On Friday, April 10, Tom Buck ’91 came to Log Lunch to speak about private sector environmental work in developing countries. Buck’s career and work has largely been guided by a passion for international affairs. After graduating as a history major from Williams in 1991 and becoming fascinated by post-communist Eastern Europe, Buck traveled to Czechoslovakia to teach English and also pursue journalistic work. He then returned to the states interested in nationalism and attained a master’s degree in international affairs and comparative politics from the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Buck spent the next eighteen years focused on international development and currently serves as the Deputy Director of Programs at SSG Advisors, a small international development firm based in Burlington, Vermont. SSG works on private-public sector partnership initiatives focused on issues such as health, environment, and local governance in developing nations. The organization often serves as a junior partner in larger projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) and led by NGOs. At SSG, Buck is involved with projects ranging from sustainable fisheries in the Philippines to climate resiliency in Ghana.
Buck began his talk by providing context of the US AID public-private partnership model. US AID is an American government program that provides funds to developing countries, 22.8 billion dollars in 2016. Yet Buck explained that the ratio of public and private funds funneled to these places has drastically shifted in the last fifty years. Currently, of the 226 billion American dollars are spent on international development, only fourteen percent comes from the US AID budget. The rest originates from the private sector. While only 22 billion dollars was spent on international aid in the 1960s, the shares of public and private money that constituted this total were essentially flipped.
In the traditional foreign aid assistance model, the government gave contracts and grants to U.S. organizations, which fostered a system of dependency for the developing nations on U.S. NGOs. As private sector initiatives have become much more prominent in the 21st century, international development has become more collaborative. There are new challenges, such as climate change, within a new environment of increased local fiscal capacity and external constraints.
SSG functions within this new system of development defined by public-private partnerships. Buck emphasized that these relationships were not driven by philanthropy but the concept of shared value. Attributed to Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, shared value encompasses how companies are driven by profit but also wish to create social and economic progress. Shared value encompasses the “overlapping interests” between US AID, community stakeholders, and private companies. Such relationships help achieve corporate-social responsibility, leverage, and better public image in the short-term and development impact, business opportunities, and improved lives and local capacity in the long term. Together, public-private partnerships link U.S. objectives and capabilities with private sector interests and capabilities to create projects of increased scale, sustainability, and potential for innovation in developing nations.
The benefits of shared value-driven partnerships are clearly shown in the work in which SSG is involved. For example, the organization addressed water loss in Jinja, Uganda with ITRON, a private firm and the Ministry of Water and Environment. The project led to a fifty percent decrease in water loss, a goal of US AID, the use of ITRON’s services and products, and a saving of 650,000 (twenty percent annually) for local stakeholders.
Through such success stories, Buck illustrated the ability of the private sector to augment the public sector role in developing nations to the benefit of private companies, the public sector, and local communities. Although such companies may seem to have primarily goals contrary to the environment, Buck showed that the private sector can have an extremely positive role in ameliorating environmental ills in nations that may not have the resources to do so solely by themselves.
To learn more about Tom Buck ’91 and SSG, please visit http://ssg-advisors.com/who-we-are/team/.
By Sara Clark ‘15
Megamenu Social