Bono's 'Humbling' Realizations About Aid, Capitalism And Nerds

Oct. 30, 2012
Forbes

Bono has learned much about music over more than three decades with U2. But alongside that has been a lifelong lesson in campaigning — the activist for poverty reduction in Africa spoke frankly on Friday about how his views about philanthropy had now stretched to include an appreciation for capitalism.

The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE, a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches.”


“Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a bridge,” he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and investors at the F.ounders tech conference in Dublin. “We see it as startup money, investment in new countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce.”

Bono’s work with ONE was borne out of a charity he co-founded in 2002, DATA, which sought to raise awareness around debt, AIDS and trade in Africa; it created ONE in 2004 and the two organizations were merged under the name ONE in 2008. (Disclosure: Bono is a managing partner of Elevation Partners, a investment firm that owns a stake in Forbes Media.) As part of his work on the board of ONE, Bono has lobbied American congressmen, presidents and other leaders from developed nations.

The singer, who dropped by the F.ounders conference on Friday in between working on songs for U2′s next album, said he’d had other, similarly tough realizations: that there are “enormously useful,” people on the left and right. “You just have to reach them.”

Hence the “unusual” people he has on the board of ONE, including the former U.S. Secretary of State under the Bush administration, Condoleeza Rice, Desmond Tutu and the finance minister of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. “People go, ‘Huh? Why?’” said Bono. “Our single idea is that normally these issues we fret about, which are seen as left-wing subject matter, we figure, ‘Why divide our audience in half?’ So we work with left and right.”

Bono has also had realizations about how useful the Internet can be for transparency. “The strongest and loudest voice with moral punch on the continent at the moment is a nerd,” Bono said, pointing to the tech company founders in the audience, many of whom were programmers. “He’s a tech innovator.”

Websites like ipaidabribe.com, a site founded in India where citizens can report incidents of bribery and corruption, and another African site in which school kids can report if their teacher hasn’t shown up to class, were fighting the “biggest killer disease of them all: corruption,” said Bono. “It kills more kids than AIDs, TB and malaria. Right now in Africa we spend time with groups in civil society, with groups who are using technology to inform themselves better on what governments are doing and holding them to account.”

Bono spoke of the “network effect” and a radical shakedown affecting hierarchical institutions, particularly among repressive regimes in regions like the Middle East. “It’s affecting everyone from the Tea Party to Occupy,” he said, adding that his organization and others like it needed “an ethical online activist army pressing buttons at the right time… The next wave will come online. There’s a lot of smart people with smart ideas. “