Here are two things worth understanding about poverty:
1. Poverty is not just real life but without money.
Not if you define “real life” as the life you live right now.
The non-poverty life is about possibility. The possibility of connection, of leveling up, of a tomorrow that’s significantly better than yesterday.
No, the thing that’s possible doesn’t always happen, not for most people, but living with hope is something we take for granted.
A life lived in poverty, though, is always about scrambling. A life lived in poverty is about another kind of possibility, the very real possibility that there will be no food tomorrow, no shelter, no emergency health care for the children. It’s always about scrambling, about the risk.
Day after day, week after week, year after year, a life lived in poverty corrodes the people who have to endure it. It erases hope, self-respect and even fleeting moments of peace of mind. Cursed with poverty, people (not simply people, they are our relatives, our distant cousins, friends of friends, people just a few handshakes away in the global network in which we are all connected) waste opportunities because they cannot see them.
Poverty is an iron ceiling, a ceiling four feet off the ground, a ceiling that forces those who live with poverty to spend their days hunched over, on the edge of fear and humiliation.
2. Poverty is often part of a system, not an event.
A catastrophe can introduce poverty to a village or a family. But too often, poverty is generational, systemic and amplified by some of the very forces designed to eradicate it.
Those in poverty are likely to raise children prepared to live in poverty as well. It’s no surprise when parents are unable to educate, to breathe and to hope for much, they often create a cycle inherited by their children.
Worse, the system of poverty isolates people from markets. When there is no access to productivity, to education, to efficiency, the poverty gets worse.
If all the stores you frequent disappeared, you’d quickly become poorer because everything you need to do your job would disappear. Your food would get more expensive. And you’d waste days and days of your life traveling to obtain the things you need.
Anytime someone engages with a market, both sides benefit. If you freely choose to buy a bag of rice for a dollar, you’re doing it because you’d rather have the rice than the dollar. Not only does the farmer benefit, but so do you. As markets get competitive, efficiencies can arise and more interactions can happen.
Once the market takes hold, the systems that enforce poverty begin to break down. Jobs need to be done. Workers need to be educated. Most of all, free markets thrive on hope, and forces begin to arise to push certain forms of corruption aside.
When Acumen companies sell a solar lantern to replace a family’s dirty, expensive kerosene, or build a power system that enables a worker to triple the productivity of his home sewing machine, or devise a method to enable purchases fast, fairly and efficiently via cell phones, they begin to break this cycle.
Poverty is a chronic disease, one as long-term and horrible as many diseases that we’ve managed to eradicate over the years. The cure for this disease, though, is the action it takes to bring access, hope and dignity to the people who need it.
Jacqueline, you have touched millions of people. You have led an organization that has created tens of thousands of jobs, you’ve set a standard for what sort of work now matters in the developing world. At the same time, you’ve opened the eyes of people like me, amplified the connection that’s possible in our world, and done it all with patience and grace.
Everyone on the Acumen team, past and present, the extended family of a million or more of us, wishes Acumen a happy anniversary. This is just the start of a more stable, more connected and more healthy world.
Thank you.
