Auren Kaplan of triplepundit.com profiles Paul Polak who is a leading voice for ending poverty through applying basic business principles. You can read the entire post here.
Paul says:
"You may have the noblest intentions in the world, and even be selflessly dedicating your time and talent as a volunteer, but you won’t get very far by treating poor people as recipients of charity."
Auren writes:
This is a controversial stance. Indeed,
there are thousands of global organizations, with tens of thousands of
hard-working human beings, attempting to lift these 2.7 billion people
out of poverty. But absent some notable success stories, the nonprofit
sector has failed to solve the issue of poverty in a measurable,
scalable way. If they had, Paul wouldn’t need to be working on ending
poverty.
The reason why is that without the market mechanism of profit
driving the intentions of individuals at every level of the supply
chain – down to the last 500 feet - things break down. But when people
are motivated by the opportunity to earn profit, they stay in the game.
The numbers speak for themselves.
For example: take a water well,
subsidized by the government and installed by a nonprofit. Once that
water well breaks, who fixes it? Unfortunately, the answer is usually no
one. However, if that well was operated by a small local business in
one of the nearly 650,000 villages in India,
and it made a small profit by selling that water to the homes of
villagers – a service the villagers have asked for and are willing to
pay – then that well will be maintained ongoing.
- What do you think?
- How do you and your organization think about the people you serve?
- Are they charity recipients or customers?
- What effect would treating them like customers have on your operations?
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