Philanthropic Mono-Cropping, or Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom?

21 Oct 2010 – Shankar Venkateswaran

So, the much-awaited Forbes list of richest human beings is out. And the big surprise – for the third year running, the world has a new richest man and that man is the Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helu. He pipped the usual suspects – Bill Gates and his “buddy and bridge partner” Warren Buffett – to the post! And the top 10 boasted 2 Indians – Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries and Lakshmi Mittal of ArcellorMittal. And the US list of the richest also includes 4 of Indian origin.

What was interesting was not just the list but the fall-outs. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett then launched a campaign urging the billionaires to pledge donating 50% of their fortunes to charity. And 40 of them did. And when Forbes India recently announced its list of the richest Indians, Gates and Buffett were quickly off the blocks, saying they would persuade these Indian rich to also part with their wealth of the larger good.

It will be fascinating to see how this will pan out. It is well known that Warren Buffett directs a significant portion of his philanthropic spend through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), saying that it made sense for the former to do the thinking on what to spend on and then using the even larger pie to spend it with impact. All this makes intuitive sense. Will these billionaires all decide to pool their wealth to fund the same set of ideas?

In other words, what will the future of philanthropy look like? Will it be a mono-crop with all looking somewhat the same? Philanthropic monocrop is not a myth – in India, a few years ago, huge chunks of the private grant money in public health were directed towards managing the HIV and AIDS pandemic which also impacted the public system. So if you were an NGO in need of funding, you could simply use the term HIV/AIDS in your proposal and you were home and dry! Sadly, this left health issues that the larger number of the impoverished face – tuberculosis and polio for example – to the vagaries of a less-than-efficient public system.

Can you imagine the power of such a monocrop to change the world if they get the species right? But can you imagine what will happen if they get it wrong? So, here is the million – no, billions of dollars question: is philanthropic mono-cropping a good thing or should we, as Mao famously said, let a hundred flowers of ideas blossom (and not a thousand flowers bloom, as is popularly believed)?