The Poverty Paradox: Why Most Poverty Programs Fail And How To Fix Them | Efosa Ojomo | TEDxGaborone

[Music] so I have a confession to make about a year after I graduated secondary school I failed the entrance exam into University in Nigeria twice and between you and me if I took the exam a third time I think I would have failed again but that's not even the saddest part of the story I think for me the hardest part of the story is that if I was successful and if I passed the exams here are images of some of the universities where I would have had the opportunity to study some of these universities have the same acceptance rates as some of the most elite institutions in the United States of America this is what poverty looks like many books have been written about how to end poverty organizations make it their mission to end poverty in fact every year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to end extreme poverty and we've made some progress we've reduced the global poverty rate from about 35% in the 1990s to just under 10% today but if we're honest with ourselves and there is no progress without honesty what we will find is that a majority of the countries that have escaped poverty are in Asia and primarily one which is China a majority of the people who have escaped poverty are from China and what you find is that more than half the number of people living in poverty today exist in our continent in Africa in fact when you take these 18 countries and you look at their GDP per capita in the 1960s and you compare it with the GDP per capita in 2015 what you find is that these countries are poorer today than they were in the 1960s and so how is it that we're spending billions of dollars every year trying to eradicate poverty but we've got some countries that are poorer today and they were 50 years ago that's one of the questions at the core of my research at the Clayton Christensen Institute in Boston but this isn't always how I planned I would spend my life about 17 years ago when I could not get into University in America I was fortunate to get a scholarship and I got the University in America the University in Nigeria I went to university in America in fact I felt like this guy I felt like I had just won the lottery in fact I tell my friends I felt like I was in prison I escaped then I won the lottery I had no plans of ever coming back to Africa I mean who wins the lottery and goes back to prison but as I was chasing my American dream and I opened a book in February 2008 one night and I read about this girl so 10 year old girl in Ethiopia who had to wake up every morning at 3 a.m. walk miles fetch firewood and sell so she could take her of herself and her family something happened to me that night because I thought about the hundreds of millions of other children on this continent that lived life like her and I dedicated my life to making sure that we improve the lives of people like her so I got some friends together and we started an organization called poverty stops here which since raised funds so that we could build wells invest in education and give out micro loans in struggling communities in Nigeria we'd build wells in communities where women and children would have to walk miles to fetch water but something interesting started to happen after we'd build a few wells the wells started to break at first I thought maybe this is our problem we were just a bunch of passionate guys excited about ending poverty and didn't really know what we were doing after I researched this some more I realized this isn't just us there are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wells on the continent that are broken and this problem was so important to me that I went back to school to figure out how to solve it while I was at school I was lucky to meet this man he's one of the most prominent professors at Harvard and he's one of the world's leading management thinkers is the father of disruptive innovation over the past couple years we've been studying what role innovation has to play in development we've been thinking about why we spent so much money trying to eradicate poverty but we don't get the results that we want and he has helped me see that our obsession with ending poverty is actually where the problem lies the first reason for that is interestingly the end of poverty is not the same as prosperity the end of poverty is not the same as the end of suffering it's not the the same as the end of hardship and the end of struggles there are billions of people in the world who are technically not living in poverty you know less than a couple of dollars a day who are still living very difficult lives and so as difficult as it is to end poverty it turns out that we're focusing on the wrong thing a friend of mine once told me one day that focusing so intently on poverty is like a student doing everything they can so they don't get an S in school I mean it'sit's a good thing not to get an F but is it really admirable should that be what we should be focused on and the second thing is that when we focus on poverty we see everything through that lens and because poverty almost always shows itself as a lack of resources a lack of food a lack of water a lack of schools a lack of roads a lack of clinics infrastructure a lack of things that rich people have and poor people don't what we end up with is that poverty is a resource problem and so what do we do we push these resources onto these poor communities in the hopes that we can eradicate poverty and create prosperity but then we get the results that aren't quite what we expected it's the same thing that happened to me when I went into the wells to try to get water into the community and what I found is that this image actually represents many projects in the development community where we push and push and push resources and poor communities but the progress that we make is actually very limited and that's because many of the projects are anchored on this question how can we eradicate poverty but if we tweak that question just a little bit and asked a different question how can we create prosperity what we begin to find is that this is not a resource problem at all this is an innovation problem and I mean innovation simply put is practical solutions to real problems and we find that many of the resources that are pushed on these poor communities are not practical because they can't afford them and they're not getting to the root cause of the problems you know a few weeks ago I was in Washington DC giving a presentation on the importance of innovation in development and I showed this slide with different demographics 70% of rural population 10% access to electricity the average person spends more than half their income on food the infant mortality rate is almost 20 percent and I asked people in the audience I said what country do you think this is and of course you know we we won that one people you know Somalia Sudan Mali the Democratic DRC and after I saw that they weren't gonna get it I said this is the United States of America now they were shocked and I said this is the United States of America in the 1850s through the early 1900's it had demographics that were worse than some of the poorest countries on the continent today and in order for us to figure out how to create prosperity in Africa we have to ask ourselves a question what happened in America did they push a bunch of resources on the populace or did they use a different strategy well America innovated I'll give you an example in the 1900s the car was a luxury that only rich people could afford but in 1908 Henry Ford decided to make a car for the average American he decided to make a car simple and affordable now many people laughed at him he lost several investors people thought he was crazy because there weren't even roads in America to drive the car on but he was successful he persevered and as a result millions of people pull the cars into their lives he created tens of thousands of jobs and industries began to emerge around the car people started to build suburbs in the outskirts of the cities agriculture became more productive as you could easily transport food from the farms and to the cities in fact the United States government had tried to build roads in the 1800s but they couldn't race the money to build the roads but after Henry Ford's innovation the government was able to tax the citizens with the car sales and gas taxes and as a result they were able to build roads the car came before the roads the innovations come before the infrastructure but you see Ford was not alone he was born into an America that had this culture of innovation even though the demographics were worst in some of the countries in Africa today from innovations in agriculture to innovations in financial services innovators in the 1800's and early 1900s developed products that were simple and affordable so that millions of Americans could pull them into their lives now the one thing that these innovations have in common is that they made product simple and affordable as a result of doing this millions of people pull these products into their lives the companies needed to create jobs so that they could serve these customers and as a result development happened now I know some of you are probably thinking there's no way we can do this in Africa we've got way too many issues that we need to solve that's understandable but we've been trying to fix our issues since since the wave of Independence swept across this continent in the 1950s and 60s and how are we doing on that if America tried to fix their issues the way we're trying to fix our issues the country would not be where it is today see for America and virtually every prosperous country that we have studied innovation came before development but for Africa somehow we want development to come before innovation and we have the equation backwards unfortunately it just can't work that way thankfully there are a few innovators on the continent that are making products more accessible simple and affordable so that more Africans can pull them into their lives these are the kinds of innovations that we need to foster take the late-1990s for instance when the cell phone was called a rich man's toy very few people on the continent had it but Mo Ibrahim decided that he would create a mobile telecommunications infrastructure in several African countries that could serve millions of people and just like Henry Ford people thought he was crazy banks refused to give him money but he persevered and he was able to develop this infrastructure in several countries from Chad to Nazir to Sudan to the DRC and now millions of people have pooled these products into their lives we have industries that have emerged around it but interestingly he was able to unlock 3.4 billion dollars worth of value in seven years from some of the poorest countries on this continent think about that for a second he was able to sell his company for 3.4 billion dollars in about seven years that's the kind of prosperity that exists if we think about creating market creating innovations there are a few other innovators doing the same in financial services from M paisa and micro insurer to even entertainment the Nigerian movie industry Nollywood that currently employs about a million people to another innovation that's making malaria diagnostics really simple malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of Africans every year but with a product that cost a little over $1 you can find out if you have malaria in about 20 minutes so that you can treat it more easily now focusing on these kinds of innovations is more important now than ever here's why you know in 2015 the Pew Research Center did a study that said about 92 percent of Africans earn less than $300 a month now this is after the decade of the Africa rising narrative I don't know where we were rise into well we didn't rise very high but here's what that looks like that means these are the people on this continent as a proportion that earned more than $300 every month we need to start developing innovations for the millions of people for whom a decent education is not available for whom access to health care is not available access to affordable housing we can't find what would happen if we started to focus on innovations that targeted the hundreds of millions of Africans who don't have access to these products now I think what we would see is an innovation revolution on this continent that's going to catapult us from poverty to prosperity in less than two decades but the first thing we have to do is we really have to stop focusing stop obsessing about eradicating poverty and we have to start thinking about creating innovations that can lead to prosperity thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 108,080

Rating: 4.9195113 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Botswana, Business, Development, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Social Entrepreneurship

Id: KjlRaaMduzo

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2017