Over two decades that began in 1980, Swedish executive Percy Barnevik transformed a sleepy Swedish electrical engineering firm, Asea, and then merged it with Brown Boveri of Switzerland, to create
While on a trip to India Barnevik saw children aged 8, 9, and10 years old being sold as slaves into weaving mills. The children were developing the same kind of cough that miners get, caused by the dust in the weaving process. Barnevik began buying them out for $150 and making sure they could go to school.
In 2000, having stepped down as CEO of ABB but while still Chairman, Barnevik began shifting his focus. He started Hand in Hand, a nonprofit that works to create jobs and reduce poverty. “It’s the irony of destiny in a way,” Barnevik says in a phone interview from London, where he lives. “I was running the biggest company in the world and then [became] involved in the smallest company in the world.”
Barnevik strongly supported Hand in Hand’s work, and donated $50 million from his pension to help the group grow. To run the operation, he hired Kalpana Sankar, an Indian woman with two PhDs (in physical sciences and women’s studies) who had worked with the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development and with the Indian government in Tamil Nadu. “Percy’s meeting’s used to be very intense. He challenged me at every point,” recalls Sankar. “He would prepare a 30-page memo after each visit.”
The two officially started Hand in Hand India in 2003; it remains the largest operation in the Hand in Hand network, which also includes units in southern Africa and eastern Africa. Hand in Hand operates in 10 countries, including in Afghanistan, where Barnevik was asked to go by his old friend Donald Rumsfeld (while Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary); the two men had worked together for a decade as board members of ABB. So far the network has helped to create 1.7 million jobs by getting women together in groups, training them on business skills, getting them to lend to each other or access microfinance, and helping them to scale up their businesses.
In Kenya, thanks to Hand in Hand’s training, a woman named Martha switched from selling drinks at a kiosk to producing and selling charcoal briquettes for fuel – and quintupled her monthly income to $163, enough to feed herself and her grandchildren a varied diet. In India, Najma took out a loan facilitated by Hand in Hand that let her open a bicycle repair shop with her husband. She is part of a self-help group in her village, which has provided her encouragement.
Barnevik likes to run Hand in Hand like a business, so no dollar is wasted. “We are very cost conscious,” says Sankar. “Working with the poor, you cannot have a lifestyle like a corporate person. It’s about being humble, having equity with poor people. It’s still a lean outfit.” And it embraces partnerships. In Kenya, Hand in Hand works with online microlender KIVA; in Rwanda, it partnered with Care.
The annual operating budget is $25 million; there are 4,000 people on the payroll (plus 55,000 volunteers), but almost no expats. To fund operations, Barnevik taps individuals and corporations he knows from his decades in the business world: large outfits like
Yet he says it’s not easy to secure funds. “You have in America a better attitude to donations,” he adds. “You have a tradition in your country of giving. The U.K. has some but not so much. Most of Europe feels the government should do it. That is changing gradually.” Barnevik stepped down as chairman of Hand in Hand International in February 2014 and now serves as honorary chairman. He’s 73 and says his health is in decline.
Still, his object goal is to enable as many people out of poverty as possible. Barnevik talks in big numbers. To lift 1 billion people out of poverty, you need to create 200 million jobs, he says, figuring that over 10 years, you’d need to spend $5 billion per year to do so. “If you do this right, you can do this without doubling aid budgets around the world. The bottom billion can be lifted, and I don’t say that like a professor. I’ve been working on it for 14 years.”
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