Sunday, October 29, 2006

Jeffrey and I are on the Same Page

I've been reading The End of Poverty, a book by Jeffrey Sachs that discusses the causes of extreme poverty throughout the world and describes what he believes needs to happen in order to eliminate poverty by the year 2025. It is an excellent book. I don't think that I could be reading it at a better time. There are some times in my life when I feel like several things come together at just the right time. This is one of them. Almost every page resonates with me. I feel like many of his insights and conclusions are ones that I have come to over the past two years of studying at Boston University and working with FORGE in Meheba. He talks a lot about taking a clinical approach to eliminating poverty, by which he means identifying the specific causes of poverty in a particular country, region, or community and creating a solution to address poverty there based on the particular combination of causes. That's what I've been trying to do with PACE. It's exciting to see my thinking reflected in this book. Jeffrey Sachs has been thinking about this a lot longer than me and has a lot of ideas that I haven't thought of and work perfectly with how I think that something like PACE could help to eliminate poverty.
 
I view PACE as something whose future is constantly evolving in my mind. Even the lesson plans that I've made change based on things that I learn about the participants, the community, and the problems that we are up against. Lately I've been thinking of PACE as an investment in a community. My ultimate vision is to be able to give a community all the knowledge and resources that it needs to make it onto the "ladder of development" as Jeffrey Sachs would call it. I'm still not sure everything that this investment might entail and how it would be different for different communities. That's why the approach needs to be so adaptable. I do believe that we're making a great start in Meheba with PACE. Something I just read today in The End of Poverty reinforced that belief.
 
In the chapter entitled "Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty" there is a section called "Investing in Technological Capacity" in which Sachs says, "Rapid economic development requires that technical capacity suffuse the entire society, from the bottom up... The trick, I believe, is to train very large numbers of people at the village level in creative and targeted ways, specifically for the main tasks at hand. Every village should aim to have a group of village experts, who have enough formal training to address basic technical needs at the village level." He goes on to give examples of a community-based agricultural extension worker and engineer. The PACE participants' projects incorporate both of those things. The women doing the agriculture project are planning on hiring an agricultural extension worker who will give workshops to people about modern agricultural methods and technologies. The men doing the transportation project will be hiring a mechanic/driver who will be in charge of operating and maintaining the vehicle that they will be buying for the community to use.
 
In just over a month, the participants of PACE have come to some of the same conclusions about what investments should be made in their community as what Jeffrey Sachs, the international expert economist on poverty, has come to after years and years of researching and thinking about the problem of extreme poverty. That leads me to believe that I'm doing something right here. The fact that these solutions are coming from the community members who are participating in PACE means that making good future decisions about what investments should be made in the community will not have to depend on my presence or the presence of anyone but those PACE participants. I just need to make sure that PACE is available to help make those investments when no one else is willing to make them and to continue to help them to find other places willing to invest in the community.
 
Ending extreme poverty is possible. It just requires the right investments. I am SO excited to have the opportunity to help make those investments. For a long time I've wanted to be able to help stop suffering I see in communities like Meheba. As each day comes and goes I feel like I'm inching closer to that dream.

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