Qatar Foundation OnePlanet

Qatar Foundation

Case Study

Overview

Name: Qatar Foundation

The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development is a state-led non-profit organization in Qatar, founded in 1995 by then-emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his wife Moza bint Nasser Al-Missned. Its philanthropic focus is on education, scientific research and community development. It has solicited a number of international universities to establish campuses in Qatar.

More info: https://www.qf.org.qa/

Key Challenges

The Qatar Foundation is a complex organisation and finds it hard to track activity and be joined-up across its different departments and programmes. The Foundation wished to integrate sustainability across all its departments and programmes, and to join these up with their educational activities. FIFA Qatar 2022 provided an opportunity to review how the organisation works and whether use of graph database technology embodied in the OnePlanet.com technology solutions could unlock human potential and promote environmental regeneration.

OnePlanet Solution

The OnePlanet Platform and Student Portfolio Application were used to help Qatar Foundation make connections across departments and programmes to test the approach to support better delivery of well-being and sustainability strategies. OnePlanet developed a Qatar Foundation ‘ecosystem’ of organisations and departments as well building a bespoke lens based on the Qatar National Vision 2030.

Workshops were held to introduce the OnePlanet technology to staff, including an exchange between Credo High School, in California, and Qatar Academy for Science and technology, to demonstrate the OnePlanet Student Portfolio app.

A Gap Analysis was also conducted using the One Planet Living® Framework, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and the Qatar National Vision pillars to identify opportunities for enhancing impact across the Qatar Foundation ecosystem.

‘The results were remarkable. It showed us the critical role which Qatar Foundation could play in its wider ecosystem. OnePlanet enables us to understand the big picture and show how the Qatar Foundation’s different objectives can be aligned to unlock greater impact and address gaps.’

Jason Twill, Head of Sustainability, Qatar Foundation FIFA 2022

Benefits and Return on Investment

The implementation of the OnePlanet platform provided many clear insights for the Qatar Foundation:

OnePlanet’s data structure, based on ‘Shared Outcomes’, enables the Qatar Foundation to identify and embed shared objectives not only throughout the organisation but also into stakeholder projects. For example, many issues such as decarbonisation, cut across actors, organisations and geographical areas. OnePlanet allows Action Plans made by different departments or organisations to connect to a ‘coordinating’ Ecosystem Plan. For example all organisations can choose to adopt the Shared Outcome of ‘zero carbon energy’ to enable decarbonisation to be embedded and tracked across the whole ecosystem. This allows the Qatar Foundation to better coordinate initiatives across departments, reducing duplication and conflicts, saving time and resources.

The platform allows Outcomes from external stakeholders to be adopted into Qatar Foundation’s own strategies and plans. Outcomes from the Qatar National Vision 2030 were incorporated into the Qatar Foundation’s strategy planning. The results were remarkable. It demonstrated explicitly the Qatar Foundation’s role as a critical connector nationally: taking top-down policy into community projects, and taking bottom-up innovation from schools, universities and projects back to inform national policy.

The platform’s ‘Organogram’ and ‘Connections’ functions allowed users to quickly identify colleagues throughout the ecosystem who may be contributing to mutual Shared Outcomes, monitoring related Indicators and delivering Actions. This facilitates coordinated learning and joined-up thinking, within and between departments and external stakeholders.

Built in data capture for performance monitoring, along with advanced reporting capabilities, has the potential when deployed fully to reduce time spent monitoring, tracking and reporting by up to 50%. OnePlanet technology therefore can free up mental capacity, allowing Qatar Foundation staff to focus more time and energy on delivering impact and results, increasing organisational effectiveness.

Integrating the Personal Application and Student Portfolio Application to the Qatar Foundation ecosystem shows potential to connect and engage staff and communities to the Qatar Foundation’s regeneration strategy. The Personal Application is aimed at staff and links across to the OnePlanet.com enterprise platform. Augmented by Machine Learning (and Artificial Intelligence in due course) the application can adapt itself to professional and personal preferences. This application can therefore inspire personal growth and forge connections throughout an organisation between people with shared professional and personal interests. The Student Portfolio Application is designed for use by High School students, to collect their “world saving work” in one place. The workshops demonstrated how this application is unlocking human growth and making the connections for sustainable development in California. The workshop between QAST and Credo High School to explore the student Portfolio Application for use in Qatar Foundation, showed the potential for QAST students to build such portfolios.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup can be an opportunity to showcase – nationally and internationally – Qatar’s world-leading experience in national transformation towards a regenerative knowledge economy. Using OnePlanet technology could provide one unified location for Qatar Foundation’s planning, monitoring and reporting on sustainability, creating a single source of truth which can be shared at the click of a button. Collating data centrally across a number of collaborating departments, updating in near real-time, translating into a number of different reporting frameworks and providing external communication options (such as integration to existing Qatar Foundation apps) demonstrates OnePlanet’s potential to support delivery of Qatar 2022 World Cup. It could also provide the basis to support other initiatives and global events, such as a bid to host a future Olympic Games.

The opportunity exists in future to integrate current performance management and reporting practices with the OnePlanet enterprise platform, augmenting institutional efficiency and providing the Strategic Planning Department with a user-friendly real-time reporting tool.

Conducting a high-level Gap Analysis has shown how certain gaps become the perfect places for collaboration between stakeholders. This has demonstrated a potential role for the Qatar Green Building Council and Qatar Foundation’s Policy Hub as key organisations supporting Qatar as a nation to contribute to planetary-level needs. These needs are embodied in the SDGs and One Planet Living®. QGBC and QFPH can gain a clear remit by driving necessary policy work and supporting research to fill these gaps.