Three Myths on the World's Poor

by Bill and Melinda Gates

This is a must read.

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MYTH ONE: Poor countries are doomed to stay poor.

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MYTH TWO: Foreign aid is a big waste.

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MYTH THREE: Saving lives leads to overpopulation.

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The End of Poverty, Soon

oday, more and more people are dreaming of a world free of poverty.

In April, the Development Committee of the World Bank set the goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030. More recently, the United Nations General Assembly working group on global goals concluded that “eradicating poverty in a generation is an ambitious but feasible goal.” As one who wrote in 2005 that ours was the generation that could end extreme poverty, I am pleased to see this idea take hold at the highest levels.

Are these errant dreams as the world barrels toward more confusion, conflict and climate change, or is there something substantial in the recent wave of high-level interest in the idea? The evidence is on the side of the optimists. And the evidence also supports both those who favor more markets and those who favor more public-private strategies. It’s all a matter of context.

The global picture will surprise doomsayers. According to the World Bank’s scorecard, the proportion of households in developing countries below the extreme-poverty line (now measured as $1.25 per person per day at international prices) has declined sharply, from 52 percent in 1980, to 43 percent in 1990, 34 percent in 1999, and 21 percent in 2010. Even sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the most recalcitrant poverty, is finally experiencing a notable decline, from 58 percent in 1999 to 49 percent in 2010.

The gains are more marked in health. According to the latest Unicef study this month, the mortality rate of children under 5 in Africa declined from 177 deaths per 1,000 births in 1990, to 155 per 1,000 births in 2000, to 98 per 1,000 in 2012. This is still too high, but the rate of progress is rapid and accelerating.

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Esther Duflo Bribes India's Poor To Health

An excellent article on the realities of effective development work in Fast Company
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Rajasthan is India's desert state, an often inhospitable place where per capita income averages around $1.77 per day. Poverty like that--understanding it and imagining ways to fix it--is what Esther Duflo lives for. Since 2003, her Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (named for a wealthy Saudi donor), or J-PAL, has conducted 240 randomized, controlled trials of specific ways to help the poor. She tests poverty solutions the way medical researchers test new drugs, which can violate the pieties of the philanthropic community. But she has earned a lot of respect along the way: In 2009, the MIT economist won a MacArthur "genius award" for bringing the scientific method to development work.

In Rajasthan, Duflo has been exploring whether incentives might help get more young children vaccinated.
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Bribing the poor is a notion that could offend just about anyone. We all like our philanthropy pure: Give the money, volunteer at the shelter, act with good intentions, and things will just get better. That's not a mode of thinking that allows the less fortunate to have human motivations, and it's certainly not a mode of thinking that encourages us to reflect on our own flaws. But be honest--you'd probably offer your own child a piece of candy as a reward for taking her shots. If we really want to make change, we have to discard what Duflo calls our "car­toon visions" of the poor. Doing good means engaging with what people really need and getting it to them by any means necessary

Infographic of the Day: How the Global Food Market Starves the Poor

How can 1 in 7 people be malnourished in the modern world? A beautifully illustrated video shows the causes.


How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

Being poor stunts cognitive growth

U.TEXAS-AUSTIN (US) — Growing up poor can suppress a child’s genetic potential to excel cognitively even before the age of 2.

A Light in India

One area where this is desperately needed is access to electricity. In the age of the iPad, it’s easy to forget that roughly a quarter of the world’s population — about a billion and a half people (pdf) — still lack electricity. This isn’t just an inconvenience; it takes a severe toll on economic life, education and health. It’s estimated that two million people die prematurely each year as a result of pulmonary diseases caused by the indoor burning of fuels for cooking and light. Close to half are children who die of pneumonia.

In vast stretches of the developing world, after the sun sets, everything goes dark. In sub-Saharan Africa, about 70 percent of the population lack electricity. However, no country has more citizens living without power than India, where more than 400 million people, the vast majority of them villagers, have no electricity. The place that remains most in darkness is Bihar, India’s poorest state, which has more than 80 million people, 85 percent of whom live in households with no grid connection. Because Bihar has nowhere near the capacity to meet its current power demands, even those few with connections receive electricity sporadically and often at odd hours, like between 3:00 a.m and 6:00 a.m., when it is of little use.
(..) Husk Power Systems--It has created a system to turn rice husks into electricity that is reliable, eco-friendly and affordable for families that can spend only $2 a month for power. The company has 65 power units that serve a total of 30,000 households and is currently installing new systems at the rate of two to three per week.
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Financial Independence through Entrepreneurship

A Plan to Make Homelessness History

This is a story about a plan to end chronic homelessness in the United States. It’s not an indeterminate “war on homelessness,” but a methodical approach to do away with a major social problem. 
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Against this backdrop, the 100,000 Homes Campaign has set the goal of placing 100,000 chronically homeless people — pinpointing those who face the greatest risk of dying on the streets —  into permanent supportive housing by July 2013. It’s the human welfare equivalent of NASA’s race to put a man on the moon. Whether the goal is achieved or not, the campaign is shifting the way cities address a problem that has often been seen as more of a nuisance than a public health emergency.
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Street to Home’s outreach used that index to prioritize the homeless around Times Square, and they managed to get every person they met — except one holdout known as “Heavy” — into housing. “We learned that the only way to get chronically homeless people into housing was to go out and beg them to let us help them,” explained Haggerty. Along the way, Common Ground developed the strategy that is now at the heart of the campaign: hit the streets and get to know the most vulnerable people, keep talking with them until they agree to enter housing (without pre-conditions), and then blanket them with supports to keep them there and help rebuild their lives.
Another thing that Common Ground discovered was that the homeless were an amalgam of many subgroups. They have now surveyed almost 14,000 chronically homeless people and found that roughly 20 percent are veterans, 10 percent are over the age of 60, 4 percent have H.I.V. or AIDS, 47 percent have a mental illness and 5 percent remain homeless because they can’t find housing with their pets.
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You might imagine that it would be hard to get people to show up in the pre-dawn hours, venture into alleyways, and ask strangers personal questions about their health. Just the opposite. In Phoenix, 175 people turned out; in San Diego, 250; in Omaha, 75; and in Chicago over 150, including Mayor Daley. In Phoenix, after the surveys were complete, organizers asked volunteers if they would like to contribute money — at $1,000 a shot — to assist homeless people with furniture and move-in expenses. In 10 minutes, they raised $50,000. “This wasn’t a room of philanthropists,” Kanis added. “It was just volunteers. But you had people saying, ‘I’ll take the guy in the wheelchair.’ ‘We’ll take the two veterans.’ There was probably a five minute standing ovation.”
The other linchpin of the campaign is encouraging city partners — who participate in weekly webinars and monthly innovation sessions — to teach one another how to get around bottlenecks in government systems.

The $300 House: The Marketing Challenge

This is a great article  by Seth Godin!
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Triple the U.S. population by three. That's how many people around the world live on about a dollar a day. Triple it again and now you have the number that lives on $2. About forty percent of the world lives on $2 or less a day.
What's that like? It's almost impossible for most of us to imagine. I mean, $2 is the rent on your apartment for about 45 minutes. It buys you one bite of lunch at a local restaurant. And yet, two billion people survive on that sort of income.
The key word is 'survive'. Subsistence income means that every penny is needed, is spent. It means you are on the edge at all times. It makes life itself an emergency. If every single thing goes perfectly, then you and your family will go to sleep tonight healthy, not too hungry and fairly safe. But of course, every single thing almost never goes perfectly. If you are bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, you need to buy medicine and so there's no money for food. If you need more water, you have to spend two hours walking to and from the nearest half-decent water spot, and those two hours are the two hours you were going to spend harvesting the food your kids need.
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Into this world, we welcome the $300 House. Its success will depend on the ability to create a market for the idea. How do we do that?
Any entrepreneur or marketer can learn a lesson from how new systems create new markets, and how an infinite increase in income or productivity can change everything. Everything.
Now, here's the kicker: If you're a tenth-generation subsistence farmer, your point of view, about risk, about life, is different from someone working in an R&D lab in Palo Alto. The Moral Economy of the Peasant makes this argument clearly: Imagine standing in water up to your chin. The only thing you're prepared to focus on is whether or not the water is going to rise four more inches. Your penchant for risk is close to zero. One mistake and the game is over.
As a result, it's extremely difficult to sell innovation to this consumer. The line around the block to get into the Apple store for a gadget is an insane concept in this community. A promise from a marketer is meaningless, because the marketer isn't part of the town, the marketer will move away, the marketer is, of course, a liar.
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So you see the paradox. A new product and approach and innovation could dramatically improve the life and income of a billion people, but those people have been conditioned to ignore the very tools that are a reflex of marketers that might sell it to them. Fear of loss is greater than fear of gain. Advertising is inefficient and ineffective. And the worldview of the shopper is that they're not a shopper. They're in search of refills. They are in water up to their chins.
So how can the $300 House be marketed effectively? The answer is in connecting and leading Tribes.
It lies in engaging directly and experientially with individuals, not getting distribution in front of markets. Figure out how to use direct selling in just one village, and then do it in ten, and then in a hundred. The broad, mass market approach of a Western marketer is foolish because there is no mass market in places where villages are the market. It has worked with other products. It can work with the $300 House.

What's Life Like For the More Than 1 Billion in the World Who Are Hungry? One Woman Decided to Find Out for Herself

This is a very impressive and potentially rewarding journey upon which Ms. Pepper is embarking...

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Editor's Note: On March 20, Kenda Swartz Pepper began "21 Days for World Hunger," an experiment to try for 21 days to live like the over 1 billion people around the world who are hungry. Below is her first post, you can scroll to the end for the links to her most recent posts along the way.

1.02 billion people in the world go hungry every day according to theFood and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. That’s 1,020,000,000 people.  I was tempted to round down and write 1 billion people in the world go hungry every day.  It dawned on me that I would be doing a monumental disservice to .02 billion people.  That’s 20,000,000 people.  Children.  Mothers.  Fathers. 20,000,000.  Slightly more than the entire population of Florida.  Ignoring that number would be like disregarding the entire state of Florida.  In some ways, it’s easier for me to focus on the 20,000,000 instead of the total 1.02 billion, because I cannot even conjure a picture in my head of 1.02 billion people.  I have no point of reference.

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In honor of world hunger, I am going to engage in potentially curious behaviors.  I have decided that for the next 21 days I’m going to eat – to the best of my knowledge and ability – like those who are living with hunger. I think I’m most nervous about this Souljourn, because I know it will entail pangs.  If you recall, that scares me.  But again, I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to be starving or malnourished.  I know there is food available if my resolve breaks.  This is an intentional experiment thus creating the confounding factor that I will still likely never have the experience of knowing the real fear of real hunger.  For this, I am grateful.

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Burden not yourself with the suffering of others.
Acknowledge not the presence of anguish in the world.
Ask not the truth.
Fear not the consequences of inaction.
Believe not in the worth of each hungry soul.
Give not of yourself for the common good.
Exist not in the presence of peace.
Want not.
Be Not.
See Not.
Do Not.

Why Not.

-kasp

The Underlying Tragedy

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

Non-profit organization Nuru utilizes Macs to end extreme poverty

There are quite a few non-profit organizations that help impoverished nations, but none seem to have the grassroots approach of Nuru. This one-year old non-profit is using education to help communities, help themselves and they’re using technology to do it.

Nuru was formed by Jake Harriman, a platoon commander in the Infantry and an elite unit of Marines called Force Recon. Harriman served two tours of duty in Iraq where he realized that the key to ending terrorism was to end extreme poverty.

Harriman’s thoughts can be seen in a video called “The End.” In his words, “terrorists rely on an endless supply of people living in extreme poverty, with no other options in life. The only chance we have to see the end of terrorism, is to end extreme poverty.”

Here is the link to his video story...

World Hunger Reaches 1 Billion People Mark

AP, June 19, 2009 · One in six people in the world — or more than 1 billion — is now hungry, a historic high due largely to the global economic crisis and stubbornly high food prices, a U.N. agency said Friday.

Compared with last year, there are 100 million more people who are hungry, meaning they receive fewer than 1,800 calories a day, the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report.

Almost all the world's undernourished live in developing countries, where food prices have fallen more slowly than in the richer nations, the report said. Poor countries need more aid and agricultural investment to cope, it said.

"The silent hunger crisis, affecting one-sixth of all of humanity, poses a serious risk for world peace and security," said the agency's director-general, Jacques Diouf.

Soaring prices for staples, such as rice, triggered riots in the developing world last year.

The Hidden Hunger

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau
The most heartbreaking thing about starving children is their equanimity.

They don’t cry. They don’t smile. They don’t move. They don’t show a flicker of fear, pain or interest. Tiny, wizened zombies, they shut down all nonessential operations to employ every last calorie to stay alive.

We in the West misunderstand starvation — especially the increasing hunger caused by the global economic crisis —
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The World Bank has estimated that United Nations goals for overcoming global poverty have been set back seven years by the global crisis. It calculates that increased malnutrition last year may have caused an additional 44 million children to suffer permanent physical or mental impairment.

Yet one of the great Western misconceptions is that severe malnutrition is simply about not getting enough to eat. Often it’s about not getting the right micronutrients — iron, zinc, vitamin A, iodine — and one of the most cost-effective ways outsiders can combat poverty is to fight this “hidden hunger.”

Malnutrition is not a glamorous field, and so it’s routinely neglected by everybody — donor governments, poor countries and, yes, journalists. But malnutrition is implicated in one-third to one-half of all child deaths each year; the immediate cause may be diarrhea, but lurking behind it is a deficiency of zinc.
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“Lack of iron is the most widespread nutrition deficiency in the world, and yet you can’t really see it,” he added.

In my column last Sunday, I wrote about women dying in childbirth. One reason so many die of hemorrhages is that 42 percent of pregnant women worldwide have anemia, according to the World Health Organization. And here in Guinea-Bissau, 83 percent of youngsters under age 5 suffer from iron deficiency.

A Boy Living in a Car

This is a very informative article (by my favorite NYTimes editorialist, Nicholas Kristof) in its own right. It also reminds me of the people I work with in Orbis, who like Sasha and Sarah, "get it." They "get" that there are billions of people suffering and they have made a conscious commitment to help "right" the world. Incredible and inspiring are the Orbis crew, similar to Sasha and Sarah, profiled here...
The Orbis people are a fantastic antidote to those who fall into the orbit described by one of my favorite songwriters, Nick Cave in one of his seminal songs, "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side, in which he describes the "usual state of affairs"--
"But watch the one falling in the street
See him gesture to his neighbours
See him trampled beneath their feet
All outward motion connects to nothing
For each is concerned with their immediate need
Witness the man reaching up from the gutter
See the other one stumbling on who can not see"
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As America’s unemployment rate rises, those paying the severest price aren’t necessarily in Detroit or Miami. One of the newest street children here in this northern Haitian city is a 10-year-old boy whose father was working in Florida but lost his job and can no longer send money home. As a result, the family here was evicted, the mother and children went separate ways to improve their odds of finding shelter, and the boy found refuge in an abandoned wreck of a car.

The boy is one of 46 million people in the developing world — more than double the New York State population — who will be driven into poverty in 2009, according to a World Bank estimate.
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It’s natural in an economic crisis to look inward, to focus on America’s own needs, but it’s worth remembering that the consequence of a deep recession in a poor country isn’t just a lost job but also a lost child.

In Cité Soleil, a woman named Chantal Dorlus told me that her 5-year-old daughter, Nasson, starved to death last month, and neighbors confirmed the account. Ms. Dorlus said that her three other children would have starved as well if not for the generosity of her neighbors, who share their meager food supplies.

If slum-dwelling Haitians can share what little they have, I hope we can be equally generous during this downturn when needs are greatest.
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On this trip, I met a couple of American women, Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell, both in their early 30s, who offer an example of outward commitment at a time when most of us are retrenching and focusing on ourselves. Sasha and Sarah run a hand-to-mouth aid group, called SOIL; they speak fluent Creole and get around on motorcycle taxis while waving back at legions of fans on every street. (You can watch a video of them at nytimes.com/ontheground.)

I was interested in their work because it addresses two of the developing world’s greatest but least glamorous challenges. One is sanitation, for human waste in poor countries routinely spreads disease and parasites. The second is agriculture, for poor countries must increase crop yields if they are to overcome poverty and hunger.

As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists

NEW DELHI — Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge — “a national shame,” in the words of its prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.

Barefoot College in India

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The students are mostly women. Some are grandmothers. Hundreds have come through here from villages across India and a dozen other countries to learn how to install and maintain solar energy in rural areas.

Even though it's sophisticated coursework, the only pre-requisite for admission to the Barefoot College is that there are no pre-requisites, not even to speak the language.

Until we arrived with a translator, these Mauritanian women who'd been here four months hadn't spoken to anyone else in Arabic, the only language they know. But language is not a barrier to learning, says the college's founder.

BUNKER ROY (Founder, Barefoot College): Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.

Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India

NEW DELHI — An old woman missing her upper front teeth holds a child in rumpled clothes — who is wearing a Fendi bib (retail price, about $100).

Vogue India’s August issue presented a 16-page vision of supple handbags, bejeweled clutches and status-symbol umbrellas, modeled not by runway stars or the wealthiest fraction of Indian society who can actually afford these accessories, but by average Indian people.

Perhaps not surprisingly, not everyone in India was amused.
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There’s nothing “fun or funny” about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen, she said in a telephone interview. “There are farmer suicides here, for God’s sake” she said, referring to thousands of Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the last decade because of debt.

Food Politics

THE WHOLE world is feeling the impact of soaring food and commodity prices. A recent series in The Post reported that poor families in West Africa are selling precious livestock to buy staples, while some consumers in our own area have taken to hoarding cut-rate groceries. The surge in costs, unlike anything global food markets have seen since the 1970s, has many causes. It reflects one good trend -- rising demand for food as India and China prosper -- and a dangerous one -- rising oil prices. There has been drought in wheat-exporting Australia. Many countries have banned or discouraged food exports. Yet several contributing factors are made in the U.S.A. The Federal Reserve Board's interest rate cuts are weakening the dollar. They may also be driving speculators to bid up the price of commodities. And ethanol subsidies, coupled with Congress's new mandate to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol annually by 2022, are diverting land from other crops to corn production -- and corn from food to energy.

Correcting policies that exacerbate the food crisis will be one of the next president's most urgent tasks

Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

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Leaders who ignore the rage do so at their own risk. President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families. “If there is a protest against the rising prices,” he said, “come get me at the palace and I will demonstrate with you.”

When they came, filled with rage and by the thousands, he huddled inside and his presidential guards, with United Nations peacekeeping troops, rebuffed them. Within days, opposition lawmakers had voted out Mr. Préval’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis, forcing him to reconstitute his government. Fragile in even the best of times, Haiti’s population and politics are now both simmering.
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The Poor Eat Mud:
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”