Oral evidence: Jobs and Livelihoods, HC 685Tuesday 21 October 2014
Oral evidence, 21 October 2014.
Witnesses
Diana Noble, CEO, CDC, and Alex MacGillivray, Director of Development Impact, CDC, gave evidence
Chair
Thank you both very much for coming in. I think it is of interest to us for the inquiry, obviously, but it is also good to reengage as a Committee with CDC in a formal way and maybe tease out some of the other things since we last spoke. Again, just formally for the record, could you just introduce yourselves?
Diana Noble
I am Diana Noble, Chief Executive of CDC.
Alex MacGillivray
I am Alex MacGillivray, Director of Development Impact. It sounds like a weird job title; in fact, it is a new post that CDC created in 2013. Everyone at CDC is responsible for development impact, but my team’s job is to measure, monitor, evaluate and report on the impact.
Chair
That, in itself, is an interesting point, which we appreciate. As you know, we are talking about jobs and livelihoods. The previous discussion was about the extent to which jobs can be created and, when jobs cannot be created, the extent to which you can improve the income of people engaged in their almost subsistence-level livelihoods and raise them up. Nevertheless, if we can start by talking about jobs, where do you think the potential for job growth is in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, and why do you think it has not happened there in the way that it has in south‑east Asia? Every time we go to a country, we talk about it: why are jobs not being created in food processing, why are jobs not being created in new industries, and why are jobs not being created in, say, the garment sector? What is stopping sub-Saharan Africa from following the example of south‑east Asia, even in a different mix?
Diana Noble
Can I firstly say thank you for inviting us here today and also how delighted we are that the Select Committee has chosen this particular topic? It is such an important and worthy theme and, in our view too, is central to development and to lifting people out of poverty. As I stated in my evidence to the Committee when I was here last year, we decided, when we set a new strategic direction for CDC in 2012, to focus the impact that we wanted on jobs, so this is obviously enormously important to us. The question about why job creation is difficult in Africa is obviously a complex question. I think historical reasons are largely responsible. If you look at Africa’s dispersed leadership across 54 separate countries, and if you look at the mixed political and economic governance of those countries, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s, there is a legacy that we are trying to catch up on. If you read the literature, people point to a lack of power, a lack of infrastructure and a lack of skills across countries.
Chair
By “power”, do you mean electrical power?
Diana Noble
Yes, exactly, and I think all of these elements have to come together. It is a big topic but I will keep that particular answer short.
Chair
Do you see plenty of opportunities in Africa?
Diana Noble
Yes, we do see investment opportunities, but let me be clear: it is hard work. Very little that comes to us is immediately investible the moment that we see it. There are long lead times to turn what, initially, tends to be uninvestible into investible. Largely, what we will complete this year and next year, we will have been working on for at least a year, so they are very long lead times. The way that we do it is slightly different across our three investment strategies, and it might be worth just bringing this a little bit to life for you, given that we now have funds, debt and equity. The size of those markets and CDC’s position in them is different, so I will try to be clear about those. For our funds strategy, between $1 billion and $2 billion is raised in equity funds across Africa each year in 10 to 15 funds, give or take. Despite the promise of Africa that everyone knows about, this is largely still a DFI-supported market. It really would not exist without the DFIs. Commercial money is still looking at Africa and saying, ‘We will wait’ when it comes to funds. Only the very largest institutional funds get raised without DFI money, which is encouraging, because it does mean that at least a piece of the market is beginning to move beyond the DFIs, where we were instrumental in getting it started. We see pretty much every fund that is raised every year, because of our reputation, often when they are just a concept, where it is just a couple of people with an idea of a strategy. We will typically invest in seven out of the 10 to 15 and will commit about $250 million a year. A good proportion of those—three or four out of the seven—will be first-time teams. What is exciting about Africa at the moment is that we are now beginning to see economic activity and demand for equity across regions that, typically, have had very little activity. For example, we are working at the moment on an SME fund for DRC. This is really frontier investing and really beginning to push the boundaries. However, the story that the team is telling us is genuinely of demand for equity, and debt mixed with equity, in that region amongst the SMEs, which is really encouraging. Our debt strategy is rather different. Demand for debt from DFIs across Africa is incredibly high and has been growing in the last few years. This is partly driven by economic activity, as well as by the fact that local banks tend to lend in very short tenures and at really high interest rates. Also, the international commercial banks have been pulling back from the region because of Basel III and regulatory requirements. The debt market for DFIs is very large and, in 2013, the debt provided by all the European DFIs, plus IFC and the African Development Bank, excluding South Africa, totalled $4.5 billion, so it is a big and very developmental market. CDC participates in loans led by other institutions. We decided to enter that market behind other leaders, so we do not originate our own transactions, but we committed about $120 million in that market in 2014. We do, however, select the transactions that meet the best of our financial and developmental objectives. Finally, our equity mission is the most challenging of all three. When we started, I think people thought that, because we had such a large fund business, we would do a lot of co-investment with our funds. In reality, we do very little of that. It is a very small market. Our fund managers, historically, have not got capital into the really hardest regions that we wanted, so it is beholden upon ourselves to develop our own equity strategies. We really developed two strategies: one is to selectively back the most promising medium and larger‑sized businesses, but without letting the number of those outstrip our capability to manage them, because, in equity, this is much more hands-on than debt; and also to develop relationships with the best of the largest businesses in our priority sectors, wherever they are based, which have an interest in partnering with us to bring businesses to sub-Saharan Africa. Our aim there is to develop a relatively small number of close relationships, where we can successfully build high-quality and effective businesses in difficult geographies over time. We think that that is a sensible way to do what we are doing, and we can illustrate each of funds, equity and debt with examples, if that is of interest, of how it is working in practice.
Chair
Could you do that in a note?
Diana Noble
Yes.
Chair
That would be very helpful, thank you. You have your critics, but then who does not? Christian Aid has picked up and said that you had investments in 150 funds with 88 different fund managers and 19 direct investments. This is Christian Aid speaking. They say, “This makes it impossible for the company to understand its contribution to jobs and livelihoods in developing countries. It says it knows about employment numbers in 81% of those companies—but not whether the jobs are direct, via subcontractors or entirely casual. Nor does CDC appear to know about wages and working conditions at the firms in which it is an indirect investor.” That is your role, I guess, but given that, and the fact that you have set out this aim to achieve development impact focused on job creation, how do you do that and how do you respond to that criticism, in terms of how you address those outcomes?
Alex MacGillivray
I will jump in for the first bit of that at least. Thanks to the Committee, in 2008 we started gathering information on direct job numbers in all of the investments, which, at that time, were purely in funds business. We wrote those into legal agreements with all the fund managers that they would supply us with employment numbers from investing businesses across the whole universe, including China but particularly in Africa and south Asia. By now, I am not sure if the 81% figure is correct but it is certainly over—I think my figure is 90% complete data on businesses that we have invested in since 2008. We still have some legacies where we did not have the legal agreements in place in time to do that. You get a pretty good idea, with the 90% coverage, of your sample, so I am not sure that we would agree that we do not know what is going on in the companies; hence we were able, last year, to report on the direct job creation in the portfolio of 68,000 net new jobs created across all of our geographies. We have the information broken down by geography as well. In terms of wages, we started gathering that information more recently. We do not have as full a picture. In terms of job quality and issues like gender, we also started more recently, in 2013, asking about the gender breakdown of the jobs. Again, we do not have a fuller picture but we are gradually getting a fuller picture as old investments leave the portfolio and new ones come in that are bound by these legal agreements.
Chair
Your response to that, then, is that, since 2008, you have been monitoring both the overall statistics and, now, more qualitative information about—
Alex MacGillivray
Exactly, yes.
Diana Noble
The reason why we created this role was precisely because we do want to understand what is happening and we do want to understand not just how many people are being employed in our companies but what is happening to job creation, to job losses and to gender and other areas. This will take time but to say that we are not interested or that we do not care is definitely not the case. We will need some time to build up the full picture there.
Chair
Another thing is, when you are looking ahead, how do you decide—or do you decide—which sectors to prioritise? Do you think about whether or not it creates jobs as opposed to a good return? Indeed, do you have a proactive role in developing new sectors? We have had a discussion, for example, as to why the garment industry is so underdeveloped, and there may be other sectors. Is this something where you stand back and say, “These are sectors we should be looking to invest in. These are sectors which Africa should be getting involved in and we might be able to help”, or are you responding to people coming to you and saying, “We have these great ideas. We would like your support”?
Diana Noble
We are proactive, and one of the big changes we made following the new strategy in 2012 was to say that we really do care about the sectors that we support, because we know that some sectors inherently have a propensity to create more jobs than others. I believe the Members of the Select Committee received a copy of the development impact grid that we use when we make investments, and we use that to channel capital behind our developmental aims, which are to support the growth of businesses for the creation of jobs across Africa and South Asia, especially in the hardest places. As you will have seen on the grid, the X axis shows how challenging the geography is. Each country or state of India is spread across that axis, but it is the Y axis that I would like to focus on here with this topic. We asked the chief economist at DFID, Stefan Dercon, the academic, Ethan Kapstein, and the leading impact-measurement consultant, René Kim from Steward Redqueen, to help us develop a methodology for identifying which sectors would have the highest potential for creating employment, and then the medium and the lowest. They did it and came back, and they used three criteria for doing that. They looked at the potential to create employment directly, as indicated by the employment-to-capital ratio—i.e. how much capital do you put in typically to get jobs out; the potential to create employment indirectly through backward linkages, effectively through the supply chain, as indicated by the local procurement-to-capital ratio; and the potential for indirect forward job creation through investment into a central infrastructure and areas like financial services, where there are significant business constraints at the moment. They put those methodologies together and they came up with priority sectors, so we now have seven priorities: agribusiness, construction, manufacturing, financial institutions, infrastructure, health and education. As an example, although mineral resources have driven a lot of growth in sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade, it is a low-priority sector because we know it has a small workforce and little indirect employment relative to capital investment. That is the methodology that we use in theory. In terms of what we also do in thinking about new sectors or gaps in Africa when we apply this methodology, our mandate is to work with the market and respond to wherever there is a need and a financing gap. But we are doing incredibly interesting work at the moment in identifying enormous gaps, largely in existing sectors rather than establishing new sectors. Whenever we take one of our priority sectors—and what we tend to do first is we draw a market map and say, “What exists, what is the need, who can satisfy it and where are the gaps?”—every single market map for Africa says that there are enormous gaps everywhere. Africa does not have enough of everything, whether that is electricity, transport infrastructure, schools, hospitals or cement plants. You can draw a very long list. For example, in power, it is well-established that power generation falls disastrously short of the need. Poor transport infrastructure is a perpetual problem. Access to healthcare, as the current Ebola crisis is tragically highlighting, is far too low. When we identify the need, we then say to ourselves, “Who is the best partner who we could find, who would be aligned to us in trying to establish operations in Africa?” These partners may already be in Africa, although that is quite rare; they may be in South Africa; or they may be somewhere else in the world. What our teams do, without waiting for deals to come to us, is to proactively go out, knock on doors and say, “Are you interested in partnering with us to establish high-quality businesses in sub-Saharan Africa?” We are really encouraged by this strategy already. We have already partnered with a large South African business called Grindrod, which is one of the few African businesses that is developing critical infrastructure where it is most needed. We partnered with them because we want to work with them to bring that infrastructure to broader places across Africa, not just South Africa. We are well advanced in discussions to develop a pan-African education business with an international group. We have a number of promising conversations with healthcare groups in India, which have developed really innovative low-cost models that could be taken to Africa, because low cost is what you really need in Africa. If all of these happen, they will create new businesses and new models that will employ lots of people, as well as fulfilling the essential needs that are so lacking today. In a way, this is a 21st century version of the kind of pioneering investment that CDC used to do in the old days. We have tried to learn from our history and adapt it to what is needed in today’s markets. We think it is a more practical and lower-risk way of establishing and growing high-quality new sectors in countries that really need them than just backing a virgin new start-up in a country where it is just us and them.
Chair
That is really interesting. In terms of what we hoped CDC would be doing, I think it is definitely down the right avenue.
Jeremy Lefroy
Thanks very much, and good morning. We have heard quite a lot on the changes that have happened to CDC since 2010-11, and I do not particularly want to go into more detail on that, but we would be interested to know how the geographical range of CDC’s investments and the type of investments has changed as a result of the difference in policy. If you could also talk about obstacles, you have mentioned some already, but are there others that you would like to bring to our attention, which have made it difficult for you to achieve that?
Diana Noble
You pointed to the portfolio shift between both geographies and ways of investing, and those were two key aims of what we were trying to do in 2012 when we put a strategy together that is up on the website for anyone to read and that said that, when we started the strategy in 2011, the portfolio was 51% funds in regions where we wanted to continue—Africa and south Asia—and 45% of the portfolio was in the geographies that we were not going to invest in anymore—China, Latin America and south‑east Asia. A very tiny amount—4%—was in other investments, like microfinance. We put together a set of projections that highlighted a dramatic portfolio shift and, I have to say, when I looked at it, I thought, “Is this even doable?” We said that, by 2016, the amount of the portfolio in the legacy geographies like China would have fallen to 17% from 43%, and that the debt-and-equity direct part of the portfolio would grow from virtually nothing to 43%, whilst funds in our remaining regions would stay at 40%. We have just done a set of projections for the next couple of years, which are not fully embedded down and have not gone through the board, and there is still a lot to do to deliver them. However, if we do, we will be well ahead of those numbers. We would be at 56% for direct investing by 2016 if we deliver what we need to do in the next couple of years, and our legacy geography will have fallen to 16% compared to 17%. It is a huge shift in the organisation and I think we are proud of the progress that we are making. If I look at the barriers and the harder things, I think the first thing to point to is how long this all takes. It is still incredibly early days. I can quote these nice numbers to you but it is incredibly early days in demonstrating what we feel success would be from the new strategy, and that is not just making investments; it is showing that the portfolio is delivering, over the long term, the financial returns and development impact. The sort of thing we can show today in terms of progress is that the grid is generally driving capital to the harder geographies and the more job-creating sectors, exactly as it was designed to do. We can show that our new teams are investing at a much higher rate than before, and that the balance of products between direct and indirect is where we want it to be. In terms of demonstrating our full objectives, however, that is going to take many more years. I think the second comment I want to make is about the challenge of building an organisation to do this work. Working at CDC is, I think, the hardest investment role that I know of. We are asking our teams to go out to find investments—and create investments in most cases; it is not just responding to what comes to us—where the private sector is weakest, where there is most corruption, where there are very few experienced managers, and where accounting and legal systems are patchy; and to, over many years, with many bumps, support those businesses to be commercially sustainable and, ultimately, saleable. It takes an exceptional level of skill to do this and to do it well. As the Committee knows, we responded to the recommendations of the Committee in dramatically reducing the compensation at CDC at the end of 2011. We are also saying to our potential recruits, “Come to CDC and do this incredibly hard thing, but we will pay you considerably less than you could earn elsewhere.” Inevitably, therefore, it is a small pool that we fish in. We also set ourselves a high bar to build the organisation very quickly. I think we are doing well so far. There were 50 people when I first joined CDC, of whom 30 are still with us. We now have an organisation of 130 people, so that is hiring 100 people in the last two and a half years. However, retention is going to be increasingly important. We need a stable and experienced organisation to execute our mission. In the first year, we lost 13 people, which was to be expected, in a way, as we reoriented ourselves. Last year, we lost seven; this year so far, four. These are low numbers but because so many people are new, you would not expect it to be high. Over the next few years, only time will tell whether we have created what we want, which is an organisation that will attract great people but hold on to them for the long term.
Jeremy Lefroy
It is very encouraging to hear that and it really goes to the core of CDC’s mission, which is to do the kind of investments that others would not have done, and that was really going to be my next question. Is that going to mean, inevitably, a much lower return on investment, or how do you balance the expectations that, in previous years, CDC was making quite high returns on investments because they were seen to be, to some extent, potentially low-hanging fruit, against the need to do what is additional, which is, after all, your mission? Your mission is not to do what everybody else is doing but to do the things that other people are not doing and, in so doing, create jobs in places where other people are not.
Diana Noble
It is a great question, and let me talk about additionality first, because this is an area that we put a lot of thought into this year in particular. We absolutely recognise that, as we are a public-sector, development-finance institution but we are investing in the private sector, we always need to address the question of what our role is relative to the purely commercial investing organisations. We have to answer the question of why CDC is needed, particularly in a world where private capital flows are going up all the time and have exceeded official flows, even in Africa and south Asia. The CDC board has put a lot of thought into how to embed additionality into our investment strategies. We engaged an ex-IFC consultant to review all the literature in order to establish how comparable institutions think about additionality and make recommendations to us. The recommendations were that we should always be clear about additionality, both at the strategic level as well as every single investment, but we should break that down very clearly into its constituent two parts: first, financial additionality, which captures the concept of providing capital where this is not offered at all by the private sector, or not in sufficient quantity or not on the same terms; and also focusing on value additionality, which recognises that DFIs like CDC often provide more than money, which can be additional to the offering that the market is providing. We need to be very clear, however, about both of those things in every case. Those recommendations are being worked into guidelines at the moment, so that the board itself can be absolutely clear that CDC is fulfilling its role as a public-sector DFI. Then, just responding to your question about how we make the whole equation work, in terms of development impact we have the grid that is driving us to the hardest places and developmental sectors; we have additionality, which says we have to show that our role is important—we cannot just follow commercial capital; and we have to deliver a financial return. The answer, I think, is only in the quality of the team and the organisation. We have to have skilled people who understand risk, who can run a high-quality process, and who can select the right partners to work with. We need very good investment committees. We have hard conversations there. Every proposal goes through three stages—screening, interim and final—and we will talk a lot about the judgments that we are making in every case: will this strategy deliver all three? As I said, we will not know for some years still. One of the challenges as well is that the markets we invest in gyrate, so you might say, over a period of three years, the returns are quite low but we are marking to market. It is really only after you see a 10-year picture, and you look at that compared to the markets, that you can say, “Yes, we really delivered”. All I can say so far is I am really pleased with the quality of the investments that we have been making. We do portfolio reviews every quarter, particularly for the equity portfolio, because that is so dynamic. I do not feel that we are making big mistakes at the moment but, as I say to my board, give us time because we definitely will. It is, however, in our mandate: we will make mistakes.
Fabian Hamilton
In this Select Committee’s report on CDC in 2011, one of the recommendations we made was, “CDC and DFID country offices should work in closer collaboration to decide on which sectors and countries to invest in. There should also be closer collaboration between CDC and DFID’s Private Sector Department with clear accountability between the two.” I wondered how you would evaluate DFID’s engagement with the private sector and what it could do better.
Diana Noble
I can certainly describe how we are working together, if I can answer it that way. It is fair to say that, when the Select Committee looked at this topic, the correct response was that CDC and DFID were not engaging enough and should definitely do more. Since 2012, however, our two organisations have inevitably been coming closer together. We have become more developmental: we think about it much more, we talk about it and we challenge ourselves about it. DFID itself, as you know, is putting a far greater emphasis on the private sector as an important mechanism for alleviating poverty. Of course, our two organisations are coming closer together. We have had to think about how to work that in practice. Of course, we talk daily in London at multiple levels, but equally important is the relationship between CDC and the DFID country offices. In late 2012, we agreed with DFID to put together what we call a liaison programme, and the express objective of that is to enhance the communication between the investment teams—not me but the people who are making the investments—and the private-sector advisers of DFID, which, as you know, has been a big growth area within DFID across the world. Because we were starting from a very low base of, frankly, trust and knowledge about each other’s organisations, we did not set any targets for this programme at all but we simply impressed on both teams that both organisations would be strengthened if we got to know each other and if we understood each other’s priorities and then built on that, to see if we could establish some joint priorities together. I am really happy with progress on that, although it is, again, early days. Typically, when CDC investment teams go to countries, they call on the local DFID team. We often discuss our potential investments for the DFID local opinion. This is particularly true of a strategy that we have, which is called our Frontier Investments strategy, which is a small team which is currently exploring opportunities in Nepal and north Nigeria. These are particularly challenging places, and it would be really easy for us to make missed steps or back completely the wrong teams, with a team in London. DFID’s local knowledge and network of relationships is absolutely invaluable to us, and we tell them all the time. It also happens in other places; for example, we made an investment in a very innovative education business in Kenya called Bridge International Academies, and DFID has provided very helpful views on education regulation in Kenya that has helped us with that. We invested in an agribusiness in DRC, and the DFID office provided very helpful advice on agricultural law, which is, I can tell you, a very arcane and difficult topic in DRC. It is not, however, just a one-way flow of value. We certainly appreciate what DFID brings to us, but, as DFID itself has been exploring and designing its own programmes for returnable capital and making manager selection, for example, in India, the CDC team has provided a lot of input and guidance to that on how to set that programme up, how to structure it, and how to provide oversight. There is one part of CDC where the collaboration is particularly close, though, and that is the DFID Impact Fund, which I think you all know about, where we manage £75 million of DFID’s capital for it, and invest it in impact funds that themselves invest in businesses providing jobs, goods and services to the very poorest people in Africa and south Asia. It is not a huge market in capital terms but it is a very vibrant one, and this collaboration has married CDC’s expertise in funds with DFID’s knowledge and understanding of direct poverty alleviation, I would say to the benefit of both organisations. We are now looking to build on this potentially by piloting a small pool of capital to deploy along our mainstream direct equity business, which would allow us to encourage management teams we back with equity to undertake more developmental but risky strategies that they would not otherwise do. We are going to pilot that and see how that goes too.
Fabian Hamilton
In your opening comments, Mr MacGillivray, you mentioned that you were involved in the impact of the work of CDC with development partners. Have you worked with the Independent Commission for Aid Impact or talked to them at all?
Alex MacGillivray
We have not yet, to be honest, but we do read the reports. In fact, the thinking we are doing in terms of developing our evaluation framework is well informed by the process that they go through and the rigour of that process. We are looking forward to meeting with them, but we have not engaged so far.
Fabian Hamilton
It just seemed to me that there may be some crossover there and you may be able to help each other.
Alex MacGillivray
Yes, absolutely, and there are a number of other organisations internationally around the IFC family of evaluation bodies that we are also in touch with.
Chair
Just following up from that, are you able to give us any details on the meetings that you have had outside London with the various countries, especially in Africa? In particular, given that we are going there, we would be interested to know what activities you have had in Tanzania. Just to give us a feel of when and where these meetings happen and how often, but again something specific relating to Tanzania in advance of our visit.
Alex MacGillivray
Maybe I could just jump in on Tanzania because I was there last week visiting one of our investments, Export Trading Group. I was quite surprised to find out that the only people who had not visited the new cargo-handling facility there was the Secretary of State on her last visit, so we were able to talk about that from the company’s side.
Chair
She had or had not been?
Alex MacGillivray
She had not, unfortunately, but I gather you are going to have a chance to visit in early December, so that is a good example. I can tell you that it is quite impressive, so, if you do have time, it is well worth a trip there.
Chair
It would just help us to understand. The criticism of CDC in its previous incarnation was that it was basically a fund of funds sitting here and not really connecting. What you are telling us is that it is a much more engaged, hands-on model.
Diana Noble
If you came to our offices on any day, you would see 50% of the team are out.
Chair
If you could give us more detail, that would be good.
Diana Noble
Yes, we do log engagements with DFID and we have numbers, which I have not brought with me but we can—
Chair
If you could, please. We have also been informed by DFID that, in 2016, you will be creating a new strategy. I think you are in the process of implementing a new strategy. What does that mean? Is that your decision or DFID’s decision?
Diana Noble
The strategy that we put together in 2012 for 2012-16 was an absolutely collaborative process. We debated it, we tested it, we involved, as I said, Stefan Dercon in the design of the grid, and we came and presented to the DFID board. It was only after we went through that quite rigorous process that we then encapsulated it in the presentation that is up on the website, plus the investment policy, and we would expect it to be similar next time round. I think, though, if I talk about 2016—and this is a nice opportunity to do so—CDC is, in essence, an extremely long-term and patient investor. We commit and invest capital, and do not expect, as I said, the full results—whether developmental or financial—for seven, 10 or even 15 years per investment. The view that we put together in 2012 was a five-year view, and it was very meaningful because it talked about how much change we would implement in terms of how we would invest, how we would be more developmental and how we would build an organisation that could execute the strategy that both we and DFID wanted—all the things that we have touched on today. We will not, however, see the full results until we have been through a full investing cycle, which I know is frustrating for all of us but it is also reality. I envisage a process at the end of 2016 that should be, of course, a proper and full review of what we are doing, and what is going well and not going well, and I do anticipate tweaks. Of course we should do that, but I do not feel it would be sensible to do anything too fundamental, because I think that what the organisation really needs is continuity. CDC has had two fundamental changes of strategy in 10 years: 2004, when Actis was spun out; and then 2012. It needs consistency in the way it engages with the market and its clients, the way we describe ourselves in the market, the way we make long-term investments and the way that we want to build up accumulated knowledge and wisdom, particularly on the jobs side, from our team over time.
Chair
That is helpful and encouraging. I was thinking, “Surely, not another great change of direction”, so that is what I would hope to hear. Can I thank you very much? The offers of additional written information are much appreciated and will help inform us. Also, if you reflect on anything afterwards that you think we ought to know about, whether it relates specifically to Tanzania or to the more general employment and job-creation aspect, we would be happy to hear it but, in the meantime, thank you very much indeed for coming in.
Diana Noble
A pleasure.
Alex MacGillivray
Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Jobs and Livelihoods, HC 685 21