It was just before 6 o’clock on 11 March, and I was on my last call of the day when news broke that the WHO Director-General had declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Sometimes life-changing moments are only recognisable as such in retrospect, but sometimes – like this one – you recognise their significance in the very moment.
It just so happened that my call was with Myriam Sidibe, world-renowned handwashing expert, and Catalina Garcia Gomez, Global Director of Corporate Affairs at AB InBev. For those of you who have met either of these inspiring women, you won’t be surprised to learn that within about five minutes, we had agreed to launch a Business and COVID-19 Response.
Add in three more driven women – Jane Nelson, Director at the Harvard Kennedy School Corporate Responsibility Initiative; Liz Patterson, Head of Responsible and Inclusive Business at the UK Department for International Development; and Yvette Torres-Rahman, my wife and Business Fights Poverty Co-Founder – and within a matter of days we had pivoted our organisation to focus exclusively on guiding companies’ immediate and longer-term decision making to support the most vulnerable in the face of COVID-19.
For me personally, it felt like our 15 years of curating purposeful collaboration had all been a practice for this one moment. To their immense credit, our entire team leant into the challenge – working at a pace that none of us had worked at before. It helped that from the start, Business Fights Poverty has operated a fully-flexible, dispersed workforce model, and a large part of our experience has been in driving online collaboration. We compressed our Challenge-based approach – which normally takes 6 to 9 months – into a 10-day cycle and, through 18 events in the following 9 weeks, we brought together over 14,000 people across our amazing community and co-created 50 outputs to guide and inspire business action, in partnership with Jane Nelson and funded by UK aid from the UK Government, along with a number of our corporate partners.
You can find all of these materials in our Business and COVID-19 Response Centre, and I invite you to share them widely. These include our original Response Framework, published in March, and our follow-up, Rebuild Better Framework, which looks towards how businesses can support efforts to create a more inclusive, sustainable and resilient future. We have also produced seven Action Toolkits that focus on specific topics: tackling gender-based violence, supporting vulnerable workers, helping micro and small businesses, promoting handwashing and other preventative measures, creating national collaboration platforms, driving rapid innovation through collaboration, and supporting NGO partners.
While we were busy distilling actionable insights for decision-makers at the global level, Myriam and her team were accelerating massive action on the ground in Kenya through the National Business Compact on Coronavirus, and you can read more about her experience and reflections in her Action Toolkit (also available in the Response Centre).
This has been a true team effort, and I am grateful to all those who played a part: our lead authors, the close to 30 other people who stepped into our core team, the many experts and practitioners who shared their insights through our events, and the various companies and content partners who came forward to support this collective effort. More broadly, I have been moved by the many people across our community who have sprung into action, mobilising their businesses, NGOs, or government departments, and collaborating in new ways – even with traditional competitors – to make an urgent difference. Over 30 of our fellow business networks have also been coordinating and collaborating with us behind the scenes.
Most inspiring has been the fact that you have all done this despite unprecedented personal and professional stress. We have all been impacted, and we have all been moved by those on the frontline who have been keeping us safe. We took the early, but difficult, decision to cancel our flagship Washington event, due to take place in April, and have since cancelled all of our large in-person events this year. Iain Forrest, a medical student, and cellist from New York, was due to open our DC event. Instead, we asked him to perform for a video that we dedicated to all front line workers. The result is a performance that moves me to tears every time I watch it!
This is only the start. The pandemic is far from over – and is only just peaking in many countries with weak health systems and social safety nets. With the pandemic likely to come back in force in many countries, and with the most vulnerable facing the greatest risks, we will be dealing with a complex mix of emergency response, recovery, and rebuilding for a long time to come. Importantly, we as a community have the opportunity and, I believe, the responsibility, to act now to build a better future. Let’s face it; the pandemic has exacerbated deep inequalities and fragilities in the current system that have always been there. Actions we take now will have long-term consequences for those who have been most impacted, the very people whom all of us in this community have dedicated our careers to supporting.
That is why we are launching a listening exercise across our community and beyond – to understand what “better” means for you at a society level, business level, and individual level, and what actions we need to take to rebuild better together.
Please take this five-minute survey and/or share your views in our online written discussion. I look forward to continuing this journey with you.
