An Open Letter to Warren Buffett:
By: Susan Raymond, Ph.D., 06/28/06

Dear Mr. Buffett:

As the world applauds your generosity, it will also watch what you do and how you do it.  You face both a challenge and an opportunity.  The challenge is that, in 40 years, governments of the industrialized world have spent $2.3 trillion on foreign assistance.  Most recent studies have shown no relationship between that expenditure and real economic growth or self-reliance.  The opportunity is to show that private philanthropy can do a better job.

This is an extremely important opportunity.  In order to seize and capitalize on that opportunity, however, you and Mr. Gates will need to think of yourselves, indeed develop your initiatives, not simply as donors, but as peers and partners of the peoples you seek to help.

Five years ago I asked an expert in immunization the following question:  If I told you that 20 years from now (this was in 2000, so in 2020), I as a donor would pay for not one single dose more of vaccine anywhere in the developing world, but that in those 20 years I would move heaven and earth to see that countries could afford and manage their own immunization programs, could you the immunization expert get countries to a point of self-reliance?  The answer was immediate.  No.  Astounded, I asked why.  Because, he said, they are poor.  Wait, I replied, by 2020 you will have been in the immunization business for half a century.  And in that time, in 50 years, in an entire generation, you could not help countries become other than recipients?  The answer was still no.

Mere donations do not create self-reliance.  Sustained partnerships that are premised on mutual definition of interests and mutual commitments of resources build self-reliance.  Please do not think of yourself merely as a donor; please do not think the job is simply to transfer resources.  What development needs, what the poor need, are partners.

Do not mistake me.  It is impossible to overstate the importance of the world’s poorest nations.  There is success in the developing world, and that success has come with economic growth.  The developing world is bifurcating.  The middle income countries are pulling away from the poorest countries on virtually every measure, health, education, trade, investment, growth.  The poorest nations have not advanced markedly in the last four decades; indeed, they are at risk of becoming a permanent underclass of nations, of whole peoples.  This is not the stuff of rock-star public relations.  This is the stuff of national security.

We in America have an enormous amount at stake.  The very future of our children depends on solving this problem of abject poverty in whole nations, where poverty breeds despair and despair breeds resentment and resentment breeds extreme measures.  If we as a nation value life, if we as a nation value the lives of our sons and daughters, then we must address this problem.  Mr. Buffett, my son, a 2003 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, just returned from a year in Iraq.  As a newly minted infantry captain, he will likely be deployed again.  I send him willingly.  He goes willingly.  But I do not want to send him to even harsher places with even more impossible expectations.

It is enormously important to the human race that we address abject poverty.  It is enormously important to America that we find a way to help the least developed nations themselves overcome the stagnation that characterizes their current economic and human situation.  We must do it because it is the only path to our own security.  More importantly, we must do it because it is right.

What to do?  You are embarked on a harder job than you have ever before undertaken, embedded with more risk and more complexity than is to be found in any commercial market.  Development is tough work.  The tragedies of poor governance, of corruption, of governments that kill their own people, of failed institutions, or tribal, ethnic, racial, religious rivalry these are all problems that no amount of outside money can solve, no amount of clever technology will relieve.

But you and Mr. Gates have an advantage.  You both understand what it means to be partners.  You have built your businesses on understanding shared interests and shared commitments to achieve shared ends.  Indeed, it is your successful mastery of these concepts that has enabled you to be the donor that you now are.  I implore you to build your philanthropy from that same perspective.  Reach out to poor nations as a partner, as a peer, as an equal.  Reach out with the hand of a partner, not with the hand of pity.

We do not understand clearly how to conquer abject poverty such that peoples and nations achieve self-reliance.  In some ways, the global community has tried very hard to accomplish this goal; in some ways perhaps it has not tried hard enough.  It will take your best ideas, the best ideas of Mr. Gates, and the best ideas of those you seek to assist.  Permit me to make two suggestions for where to start if the objective is indeed progress toward self reliance in the poorest nations.

First, listen.  Certainly not to me.  And even more certainly, not to all of the august advisors who I am sure would like a piece of your largess and that of Mr. Gates in exchange for their deep thoughts.  Rather, listen to the people, just as you do in business.  Listen to the consumer, to their hopes and dreams for their own children.  To their aspirations for their own families and their own lives.  To what they want to become with their own initiative in their own communities.  Go to the poorest countries and listen to the people.  Leave the cameras behind.  These are smart people, Mr. Buffett.  They may be illiterate, but they are not stupid.  You and I would last about 10 minutes in their shoes.  They know what they want for the future of their families.  Listen to them before you put in place one single program, one single “solution” to their problems.  The people are your partners, Mr. Buffett, not your recipients.  Align your ideas with their desires and their resources.

Second, talk to your business counterparts, not in Seattle and Chicago, but in Accra, in Johannesburg, in Jakarta, in Nairobi.  Create a cohort of colleagues among these men and women (yes, some are indeed women), among these emerging business leaders.  Create a forum for their continued dialogue and sharing about how they themselves can build up their own philanthropy in their own countries.  This is the path to self reliance, not the transfer of outside resources to solve abject poverty, but the commitment of emerging leadership in free and open societies to solving their own problems. 

You and Mr. Gates control something infinitely more important than your money. You and Mr. Gates, Mr. Buffett, are leaders of people, leaders of immense stature, leaders who can be colleagues of the emerging commercial and civil society leaders in developing countries.  If you will step forward not with the handout of pity, but with the hand of a colleague to these emerging commercial and social leaders, the hand of a peer, you will accomplish more for the ultimate sustainability of solutions than has been accomplished in 40 years of trying.

You are a leader, Mr. Buffett.  Lead.

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About the Author

*Susan Raymond, Ph.D., is Sr. Managing Director, Research, Evaluation, and Strategic Planning for Changing Our World Inc., a leading consulting firm helping nonprofits and private and corporate philanthropists achieve their goals.  Dr. Raymond is also Chief Analyst for onPhilanthropy (www.onphilanthropy.com), a global resource for nonprofit professionals, and the author of The Future of Philanthropy: Economics, Ethics, and Management, published by Wiley & Sons.

She can be contacted at sraymond@changingourworld.com