Defeating Global Poverty

I recently finished reading David Bornstein's book, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. This book is a very fun read filled with stories of innovative social entrepreneurs tackling and making large scale progress on many national and global social issues. In a world where the media focuses mostly on what's not working, it is encouraging to see what is working under the radar.

Read my full review.

Labels: ashoka, book reviews, bornstein, poverty, social entrepreneurs

I have recently completed reading a detail-filled book about the transformation of [2006 Nobel Peace Prize winning] The Grameen Bank over the past few years.

This book is titled, The Poor Always Pay Back, chronicles how the bank developed "version 2" of the widely now copied Grameen model of microfinance ... including offering loans with group guarantees, customized (vs. one-size-fits-all) loan products, insurance products, pension products and much more.

See my book review.

Labels: book reviews, grameen, microfinance, poverty

I recentedly read an interesting book on the economic rise of China called China Shakes The World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation by James Kynge, the Financial Times Chinese Bureau Head for 17 years. Kynge uses stories of entrepreneurs and others from within China and from people outside of China who have been impacted by the emergence of China as an economic powerhouse.

See my book review.

Labels: book reviews, china, poverty

The Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working by Robert Calderisi is a very interesting read for anyone interested in getting more insight into the complexity of seeing a better future for Africa. Calderisi has 30+ years on the ground with international development and shares many stories about his personal experiences as well as behind-the-scenes issues of dealing with various Africa projects and leaders over the past 20 years. Even though he was a World Bank executive, he provides plenty of critique of the World Bank and the complexities of dealing with international politics.

Calderisi concludes with 10 bold and contraversial recommendations for re-directing African international aid towards the better governed countries in an attempt to deliver some helpful long-term beneficial results.

Read my full book review

Labels: africa, book reviews, poverty

Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent international economist, wrote a book called "In Defense of Globalization" published in 2004. This book has become one of the definitive textbooks arguing that globalization is providing immense benefits to the poor ... both economically and socially.

Bhagwati is not shy about critiquing bad practices and abuses of globalization and advocating for reform in order for the benefits to be distributed more equally.

Read my full book review
Dave's Defeating Global Poverty Reading List

Labels: book reviews, globalization, poverty

I recently finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. This is an interesting book tracing human development and exploring why societies developed differently. I wrote a brief review in my recommended poverty reading list.

Review of Guns, Germs and Steel
Dave's Defeating Poverty Reading List

Labels: book reviews, history, poverty

I recently finished reading an interesting new book by William Easterly called The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest have done so Much Ill and so Little Good. This book has a wide range of strong responses and even an oped piece in the New York Times. Easterly is an Economics professor at NYU and previously an "insider" to the international aid community as an economist at the World Bank.

Easterly argues that our Big Push approach to jumpstart poor country economies has no historical foundation for how countries have escaped poverty in the past. In fact, he argues that our current top-down approaches (much like colonial activities before) are doomed to failure and worse they will likely delay the emergence of sustainable long-term economic growth in these countries.

Read my full book review

Labels: book reviews, international aid, poverty

I recently finished reading an interesting book by Narendra Jadhav called Untouchables: Family's Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India. If you want to understand India and how to be effective in accelerating impact on poverty there, you need to understand the caste system and how it affects how the vast majority of people think in India.

If you think the India caste system is dead, all you need to do is open up any Indian newspaper and turn to the classifieds section for people seeking marriage partners. Almost all of the ads are explicit about the caste system of the ad buyer as well as the caste requirements of the spouse they are looking for. The explicit caste recognition is less front-and-center in other social spheres, but it is very much there under the surface and affecting how people think about themselves and each other.

This book is a biography of a dalit family living through The Great Depression, the India independence movement and up to today. Dalits are also known as the out-castes or untouchables. They are lower than the lower-castes as they are below the caste system. It is a story of triumph and yet a call to continue to fight to break the caste slavery system.

Read my longer book review

Labels: book reviews, caste, india, poverty

I had the opportunity to hear Muhammad Yunus, founder and director of The Grameen Bank, earlier this week speaking at an event in Seattle.

Yunus is very much an activist for practical solutions to defeating poverty. He recounted his story of starting The Grameen Bank, now one of the largest banks in Bangladesh with now over 5M micro-credit borrowers. They also launched a mobile phone company in Bangladesh called Grameen Phone targeting the rural poor which has now become not only the largest phone company in the country, but also the largest company and tax payer! More than 200,000 micro-entrepreneur "phone ladies" are now operating in villages all over Bangladesh renting out phone minutes to fellow villagers. This is a significant service to the rural communities, a profitable business for the phone ladies and a profitable business for the phone company -- a triple win.

The Bonsai People

Yunus is very much an advocate for the potential of the human spirit in every person. He believes that people are poor not because of their own actions but because of the systems that have denied them the ability to reach their potential. Yunus provided the analogy of the bonsai tree. He said that you can take a seed from the largest tree in the forest and put it in a small pot, limit its water and it will grow up as a dwarf tree. Yunus said that this is a good analogy for how potential is not realized by poor people.

Dream Your World

Yunus was asked about how he would talk with well-off children about poverty. He said that we should encourage our children to dream about the world they want. Then we should encourage our children to pursue making that world. Wow!

Social Entrepreneurs

Yunus was asked about what he saw as the next major movement. He talked about a new kind of business person who was building a business to make a profit (for no business will survive without profit) but also to equally value providing a social return. This contrasts with the Wall Street approach of focusing exclusively on maximizing profitability. He envisions an industry developing around social capitalism to run alongside the traditional profit-only focused industry.

Previous post on Grameen and beggars

Labels: book reviews, grameen, microfinance, poverty, social enterprise, yunus

Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, has written another must read book for people interested in global economic trends. This book builds on his popular The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization to describe what he calls Globalization 3.0 which started around 2000 and replaces Globalization 2.0 (the industrial revolution) as the defining economic driver for the 21st century. Friedman describes how the world has become more “flat” as people and countries have been connected through the Internet and a massive global supply chain. He also explores the challenges for some of the world’s 3 billion people in the “unflattened” world and how we need to help them participate in the benefits brought by globalization.

Read full book review

Labels: book reviews, friedman, globalization, poverty

Manji is a gay, practicing muslim who grew up in Vancouver area, Canada (my home town) and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She is a journalist and now activist for reform in Islam. Manji describes herself as a muslim refusenik who is fed up with the stuck-in-the-6th-century, refusing to think mainstream muslim culture dominated by “desert Islam” religious despots.The anti-dote? Revive “ijtihad”, Islam’s lost tradition of independent thinking. Regarding poverty, she asks her fellow muslims some very poignant questions about why they support (primarily through silence) oppressive Islamic regimes which keep women as 2nd class citizens and create enduring poverty in so much of the world. While this is not strictly a defeating poverty-type book, it is very helpful to hear a muslim insider explain Islam today.

Read full review

Labels: book reviews, islam, poverty

I just finished reading Jeffrey Sach's book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. This is probably the best book that I've read so far which seeks to lay out the facts -- both historical and present -- on the state of global poverty and with concrete recommendations about how to move forward.

Here are a few facts:

• world population -- about 6.1 billion
• extreme poor (< $1 income/day) -- 1 billion -- live at subsistence without core basics
• poor ($1 - $2/day) -- 1.5 billion -- above subsistence (survival ok), but hard to meet ends meet
• middle-income (few $1,000's/year) -- 2.5 billion -- most live in cities, have housing and maybe indoor plumbing, children go to school, nutrition and clothing are adequate -- but not like USA middle-class
• high-income -- 1 billion

He advocates two goals by 2025: (1) End extreme poverty; and (2) Enable all poor a place on the economic development ladder. He demonstrates how a modest 0.5% of GNP provided as as official development assistance (ODP) by the developed countries through 2015 would be adequate to achieve the UN Millenium Development Goals (MDG) which target reducing extreme poverty by 50% from 1990 levels. Since Sachs was one of the key contributors to MDG, he provides details into why these goals were chosen and how they can produce these (seemingly) dramatic results. He then declares a 2025 goal to extend MDG objectives for 10 more years at a decreasing % of rich country GDP investment level to finish off the task. Why a decreasing investment level? Because with fewer poor people, growing GNP in poor countries and continued growth of overall GDP in developed countries, the cost for ODP is simply lower.

One thing that stuck out to me is the lack of follow-through that the USA has had towards promised aid to developing nations. The US has publicly committed (signed multiple documents) that it will make "concrete efforts" to contribute 0.7% of GNP to ODA. Our current level is about 0.2%. We spend all told about $15B on aid per year (vs. $450B on military.) And of the $15B, more than half is on activities other than ODA (e.g. paying USA consultants.) For the USA to reach 0.7% of GNP as ODA here is what it would take ... "With the U.S. per capita GNP rising by around 1.9% per year, the extra amount represents less than one third of a single year's growth in GNP. So, if the U.S. were on track to reach a $40,000 disposable income by, say, January 1, 2010, it would instead reach the same income on May 1, 2010, one third of a year later." (p. 304)

I have additional topics I'll cover in separate posts.

Labels: book reviews, poverty, poverty stats, sachs

I think it is pretty much unanimously agreed to by most economists that in order to unleash the full potential of the wealth creation process of capitalism that a nation needs to have a reasonable and predictable methodology for defining and managing property rights.

Desoto heads up a Peruvian economic think tank. In this book, he describes the historical development of property rights in the developed world and how property rights work today in the rest of the world. He argues for property right reform as a critical component to economic development in 2nd and 3rd world nations.

Read full book review

Labels: book reviews, de soto, poverty, property rights

I recently read a book called World on Fire written by Amy Chua, a Fillipino law professor at Yale on the economic ownership complexities in developing countries around the world. This book examines the wealth imbalance in most developing countries where non-indigeneous, small minorities have risen up to have dominant economic wealth. Chua explores the implications of this on our expectations of consequences when we advocate for instant free markets AND universal suffrage democracy.

Read full book review

Labels: book reviews, dominant minorities, poverty