The Impact Room

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Sesame Street has been entertaining children around the world for generations. First launched in 1969, the show was an experiment to see if television – then just an emerging technology – could be used to educate young children.

Today, this unique style of education and social messaging continues to be delivered by a diverse cast of muppets – and humans – to children and caregivers across seven continents in more than a dozen different languages.

In this episode of The Impact Room, we take a detailed look at Ahlan Simsim, a new Arabic language version of the show, which has been designed specifically to target Middle Eastern children affected by war and displacement, and its sister programme supporting Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Ahlan Simim uses music and humour to tackle emotional issues and provide youngsters (and their caregivers) tools for dealing with feelings of fear and anxiety. It mixes media outputs, training sessions, and school materials to also deliver basic literacy and numeracy learning for children who may be locked out of formal education.

Sesame Workshop received more than $100m of grant funding from the MacArthur Foundation for the project it is doing in partnership with International Rescue Committee (IRC). A year later, The Lego Foundation gave Sesame Workshop another $100m to support its work with BRAC and their programming for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
Together, these two grants are the largest ever philanthropic intervention into early years education in a humanitarian setting.
To discuss Ahlan Simsim, our host Maysa Jalbout, is joined by Shari Rosenfeld, senior vice president of International Social Impact at Sesame Workshop, and Marianne Stone, Ahlan Simim regional project director for IRC.

She also speaks to Professor Hiro Yoshikawa, a community and development psychologist specialising in early childhood and the co-founder of Global TIES, a research centre at New York University, which is carrying out an Impact evaluation of Ahlan Simsim.

“The vision here is to really to develop a new set of models in this somewhat brand-new field of early childhood development in the humanitarian sector, which has been largely overlooked for a very long time," he explains.

Many of the topics explored as well as materials used in Ahlan Simsim are applicable to other conflict and displacement settings. Indeed, some of the content is already being adapted for other countries.

In Iraq, for example, the US government’s overseas development agency, USAID, has provided additional funding to create some Iraq-specific Ahlan Simsim materials.

And, just as we were putting this podcast episode together, Sesame workshop confirmed that work was also underway to create a new suite of resources in Dari, Pashto, Spanish, Ukrainian, and English - with additional languages to follow - to support young children and caregivers affected by crisis.

For more about Ahlan Simsim and the work of Sesame Workshop in the Middle East visit their website or the IRC website.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. This episode was produced and edited by Louise Redvers.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

The Rockefeller Foundation is one of the world’s oldest and largest philanthropies. It was launched in 1910 with funds from oil, but in 2020, unveiled a plan to divest its US$5bn endowment from existing fossil fuel interests and refrain from future investments in the sector.

The foundation has also committed to invest US$1bn of programme resources into collaborations and partnerships in the areas of energy, food, health and financial systems.

This is with the aim of creating the changes possible to keep 1.5 degrees alive as a global temperature target, and protect three billion people on Earth, who live in countries vulnerable to future climate transitions.

To talk about The Rockefeller Foundation’s climate strategy, and so-called Big Bets philanthropy, , its president Dr Rajiv Shah, joined Maysa in the The Impact Room shortly before the UAE hosted COP28.

Optimistic that we have the science and know-how to curb climate change, Dr Raj admits a lot still comes down to financing. “I hope to see absolute serious financing solutions being provided to emerging and developing economies to allow them to access the renewable energy technology frontier that is so defining the global transition in terms of climate and wealthy economies,” he says.

And he adds: “In an age of abundance, we don't need to have nearly a billion people living in energy poverty, 800 million people hungry every night, and girls still experiencing deep vulnerability and discrimination around the planet.”

Collaboration is a recurring theme in the interview and Dr Raj says Global North investors needed to “drive more capital into emerging economies and developing economies to ensure everyone benefits from an accelerated climate transition.”

Dr Raj joined the Rockefeller Foundation in 2015 after six years at the helm of the US foreign aid agency, USAID, leading it during the response to the Haiti earthquake and the West African Ebola pandemic.

The founder of Latitude Capital, a private equity firm focused on power and infrastructure projects in Africa and Asia, he has also worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he created the International Financing Facility for Immunisation, and he has served as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

Dr Raj's book, Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens, is designed to inspire nonprofit leaders re-imagine how they approach social impact.

About the host

Maysa Jalbout is a leader in international development and philanthropy. Her previous roles include founding CEO of the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education, a $1bn philanthropic initiative based in Dubai, and founding CEO of the Queen Rania Foundation. Maysa is a visiting scholar at MIT and ASU, and a non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Find her on Twitter @MaysaJalbout.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Climate change, food security, funding collaboratives, and design for development. These are just some of the topics we’ll be discussing in Season Four of The Impact Room.

Join Maysa Jalbout in conversation with a diverse line-up of global philanthropists, development leaders, industry experts, and frontline organisations as they share insights and inspiration.

With the UAE due to host COP28 at the end of the year, we’ll be applying a climate lens to several of our episodes, looking at the role for philanthropy in helping to improve water and food security, and delivering equitable energy transitions and climate justice.

We’ll also be digging into funding collaboratives: what they are, and the pros and cons associated with group giving. And finally, we’ll be looking at how design can influence development and why how we build things changes the way we interact with our surroundings.

Subscribe now, so you don’t miss an episode.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Lisa Seitz Gruwell, chief advancement officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, talks knowledge sharing, fake news, and why Wikipedia has a bias problem.
It’s the world’s go-to site for information. Founded in 2001 with the aim of creating a free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is today the largest crowdsourced collection of free knowledge in history, with over 55 million articles in hundreds of languages, all written by volunteers.

But, in an era of fake news and the explosive rise of social media, is Wikipedia’s model at risk? How can it ensure its crowdsourced content is accurate and unbiased? What is Wikipedia doing to ensure its articles reflect all voices and communities, and not just those in the wealthy west?
In this episode of the Impact Room, answering these questions and more, is Lisa Seitz Gruwell. Lisa is chief advancement officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the US-based nonprofit that is responsible for Wikipedia and its partner sites. She takes us on a deep dive through Wikipedia’s efforts to boost inclusivity and tackle bias, the frontline fight against fake news, and why equitable access to knowledge should be a global concern.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge

We'd love your feedback. Let us know what you thought about this episode.

Are global efforts to end exploitation making progress, or are countries and campaigners failing in their fight? Three experts weigh in.
More than 40 million people around the world today are thought to be enslaved, a shadow economy of coerced labour, sexual exploitation and rights abuses estimated to be generating $150bn in illegal profits a year.

In recent years, there's been a surge in legislative efforts to combat slavery, alongside a rise in philanthropy-funded initiatives lobbying for change.

But are we making progress? Are the new campaigns, funds and stricter laws helping to shrink the scale of global exploitation? And if not, what more needs to be done?

In this episode of the Impact Room, we explore these questions – and more – with three expert guests.

Joel Quirk is a professor of political studies at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, where his research focuses on slavery, human mobility and human rights. Joel also serves as rapporteur to the UNESCO Slave Route Project.

Nick Grono is CEO of the Freedom Fund, the first private collaborative fund to target the abolition of modern slavery. Founded in 2013 by investment group Legatum, along with partners Walk Free and Humanity United, the Freedom Fund invests in frontline organisations in three continents, helping to eradicate exploitation and advocate for change.

Anannya Bhattacharjee is a leading Indian labour organiser with a long career in advocating for workers’ rights. She is the international coordinator of the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, which campaigns to pay a living wage to garment workers in Asian countries and to secure their right to organise.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media at @PhilanthropyAge.

The Impact Room is brought to you by Philanthropy Age and Maysa Jalbout. Find us on social media @PhilanthropyAge