Three goals of an effective anti-poverty strategy.
Anti-poverty strategies need a clear goal.
When we know why people are experiencing poverty, we are able to design better strategies to help - and our help can be both preventative and restorative.
Research indicates that the best anti-poverty strategies are preventative. These strategies aim to set up an individual, family or community to be independent and self-reliant, capable of providing for themselves and with room to help others. This is why some of the highest-impact organizations work with expectant mothers, infants and children. The secondary strategies are restorative and seek to direct people back to full capacity. They’re harder and more expensive, but they typically make more of a “visible” impact.
When organizations effectively and intelligently match their interventions to one or more of these goals, they create powerful and long-lasting change.
1: Resilience
Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from a shock (disaster).
There are two elements of resilience: preparation and recovery. People can build resilience prior to a disaster through effective preparation, such as building safe and sturdy homes, being adequately nourished and immunized, and avoiding excessively risky scenarios. Conversely, people have resilience after a disaster by being able to quickly return to their pre-disaster state. Emergency savings and reserves, adequate insurance and affordable health care are examples of post-disaster restorative practices.
High-impact organizations aim to build resilient individuals, families and communities who are able to prepare for adversity in advance, weather the shocks of life as they appear, and return quickly to a pre-disaster state with limited impact on income-producing activities. This keeps them from the precipitous slide into poverty.
2: Productivity
Productivity is the ability to engage in economically-advantageous activity that allows you to meet your needs.
Productivity has two sides. The first, and typically smaller side, concerns attitude. People need to show the discipline required to both generate an income, and live within that income’s means (and despite what some may want you to believe, research shows that people experiencing poverty are usually incredibly hard-working and responsible individuals). The second, more important side, is having knowledge and skills that are marketable: someone is willing and able to pay for what you have to offer. Importantly, a person needs to be able to connect their skills to a market, and that market needs to be able to pay enough to support local living conditions.
High-impact anti-poverty strategies aim to build productive individuals, families and communities who have both the education and employment opportunities to engage in economically-advantageous activity, meaning that they also have enough resources to avoid sliding into poverty.
3: Self-determination
Self-determination is the ability to express choice and control over one’s life.
To ensure self-determination, we need those holding power to use their power for communal well-being. This is probably the most difficult goal to achieve, as it requires someone to relinquish some of their privilege in order to help others. But the research shows it’s also the most effective: when the powerful use their power to serve those considered below them, the standard of living improves for everyone.
Effective anti-poverty strategies aim to build self-determination, typically by combatting corruption, preventing violence and coercion, and promoting and ensuring the effective rule of law and justice.
Effective anti-poverty strategies aim to build one, two or three of these goals into the lives of individuals, families and communities. Importantly, each single goal is not independent of the other two as there is considerable positive overlap: a family with strong resilience is more likely to maintain productivity after a shock; an individual with strong productivity is more likely to maintain self-determination and avoid exploitation.
Some of the most effective anti-poverty organizations take a multi-pronged approach, supporting multiple areas and honoring the whole person. If all three goals can be realized, it’s likely that the individual or family will achieve long-term self-sufficiency.