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May 8 - July 9, 2014
What was so clear to me was the way these very impoverished Rwandans at their point of most desperate need, huddled against those advancing machetes in that church, did not need someone to bring them a sermon, or food, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a micro-loan. They needed someone to restrain the hand with the machete—and nothing else would do.
The history of the world’s effort to fight severe poverty is largely a story of seeing what’s obvious and simple and trying to do something about it, and in the process, discovering the hidden and complex realities of that poverty, and then trying to re-engineer solutions that better fit those realities.
Violence in the developing world is like grief in the developed world—it’s everywhere, but we just don’t see it.
An excerpt from IJM's book, The Locus Effect.
Surprisingly perhaps, one of the most massive and successful efforts to listen to poor people was sponsored by the World Bank in 1999 in a study released in three volumes titled Voices of the Poor. There had never been anything like it. In tens of thousands of detailed personal accounts, very poor people speak for themselves, answering the questions: How do you view poverty and well-being? What are your problems and priorities? And what did the world learn from listening directly to the poor? Without a doubt, one of the most powerful revelations came from allowing poor people to finally pull
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the World Bank has estimated that the epidemic of gender violence kills and disables more women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44 than cancer, traffic accidents, malaria, and war combined.29
chilling statistic
