[0:18]today I want to talk about solving the Grand Challenges of the 21st century paramount to those Grand Challenges how
[0:28]we as a global society can solve global poverty a co-founder at the unreasonable Institute one of my best friends in the
[0:37]entire world his name is Daisy raveloe Chen showed me this cartoon as a reference point for how he feels like we often think about coming up solutions coming up with solutions to our hardest
[0:49]problems like this cartoon as you could see on the left there's a very difficult problem and on the right there's a elegant solution and in the middle it says then a miracle occurs and beneath
[1:01]it one of the mathematicians is telling his friend I think you should be more explicit in step two I think that this is an analogy to how we think about solving our toughest challenges because
[1:10]oftentimes we leave it up to miracles we leave it up to individuals who are on the fringes of human potential the mother Teresa is the mahatma gandhi's the Martin Luther King's of our time and
[1:21]this is no longer acceptable because how we look at these individuals as we look at them as heroes we separate ourselves from them they feel different from us and if we're gonna solve these problems
[1:33]it's going to take all of us today we live in a borough in a world where a billion people live in absolute poverty 770 million individuals do not have
[1:43]access to clean drinking water we live in a world where over 780 million adults are still illiterate not able to read or write and two-thirds of them are women
[1:53]in a world with these types of numbers we can't afford to bet on miracles so in 2010 with a ragtag group of friends I was fortunate to co-found the
[2:05]unreasonable Institute as an organization dedicated to demystifying and clarifying how we can go about solving our toughest challenges and specifically our toughest challenges
[2:16]related to endemic poverty what we do at the unreasonable Institute is work with entrepreneurs from all around the world who are trying to solve these seemingly intractable problems and we align them
[2:27]with what we would call an unfair advantage we align them with skills training from experts and workshops with world-class business leadership as mentors with financing and investment in
[2:37]funding and ultimately with a global community that will continue to support them as they scale up their companies and something seems to have been working to date we've worked with over 170
[2:49]companies across all of our programs headquartered in over 41 different countries and together they're all solving problems related to endemic poverty whether that is reintegrating
[3:00]50,000 former Liberian child soldiers are working on the prevention of honor killing in Pakistan or ultra affordable DNA diagnostics in Argentina what is shared throughout our entrepreneurs
[3:11]there's a sense that if they are successful they'll help bend history in the right direction we've been amazed at how effective these programs and this
[3:20]community has become over time and a recent impact assessment on the unreasonable Institute it was seeing that from the programs we run entrepreneurs who go through them within
[3:30]24 months see a nine point seven X increase in revenue and in over 5x increase in their team size so something seems to be working but two years ago
[3:40]like most startups who realized that we needed to pivot we realized that if we're gonna have a chance in hell at obtaining our broader mission of putting a dent on global poverty then we need to orient our efforts at unreasonable and
[3:52]those of the entrepreneurs we work with around meeting the needs of adolescent girls living on less than $2 a day I think that intuitively and emotionally
[4:01]we all understand this we get this but it wasn't until our team at a reasonable read the hard facts that this really was brought into clarity research shows that
[4:12]for families living on less than $2 a day if a son and that family receives an education that boy will on average take 30 to 35 percent of his future earnings and invest it back into his family now
[4:24]if a daughter in that same family is given the same educational opportunity she will on average take 90 to 95 percent of her future earnings and
[4:34]invest it back into her family you have a 3x leverage return on poverty alleviation if you invest in girls and yet they are the most marginalized population on this plan
[4:44]when it comes to being able to access education in sub-saharan Africa alone there are 19 countries where the graduation rate of secondary school for girls is under 5 percent of the
[4:55]population something needs to change so taking these realizations to heart we were privileged to partner with the Nike Foundation in the girl effect movement to launch the world's first accelerator
[5:06]dedicated entrepreneurs who are positioned to benefit millions of adolescent girls in poverty we called this the girl effect accelerator the
[5:18]goal of the girl effect accelerator is to align with fast-moving startups for-profit startups across emerging markets that are uniquely positioned to solve problems and constraints related
[5:28]to adolescent girls in poverty and to help these companies position their directory trajectory around solving those different needs and those different challenges faced by girls but when we started on this journey two
[5:39]years ago with the Nike Foundation and with the girl effect we actually didn't know if this was possible our question was are there actually for-profit highly scalable solutions in emerging markets
[5:50]that are oriented around benefiting adolescent girls living a less than $2 a day this is probably the hardest demographic on the planet to reach and so we just Dobin we started a research we asked everybody we knew we scoured
[6:01]the globe we went through our network and after a year of scouring these different markets we identified a portfolio of entrepreneurs that we believe sit at that nexus of explosive
[6:12]growth and impacting girls but to make this a lot more real unless theoretical what I want to do is just tell you two of the stories of two of the companies out of the ten that we worked with in
[6:22]our inaugural program the first company has designed a technology that it was created to help mothers save the lives of their infants ensure that they stay
[6:31]warm this photo behind me of this baby of this infant it looks like she's sleeping very peacefully but in reality she's struggling for her life and every
[6:42]single breath that she takes because she's a premature newborn and premature babies have an extreme difficulty regulating their body temperature to them this room which feels like room temperature to us would feel like
[6:53]ice-cold water and if this baby this premature baby was born in a village in a rural environment in emerging markets it would likely not survive today the numbers are pretty staggering
[7:05]there are 15 million newborns that are born prematurely every single year and tragically 3 million of them will die due to hypothermia the majority of these
[7:15]newborns who passed away because of hypothermia are in emerging markets and in rural environments and the reason this happens is the babies aren't able to keep themselves warm but the mothers are not able to bring the babies to a
[7:27]hospital that has a baby incubator that could keep that baby warm and that's because most baby incubators look like this on average of the cost 20 thousand US dollars they require electricity they
[7:37]need the specialists they exist only in hospitals that rural villages typically don't have access to it's just far too expensive for these markets so if you were to design an effective incubator
[7:49]that could save the lives of those 3 million infants every single year in emerging markets in rural environments it would need to be able to operate without electricity it could not require
[7:59]a specialist because there are not enough specialists in these markets and it would need to be not half as expensive as an incubator not ten times less expensive but at least a hundred
[8:10]times less expensive we were privileged at the girl effect accelerator to work with a start-up called embrace innovations and they have somehow
[8:19]magically invented this new form of an incubator this is the technology they created it's called the embrace warmer it is literally a hundred times cheaper
[8:30]than the incubator you just saw and it is medically just as effective yeah they have launched this across emerging markets they've helped mother save 150,000 lives of their infants keeping
[8:40]them warm and what I love about embraces if you talk to their team if you talk to Jane their CEO she will tell you that they're just getting started the second example I wanted to share with you is
[8:51]around a start-up that's working to ensure that girls on the African continent can study at night and not be concerned about health or safety that's
[9:02]typically on the African continent this is what it looks like for a girl who goes home and wants to study in the evening three out of four girls on the African continent have access to
[9:12]electricity and so instead when they sit down and they open up their books they light a kerosene lantern next to that book and this girl she'll sit there and she'll work as long as you possibly can
[9:22]but for all practical reasons she is sitting next to a flame that is made up of burning jet fuel and she'll study as long as she can as her eyes water and she begins to cough and this is the
[9:33]equivalent of her in her study in our smoking two packs of cigarettes every single day as she sits next to this flame and this is a big reality for a
[9:44]lot of people around the world 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity and instead they use dirty fuels like kerosene to put that into perspective that's more people who today
[9:53]don't have electricity then there were on the planet when Thomas Edison lit up the first light bulb now the good news is there are a lot of startups who are working to replace kerosene lanterns
[10:03]like this one with solar lanterns and they're very effective and they're having a great impact but the tough thing about this is who's really benefitting and what we've seen is that the girls in the household aren't
[10:15]benefiting in the way that we had hypothesized because the hypothesis was if you replace a kerosene lantern with a solar Lantern then the girl will be able to study at night perform better in school and she'll be able to do so in a safe environment
[10:26]in reality though what happens is for most these families living in absolute poverty once they are able to purchase a solar Lantern the first people get to use it in the evening are typically the
[10:36]parents the second person in line is typically the son and the third person if she's lucky enough is the girl who will be able to use this solar Lantern to study so if you're actually going to
[10:47]change the game for girls in poverty and give them access to clean energy at night you need to find a way not just to replace the kerosene lantern with one solar light but to electrify the entire
[10:57]house or Hut with solar lights we were really privileged that the girl effect accelerator should work with a company called off-grid electric based out of Tanzania who's doing exactly that this
[11:07]map behind me is of Tanzania and it's showing in mid-2012 an off-grid electric launched its product in market what you're going to see are a bunch of yellow dots they're going to come across
[11:17]this slide each one of those dots represents a household that off-grid took from a dirty fuel like kerosene to modern sort of living across
[11:25]the entire house will go back you can
[11:41]see their growth was explosive across Tanzania this was their pilot by the end of 2014 they had lit up over 25,000 different homes in Tanzania replacing
[11:52]kerosene with solar electrified light giving ubiquitous democratize access to everybody in the family including the daughters so these two examples embrace an off-grid electric are two companies
[12:03]that joined us for the inaugural girl effect accelerator this past November we came together for two weeks we lived on a small farm a couple hours north of Silicon Valley just outside of San
[12:13]Francisco and together we worked on solving the hardest challenges that these ten companies were facing in terms of scaling to meet the needs of millions of girls around the world we brought in
[12:24]about 20 mentors and these mentors were incredible business leaders from the CFO of Google to the co-founder of Priceline to the founder of one of the largest solar companies on the planet and even
[12:35]Seth Godin who's seen here working with other entrepreneurs I'm an incredible marketing guru and entrepreneur himself and together as a community we had Ana replicable group of entrepreneurs and business leaders
[12:45]trying to figure out how do we position the future of business around ensuring that we unleash the girl effect at scale post the program in November all of the companies we work with have agreed to
[12:56]track their core leading indicator on their impact of girls in poverty and to report on that quarterly into perpetuity and it's with this data that we're gonna be able to pull insights from what works
[13:06]and equally as important doesn't work in terms of meeting the needs of girls in poverty through entrepreneurship and through business of course if you're sitting in the room right now you're probably asking yourself okay so you ran
[13:17]this program the girl effect accelerator now why what's next and when we first launched the girl effect accelerator and we were looking at working on this two years ago with the Nike Foundation we
[13:28]had decided that we would work together to launch a fund it was going to be an investment fund focused exclusively on investing into ventures that were sustainably benefiting girls in poverty and we were going to call this the athlean
[13:39]girl fund what we realized and in conversations with my partner and a reasonable capital Ashok ready is that launching a fund called the girl fund focus exclusively on ventures that
[13:50]benefit girls in poverty although it would be very impactful it's the wrong posture because this would be a sidecar fund and instead what we needed to do was something bigger we needed to ensure that every company we invest in at a
[14:01]reasonable capital tracks their impact on women and girls in poverty and so we're launching our first fund now and in that fund although we're focused on profitable investments across emerging
[14:13]markets no matter what the industry no matter what the vertical no matter what the focus of our companies that we invest in is we're ensuring that they all track their impact on women and girls in poverty if they will receive
[14:24]investment from a reasonable capital and we know this isn't enough that this is just a starting point but we do believe that what you measure is an indicator of what you value and what you measure often changes behavior over time and so
[14:36]we're hopeful to see the results of this fund in closing I'd like to round out with a conversation I had with a friend a few weeks ago and she mentioned to me that she felt like these conversations
[14:47]around women and girls and in creating a positive impact on women and girls are becoming trendy and she pointed to the girl effect accelerator and even to this advanced TEDx women has two examples of how this is becoming trendy and the
[14:59]truth is I agree with her I think that these conversations are becoming trendy but I would argue that they're not becoming trendy enough that they need to move from being a trend into being the
[15:10]status quo because if we're ever gonna live in a world that we know is possible we will not get there unless we're able to release the constraints faced by the
[15:19]250 million adolescent girls living in poverty and we will not be able to put these grand challenges way that belong in a museum unless we ensure that all
[15:30]women and all girls are able to reach their creative potential and equally as important we will not be successful at this if we exclude men from the conversation which i think is why I was
[15:41]so excited and privileged to be able to accept this invitation and be here on stage with you this morning in closing I just want to say it was such a privilege to be able to share few humbling thoughts from our
[15:52]perspectives adarand reasonable and I hope together collectively throughout the day throughout the evening we're able to take a conversation that's being had here off of the sidelines of being a trend and into the mainstream of
[16:04]becoming the status quo thank you