I have a question for the people who control billions of dollars in poverty funding. How many lives actually changed as a result? The question sounds simple.
The World Bank estimates that 824.3 million people—about one in 10 people worldwide—were living in extreme poverty in 2024. Progress has slowed to a crawl in many of the places that need it most. After decades of international aid, development programs, and increasingly sophisticated impact reports, we should be willing to ask whether we have become better at measuring poverty than escaping it.
I have spent years living and working alongside people in some of the poorest communities in Africa. I went there thinking I would help a village. Instead, I found myself asking a much more basic question about individual people.
What does each of them need? What would actually make tomorrow different from today? Poverty is too often viewed as a program.
But it is, in fact, individual lives, millions of them, each shaped by family, culture, leadership, education, opportunity, habits, and belief. Money is part of that equation. It is rarely the entire equation.
I have watched organizations become consumed by metrics because funders demand them. How many businesses were created? How much revenue did those businesses generate?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
