Innovative Approaches To Reducing Global Poverty

This book presents innovative approaches to reducing poverty through the commitment, involvement, and leadership of individuals, for-profit businesses, and not-for-profit organizations. Many of these approaches are making significant contributions to reducing poverty right now. Some of these approaches may look promising now at their current level of success but will turn out to be limited in their scalability or in their ability to sustain themselves and endure over time. Others may some day be looked back upon as having laid the ground work for major contributions to reducing global poverty. However, all of them offer fruitful grounds for inquiry and learning. It is our intention that sharing the learning from these projects and initiatives from around the world will be useful to others committed to assisting the poor in escaping from poverty — especially by bringing the poor into productive business activities. It is also our intention that these experiences stimulate ideas for new directions that build upon and go beyond the rich variety of projects and successes described by the authors in this book. The innovative programs and projects described in these chapters are reducing poverty not just in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya, but also in the UK and the USA. They remind us that poverty is everywhere – in developed and under-developed countries. They remind us that just as poverty is in some sense almost everywhere, the opportunities to reduce poverty are also almost endless. They remind us how important a few committed individuals can be in pioneering new ways of reducing poverty and enhancing social justice. They point to the need for contributions by for-profit companies and not-for-profit social enterprises. They support and remind us of Peter Drucker’s framing of the poverty issue in terms not of seeking to make the poor wealthy, but instead in helping the poor find work that is productive and sustainable. And they remind us that reducing poverty, whether on a large scale or on a small scale, requires commitment, energy, and persistence, and a profound caring for others. The book also supports C K. Prahalad’s work made available in a number of his writings, including his very influential book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (Wharton, 2004). Prahalad’s work has called attention to creative ways to think about the question of poverty and how it might be reduced and eventually eliminated. He suggests ways of thinking and acting that break many of the traditional rigidities that occur in how we think about markets and business practices. Although one theme of Prahalad’s work relates to the benefits of marketing to the poor by supplying products better fitting the needs of low income individuals and groups, his work also emphasizes ways in which the poor can produce innovatively conceived and designed products for themselves and for others. This emphasis on enabling the poor to become productive is also presented forcefully in many of the chapters of this book, just as it is in Craig and Peter Wilson’s, Make Poverty Business: Increase Profits and Reduce Risks by Engaging with the Poor Greenleaf 2O06).

This book takes a unique approach to the topic of poverty reduction, primarily employing an international business framework as opposed to the usual economic or political lens. Some of the key ideas explored in the book include: poverty is primarily the lack of choices, not the lack of material possessions; attacking inequality of opportunity might be a more effective means to reduce poverty than attaching inequality of wealth; political systems matter, but individuals and for-profit firms also have a vital and indispensable role in helping to create the wealth needed to reduce poverty; and an effective corporate social responsibility strategy to help reduce poverty may include finding innovative and creative ways to operate profitably in areas of the world where poverty is currently robbing too many people of the opportunity to live their version of the good life. Building on such ideas, the book advocates for private companies to expand operations into the least developed regions of the world as part of their corporate social responsibility programs and to reframe the debates away from ones focused on exploitation and economic nationalism to one of creating opportunities across political borders.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

Understanding Global Poverty introduces students to the study and analysis of poverty, helping them to understand why it is pervasive across human societies, and how it can be reduced through proven policy solutions. The book uses the capabilities and human development approach to foreground the human aspects of poverty, keeping the voices, experiences, and needs of the world’s poor central to the analysis. Starting with definitions and measurement, the book goes on to explore the causes of poverty and how poverty reduction programs and policy have responded in practice. The book also reflects on the ethics of why we should work to reduce poverty and what actions readers themselves can take. This new edition has been revised and updated throughout, featuring: • a new chapter on migration and refugees • additional international examples, including material on Mexico, Covid-19 in global perspective, and South–South development initiatives • information on careers in international development • insights into how various forms of social difference, including race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexuality relate to poverty Fully interdisciplinary in approach, the book is also supplemented with case studies, discussion questions, and further reading suggestions in order to support learning. Perfect as an introductory textbook for students across sociology, global development, political science, anthropology, public health, and economics, Understanding Global Poverty will also be a valuable resource to policy makers and development practitioners.

World leaders have given the reduction of global poverty top priority. And yet it persists. Indeed, in many countries whose governments lack either the desire or the ability to act, poverty has worsened. This book, a joint venture of a Harvard professor and an economist with the International Finance Corporation, argues that the solution lies in the creation of a new institution, the World Development Corporation (WDC), a partnership of multinational corporations (MNCs), international development agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty, George Lodge and Craig Wilson assert that MNCs have the critical combination of capabilities required to build investment, grow economies, and create jobs in poor countries, and thus to reduce poverty. Furthermore, they can do so profitably and thus sustainably. But they lack legitimacy and risk can be high, and so a collective approach is better than one in which an individual company proceeds alone. Thus a UN-sponsored WDC, owned and managed by a dozen or so MNCs with NGO support, will make a marked difference. At a time when big business has been demonized for destroying the environment, enjoying one-sided benefits from globalization, and deceiving investors, the book argues, MNCs have much to gain from becoming more effective in reducing global poverty. This is not a call for philanthropy. Lodge and Wilson believe that corporate support for the World Development Corporation will benefit not only the world's poor but also company shareholders as a result of improved MNC legitimacy and stronger markets and profitability.

This is the first volume in an ambitious new series-"Patterns of Potential Human Progress"-inspired by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) and other initiatives to improve the global condition. The first and most fundamental of these goals-reducing poverty worldwide-is the focus of this book. Using the large-scale computer program called International Futures (IFs) developed over three decades at the prestigious University of Denver Graduate School of International Studies, this book explores the most extensive set of forecasts of global poverty ever made-providing a wide range of scenarios based on an authoritative array of data. It transcends the "$1 a day" baseline measure of poverty and probes important concepts like income poverty gaps and relative poverty. The forecasts are long-term, looking 50 years into the future, far beyond the 2015 date set out by the MDGs. They are geographically rich, spanning the entire globe and drilling down to the country level, including one of the most important global focal points, India. The poverty forecasts in this book, and all the volumes in the series, are fully integrated in perspective across a wide range of human development arenas including demographics, economics, politics, agriculture, energy, and the environment. Full of colorful, thoughtfully designed graphs, tables, maps, and other visual presentations of data and forecasts, this large-format inaugural volume ensures that the "Patterns of Potential Human Progress" series will become an indispensable resource for every development professional, student, professor, library, and indeed, country around the world.

Over 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger, and over ten million children die each year from preventable causes. These may seem like overwhelming statistics, but as Stephen Smith shows in this call to arms, global poverty is something that we can and should solve within our lifetimes. Ending Global Poverty explores the various traps that keep people mired in poverty, traps like poor nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to health care, and others and presents eight keys to escaping these traps. Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what approaches are most effective in fighting it. For example, celebrities in commercials who encourage viewers to "adopt" a poor child really seem to care, but will sending money to these organizations do the most good? Smith explains how to make an informed decision. Grass-roots programs and organizations are helping people gain the capabilities they need to escape from poverty and this book highlights many of the most promising of these strategies in some of the poorest countries in the world, explaining what they do and what makes them effective.

This study—the result of a collaboration between CSIS and the JICA Research Institute in Japan—reviews U.S. and Japanese public and private approaches to innovation, including building innovation ecosystems and promoting smart cities technology. It also presents two case studies that explore a specific innovative technology and its development impact. First is innovation-enabling platforms, including the Bohol Fabrication Lab, in the Philippines. Second is innovative approaches to urbanization, including a smart cities approach, in Jakarta, Indonesia. The report discusses challenges and approaches to supporting innovation in developing country contexts. It concludes with recommendations and final thoughts for developing-country governments, bilateral donors and multilateral organizations, and other actors to create an agenda around operationalizing transformative innovation for sustainable development and poverty reduction.