What charities actually work?
Dec. 11th, 2009 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellA lot of research coming out lately has shown that many charities who are trying to help the 3rd world end up doing the opposite:
From an interview of the founder of KickStart in the WSJ:
You can't donate people out of poverty, although many people think so. [Economist] Jeff Sachs believes it will take $1.6 trillion a year, and he believes that a dollar a day people are too poor to invest in their own path out of poverty. Martin and I both feel that poor people have to invest time and money to move out of poverty. In Bangladesh, President Ershad was impressed with treadle pumps, so he said would give 10,000 of them to people in the district he came from. Then farmers stopped buying them, local manufacturers had to close their doors, and it set farmers back in that region two years.
I like KickStart's philosophy -- they create devices that dramatically improve the productivity of families in the 3rd world (such as irrigation pumps, brick-making machines etc). Then they sell them at cost to shops in 3rd world countries, who in turn sell them to local farmers. Their site claims some impressive numbers, showing that they've lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty in a sustainable fashion. Their ultimate goal is to create a thriving middle class, which has been shown to be correlated with greater political stability.
Microfinance is a similar idea. Instead of us going in and buying the locals what what we think they need, it empowers them to use small amounts of money to create businesses that they can use to pull themselves out of poverty.
However, societies that are stuck in a state of mass poverty often have many things holding them back, and it's unclear whether just pressing on one lever will actually solve their intricate web of problems. There have been various studies showing a strong correlation between poverty and lack of women's rights. An organization called Half the Sky is looking to empower women as a way of getting African countries out of poverty.
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For those of you who know more about this than I do, what do you think of these organizations? Who else has a data-driven and results-driven approach?
From an interview of the founder of KickStart in the WSJ:
You can't donate people out of poverty, although many people think so. [Economist] Jeff Sachs believes it will take $1.6 trillion a year, and he believes that a dollar a day people are too poor to invest in their own path out of poverty. Martin and I both feel that poor people have to invest time and money to move out of poverty. In Bangladesh, President Ershad was impressed with treadle pumps, so he said would give 10,000 of them to people in the district he came from. Then farmers stopped buying them, local manufacturers had to close their doors, and it set farmers back in that region two years.
I like KickStart's philosophy -- they create devices that dramatically improve the productivity of families in the 3rd world (such as irrigation pumps, brick-making machines etc). Then they sell them at cost to shops in 3rd world countries, who in turn sell them to local farmers. Their site claims some impressive numbers, showing that they've lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty in a sustainable fashion. Their ultimate goal is to create a thriving middle class, which has been shown to be correlated with greater political stability.
Microfinance is a similar idea. Instead of us going in and buying the locals what what we think they need, it empowers them to use small amounts of money to create businesses that they can use to pull themselves out of poverty.
However, societies that are stuck in a state of mass poverty often have many things holding them back, and it's unclear whether just pressing on one lever will actually solve their intricate web of problems. There have been various studies showing a strong correlation between poverty and lack of women's rights. An organization called Half the Sky is looking to empower women as a way of getting African countries out of poverty.
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For those of you who know more about this than I do, what do you think of these organizations? Who else has a data-driven and results-driven approach?
