New Trends for Poverty Alleviation

What to do when you build a school but the locals don’t see education important? What to do when you give poor people jobs then they continue to be alcoholic and gamblers? How can we make poverty reduction work effective?

I have recently finished the book ‘Banker to the Poor’ by the Nobel Peace Price Laureate 2006 Muhammad Yunus and went for a study trip to Manila for their famous national movement – Gawad Kalinga. There are a few similarities crucial to successful poverty reduction work that I drew from both practices.

1. First of all, we need to transform the values of the poor (or create buy in). They should not be seen as beneficiaries or recipients. They need to believe and feel empowered that their life can be improved significantly.
2. We need to create a community of the poor who can share the new values and support each other. Social/peer pressure can help them to persevere in changing their lives.
3. We need to address more than one problem at once: education, health care, information system, housing, livelihood, etc. Because if they become financially improved, we don’t want to see them falling back to their old life style if they were into gambling, drinking, violence, etc. Instead, they should go into more and more areas to overall improve their entire being.

I hope this can give some inspiration to the CSR projects of the companies to make the communities they operate truly sustainable.