Innovation in the Developing World

I know, I know – I’m getting a lot of e-mails from you all who want to read the next installment of the “It’s Time to Change the World” series of blog posts. I want those posts to stand the test of time, so I am taking my sweet time making sure my thoughts are well-organized and cogent before I hit “publish.”

But in the mean time, here’s something interesting on the subject.

I had an exciting invitation about a week ago that I was thrilled to accept.

Back when Cacey and I were heading to Africa for the first time, my international roaming SIM card was having some problems. I tweeted about it, and out of the blue, a former marketing exec at that company tweeted back and connected me with another extraordinary person who fixed it.

Since then, I’ve become a big fan of that former marketing exec, Jackie Danicki. She now leads communications and external relations at Innovations for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a project of Concern Worldwide US.

The “Innovations” project came about because of a $41 million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create “bold and inventive ways to overcome barriers to delivering proven maternal, newborn, and child health solutions.”

As I’m sure you can see, maternal and child mortality have a tremendous impact on developing world poverty and the global orphan crisis. At best, a mother dying in childbirth leaves the remaining single-parent family teetering on the edge of poverty by removing 50% of the adults from the family. At worst, the remaining children instantly become orphans with no one to care for them.

Bringing real change to maternal, newborn and child health in the developing world will have a tremendous positive impact on lessening poverty and solving the global orphan crisis.

“Innovations” held an exciting competition for new ideas in the field. You can watch this video about what they did in Sierra Leone, Malawi, and India.

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: the video is embedded above.)

Now, a small panel facilitated by retired Intel CEO Craig Barrett, will be meeting next week in New York City to discuss and analyze the process.

I was more than a little bit surprised and humbled to be invited to join this group of people.

I’m hoping that my work in entrepreneurial business and product development, combined with my passion for Africa and the developing world, can contribute some useful ideas and out-of-the-box thinking to the process.

So on Saturday night, I’ll hop a red-eye to NYC (this is what happens when you buy plane tickets at the last minute). Along with some other meetings, the panel is on Tuesday and I fly home on Wednesday.

I’ll let you know what I see and learn there!

Changing the World Requires Sustainable Solutions

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

We’ve talked about how different poverty is in the developing world when compared with the United States, but there are two more things that are critical to understand: first, the scope of poverty as expressed in US Dollars; and second, the foundation on which workable solutions will be built.

While I saw a lot of what I’ve been writing about while I traveled in Africa, I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of it all until I came home and read The Hole in our Gospel, a gripping book by World Vision CEO Richard Stearns. (World Vision, by the way, is the largest non-profit focused on these issues in the entire world, with more international staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the US Agency for International Development combined.)

While it’s true that I didn’t agree with everything he wrote, Stearns’ point is addressed to the church and is deadly accurate – far too often, American Christians completely ignore the radical mandate for social change that we see in God’s words, perhaps best embodied in the command I often quote from Isaiah 1:17: “seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless.”

It was the statistics on poverty detailed in the book that grabbed me by the lapels and shook me.

Consider this: in the United States, the average income is $38,611 per person or $105 per day. And that’s just the average – we all know people with incomes that are a multiple of that amount.

Out of the 6.7 billion people we share this planet with:

• 60% or 4 billion live on less than $4 a day
• 38% or 2.6 billion live on less than $2 a day
• 15% or 1 billion live on less than $1

As Stearns puts it, “brace yourself for the good news” – you’re rich!

If you make more than $25,000 per year, you are in the top 10% of the population. If you make $50,000 per year, you’re now wealthier than 99% of the world’s inhabitants.

That fact has the potential to dramatically change how we see the world.

Now, here’s the key question: what do we DO with this information? How do we build solutions that are sustainable and can permanently end poverty, rather than stick a band-aid on it?

As I’ve read and listened to a number of authoritative voices on this subject, I’ve noticed a few of them expressing a sentiment best summarized like this: ‘free market capitalism may actually be the source of many of these problems, and at best, is a direct hindrance to solving them.’

I could not disagree more.

Nobody says it quite that explicitly, but I see that sentiment in the chapter of Stearns’ book when he rightly criticizes empty materialism, but argues that the American Dream and the fight against poverty are diametrically opposed, and throws out the line “we need to put the American Dream to death.”

I see it in the incredible must-read book There Is No Me Without You, Melissa Fay Greene’s 2006 chronicle of the AIDS pandemic sweeping Ethiopia. Not only do a few inaccurate partisan potshots slip through, but an entire chapter is devoted to using some awful excesses on the part of pharmaceutical companies to paint the principles of capitalism with an extraordinarily broad brush.

I don’t know either of these talented authors personally, but I think the world of them. It’s my guess that in their righteous zeal to eliminate hunger and disease, they have been blinded to an incredible fact.

Free market capitalism and the “American Dream” have been among the greatest killers of poverty the world has ever known.

Remember, the free market is not a zero sum game. There isn’t a fixed amount of money in the world. Eliminating poverty will not happen by forcibly taking from some and giving it to another. The right kind of economic growth and investment is a “rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Rather than attacking the wealthy (or the systems that allow people to become wealthy), aren’t we better off convincing people that “being our brother and sister’s keeper” is not only our responsibility as fellow human beings, but is in our best interests as well? After all, the world’s wealthy would be better off if the number of customers that can afford goods and services tripled from 2 billion to 6 billion.

Let me put this another way: the growing gap between rich and poor is not evidence that free market capitalism is evil; rather, it’s a clear indicator that the opportunity of free enterprise has yet to penetrate deeply enough.

Philip Smith and Eric Thurman understand that fact implicitly and make it over and over again in another incredible must-read book, A Billion Bootstraps: Microcredit, Barefoot Banking and the Business Solution for Ending Poverty (referred to me by my friend Shanley Knox). They document the success of using tiny microcredit loans to help people achieve permanent self-sufficiency, permanently lifting their families out of poverty. The examples they share and the framework they’ve built is inspiring and hopeful.

So let’s review.

• There are 145 million orphans worldwide, and one child joins their ranks every 18 seconds. These kids are missing the permanence and love that they were designed to have. There are three ways to reverse that trend: adoption, orphan care and orphan prevention.
• The best way to prevent kids from becoming orphans in the first place is to arrest the root cause that tears their families apart: the spiral of poverty in the developing world, driven by hunger, disease, lack of access to clean water and few opportunities in education or employment.
• You and I are clearly among the world’s 2 billion rich people (comparatively speaking), and if we work together to harness the free enterprise system that brought us prosperity, we have the resources and capability to help the other 4 billion become self-sufficient and pull themselves out of poverty.

Let’s talk solutions!

Next Post: Is Adoption the Answer?

Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia