to make sure we’re resourced and focused on building a Ukraine that is the Ukraine that the Ukrainian people want right now for the future.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Yeah. And, of course, the Marshall Plan was an extraordinary example of this.
But I wanted to ask you now about the role–you’ve talked a little bit about it–of financing and cooperation with companies and also holding companies themselves accountable when it comes to issues like climate.
DR. SHAH: Look, we work with companies around the world in almost every industry we work with. So, for example, we have to talk less about resilient agriculture, but the truth is, if we’re going to change the global food system, we need the 20 or 25 largest food companies in the world to agree to set a target of potentially having 50 percent of their supply chains in climate-smart or resilient agriculture. And we need those companies to start measuring the amount of carbon they’re sequestering in the soil on the farms that they’re relying on for basic commodity ingredients and food items. So we’re having that discussion and dialogue now.
I believe you’ve got to have both pressure and cooperation. So I think activists should be complaining aggressively about a food system that’s making us sick and destroying our planet. I think we should be–you know, documentaries and public visibility on some of the excesses of that industry are just as important as sitting together at the table with them and saying, okay, how can we set goals and targets, and then in a structured way, measure your change and your evolution. And we do that in that space. We do that with drug and vaccine manufacturers and diagnostic testing manufacturers during a crisis and a crisis response, and I think that mindset of pressure plus engagement is the right mindset for us.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So that actually took me to my next question, which was really to ask you about the most effective means, or if you have an example of that combination of pressure and engagement working to effect change quickly in a government or in a big company.
DR. SHAH: Well, you know, I’ll actually give you an example from something that President George W. Bush created, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR which, you know, at the time, I think there were less than 50,000 people in Africa receiving antiretroviral therapy, and people were dying by the millions.
I remember traveling through rural communities in Kenya and in Senegal and in Zambia, and the most common product for sale street-side was a coffin because of the extraordinarily devastating disease of HIV back then. And between President Bush and then later President Clinton, actually through the Clinton Foundation, created these large-scale efforts to procure antiretroviral therapies and then ultimately partnered with industry to do deals that allowed the creation of generic versions of those drugs to be sold cheaply and at massive scale. And those efforts together have resulted in a world that is saving 25 million people a year because they’re on those therapies and probably saved the structural economies of 18 to 20 African nations.
So that’s a good example of where outside pressure on those drug companies, which was so visible, even going back to the 2000 presidential election when Al Gore was running for president–that pressure plus the desire to sit at the table and cooperate on procurement, on pricing, on generics availability, and design made all the difference.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So The Rockefeller Foundation is giving its billion to climate change, but overall in philanthropy, I think less than 2 percent of donations go to climate change. What do you do to increase that percentage and make people feel that this is something they should give toward?
DR. SHAH: Well, I think–and I do write about this in the book.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Right.
DR. SHAH: I think the biggest thing we do–or at least we try to do–you know, don’t get it right every day, but we try–
DR. SHAH: –is to help people believe that these problems can, in fact, be solved. So you’re right. Global philanthropic giving, I think, is about $810 billion a year. I think less, well under 6 percent goes to climate change in general–I’m sorry–well under $6 billion goes to climate change in general. And so there’s a lot of capacity to do more and to do more well.
What I found works is being able to go to others and say let’s do this together and do it at scale, and let’s invest in those strategies that are working. So, for example, we took our India program on renewable energy, which was called Smart Power India, and had kind of invented these solar mini grids that were providing power in rural communities for about 20 cents a kilowatt hour, which is cheap enough to be effective on a quasi-commercial basis. And we went to other philanthropic partners, the Bezos Earth Fund and the–and the Ikea Foundation, and we said let’s take this model and scale it across the planet and reach a billion people. And together, we each put $500 million dollars into the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, raised another $10 billion on top of that from investors and development finance partners. And now we’re active in 20-plus countries, and as I noted before, instead of reaching a few hundred thousand, we’re all reaching–we’re already reaching several million. And we just closed a transaction in the eastern part of Congo, which was a $70 million transaction, but only took $7 million from us, and the rest of the money came from commercial investors.
So those kinds of high-leverage, high-impact, high-visibility models, I think, can inspire others to join big bets and make a real difference on this planet.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Raj, we’re running out of time, but I’m going to have one last question, and I’m going to give it to one of the members of the audience who’s been writing in, although I have many more for you. This one comes from Don in Vermont, and Don asks, “While so many folks are exhausted and some are experiencing despair, how do we engage people to take action and stay engaged with a just cause?” So really about the common good, how do we keep people going? And I’m afraid the answer has to be quick, but–
DR. SHAH: Sure. Well, Don, thank you for the question. I think the answer honestly is engagement. I mean, I write in the book about Mitch Landrieu as mayor of New Orleans and efforts he made to take down a series of confederate statues that was the result of deep community engagement, where every member in the community, all these groups were part of a dialogue for years around should we take these statues down, why should we do that, what are the racial justice consequences of that, and what kind of dialogue can we spark doing it? And then he had the courage to do it. We were proud supporters of that effort when it ran into some snags and very dramatically so. But, at the end of the day, it was the level–that high level of community engagement, not only achieved the results, but it made the people in that community deeply committed to the cause, and it made them optimists. And it got them excited when they finally succeeded and started a national movement about debating the presence of some of these post-Reconstruction confederate statues.
So, to me, it’s get people engaged in these things, and what you tend to find is these efforts to change your community or change your world. They end up actually changing you, even more than you change your environment–
MS. STEAD SELLERS: [Laughs] Right.
DR. SHAH: –and they give you a sense of contentment overall that I try to make reference to in the book. And it’s why I want more young people to pick it up, read it, and hopefully be inspired to be a change maker.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: What a great message to end on Dr. Rajiv Shah. Thank you so much for joining us today on Washington Post Live.
DR. SHAH: Thank you, Frances.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: That was a wonderful conversation. There is always more to come on Washington Post Live. You can go to WashingtonPostLive.com to find our upcoming programs.
Thank you for joining me today. I’m Frances Stead Sellers.
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