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

So I have a confession to make about a year after graduating high school. I

fail

ed the university entrance exam in Nigeria twice, and between you and me, if I had taken the exam a third time, I think I would have

fail

ed again, but that's not even the case. The saddest part of the story I think for me the

most

difficult part of the story is that if I was successful and 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 Las 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 on how to end

poverty

. The organizations' mission is to end poverty. In fact, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year. dollars trying to end extreme poverty and we have made some progress, we have reduced the global poverty rate from around 35% in the 1990s to just under 10% today, but if we are honest with ourselves and There is no progress without honesty, what we will find is that most of the countries that have escaped poverty are in Asia and mainly one is China, most of the people who have escaped poverty are from China and What we found is that more than half the number of people living in poverty today exists on our continent in Africa, in fact, when you take these 18 countries and look at their GDP per capita in the 1960s and compare it to the GDP per capita in 2015, what you find is that these countries are poorer today than before.

We were in the 1960s and so how is it possible that we are spending billions of dollars every year trying to eradicate poverty, but we have some countries that are poorer today than they were 50 years ago? That's one of the central questions of my research at the Clayton Christensen Institute in Boston, but that's not always how I planned it. I would spend my life about 17 years ago when I couldn't get into college in the United States. I was lucky to get a scholarship and went to university in the United States. College in Nigeria I went to college in America, I actually 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 and then I won the lottery. I had no plans to go back to Africa, I mean who wins the lottery and goes back to prison, but while I was chasing my American dream, I opened a book one night in February 2008 and read about a 10 year old girl in Ethiopia who had to I woke up every morning at 3 a.m. m. He walked miles for her, looked for firewood and sold it so he could take care of her and her family.

Something happened to me that night because I thought about the hundreds of millions of other children on this continent who lived lives like her and me. I dedicated my life to making sure I improved the lives of people like her, so I gathered some friends and we started an organization called "poverty stops here" which has since raised funds so we could build wells, invest in education and provide microcredit to people who they fight. communities in Nigeria we built wells in communities where women and children had to walk miles to fetch water, but something interesting started happening after we built some wells, the wells started breaking at first.

I thought maybe this was our problem. We were just a bunch of passionate guys excited about ending poverty and we didn't really know what we were doing. After I did some more research I realized that it's not 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 in the school. I was lucky enough to meet this man, he is one of the most distinguished professors at Harvard and he is one of the most distinguished in the world. leading thinkers in management is the father of disruptive innovation for the last two years we have been studying what role innovation has to play in development we have been thinking about why we spend so much money trying to eradicate poverty but we don't get the results we want and he has helped me see that our obsession with ending poverty is actually where the problem lies.

The first reason is that, interestingly, the end of poverty is not the same as prosperity. The end of poverty is not the same as the end. of suffering is not the same as the end of hardship and the end of struggles, there are billions of people in the world who are not technically living in poverty, you know, less than a couple of dollars a day, who are still living very difficult lives and As difficult as it is to end poverty, it turns out that we are focusing on the wrong thing. A friend of mine told me one day that focusing so intensely on poverty is like a student doing everything possible to not get an S in school, I mean, it's nice to not get an F, but is it really admirable that he's at that?

What should we focus on? And the second thing is that when we focus on poverty we see everything through that lens and because poverty almost always shows up as lack of resources, lack of food, lack of water, lack of schools, lack of roads, lack of clinics, infrastructure, lack of things that the rich have and the poor don't, what we end up with. is that poverty is a problem of resources and so, what do we do? We push these resources into these poor communities with the hope that we can eradicate poverty and create prosperity, but then we get results that are not exactly what we expected.

Is the same. That happened to me when I went to the wells to try to bring water to the community and what I discovered is that this image actually represents many projects in the development community where we push and push and push on resources and poor communities, but progress What we achieve is actually very limited and that is because many of the projects are based on this question: how can we eradicate poverty? But if we modify that question a little and ask a different question: how can we create prosperity? What we begin to find is that this is not a resource problem at all, it is an innovation problem and I mean that innovation, simply put, is practical solutions to real problems and we find that many of the resources that are imposed to these poor communities they are not practical because they cannot afford

them

and they are not getting to the root 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 data demographics 70% of the rural population 10% access to electricity, the average person spends more than half of their income on food, the infant mortality rate is almost 20 percent and I asked the people in the audience, I said what country do you think this is and of course you know we won that town you know Somalia.

Sudan Mali, the democratic Democratic Republic of the Congo and after seeing that they were not going to understand it, I said this is the United States of America, now they were shocked and I said this is the United States of America from the 1850s to the early 1900, had demographics. that they 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: what happened in the United States? Did they push a lot of resources to the population or not?

They use a different strategy. Well, America innovated. I'll give you an example. In the 1900s, the automobile was a luxury that only the wealthy could afford, but in 1908 Henry Ford decided to make a car for the average American. He decided to make a simple car. and affordable now many people laughed at him he lost several investors people thought he was crazy because there weren't even roads in the United States to drive the car but he was successful, he persevered and as a result millions of people incorporated cars into their lives He created dozens of thousands of jobs and industries began to emerge around the automobile.

People began to build suburbs on the outskirts of cities. Agriculture became more productive as food could be easily transported from farms to cities. In fact, the United States government had tried to build roads in the 19th century, but couldn't get the money to build

them

, but after Henry Ford's innovation, the government was able to tax citizens on road sales. automobiles and gasoline and, as a result, they were able to build roads in the 19th century. the automobile came before roads, innovations came before infrastructure, but you see, Ford was not alone, it was born in an America that had this culture of innovation even though the demographics were worse in some of the countries of Africa today, from innovations in agriculture to innovations.

In financial services, innovators in the 19th and early 20th centuries developed products that were simple and affordable so that millions of Americans could incorporate them into their lives. Now, the only thing these innovations have in common is that they made products simple and affordable as a result of doing this, millions of people incorporated these products into their lives, companies needed to create jobs to be able to serve these customers and, as a result, development occurred now. I know some of you are probably thinking there is no way we can do this in Africa. We have too many problems we need to solve, that's understandable, but we've been trying to solve our problems since the wave of independence swept this continent in the 1950s and 1960s, and how would we fare if the United States tried to solve it? their problems the way we are trying to solve our problems, the country would not be where it is today.

For the United States and virtually all the prosperous countries we have studied, innovation came before development, but for Africa we somehow want development to come before innovation and we have the equation backwards unfortunately it just can't work that way fortunately there are some innovators on the continent who are making products more accessible, simple and affordable so that more Africans can incorporate them into their lives, these are the kind of innovations we need to encourage, take for example the late 1990s. In the 1990s, when the mobile phone was said to be 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 than Henry Ford, people thought he was crazy, the banks refused to give him money, but he persevered and was able to develop this infrastructure in several countries, from Chad to Nazir, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and now millions of people have including these products in their lives. we have industries that have sprung up around him, but interestingly, he was able to unlock $3.4 billion 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. In about seven years that is the kind of prosperity that exists, if we think about creating innovations that create markets, there are some other innovators doing the same in financial services, from M paisa and microinsurers to even entertainment, the Nigerian film industry of Nollywood, which currently employs around one million people, has joined another innovation that is making the diagnosis of malaria really easy. Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of Africans each year, but with a product that costs a little more than $1 you can tell if you have malaria in about 20 minutes so you can treat it more often.

Easily focusing on these types of innovations is now more important than ever. Here's why you know that in 2015 the Pew Research Center did a study that said about 92 percent of Africans earn less than $300 a month. This is after the decade of Africa's rise. narrative I don't know where we rose, well we didn't get very high, but this is what it seems, that means these are the people on this continent who proportionately earned more than $300 every month, we need to start developing innovations. for the millions of people for whom there is no decent education available for whom access to healthcare is not available access to affordable housing we cannot understand what would happen if we started focusing on innovations aimed at the hundreds of millions of Africans who We don't have access to these products now.

I think what we would see is an innovation revolution on this continent that will catapult us from poverty to prosperity in less than two decades, but the first thing we have to do is really stop. With focus, let's stop obsessing about eradicating poverty and start thinking about creating innovations that can lead to prosperity, thank you.