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Ready to solve world poverty? (and why what we’re doing isn’t working)
Last week I spent three days in a room full of very smart people talking about the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Being a former economist and, having spent much of my career working on policies and programmes to solve poverty, I joined the ‘prosperity’ track to see what new things I could bring to the conversation. I say ‘new’ because it feels like this is a conversation people around me have been having for at least thirty years (the span of my working career), and so I listened with the intention of seeing something different about potential solutions.
Here’s what I noticed in that room:
1. Maslow has a lot to answer for
There’s a perception that seems to me to be more prevalent when we talk about international development, that getting people out of extreme poverty is the route to allowing them to focus on belonging, community and (eventually) self-actualisation.
If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If not, the premise is that there are ‘basic needs’ — food, shelter, water, etc that are fundamental foundations we must fulfil before we can go on to meet our psychological and self-fulfilment needs.
