Mona Hamdy believes that technology married with pragmatic optimism can save the world. That’s what the entrepreneur and Harvard University Applied Ethics teaching fellow told me while we sat overlooking the Potomac River at her restaurant in Georgetown. We discussed impossible problems like plastics in the ocean, hostile AI, hypersonic missiles, the perils of cashless economies for the world’s poorest, socioeconomic challenges for women in the Middle East and North Africa, and cultural misunderstandings between the U.S. and Arab nations.
As I watched the sun glistening off the water, mulling over our conversation and the seemingly insurmountable challenges we had discussed, Hamdy caught my gaze. Surprisingly, she was smiling.
“I am a realist. You have to clearly understand human nature to design effective solutions for the biggest challenges people face. But I’m optimistic about the human ability to solve problems. I choose to see these issues as design flaws we can fix.”
Entrepreneurs will find viable market opportunities in addressing these issues, just like banks and large corporations do, Hamdy told me. “How will the pesticide market change if amortization of crop yield is based on soil quality, not on acreage? Is there a need for a physical crypto instrument to replace the freedom of cash in our increasingly cashless future? Can biomimicry give us clues about better batteries and more efficient energy distribution?”
There are ways to solve these problems that make life better for billions of people, Hamdy told me. She spoke of women acting as true change agents, how the companies she builds work with local communities to empower themselves and assist others, and the importance of ethics and inclusion when developing actionable solutions.
“For those of us lucky enough to wake up on solid physical and economic ground, we have a great responsibility to help others in need. Modern technology can help us do that. That’s just good stewardship.”
Stewardship is a word that comes up often with Hamdy. “We are just caretakers of what we have in this life until we pass it along,” she explained. Then she looked me straight in the eye and told me, “One day, our world will run on transparent, highly-efficient systems designed to heal our planet. It’s our shared responsibility. And it’s within our grasp.”
As the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve and 2020 arrived, my anxieties over dystopian futures grew. I frantically reached out to Hamdy explaining my worries and asking about her optimism for the future.
From her trek on the Camino de Santiago, Hamdy wrote me back. “It’s normal to be worried about the future,” she said. “Our species has been worried about the future for at least 6,000 years, maybe longer. But we are building powerful technologies in a globally connected way that can create empathy and helps us understand ourselves better.”
“The kind of technology we have created should give us pause. It means we are aware of its potential in our hands. We can regulate it and use it to help relieve human despair like no other time on earth. Conflict, famine, poverty, and ecological destruction can be mapped on top of each other. Let’s learn as much as we can, and create economies that address these problems as solvable opportunities.”
I smiled. With fireworks gloriously exploding in a panoply of spectacular colors over the Marina Bay in Singapore, I asked her if we could continue our conversation the next morning to discuss why she hasn’t given up on it yet. While I brewed a much-needed cup of coffee, Hamdy found cellular service in the mountains and I learned about the bright future she is working toward.
One critical element for Hamdy is how she believes climate change will force people to stop talking about sustainability as a separate issue. Instead, it will become part of the standard business framework, forcing people to be more thoughtful about ecological systems in their business models.
“Ten years ago did you ever believe you would see a stock exchange discussing delisting anyone who didn’t help mitigate climate change? The UK Labour party did that. Or crypto investments in the salvation of endangered species? That’s already happening. Government and private sector stakeholders are shifting their priorities to respond to this existential threat. There’s hope for us yet to realize just how connected we are to our ecosystem and to one another. But first comes awareness. So, for now, I focus on creating projects that prove profit can be made while Sustainable Development Goals are honored.”
Hamdy co-founded the Al Baydha Development Company as a kind of “living laboratory” exploring methods to make the hyper-arid regions of the Arab world an example of better stewardship of the Earth’s natural systems and resources, including the people who live there.
“There’s a saying I keep on my desk from an ancient Greek philosopher named Epicurus. ‘Empty is the argument of the philosopher which doesn’t relieve human suffering’.”
Hamdy told me that it was given to her by the Saudi woman who was her mentor and catalyst for Al Baydha from its inception. “We knew, ultimately, that was the goal of our endeavor. What’s the point of all the technological and scientific wonders we have at our disposal today if we don’t use them to ensure the thriving of our species?”
I stop Hamdy to clarify. From our conversation, it strikes me that the most lauded climate change reversal project in the Arab World was founded by Arab women. “Most people are surprised to learn Al Baydha’s founders were all women. I’m not sure why that is. If they knew anything about us Arab women, and these Saudi women, in particular, they wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
“Al Baydha was our attempt to test our hypothesis that poverty, sickness, and ecological desolation on our planet are related. We wanted to see if by redefining wealth to include sustainability and dignity, and fixing these problems in tandem, we could create flourishing peoples, economies, and ecologies. If poverty is something we caused, can we design it out of a system? What about climate change?”
The project focused on creating entrepreneurship among settled Saudi Bedouins by using sustainable infrastructure and permaculture design principles as a way of redefining wealth for impoverished, climate-change affected societies. “We wanted to show you that you can green the desert through development of a hyperlocal economic cooperative and simple traditional land management systems,” she continued.
“Building that company allowed me the opportunity to learn from our ancestors. As Arabs, our civilization was built on the relentless pursuit of objective truth through multi-faith, interdisciplinary knowledge and information-sharing. We were not a profligate or wasteful people— to be so would mean death in the harsher terrains of our lands,” said Hamdy.
“The nature of our company combined this traditional wisdom with futuristic technology like cinematic worldbuilding, mixed reality and AR for education, digital twinning, and 3d printing as effective modes of information transfer. These things were not considered part of the poverty-eradication toolkit a decade ago, but the world is coming around to it. Tech and heritage-- it’s the 21st century version of what our ancestors would have done. ”
As for part of what makes Hamdy hopeful about the future, she has a ten-year data set that provides strong objective evidence that watershed and dryland management systems are effective in reversing desertification and therefore, climate change.
“What we learn from Al Baydha seems especially relevant now. I recently had a rather poignant exchange with the founding permaculturist, a remarkable American man who lived in the village and led this project alongside the people of Al Baydha from our very beginning. He was updating me on our progress. In the middle of the deserts of Makkah, the Al Baydha demonstration site is a thriving, lush savannah. Today there are mushrooms in soil that once was sand. The satellite images show our site as an island of green in an ocean of beige desert. Our one development company changed the ecosystem. Imagine if we used resources this way on a regional or global scale?”
Hamdy attributes her understanding of retaining humility in resource consumption from conversations with her grandmother while growing up in Egypt. “My grandmother taught me a great deal about how Arab identity and culture was founded on being useful and hospitable to our community. For our people, dignity is tied to humble and conservative use of resources.”
With so many projects future-facing Hamdy believes in the virtue of patience, and that even in business, time is relative to scale and scope.
“ I design projects that prove companies can be profitable when the end result is better stewardship of our planet. I think it’s the most ethical thing we can do for those who will come after us. Sometimes, like in ecological projects, that end result just happens to be a hundred years from now. Which isn’t that long when you consider how trees grow or lakes fill.”
I paused. Then I told Hamdy that all of that makes sense but that I was still thinking and worried about those big pressing problems currently challenging the planet. Perhaps thinking a bit too much about The Terminator movie, I turned to Hamdy and asked her to level with me and tell me when sentient robots are coming for us?
“Ha! Not for a while yet. Everyone is worried about the future of humanity, the fate of our planet and our place alongside sentient AI-powered robots. What attributes of our species would you preserve? Chances are they have a lot to do with what I call the five human pillars of the Fifth Industrial Revolution--community, creativity, vitality, story, and soul. As Fourth Industrial Revolution technology embeds itself in our lives, I think those five things will be what we will find makes us most human.”
However, when working in high-risk areas, the stakes are high and time is tight. “It’s those projects that taught me one of the key responsibilities of a good leader is to make reliable decisions in a timely manner,” Hamdy said. “Sometimes, you have to keep an eye on the second hand as you think. People are counting on you.”
It can be exceedingly difficult to know if your company is on the right track in the international development space. As Hamdy explained, this is because measuring social impact can be harder to quantify than economic impact. “Boardrooms and stock markets give feedback much faster than NGOs and multinational bodies produce reports,” Hamdy explained. To overcome this, Hamdy created a data-based analytics dashboard she uses to measure the real-time impact in each of the communities that she assists.
Hamdy includes an additional metric: beauty.
“To me, beauty is an essential human right,” Hamdy said. “We don’t often think of design, or art when looking at the world’s most devastating and ravaged political and social environments. Creative expression is a human need. It is an essential part of human dignity and cultural identity. It’s a hallmark of our species, since the beginning of our recorded history.”It may seem impossible for international relief agencies to try to focus on beauty and culture in addition to keeping people safe and alive. However, Hamdy believes that it is not only possible, but it is also paramount.
“It’s all about utility and efficiency when fighting impending famine, or providing maternal healthcare during a pandemic. It’s justifiably hard for these large institutions to send crayons and music to orphanages when clinics need antibiotics and bellies need calories. But sharing beauty and culture is doable. Especially for the private sector. We have done it in prisons and ghettos, and we’ve done it in refugee camps, and active conflict zones, too. Our projects try to fill that gap as best we can by embedding things like books, art, music, courtyard spaces and heritage preservation into either the revenue model or the physical infrastructure itself. Everybody has a right to express their culture and retain it for future generations if they want.”
The barriers to access and entrenched limitations in the world for marginalized communities are enormous, Hamdy said, but that doesn’t mean it’s a hopeless grind. She looks for beauty in the wider environment as the cornerstone of the growth. This is because she believes that with beautiful spaces, places emerge to kindle our minds and souls. It’s when the music stops and the children stop drawing, when there is no graffiti in the rubble and when all the color palettes of the city drain into a defeated grey that she truly worries, Hamdy tells me.
I can hear Hamdy giggling over the airways as she sings a couple of the lines from Tupac Shakur’s poem, "The Rose That Grew From Concrete."
This is fitting because finding and nurturing beauty in places and hearts of the people she works with regardless of gender, affiliation, orientation, race, disability, and economic station is crucial to her vision for a more sustainable, inclusive future.
“I try to find a way to preserve a bit of these great things that make us human using the best technology and innovation our age has to offer. There is hope for our world and our species. I suspect there always will be.”
