‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ – this infamous quote by Einstein was running through the mind of Dr. Arne Fjørtoft, Founder and Secretary General of Worldview International Foundation (Worldview), over and again during his efforts to secure funding to sustain Worldview’s efforts of planting mangroves in Myanmar.  

Fjørtoft had founded Worldview in 1979 to accelerate a digital revolution and its potential to empower disadvantaged communities and promote democracy in the developing world. Three decades later, Fjørtoft turned his attention to the environmental and social challenges of poor communities in the Bay of Bengal region. He learned that all across the region, mangrove forests were being destroyed due to a relentless onslaught of overexploitation, oil spills, plastics pollution, and the relentless march of coastal development; and deforestation played a key role in coastal villagers’ vulnerability to the sea. 

“In 2004, over 30,000 people died in the Indian Ocean Tsunami. In the aftermath, picking up the pieces, we realised regions with mangroves suffered much lower losses of life,” he recollected. In 2010, Worldview resolved to pivot its full energies to work on climate change, sea level rise, and the challenges of sustainable development in South East Asia. 

Besides the work of planting mangroves, obtaining sufficient funding was almost always on the top of Fjørtoft’s mind. Between 2014 and 2016, Fjørtoft spent thousands of hours on planes, calls and meetings, writing emails, letters, and proposals, all towards the goal of securing an accredited agency to enable his team to draw funds from governments or international funding agencies. By the fall of 2016, his efforts had produced only costs, except for the occasional funding from private companies.  

“Ours is a cycle. If we don't start the nurseries in time, and if we don't plant the trees in the nursery in time, it will all be spoilt. Mangroves have a very sensitive nature. The seedlings are living plants, living beings, and they have their own way of doing things and we have to respect that. If not, they will not grow up. We are their custodians. They are our babies,” he explained.  

Fjørtoft spent time engaging with an organisation in Washington DC, the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), which required him to register his project and gain validation to earn carbon credits. He also met with the United Nations Environment Programme and the Green Climate Fund to seek direct funding.  

 “The Green Climate Fund, according to the UN, is the premier funding source in the world for climate projects. But for all their projects, you still need an accredited agency. So after we gave up with the United Nations Development Programme in 2015, we tried the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), because they had offices here in Myanmar, but they said they needed to send the project to America. And time passed, and then finally we got word back, “Sorry, but we are understaffed here, and we don’t have the capacity now to take on your project.” So this too failed,” said Fjørtoft. 

Running into a succession of failures in securing critical funding, Fjørtoft would go on to consider a radically different approach: a cryptocurrency to finance mangrove trees, democratise mangrove funding, and link Worldview to an untapped world of impact investors. This came in the form of working with Alan Laubsch, a passionate environmentalist with a career in risk analytics and international finance. Laubsch worked for a Swiss fintech firm called Lykke, and was pioneering a zero-fee exchange for digital currencies. 

Explaining his motivation, Laubsch said, “This is an incredibly important time in our history as a species, when earth’s natural capital, which sustains human financial capital, is at risk. Natural capital gives us free ecosystem services of US$150 trillion every year. This far exceeds global GDP of US$80 trillion. But there are now about US$8 trillion every year in negative externalities that deplete natural capital. We need to urgently address these losses, because if we don’t, there will no longer be a sustainable financial market. If our life support systems, in the climate, the soils, and the oceans, are not valued by our economy, we could be losing up to 5% of GDP per annum, and looking at the collapse of civilisation.” 

NGOs are complex organisations that interact with many stakeholders, and managing an NGO can be even more complex than managing a profit-seeking company. Written by Simon Schillebeeckx, Associate Professor of Strategic Marketing, SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business and Ryan Merrill, Doctoral Research Fellow in Sustainability and Innovation, SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business, this case examines the complexities of managing an NGO and the difficulties involved in securing funding for projects that are chiefly beneficial to the earth and to impoverished communities, where real business opportunity may still be lacking. The importance of good leadership and social capital are underscored. 

To read the case in full, please visit the CMP website by clicking here.