Giving meaning to (Marine) money

June 27, 2012

I’m in NYC for Marine Money and the lunch speaker on the first day was John Wood of educational charity Room to Read. It reminded me that I wrote a blog post about R2R last year after first hearing John speak. Its original client declined to publish it (they had a pretty simplistic view on training and education back then) so here it is. All still relevant I’m pleased to say, except that Marine Money has since put its money where its mouth is and has funded a R2R school in Sri Lanka. Wood told delegates today that he has a West Coast benefactor prepared to match six similar donations made during Marine Money.

Ship finance and social standards in the Third World do not on the face of it make likely bedfellows. The former, expressed at its apogee in Marine Money Week in New York City is after all a playground of bankers, lawyers and owners engaged in the pursuit of money.

Here the talk is of billions of dollars worth of equity participation, revolving credit and bullet loans – with no prizes for coming second. But delegates at lunch on Wednesday got a taste of how they could do something to change the world for good, while continuing to make as much money as possible.

John Wood’s epiphany came on a sabbatical from his job at Microsoft – a break he said he took “to get away from Steve Balmer shouting”. In a village in Nepal he visited a local school and this self-confessed ‘book nerd’ asked to see the library.

He was shown a completely empty room. Stunned but moved by the commitment of the teachers, he decided to do something. What he did was organise a book drive, collecting 3,000 books and taking them back to village himself.

The response of villagers convinced him of the value of providing educational opportunities or as he put it, “giving meaning to money”. Wood cheerfully admits that his decision to quit Microsoft and found the charity Room to Read “probably cost me millions”. Why it works, he suggested is because he is a businessman – with an MBA and banking experience – rather than a dedicated do-gooder.

The title of his talk ‘Why capitalists should care about developing world education’ was designed to appeal to his audience. Education he said is the cornerstone not just of better health and education but also social stability, prosperity and therefore trade. It’s a lesson learned by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore and the potential market is still huge.

“There are 75 million children world-wide with no primary school education, 275 million with no secondary education and 780 million who are illiterate. The case is both moral and economic and it appeals to hardcore capitalists because we can help them and ourselves,” he explained.

Wood left Microsoft in 1999, scrawling ‘10m’ on a whiteboard in his home office, standing for the number of children he wanted to help by 2020. As at 2011, he is at 5m and thinks he can hit 10m by 2015.

How does he do it? A hard-nosed low-cost approach, encouraging companies to donate air miles and hotel rooms, appealing to financial sector companies as backers and persuading governments to invest in teachers. In return the people he tries to help donate their time and labour, often building schools from scratch.

He also has a ‘no Land Rover rule’ again for sound reasons – they cost $17,000 apiece, enough to educate 300 children for a year. The results are hard to argue with. Room to Read has built 1,443 schools in nine countries – opening a new school every 26 hours. It has opened 11,000 libraries – one every four hours.

There is no doubting the power of the message – nor the appeal to the shipping industry, always looking for new markets and searching for young seafarers. As Wood puts it, “You have to look at this like a supply chain. A child’s fate is decided early, but capitalists should care because economic development depends on human capital”.

For more, see: www.roomtoread.