Can we measure peace? Steve Killelea is trying.
Australian entrepreneur and philanthropist Steve Killelea credits surfing with opening his eyes to the plight of the world’s poor. As a young man chasing big waves in Indonesia, he spent time with a local family and saw how poverty impacted their lives. Years later, after the software company he founded, Integrated Research, had made him a high-tech tycoon, Killelea decided to put his fortune and energy into humanitarian aid, sustainable development, and peace-building. His efforts include the Global Peace Index, a measure he created to quantify peace, and the Institute for Economics and Peace, a nonprofit think-tank he founded that focuses on the intersection of peace, business, and the economy. Killelea will be a keynote speaker on 5 June at the Rotary Peace Symposium in São Paulo, Brazil. Learn more and register at www.riconvention.org/peace.
THE ROTARIAN: What convinced you to focus on aid, development, and peace?
KILLELEA: I had a good friend who was the treasurer for World Vision who took me up to Laos to look at a project we could do [together] there – providing water to about 15,000 people. It cost less than $20 a head, reduced the death rate for children under five from about 18 percent to 12 percent, and got rid of all the waterborne disease. I was hooked on the substantial impact you can have with the right developmental aid projects. To date, we’ve done about 110 projects in countries around the world, and because we’re working with the poorest of the poor, a lot of them are in countries that are war zones or near post-war zones. So I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the devastating effects of conflict, and that’s what got me interested in peace.
TR: Where did the idea to create a Global Peace Index come from?
KILLELEA: I was in northeast Kivu in [the Democratic Republic of Congo] and started to wonder what the most peaceful countries in the world were like. Was there anything I could learn from them? So I did some searches on the Internet and couldn’t find a list of the most peaceful countries in the world. A simple and profound question springs from that: How much do we actually know about peace?
TR: What are some of the ways in which peace intersects with business and economics?
KILLELEA: A simple example would be a farmer: If you’ve got a conflict going on, a farmer won’t plant a crop because he may have to leave, or militias or government troops may seize the crops for their own use. We’re developing a Mexican Peace Index and conservatively estimate that Mexico’s GDP would be 18 percent higher if there were no violence. Most people who die of homicides are young men, so generally you could say [each death represents] 40 years of lost participation in the economy. If you look at businesses, you see that crime increases the need for security, to the point where you need multiple armed guards in front of shops. We also find that distribution routes change in high-violence areas. People will stop shopping in areas they think might be dangerous. People will stop going out to bars at night. In many cities of the world, you wouldn’t get a taxi on the street because you’re worried about getting hijacked. – Heather Maher