According to global poverty experts
The goal of ending poverty is elusive, and those in the aid business seem to oscillate between giddiness and despair, between the excitement of the latest miracle cure and accusations of failure or worse. As the critics never fail to point out, billions of dollars have been spent on aid but the poor are still with us.
There is no one thing that can end poverty. And certainly no one thing that is within the capacity of you, or us, or any particular person or institution. The fight against poverty is not a crusade, with a well-identified and specific enemy, be it unbridled capitalism, rogue governments, over-regulation, hunger or malaria. All of these probably have something to do with the persistence of poverty. But none are easy to fix and, more importantly, even if they were fixed, poverty would still be with us.
Fighting poverty is to fight, with patience and deliberateness, the many problems that make the lives of poor people difficult: bad schools, dirty water, infectious diseases, the vagaries of weather and other natural disasters, poor sanitation, lack of skills, petty corruption, potholes, etc. The list goes on.
These problems are concrete but hardly glamorous, possible to solve, but often without a known solution. No one person can solve all of them and, in any case, getting them all fixed will not end poverty tomorrow and maybe not even in 50 years. But if we could give up the lofty goals and empty promises, and focus all our energies on the concrete steps we are able to take here and now to improve the lives of the poor worldwide, we would at the very least bring some real comfort to the lives of many millions.
And perhaps out of all that, in some unexpected corner of some unheralded economy (after all, who in 1979 thought the world economy one day would rise and fall with growth in China?), there will be a spark that will make the entire economy catch fire, unleashing the growth that will eventually end poverty as we know it.
Poverty 