John J. Danilovich - Ambassador John J. Danilovich began his duties as Chief Executive Officer for the Millennium Challenge Corporation on November 7, 2005, continuing a distinguished career of more than thirty years in both the public and private sectors.
Prior to his appointment by President Bush as CEO, Ambassador Danilovich served as the American Ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica from 2001 to 2004, and then Ambassador to the Federative Republic of Brazil.
Ambassador Danilovich is a businessman and private investor with a strong background in foreign affairs. A native Californian and resident of London for many years, he was active in the international shipping business for over two decades and served as director of companies in the shipping, property, publishing and investment fields.
Ambassador Danilovich served on the Board of Directors of the Panama Canal Commission from 1991 though 1996 and chaired the Commission's Transition Committee prior to the transfer of the Canal to the Panamanians. Ambassador Danilovich has been a Director of the Stanford University Trust, a Trustee of the American Museum in Britain, a Director of the U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Commission, and has served in leadership positions for several charitable organizations.
The Ambassador graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in Political Science, and received a master's degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California (London). Ambassador Danilovich is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an Associate Fellow of Pierson College (Yale University), a Knight of Malta and the recipient of several national and international awards including the Choate Alumni Seal Prize.
Sheryl Sandberg - Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook in March 2008 as chief operating officer. In this role, she is responsible for Facebook’s business operations, including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy, and communications.
Ms. Sandberg joined Facebook after six years at Google, where she served as vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations. In that role, she built and managed Google’s online sales channels and managed global operations for Google’s consumer products.
Ms. Sandberg was also a leader for the company’s philanthropic efforts. She created the Google Grants program, which donated over $240 million dollars of advertising to nonprofits worldwide. The Economist called her “the unseen driving force behind the creation of Google.org,” Google’s philanthropic arm, where she served as a founding member of the board and led the search for its executive director, Larry Brilliant.
Prior to joining Google, Ms. Sandberg was the chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department, where she helped lead its work on forgiving debt in the developing world. Before that, Ms. Sandberg was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company and an economist with the World Bank, where she worked on eradicating leprosy in India. Ms. Sandberg currently serves on the boards of The Brookings Institution, Women for Women International, The Ad Council, Leadership Public Schools and eHealth.
Ms. Sandberg received a BA summa cum laude in Economics from Harvard University. She received an MBA with highest distinction from the Harvard Business School. In 2007, Ms. Sandberg was named as one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business by Fortune.
Financing Poverty Alleviation: A Keynote Address by John Danilovich at the 2007 Global Philanthropy Forum Conference held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Introduction by Sheryl Sandberg.
Click on any word within the transcript to jump to that point in the program.
Sheryl Sandberg: So good afternoon everybody. That may or may not work. Good afternoon, I was told if I started everyone would magically sit down and we could get our afternoon on time. So good afternoon everybody, I am Sheryl Sandberg from both google.com and google.org and it's my pleasure to have two welcome's this afternoon. The first is to welcome you as part of your continuing welcome to Google, to participate in what we call the Google Grants program. Larry, Sergey, Larry Brilliant and I wanted to extend an opportunity to get free advertising on Google to all of the non profits that are here with us today. The Google now we also got the Google Grants program we have extended it to about 2000 non profits worldwide, we have given away about $140 million in free advertising and most importantly we have worked with our grantees to help them use the power of the web to broaden their reach. Jane will be helping us sent an email to all of you giving you the details of how to sign up. As you can imagine there is a fairly long wait list for this program but we will expedite the process for the organizations that are here today. And we hope it makes helps you grow your grow your reach and grow your impact.The second welcome the second welcome I am pleased to be able to do today is to welcome you to the next part of our agenda, financing poverty alleviation. All of us are here because we care about the World's poor and we know that there is no easy answer to improve the lives of the two billion people living on less than $2 a day. We know it will take a combination of things to make a real difference. It will take the right government rules, the right government laws, the right momentum for the private sector. It will also take aid both in the form of private philanthropy and in the form of government aid. And one of the challenges we all face is that in neither of these two areas are we doing what we could or should be doing. Google.org just commissioned and completed a study of private philanthropic giving in United States. We published the findings last week in an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and we will be publishing the full study on our website in about four to six weeks.And despite the facts that Americans as private citizens are the most generous in the world, giving over $250 billion annually which is a large number compared to any other kind of giving, unfortunately only eight percent of that goes to international causes of any kind. And if you pull Americans they will tell you that their primary reason for their private donations is to help people that are not as well off as themselves, but only a third of their donations touches anyone in need anywhere in the world. If we are going to make a difference Americans need to follow the example of people like Steve and Jean Case and not just identify as part of their local communities giving to their local institutions, their churches, their universities, institutions that provide important public goods but don't help alleviate global poverty. We need to help Americans to find themselves not just as Americans but as citizens of the world building a broader global community. Government aid faces the same problem. If you pull Americans they will tell you that 15 to 30 percent of the US Federal Budget goes to help nations, other nations in need. The reality is a very small percentage, less than 20 times that. In fact the total developed world gave a paltry 0.3 percent of global national income to development. Now those numbers are still big. And so one of the things we are focused on is raising that number and also making it most effective as possible. And that's where our next speaker comes in.I am very pleased to introduce Ambassador John Danilovich to the stage. He became CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation in November 2005 after a very distinguished career. He served as Ambassador to Brazil and Ambassador to Costa Rica from the years 2001 to 2005 before that a very successful career in the international shipping business. He served on the Boards of Directors of the Panama Canal Commission, a Director of the Stanford University Trust and a Director of the US-UK Fulbright Commission among many other activities. But most importantly he is one of the leaders in the world at trying to make government aid effective, by giving recipients the right incentives to do the right things to help their own populations. Ambassador we are pleased to have you here.
John Danilovich: Thank you very much Sheryl for that very generous introduction. I greatly appreciate it. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak to such a distinguished audience of philanthropists, entrepreneurs, public, private and corporate executives and representatives of various foundations and to tell you about the work that the Millennium Challenge Corporation is doing to combat poverty throughout the world. Reflecting the President's vision and Congress's bipartisan support, a unique combination at the best of times, and recognizing the responsibilities we have as part of the developed world to assist those in the developing world, the Millennium Challenge Corporation was established by an act of Congress in 2004 to offer an alternative to US foreign development assistance. The MCC model is based on the American ideals of compassion for those in need together with accountability and responsibility. And it provides sizable development assistance grants to partner countries that practice sound policies, supporting good governance, investments and health and education of their citizens and economic freedom. Countries that are actively engaging and pursuing their own development by devising and implementing their home grown strategies for poverty reduction through economic growth and countries that demand less nothing less than measurable and tangible results in lives of the poor.Today the MCC has awarded development grants, what we called compacts, to 11 partner countries throughout the world totaling in $3 billion. Another $310 million has been awarded to 13 other countries in threshold agreements to help them address policy weaknesses, to push them over the threshold towards compact eligibility. Though we are committed to development assistance, development assistance alone is not the answer to alleviating poverty. The answer is using aid as a foundation, a starting point a spring board to attract and leverage what is essential for generating sustainable and transformative poverty alleviation. MCC's approach does just that. We use our aid to leverage the power of good policies, a country's ownership of its own development and the role of private enterprise, to fight poverty. Let me explain what I mean by each of these areas. First aid alone is ineffective if a country's policy environment underutilizes or wastes it. For this reason the MCC as designed provide aid as a positive reward to countries that have a sound policy framework already in place. We do not provide aid to a country that promises to enact good policies. We provide aid to countries because they already practice good policies. Lessons learned after decades of work in the development arena prove that performance based aid allocation helps maximize aid effectiveness. Therefore we partner with countries that measure above the median on at least half of the 16 objective and transparent indicators we use to access a government's performance in the areas of ruling justly, investing in the health and the education of their people and promoting economic freedom. We also require our partner countries to perform above the median on our control of corruption indicator.Currently the Millennium Challenge Corporation is the only donor that ties eligibility for assistance to performance on a transparent and public control of corruption bench mark. We create scorecards summarizing a country's indicator performance for our board to use in making the selection of countries that qualify for our aid. You can visit our website at www.mcc.gov, to view the indicator scorecards for all low income and lower middle income countries. Because scores and data drive our approach, countries suffering from corruption, poor governance and closed markets do not receive our assistance. Countries that do not perform well on our indicators are encouraged to improve and try again in the next selection round. And many countries are doing just that. And even after a country is selected to participate in our program it must continue to maintain passing scores on their performance indicators or risk loosing their eligibility. Since we maintain that aid goes further and would be awarded only by us if good policies are in place we are finding that countries are taking it upon themselves to proactively initiate and accelerate policy reforms.We call this phenomenon the MCC effect, the Dominican Republic for example, launched a campaign to immunize five million of its citizens from measles and explicitly attributed the tremendous undertaking to its desire to qualify for MCC assistance, since the MCC measures immunization rates in our investing in people category. Countries talk to us and even hire experts to help them better assess their indicator performance. They engage directly with the organizations supplying the indicator data to make sure the policy performance is captured accurately. Countries are providing us with detailed reform agendas. It is no accident that some of the most aggressive policy reformers in the world, as measured by the World Bank Doing Business Report are MCC eligible. According to that report 24 countries specifically sited the MCC as the primary motivation for their efforts to improve their business climate. Presidents, ministers and government officials regularly call on us or ask our ambassadors in the field, what reforms do we need to make to become eligible for MCC funding? To date at least 14 countries have established inter ministerial committees and presidential commissions to device, implement and track reform strategies that address our selection criteria. They share our core belief that aid is most effective in a policy environment where good governance as well as economic and human development are valued.Second aid alone is ineffective if it fails to enable countries to help themselves. We believe our partner countries must play the central role in their own development. Our aid and our involvement must enable countries to build their own capacity, to do for themselves. Therefore we ask our partner countries to develop their proposals for funding after identifying their barriers to poverty reduction and economic growth, in consultation with their civil societies including the private sector. Taking an approach much like an investor rather than a traditional donor we require that countries themselves come up with their development strategy and provide their proposals to the MCC, much like a business plan. If due diligence determines that their proposals are well integrated and comprehensive we not only ask the we not only provide the funding upfront, but also ask countries to implement these proposals. And we ask that they work with us to monitor their performance and evaluate impact along the way. These expectations have stretched the capabilities in our partner countries and motivated them to develop new capabilities and also to think critically about what policies are needed or what institutions need to be strengthened or created to sustain development. They are building country capacity. In Ghana, for example, one of the major obstacles to the successful implementation of development projects has been the lack of adequately trained public procurement specialists. The ability to procure goods and services in a transparent and competitive manner ensures the best use of public funds. MCC is funding their procurement capacity building initiative within the Ghanaian government designed to strengthen to effectiveness of various procurement entities. By improving the efficiency of government procurements, substantial resources can be saved in future years, resources that could be directed towards health and education for the poor. Fair and competitive procurement also strengthens business confidence and encourages an open environment for innovation. Countries previously have not been expected to take on such an ownership role in their own development or to take on the level of responsibility and accountability that the MCC demands. Yet we believe that country ownership is an absolutely pre-requisite if we are serious about leveraging our aid, to make it more effective in the fight against poverty.Third, aid alone is ineffective if countries are not prepared to continue without it. Through good policies and country ownership we foresee the day when our aid can be replaced by the self sustaining economic activity, driven and spurred from within our partner country itself by the private sector. We believe that the private sector fuels economic growth and the countries experience such experiencing such growth will see the number of their citizens living in poverty decrease. We see MCC's role as transitional as we became the gateway to private sector engagement. Even the most generous American investment can only be sustained unless favorable conditions exist for private sector enterprise to flourish and to become the engine for driving long term economic growth, because the MCC demands performance on indicators, evaluating fiscal, monetary, regulatory and trade conditions including the cost and days to start a business and insist on transparency and a rejection of corruption, we create a powerful incentive for countries to foster a business climate where the private sector can flourish and can do business. This stimulates home grown entrepreneurship, small business development, increased trade and investor opportunities both domestically and for international companies. In our compact with Benin for example, the access to financial services component is dedicated to improving the capacity of small world enterprises to respond a new business opportunities by reducing the cost of credit and facilitating access to financial services. Within five years we expect that this will generate substantial new investment, creating jobs, raising incomes and lifting the lives of the poor out of poverty in Benin. By creating favorable business conditions through our compact with Nicaragua, MCC has already helped attract almost $10 million of investment from outside firms, particularly Grupo Beta, a textile manufacturing firm that will create some 1500 local jobs, and we hope this is only tip of the ice berg. Like Grupo Beta we want others in the private sector to look closely at what is happening in our MCC partner countries, because MCC investments create and require viable physical, financial and policy infrastructure. The private sector has a favorable point of entry to initiate or expand their own commercial activities. I encourage and invite the business community to leverage MCC investments and use them as a spring board complementing or as alternatives for their own investments.MCC eligibility and selection have been viewed by business and investors as providing countries with a good government imprimatur, a good house keeping seal of approval and have encouraged and attracted investments in MCC countries. I also invite foundations and companies with compassionate corporate social responsibility and initiatives to look carefully at MCC programs in countries in which they have an interest. In conversations we have had with the Gates foundations and the Rockefeller foundations for example, we have identified a number of mutual synergies in our fight against poverty which are very worth exploring further. I have no doubt that we can be more effective, all of us, in achieving our objectives if we work together rather than when we work alone.Aid alone is not the answer to financing poverty alleviation. Aid that encourages and rewards good policies, expects countries to be champions of their own development and engages the private sector by creating the right conditions is the answer. And this is the approach the MCC is taking to reduce the poverty among our partner countries. Initial results demonstrate that our approach is working. Our compacts are lifting communities out of poverty by stimulating the economic growth, to infrastructure projects that makes access to markets, schools and health clinics possible, projects to improve the security of land tenure for small farmers, soil conservation programs and improvements to agriculture and irrigation systems, business development initiatives including micro lending credit programs, improvements to water and sanitation services that are so vital to health. Land titles are being awarded in Nicaragua and Madagascar, many to women. MCC expects the women along side men participate fully in creating, implementing and reaping the benefits of our compacts in keeping with our gender policy, which Women's Edge Coalition and its President Ritu Sharma Fox, who I see here today, plays such a significant part in developing. Farmers in Honduras are transitioning from corn and beans to higher profit crops such as squash and jalapenos. Farming cooperatives in Madagascar are going to Geranium plants that will produce oil and soaps for perfumes excuse me that will produce oil for soaps and perfumes. Grants are being awarded for the first eight agro business development projects in Georgia that are creating new jobs, improving technologies and facilitating market access. In Burkina Faso, "girl-friendly" schools are enrolling some 13,000 students. more than double the number from the last academic year, with girls making up more than half of the student population. The Millennium Challenge Corporation embodies government's effective role in applying new parameters and higher expectations to grant funding for development assistance to finance tangible outcomes that transform the lives of the poor. MCC seeks to fully leverage our relationships with our partner countries committed to sound policies and to engaging the private sector in order to reduce poverty through economic growth in sustainable and transformative ways. This is the solution the Millennium Challenge Corporation offers a solution that is already making progress and showing signs of success in replacing poverty with prosperity for the world's poorest. Again I want to thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you today and I look forward to your continued interest in and support of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and to answering any questions which you may have.Thank you very much.
