88 Ways to Do Something About Poverty

Here are some of my favorites from the list of 88:

1. Eat meatless meals 2x a week. Donate that grocery money to a local food bank.
2. Stop putting off adopting a child through an organization like World Vision (or adopt another one).
3. Talk with your children about poverty and who it affects.
4. Talk about poverty.

But I’m interested to hear what YOU do to combat poverty? What would you add to list of of 88 things?

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It’s expensive to be poor

Yeah, it’s expensive to be poor! Betcha not everyone has thought about that. But it’s true — when you hear the phrase the “penalty of being poor,” it’s not just referring to the likelihood for disease and death (although, yes, those outcomes are also a penalty of being poor). As Paul Constance at the IDB puts it:

If your income is low — say the equivalent of US$300 per month or less — you probably live in a rural village or an urban shantytown that lacks decent access to drinking water, sanitation, or electricity. The roads leading to your home are likely to be in terrible shape. Chances are that you don’t have legal title to the land you live on.

As a result, you have to spend more of your income on the basics than people who live in high-income areas with decent infrastructure and services. You spend much more buying water from roving vendors than you would if you had an in-home connection (in some Central American cities, up to 30 times more per liter). You miss work more often because of preventable illnesses caused by poor sanitation. You waste more hours commuting because of inadequate public transportation. And since you can’t put up your house for collateral, it’s almost impossible for you to obtain a loan. In an emergency, you have to resort to loan sharks that charge usurious interest rates.

So if you’re poor, you end up paying twice, three times, sometimes more! than your richer counterparts for the same basic goods and services. THIS is where smart businesses and business solutions come in. If the poor collectively around the world have a purchasing power of $5 trillion, then businesses should want to get in on that market, right!?

Well, not quite. The businesses that we Americans are used, the Fortune 500 behemoths haven’t figured this out yet. Perhaps there’s a lack of political will. But it’s partly due to the fact that they just don’t know how to design for and serve the poor. The good news is that some of cutting edge businesses are going at it — check out this site called Design for the Other 90%. Sponsored by the Cooper Hewlitt Design Museum, this exhibit features innovative and just really cool technologies and designs that were created specifically for the poor. There’s a low-cost drip irrigation system that helps small farmers grow, decreasing water usage by 30-70% but increasing yields by 50%. There’s a low-cost foot prosthetic that’s helping landmine victims in places like Somalia, Rwanda, and Vietnam. And let’s be clear on this — we’re not talking charity, people. We’re talking business — profit-seeking and social-mission-serving businesses. They’re not mutually exclusive!

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Blog Action Day!

Hello best and brightest of all readers! Today is Blog Action Day and I’m so proud to be a part of it. Together, more than 11,000 bloggers around the world are taking the time to use their blogs and their words to raise awareness about poverty.

Here at The Lady V Prophecy, the focus will be on market-based solutions to serve the poor. What does that mean? Well, think of it this way — there are four billion people around the world making less than $5 a day and together, they spend about $5 trillion each year. That is one HUGE market for businesses to serve! And I believe businesses can tap into this market and provide essential goods and services in ways that are not only ethical and responsible but profitable! Because unless we move our thinking beyond charity and into sustainable, long-term solutions, we will continue to have one billion people living in squalid urban slums, 30,000 children dying every day from preventable causes, 5 million people in pain from cancer that could have been treated … you get the picture. But we’re in a new era – and era in which we can think up new hybrid solutions to these very problems! And that possibility, to me, is so exciting!

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