In this video, Ousseynou Nakoulima (MBA 2009), director of the Green Climate Fund, discusses why his organization employs a holistic strategy to its work in developing countries.

“The Green Climate Fund is a fund that has been set up by the international community to mobilize financing to support developing countries—the full actors of the fight against climate change. I joined the Green Climate Fund back in 2014 to help set up the institution and to facilitate the negotiation of the Paris Agreement.

“So I saw my role as facilitating this dialogue between 190 countries, actually, and number two, as an investor, [to] facilitate also the channeling funds to projects that can help achieve that goal. When you speak about climate change, you cannot advise it if you don't have everybody play a role in it.

“While you're addressing the issue of having a common objective, a common goal, you also need to go to the very local level to understand what are the challenges of this community and find the right instruments. I would say that the thing I applied at the local level is the understanding of the global framework so that these communities know how to access these funds. And second, take, actually, ideas that were coming from all over the world and see which of these ideas could be adapted.

“Increasingly, I think people realize that you cannot address climate change if you don't address also the development challenges of communities. Because people feel that there are rising inequalities, the challenge [is] who should pay for the fight against climate change. And now there's a third piece that has been added: how to address the issues around the conservation of biodiversity.

“So climate change, international development, biodiversity, fighting the rising inequalities—all these are interlinked. And I think that this is really one of the core things that I got from HBS: the ability to not think about one issue in isolation of the bigger picture. Number two, the belief that there's not only one solution to a problem, but actually there may be different solutions. It's just a matter of connecting the dots between different parts of a strategy. And number three, helping facilitate the conversation between people who have different ideas or different focuses and trying to find a way to really meet the sometimes conflicting priorities.”

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