Avoiding passivity

Oxfam America (my current employer) just posted it's quarterly publication, OxfamExchange, highlighting our work around the world. I'm certainly biased, but it's a great report (especially the story about Haiti). Here's a taste, from the introductory paragraph:

Development work is hard to write about. At Oxfam, we try to avoid simplistic storytelling on one hand and impenetrable analysis on the other, because both do a disservice to our supporters and the people we serve. The issues that we face, however, are complex, and effective solutions require careful thought, sustained investment, and hard work. We worry that even our best-told stories may produce the same passivity that TV engenders. Like watching a movie unfold—however fascinating, the characters often seem distant, unrelated to your life.

That last thought really resonates with me; since starting to work in development, it's been easy to be passive about the myriad challenges and injustices facing people around the world (and in my own community), and critical when writers oversimplify. I'll leave it up to you whether this report succeeds in sparking action, but I thought it was a great read and wanted to share. Would love to hear your thoughts if you read it!

what i've been reading lately (new post!)

My last post was over two months ago. Since then, I started a new internship doing data analysis and helped start a once-a-month weekend meal at my church, so it's been busy!

No food this time. I have been reading a few different development, evaluation, economics, and other exciting-topic blogs this morning and was inspired to share a bit of what I've been reading lately, mostly during & for my internship (and practicum literature review), but also for fun. Yes, I have a nerdy definition of fun. :)

The most interesting thing I've been reading about is called the Acute Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), created by two researchers at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative. You can download the working paper here, read a review and debate of the paper on Duncan Green's blog here, and peruse an Economist article about it here. The most interesting aspect of the debate was whether or not it makes sense to create Indices in the first place, the primary argument (against) being that you have to deconstruct the Index to understand what it means, so why go to the trouble of creating it in the first place? What's helpful about the MPI is that it provides a standard way of quantifying multidimensional poverty in 100+ countries, something that hasn't been done in a clear or coherent way, until now. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

Also on my reading list the last few weeks? Here's a peek:

• Out of Poverty by Paul Pollack. Basically an argument for local, contextualized, and low-cost solutions in development, especially in the agricultural field.
• Data Visualization by Ben Fry, Once Upon a Stacked Time Series by Matthias Shapiro (Political Math blogger), and the necessary Java tutorials and emails back and forth with my sister to start learning how to make some wicked sweet visualizations.
• Speaking Stata: How to face lists with fortitude, On numbers and strings, & How to move step by: step
• A few good blogs I found today (and earlier): AidWatch, From Poverty to Power, Chris Blattman's blog, and IPA's blog.
• I've also been reading various impact evaluations from J-PAL and IPA, mainly focused on anything having to do with "commitment savings products" or microenterprise projects that promote group-based microsavings before loans.

That's plenty for now - I've probably lost most of you! :)

Banker to the Poor

Tonight I went with some friends to hear Muhammed Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and "builder" of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He piloted microcredit lending to the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh and Grameen Bank, which grew out of his initial work, has been incredibly successful. He has some very interesting ideas about social business - business whose bottom line is change, rather than profit - and has been influential in the move towards social entrepreneurship - business with the poor/society in mind (focusing on a double bottom line: profit and community change/development). The paradigm shift required to see every problem as an opportunity, to make change your bottom line, to look at people as an opportunity to invest in as instead of a resource to extract...that's no small paradigm shift. Yunus summed it up practically when he talked about young people in Bangladesh, recipients of scholarships and educational loans for academic excellence looking for work post-graduation. There are few jobs available in Bangladesh, but when they asked Yunus for solutions he told them not to be job seekers but job makers. That is quite a paradigm shift.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Yunus speak. He had a very humble, even unassuming manner about him and was very engaging. He's done some incredible work in Bangladesh (and has even started a microcredit program in Queens, NYC, giving an average loan of $2,200 to 600 clients - and they've seen a consistent 99.6% repayment rate!) and is a man to be respected.

However, his motivation for ending poverty seemed less than attainable. He seems to believe wholeheartedly that if we could only change our current system (for it's our system, in his perspective, that makes people impoverished), we could iradicate poverty. If we could only recognize that people are not just selfish but also have the capacity to be selfless, to act on behalf of others, and if we could hold these two desires in a proper tension, then we can create a better world, a world without poverty. It's a compelling vision, but what's the motivation to be selfless? I don't think human beings are capable of ending poverty - we're certainly capable of all kinds of beautiful, incredible, powerful things, but we're also capable of all kinds of terrible, destructive, horrific things, like creating systems where the wealthy feed off the poor. I don't think we'll ever overcome that capacity on our own.

I wonder, though, what makes things like the Grameen Bank succeed. And, will it continue to succeed in the coming decades? Will it be a sustainable institution? Will it be a force of transformation in Bangladesh? Will it truly "change the world"? Only time will tell...