Let's go back to the Tanzanian example that I gave you earlier. We've seen tons of water projects where development NGOs have come in saying “I'll drill you a well”, etc., and you go back to those two years later and they're non-functional, because the community was not involved.
This is the biggest issue with anyone. I can talk to my children about trying to be entrepreneurs, but they need to have that kind of capacity experience to be able to really leverage them out. If I'm going to do everything for my kids, then they're going to expect that any time they need something they will come to me. When I start to say “Let's work together on this, but here is really what you need to do on this and you need to latch onto it”....
Capacity building is the biggest thing we wrestle with. In an industry full of engineers who love to build things, they'd rather build schools and medical facilities, because they can point to those. When we talk about building capacity, they can't see that, but you will see it in terms of the activities that go on. When we empower people, we see wonderful things. When I see entrepreneurs in micro-finance aspects with their access to capital to build businesses, the lack of default on those loans and the return that they get is amazing.
This is all part of being an entrepreneur and of the business aspect. In Iamgold, we went through this process of teaching our employees to be entrepreneurs, not just to come to work for a job, but also how they could contribute as part of the business and start to get that kind of thinking so they could take that home for themselves and think of other aspects. That's where the gap is. That's where business can come in if we can work together as partners, and if we don't say we'll do it for them, but we actually say, “You're going to take on this project, you're going to learn from it, and it will be your project at the end of the day”.
Again, the Tanzanian experience was incredible, because you would talk to the group that was put together, and it was their project. They were very proud of it. The project was theirs. They talked about everything they did. They were very thankful to the company, because they helped to finance a bit of that and were very encouraging for others.
The government actually tried to take credit for the project. The community said no, that the government couldn't take credit for it. They said “We're the ones who did that aspect”. Through that aspect, through the development of that water project itself, I saw them starting to think about what other projects they could do and what other income sources they could build as a consequence.
That's all part of what we need to look at here: to stop doing things that way and literally partner in this process, going together. It's that concept of creating shared value, of working together on that part so that people actually own it. They have that experience on the business side of things that can leverage forward, and I think that's what we see in terms of countries that do it well. We see governments in there working on that component of it, not doing it for them.