Pierre Gurdjian, Philanthropy Partner, RVVZ Foundation, who delivered the keynote speech titled PASED Model for Development, pointed out that the most significant development in the world in the last couple of years had been the sustainable development goal movement. “It’s key because it has high aspirations. It’s important because it enables the mobilization of significant new resources. But, perhaps, most importantly of all, it is legitimizing a particular way of looking at the world in a multilateral way, in a complex way, in a holistic and systemic way,” he explained.
Robert Jung, Head of Berlin Office for Digital Strategy and Transformation at EY and Founder of EY´s refugee support initiative, pondered the question of measuring one’s success when it comes to planning and implementing refugee-oriented projects. “Being consultants, one of the first questions always is, how do we measure our success? We deliberately decided to not go for “OK, let’s do another Vision 2020/2030 strategy” but instead measure our success in the number of people whose daily life really changed after we have helped them,” he emphasized.
Anja Langenbucher, Director Europe Office, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlighted the advantages the new technologies have given us and talked about how they can be used with maximum efficiency to empower those is dire need of assistance. “One should think about positive things that you can do with digitalization, information exchange within refugee camps. For example, we’re working on the electronic money,” she noted.
Jens Waltermann, Executive Director, United World Colleges (UWC) International, has expressed his surprise with some people’s misconceptions about others. “[Some people feel that] your identity suffers when you’re faced with people with another identity. Your cultural identity gets diluted, or whatever it is,” he explained, adding that in his experience working with people of more than 80 nationalities he found the opposite to be true – people learn more about their own identities when they are exposed to others.