poverty

Dateline: Nairobi, Kenya

In February 2006, when travelling with my colleague Jacqueline in South Africa, we stumbled on the Guardian’s top 100 works of fiction of all time. Being competitive sorts, we immediately ticked off the books that we had read, or could have claimed to have read, and I was shocked. I am a well-educated guy who likes to read, so going in I thought I had a chance… I was skunked! I had only read 18 of these classics of literature while Jacqueline had read 45 or so.

Since then, on my travels around the world, I have enjoyed discovering a treasure trove of ideas, insights, and compelling stories from the list of books (current count, 38). Many of the novels resonate with the work that I do, inform the complexity of the current political and economic crisis, or remind us of our common humanity. And some are just plain old good stories.

None, perhaps, more so than Independent People, the great Icelandic novel, by Haldor Laxness, the great Icelandic author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1955. I added it to the list largely because of the wonderful 3 weeks I spent in Iceland in 1990 writing for Let’s Go Europe. Picked up for a song last fall in Portland at Powell’s (the world’s greatest bookstore), I hadn’t made much progress on the book until the long flight from London to Nairobi.

Set in early 20th century rural Iceland, it chronicles the life of a proud and stubborn freeholder Bjartur who is desperate to remain independent–of the banks, of family, of God–despite desperately harsh conditions and extreme poverty. At times hilarious, but poignant throughout, I was struck by how the economic boom and bust today is just an echo of the credit crunch that Iceland lived through following the prosperity of the Great War. (And how ironic is Iceland’s own particular financial collapse today).

Towards the end of the book, we revisit some of Bjartur’s contemporaries to see how they have fared over their lives. One, Olafur, who had lost his wife and children early in his life, continued to live in poverty in the same turf hut despite the arrival of a host of social programs and modern conveniences to his fjord. “Human life isn’t long enough for a peasent to become a man of means” Laxness reflects.

Further, in discussing the government’s attempts to improve the conditions of the poorest of the poor, through subsidies to buy tractors or ploughs, cheap credit, “access to water on tap, linoluem and eletric light”, Laxness concludes:

“The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant is the inability to avail oneself of the gifts that politicians offer or promise and to be left at the mercy of ideals that only make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

I am not sure that I fully agree, as there are millions of the poor around the world whose lives have been transformed within their lifetimes, but Laxness has a point. There are no quick fixes, this work can take generations, and it may not be through our generosity alone that they get out of poverty. We should pay heed to these fairly strong words of caution from nearly a century ago about how the best intentions may not, in the end, lead to real change for the poor.

Editor’s note: This post first appeared on Brian Trelstad’s personal blog, GreenHouseVentures

There is something Orwellian about last week’s World Bank announcement of a new poverty line, and the Bank’s entire effort to categorize the poor, that I found moderately disturbing. This top-down attempt to box the problem and then convince ourselves that, because of some statistical shenanigans, there are now more (or fewer) people living in poverty is the kind of pointless navel gazing that I want us to avoid getting trapped into at Acumen Fund.

We have had internal discussions about this, which inevitably end with the realization that we will know poverty when we see it. What’s more, we need an honest check against moving too far up market - thereby neglecting our charitable intent and our aim of trying to serve the poor, who we define in terms of lack of income, lack of access, lack of dignity and lack of a chance to take control of one’s own destiny.

It certainly should be someone’s job to think about the distribution of wealth, the trends in economic development and the amount (and distribution) of human suffering, but I would take the effort more seriously if it were done by an organization that holds itself accountable to evaluating its programs for their ability to systematically alleviate poverty.

Am on my way to one of the clients centre meetings to discuss health insurance. The streets of Lahore are very busy and all the cars are hooting; everybody is in a hurry and some cars have occupied the footpath and there is no space even for pedestrians to walk as the shop corridors are also lined up with food stalls and donkey carts displaying their wares.

As we approach the branch; it’s nothing close to what I had in mind; the dusty wall displays the signboard and we make our way through a narrow lane to get to the office. The offices and staff are very simple and also simple dressing is encouraged due to the nature of the clients they work with.I am introduced to Imran, a loan officer who will take us to his centre meeting; not far from the office. Each of the loan officers will normally attend 3 meetings in a day which translates to reaching 75 clients every day per loan officer. A typical branch will have serviced 375 clients for the day.

We arrive at the client’s house; a one roomed house; most of the clients live in one or two roomed house with an average family size of seven due to the kinship system. The furniture has been moved to the side and the women are seated on the mat on the floor and we join them. A typical centre comprises 25 women who are further broken down into groups of five which are led by group leaders and the lager group by a centre manager.

The loan officer will start by recording attendance and if quorum is achieved will have a discussion on a general topic and then will manually record their payments and wind up.
The clients are excited as there is a foreigner who has come to visit them and after a long fight which started because we have turned down a glass of juice which did not go down well with them and we ask about how the loans have empowered them.

This particular centre is from the second largest muslim sect and women are not allowed to work. One woman even emphasized that their men have sworn that the families would rather die of hunger than have their women working and fending for the family. So all the women here have accessed the loans and given the money to their husbands for business. Most of them would want to run a business but they would be viewed as almost next to prostitutes if they will go out of their homes and interact with men.

Back in my room in the evening and am wondering how do you help such women with such drive and zeal to move forward but are held back by their culture? The women are happy that even though they still have cultural restrictions and are still fighting for women’s rights; they have a social identity; they belong to a certain group. They are happy that they can now afford to by nice clothes and attend weddings and other social gatherings. They can finally become normal members of society; and it finally dawns on me that the social exclusion aspect plays major role in the definition of poverty.