Q&A: Mercy Corps CEO on the NGOs of the future

DAVOS, Switzerland — The Alpine village of Davos, Switzerland, is quite a contrast to the contexts where the global humanitarian agency Mercy Corps tends to work. Chief Executive Officer Neal Keny-Guyer spent a few days at the World Economic Forum annual meetings there last month, in between trips to Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was his 10th year in Davos, and he makes sure to travel to the Swiss mountain town from one of the 43 countries where the NGO works to put things in perspective. What brings Keny-Guyer back to Davos year after year is the opportunity to build new partnerships between government, business, and civil society. Violence has become the driving force behind most human suffering, he explains. And his call to action at the WEF meetings this year was to tackle the conflict reshaping the world by mitigating long standing grievances, supporting good governance, and promoting inclusive economic growth. Devex caught up with Keny-Guyer to get his take on the 2018 meetings, and to talk more about how Mercy Corps is dealing with some of the dynamics on the agenda, such as the risks and opportunities of emerging technology. The interview here has been edited for length and clarity. You spoke on a panel here in Davos with Cisco and NetHope on technology and innovation in humanitarian response, and we were interested to hear about your partnerships with companies including Palantir. Can you expand on some of the corporate partnerships you’re excited about and the approach you’ve taken in working with these companies? Mercy Corps is based in Portland, Oregon, so I think we have a bit of a West Coast vibe as an organization. We’re already oriented toward the world of technology and innovation, perhaps even more so than some of our colleagues on the East Coast. Partly because of that, we’ve tended to have a close relationship with Silicon Valley. “If you’re going to be a world class organization, you better be world class in your use of technology.” --— Neal Keny-Guyer, CEO at Mercy Corps We work with Palantir, which is among the world’s best in making sense of big data. We partner in order to get deep analytics about where we operate, in part to improve security for our own teams, but also to get a better understanding of the sociopolitical implications of what we’re doing. In Syria and elsewhere, they’ve sent engineers out to work with our folks on questions like: How can we take multiple sources of information and slice and dice that in a way that is useful? This has led to partnerships with other companies in the use of big data. Google’s been a great partner. We’ve partnered with them in terms of technology but also in terms of their interest in building entrepreneurial ecosystems. They’ve partnered with us in the Middle East. For example, they invested in Gaza Sky Geeks early on, which is the first tech hub in Gaza. Now we are working with Google.org on Impact Labs, a three-year global youth and innovation initiative, where we’re asking how can we engage youth in the Middle East so they can plug into the digital ecosystem and be entrepreneurs themselves? With Cisco, as we look at how to expand connectivity in the places we work, that’s good for Cisco, and Cisco is bringing the best of their engineers to help us with questions like identity protection and security. We don’t have hundreds of corporate partnerships. We are more in the range of 10 to 15. But we try to go deep with those partners and that’s important for us. We welcome any partnership with a company that’s philanthropic of course, and we appreciate corporate social responsibility and partnerships there, and we’ve had a number of those. But the real home run is frankly when you can work at the core of the business. So you’re getting the best engineers from technology to help solve problems in the humanitarian relief and development space, where it’s real partnerships and you co-design and co-create. When we can connect at all the touch points across a company, that’s where it feels best; where we feel like we’re leveraging the best of our time and those relationships, and we hear from our corporate partners the same thing. Can you talk about how you approach investments in technology at Mercy Corps? We have our own technology team. If you’re going to be a world class organization, you better be world class in your use of technology. That doesn’t always mean you’re using the shiny, newest, latest thing. That may not be smart. But it does mean you’re leveraging technology appropriately as an organization. “It’s a multipolar world, so if you’re a true international NGO, what relationships do you have with China, with India, with powers that have emerged and are emerging?” --— The way we invest in technology is in a couple areas. First and foremost, we start with the perspective that technology is not a panacea. It’s a tool. There are no silver bullets out there. I wish someone would create the app that would make everyone love each other, but we know that’s not going to happen. What we have felt, as with any good business, you want to have appropriate internal systems so you have efficiency, lower costs, you can be more accountable and more compliant, you can just work better as an organization. So that includes our talent management systems, our finance management systems, our procurement systems, our knowledge management, and so forth. I just take that as a given that any good organization needs to make those investments in order to operate in today’s world and it is incumbent on nonprofits to see that as it is for for-profits. That’s just good practice. But where I find it more exciting for us is on the frontiers of our mission. How can technology — or to frame it even more broadly, how can innovation — advance and improve our impact, our results, make more of a difference for the people for whom we exist? We have a whole tech for humanitarian relief and development team. We’ve been at the forefront of the whole movement from “stuff” in humanitarian relief, to cash. Even better than physical cash as we know, is some form of a digital payment. That’s inevitably going to lead you to ask what kind of systems do you need, who do you need to partner with, in order to be accountable and efficient. If you do that right, that opens up a whole pathway to financial inclusion and other financial services. “The organization of the future has to wrestle with a more fragile world in which the drivers of poverty are conflict and violence.” --— So for example, if you want to help smallholder farmers, as we do, how do you use technology? We, with support from the Mastercard Foundation, have been a catalyst in an ecosystem that brings together mobile phone operators, local banks, companies all along the supply chain, to get farmers up to the minute, usable information, and link to financial services. When we talk about achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, I wonder how NGOs will have to evolve. So here’s a big question: What will the NGO of 2030 look like? I’m not sure if anyone’s got the foresight to look that far ahead, but I think we kind of have to. We need to be taking steps today to make sure we’re relevant five or 10 years from now. Here are the issues I think we’re all going to have to wrestle with. One, it’s a multipolar world, so if you’re a true international NGO, what relationships do you have with China, with India, with powers that have emerged and are emerging? You want to think about whether you want to be fundamentally an international NGO with strong Western roots, or global. Like any company, the strongest NGOs of the future are going to have to tap into talent, to resources and to ideas wherever they exist on the planet, and if you can’t do that, you’re probably not going to be a leading player. That’s got a lot of implications for governance, for how you’re structured, for where you place people, and we all need to wrestle with that. Secondly, looking ahead to 2030, I think we’re looking at a more fragile world. That’s because we’re in a historical inflection point after World War II and the decline of all those institutions that were set up. It’s also because it is a multipolar world, and we see some of the blowback of populism now. If you want to to be where extreme poverty is, where the toughest challenges of poor health and poor education outcomes are, we’re seeing a world today in which conflict is driving all of those and driving an increase in the number of fragile states. Many of the development formulas that worked before don’t work in these environments and we’re just beginning to understand how to address that. So, how do you deal with grievance? What can we really do in terms of peace promotion? How do you do that and preserve your own impartiality as an international NGO? How do you manage security in those kinds of environments? How do you deal with groups who are extremists and what kind of relationship do you have with them, if at all? The organization of the future has to wrestle with a more fragile world in which the drivers of poverty are conflict and violence, not underdevelopment as we used to think of before. Then throw on top of that climate change which in the short term is going to aggravate all of those challenges. The third area is obviously critical: The pace of technology is amazing. You need to use the best tools that are out there to enhance your mission, to improve your impact. So how you think globally, how you relate to a more fragile world, and how you deal with technology, will all be critical. Finally, I hope that you’ll see incentives for consolidation, for mergers and acquisitions, for greater partnership. Because I do think the social change world is very fragmented so the sum of the parts does not always achieve a greater whole. I would hope in the future we would find, as a community, more consolidation where it really makes sense. The creation of platforms, networks, and partnerships will be critical, and the organizations that know how to do that will be the leaders of the future.