New generation of Gulf philanthropists want a seat at the table

As Western governments slash foreign aid, many organizations are seeking Gulf philanthropy to fill the gaps. While wealthy individuals and governments in the region are ready to take on a larger role, a younger generation of donors isn’t content with plowing money into existing programs, and is instead seeking new approaches with more effective and measurable outcomes.

Sonia Ben Jaafar, CEO of the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation, told Semafor that private donors from the Gulf want to be more involved in designing development programs rather than simply financing them. She said the region’s charities have developed their own expertise that can help inform changes to improve existing charitable programs. The foundation she runs — established in 2015 by Emirati billionaire Abdulla Al Ghurair and chaired by his son Abdul Aziz — has become one of the Arab world’s largest privately funded education initiatives, reaching about 500,000 young people over the past decade.

The foundation runs like a business, using performance metrics to evaluate its grants and tying funding decisions to outcomes such as job placement rates, Ben Jaafar said. The approach fits within a broader push by Badr Jafar, the UAE’s special envoy for business and philanthropy, to bring private donors, businesses, and governments together to address humanitarian needs.

In an interview in New York during the UN General Assembly, Ben Jaafar discussed the changing role of private wealth in the region, and why her foundation is quick to drop programs that don’t deliver results.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is private philanthropy hesitant to step in to cover underfunded programs that have been abandoned by many governments?

The narrative that philanthropic capital will just fill that up is not going to happen. What we’re hearing in the discussions, at least that I’m in, in the closed rooms, is: What does the new framework look like? Because it cannot be more of the same, and philanthropic capital shouldn’t be coming in as a gap filler.

We need a new model of how public, private, and philanthropy — this is the new three Ps — are going to partner together.

How does the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation measure the success of its programs?

We have a strategy that would look like any business, except instead of generating revenue, we need to generate impact for the communities we serve.

We have, on average, a [jobs] placement rate of 78%, which is a very high placement rate in my field. We don’t count just who we train. We want to know that that training landed them into a revenue-generating life.

You were early to get into Syria after the war ended. What are you focusing on there?

We’re training young Syrians to learn construction skills, and paying them to attend an apprenticeship program. Those graduates will then work on the schools we started to refurbish there.

During the war, we started a fund in 2018 that was focused on educating refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. Some of those Syrians are now returnees and are being picked up by government administration and companies to support the reconstruction.

Have you funded programs that didn’t work?

We have funded programs that we were sure would work, and we were sure we had the right partner to implement it.

Because it’s outcomes-based funding, if you cannot meet the milestone and you don’t have a good reason, or we can’t find a solution with you, then we will defund that. We’ll stop. We’ll sunset that, and we’ll find a new way of doing it.