Below are a few excerpts from my NewsOne oped on my reflections on one of the panels of the 2024 meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.
“Damon, who co-founded Water.org with engineer Gary White in 2007, initially thought they would focus on drilling wells. But nearly two decades later, the nonprofit is leveraging donor dollars to de-risk a loan portfolio, allowing families to invest in clean water solutions.
Faced with the reality that governments wouldn’t have enough funds to address infrastructure shortcomings, they created a new structure that welcomed capital markets, and the model has succeeded: millions of families in Africa, Asia and Latin America now have access to clean water and sanitation, thanks to Water.org.
Think about how this approach can be replicated: using philanthropy and impact capital to reduce risk for capital markets, enabling large-scale investment.
This is exactly the approach we take at 8B to enable loans for African students pursuing STEM degrees, initially in the U.S. Compared to other regions; fewer Africans are attending global universities due to limited financing. Scholarships alone cannot meet the overwhelming demand for education abroad, and most African governments – focused on basic education at home – cannot afford to fund overseas education.
Like Damon, we solve this issue by leveraging donor and impact dollars to reduce risk for lenders. This makes it possible to support more African students through loans than scholarships could cover alone.”
“The missed CGI opportunity, however, was in not linking these discussions explicitly to one another, allowing participants to more clearly identify and target funding mechanisms for scaling social transformation efforts that are working. Education solutions for Africa were discussed in one room, while the deeply interconnected issues of climate and water innovations were addressed in another, even though both are using the same financial instrument that clearly works.
Damon’s financial model applies beyond Water.org, yet this was not explicitly linked to those of us using similar instruments to scale African STEM talent access to global universities.
“Without Africa’s young brainpower, the world will struggle to transform ideas into scalable, transformative programs in the coming decades. And without innovative financing of the kind we are pioneering for workforce development, scale in our development interventions will remain elusive.
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