World Hunger and Poverty Blog

Presstv.ir recently reported that Muhammad Yunus wants to use his micro-credit system to help more countries:

Bangladeshi Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus has said he is hoping to export his micro-credit system to more African countries.

“There is a lot of interest from African leaders to whom I have been talking. The question is how this can be translated into practice,” he told a press conference at the close of a World Bank meeting on Africa in Berlin.

Yunus said the entire developed world needed to strive to help Africa in order to live up to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals which include halving extreme poverty by 2015.

“This is very important. It is the first time the UN has set such goals. The time has come to stick to them.”

Yunus, nicknamed the “Banker to the Poor”, won the 2006 Nobel peace prize for helping millions escape poverty through micro-credit financing projects, which enable people without collateral or steady income to get small loans.

Read entire article on Presstv.ir.

Muhammad Yunus’s micro-credit system has proven effective. He has literally enabled millions of people to escape poverty with his micro-credit loans. Where archaic charities and government welfare has failed, Yunas has succeeded. Through small loans (usually less than $50), Yunus lets poor people escape poverty, get on their own two feet, and start or repair their home businesses. After which, they repay the loans and can remain out of poverty on their own. Unlike expensive charity and welfare systems which increase dependency, Yunus’s cost-effective approach leads to self-sufficency among the otherwise poor.

I cannot applaud Muhammad Yunus enough. I also applaud those who involved with issuing Nobel prizes for rightfully recognizing the great man.

Kansascity.com recently wrote about a business named FINCA that helps desperately poor people in 21 countries by providing business loans. I include an excerpt:

Many people and organizations offer assistance to make life more bearable for the poor. The New York-based Foundation for International Community Assistance has a particularly powerful approach: It assists poor people around the world with credit to help them start or strengthen small businesses.

It is a model worth supporting and emulating.

“When we started 23 years ago, it was a dream. It looked impossible loaning money to desperately poor people,” said FINCA International board chairman Robert Hatch, a resident of Kansas City.

It’s an arduous task to help people who live on less than $2 a day and whose low incomes affect their nutrition, health, and ability to send children to school.

With as little as a $50 loan, one client can open a small business. The money is repaid in weekly cycles over three years while the person builds up a vibrant micro-enterprise as well as a healthy savings account.

Read entire article on kansascity.com.

This exemplifies exactly the kind of approach I want to see. While remaining cost efficient, it helps poor people permanently escape poverty by becoming self-sufficient. I applaud FINCA International!

With loans, we can essentially end poverty for free. In fact, instead of costing money the loaners can profit from it by charging interest. Through mutually beneficial arrangements, both the poor person who escapes poverty and the loaner reap benefits from the transaction. We can set these mutually beneficial arrangements up in a non-governmental way, such that the loans come from private organizations rather than governments. To permanently escape poverty, people need to have access to loans that pay for food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare while it pays for education (including job training) and then job placement (including starting a business if applicable). These services must be of the highest quality; so that the person earns enough from their employment (including self-employment) that the person can repay the loan with interest while also paying for food, clothes, shelter, and healthcare. Then, not only has the loaner profited (which enables them to then loan to another person), but also the recipient of the loan has profited so much they can both escape poverty and live debt-free.

Douglas Crow recently reported on a slightly overweight 63-year-old man with a bum knee. The man, named Gregory Cox, plans to walk 2,600 miles to promote his plan to end poverty in the United States. I include an excerpt:

[H]e believes each step he takes on his 2,600-mile trek from northern California to Chicago leads to ending poverty in the United States.

Cox wrote and self-published a fictional book called “Schizophrenic Rescue,” which outlines his economic plan.

The sporadically employed, one-time salesman who holds a master’s degree in economics wants 10,000 people on the verge of poverty to save $20 a month for a year. Then they could use that $2.4 million to start an insurance company to insure their cars and houses.

The company also would produce annual checks that would go into a retirement account for the company owners.

As time goes on, other companies would be formed in a similar model in several industries.

To promote the idea and build financial backing, Cox wants Oprah Winfrey to feature him and his book on her television show.

She hasn’t invited him. So Cox will mostly walk from his Northern California home to her Chicago studio, stopping at media outlets along the way to seek publicity.

Read entire article by Douglas Crow.

I haven’t read Cox’s book, but from the above outline of his plan I think it has potential. He has come up with a practical plan that helps poor people help themselves to escape poverty and gain self-sufficiency. Additionally, he has a great idea to promote the plan. I hope he gets on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Regardless of the success of his particular plan and implementation, his perfectly exemplifies what we need. We need original plans. The old ways have not worked! We need to think of innovative methods to use voluntary organization to end hunger and poverty, both in the United States and throughout the world.

Lindsay Beck recently reported called poverty goals “still distant despite Africa boom,” in a recent article. I include an excerpt:

Africa is experiencing unprecedented growth, but the continent will have to sustain that expansion for years to come if it is to lift people out of poverty, the African Development Bank chief said on Thursday.

Africa is set to grow about 6.5 percent this year, marking the fifth straight year of above-trend expansion, due partly to trade with Asia, especially China, AfDB President Donald Kaberuka said.

“Africa will have to sustain this growth for several years — probably a decade and a half of similar numbers — to begin to see an impact on poverty levels,” Kaberuka said at the close of the bank’s two-day annual meeting in Shanghai, China’s glittering financial capital.

“What this means is that, with the exception of a few countries, come 2015, many African countries will not be able to attain the Millennium Development Goals, and that includes access to clean water and sanitation,” he told reporters.

Read entire article by Lindsay Beck.

I can all but guarantee that the world will not achieve the MDGs. We can, but we won’t. The UN and other government agencies have no interest in actually solving the problems that they get made to fix. Bureaucracies inherently get caught up and misdirected with corruption and inefficiency.