A fresh approach to international development | Faisal Saeed Al Mutar

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I got to meet today's speaker, Faisal Saeed Al-Matar, when we were both giving our talks in the same TED conference session last fall. So I'm super excited to introduce his talk on international aid and development. He is a specialist in this area. And in this talk, he made me think about it in entirely new ways. Enjoy.

0:38My name is Faisal Saeed Al-Matar. I was born and raised in Iraq, in the city of Babylon. I grew up in an academic family. My dad is a doctor, my mom is a lawyer, and I'm the failure. So the person who's giving a TED Talk here is the failure of the family. So I grew up in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Malaysia. And I've seen firsthand the cost of talent and the fact that they were forced to leave their homes. So the subject of lifting people up and the subject of international development is not just theoretical academic subject for me. It's what I think about the whole time. As you probably know, the United States has spent trillions of dollars in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, only to replace Saddam Hussein with Iran and the Taliban with the Taliban.

1:19A great return of investment, right? So I started looking, I started asking questions, and I found that the current system of aid is filled with corruption, too many middlemen, too many gatekeepers, and the money hardly makes it to the people that intends to help. So the intention and the big picture is good, but to really actually get help is very difficult. And according to the World Bank, it can cost up to$20 ,000 to create one job in international development. There is still better investment than Twitter or Theranos, but still that is a lot of money wasted. But we also found, and that's the good news, is that almost half of the people in the region say that they intend to start a business in the next five years.

2:02That is millions of innovators, millions of entrepreneurs, millions of creatives who would have their skills wasted if we don't invest in them. So I started thinking about what if we actually redefined the model of aid? What if we actually redefined the purpose of aid, and instead of just being a do-good bureaucracy, to actually remove the barriers and define the purpose of aid as moving people towards normalcy, meaning moving people toward the world of supply and demand. And we did just that. So we made it very easy for people to actually get funds, and that's the process that we follow. And also, to think about investment, we think about the one that can stimulate economic growth, and also to fight the corruption crisis, and they'll call it the corruption disease in most of the Middle East.

2:52We actually make it one grant per one person. So in that way, there is little system of favoritism, little system of trying to choose people who are connected to the political elite and have it forward. So that being said, what we found was really amazing. We found that the moment we move people towards that, they're far more accountable to their own communities, not to us. This is a story of one of the great stories that we supported, which is a founder of Hakim Hashem. Hakim is a founder of Lego. He's in the city of Mosul, which used to be what ISIS declared as caliphate. And he founded a taxi female company.

3:25And now with the$3 ,000, I kid you not, he now hires more than 57 people. So think about the return of investment. And he is not alone. He is actually one of 250 projects we supported. Hany Hamada is a Syrian refugee who lives in Turkey. Hany is a self-learner. He learned Turkish. And he was, you know what? I'm going to start a business that teaches Turkish to new immigrants. And then he built up a business. And with the$3 ,000, he also now has 33 people staff. All of them are refugees teaching Turkish. So look at the new model. With$1 million, we were able to create 35 ,000 jobs compared to the old model that you can only create 50 jobs.

4:05So which investment is better? That's straightforward, right? And what's also amazing, after we actually tried that, we saw that the variation of this model is already being filled right now in Ukraine, in some parts of India, some parts of Africa. So we're not only ones doing it. And the lesson of my talk is aid doesn't have to be costly to be effective. You might actually be wondering right now, why am I talking about aid development and innovation while the Middle East is at war right now? And the answer is, the old methods and the past is actually what got us here. By focusing on the future, by focusing on innovation entrepreneurship, I believe we can transform the region from a region that's filled with conflict and war to a region that people decide to stay and invest in, to invest in talent other than a place that people escape.

5:00Thank you so much, Ted. Thank you.

5:08That was Faisal Saeed Al-Matar at TED Next 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.