(Picture from This Is the Life) Defeating Global Poverty has a link up to a Muhammed Yunus interview with Ode Magazine and some commentary worth checking out. Yunus talks about how charity is not the way to help people in need, but giving them a chance to build their own lives is. I'm somewhat with Dave here in that I wouldn't totally dismiss charity, but I do see where Yunus is coming from. When I was in Sri Lanka earlier this year and the group I was documenting was trying to turn a village on to their project that would bring them a self-contained energy supply, which they would have to power and pay for (although a small amount, and about as much as they would individually be paying for Kerosene anyway), they balked at the idea, mainly because that village had been given a schoolhouse, a water tank, and a variety of other things by a large Christian charity. They said that if the electricity grid got close enough that same charity would hook them up. The thing is that electricity grid hadn't moved any closer in five years, so they might never have that chance.

Here are Dave Richard's comments:

This is definitely a very different way of thinking than the current establishment players/experts who claim to serve the poor -- e.g. Jeffrey Sachs, the U.N., Bono, Clinton, Blair and many others. Yet Yunus' success in building one of the world's most successful banks for the poor gives him the authority to challenge the status quo thinking. Yunus is by no means some neo-conservative touting some theory that sounds great but has no on-the-ground substance. Rather he is a practitioner who is much more interested in ways to actually bring opportunity to those who have been denied it by the current powers and systems.

I find this thinking very personally challenging as some much of the lens that I look through towards solving poverty (however incrementally enlightened I may have become in the past few years ;-) still includes a large dose of charity thinking. I keeping thing, "yes, but..." Hmmm... good food for thought and implications for the road forward.

In some other news on the charity v. tool building ...

*Yemen looks to cash in on over $4 billion in international aid.

*Cynthia Gair of the nonprofit organization REDF talks about moving people out of poverty and into work in San Francisco.

*The UK should not support local government in countries that have a weak central administration, according to the Minister for International Development.

*Ethiopia Receives $37 Million Food-Aid From U.S.