> poverty is now concentrated in places where growth is harder to achieve, and population size is rising fast. Around seven in ten of the world’s poor are in sub-Saharan Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria alone account for a quarter of the total. If current poverty rates persist, rapid population growth means that these three could be home to more than two-fifths of the world’s poorest by 2050.
The world permanently funding cash handouts in highly corrupt countries sounds like a terrible idea.
Sounds much better to investing in infrastructure and improved governance to make the growing issues in sub-Saharan Africa more like the success stories in Asia and other parts of Africa.
Harder to steal infrastructure. But obviously still possible especially before and during construction, and after during maintenance contracts.
When I think of funding Africa, I think of Andrew Millison's video blogs about building a green belt.
Everyone is looking for a simple solution, but simple solutions don't take into account human social dynamics.
They're going to replace USAID in the poorest nations, offer more free Chinese education.
In time they'll unseat English as the global language.
The best colleges, by some metrics are already Chinese. Give a few hundred thousand Africans tier 1 free Chinese education and see how global perspectives shift in a few decades.
Next the Yuan will become the world reserve currency.
Edit: Sources are always better than opinions.
https://globalchinapulse.net/confucius-institutes-and-the-sp...
> The 189 member states of the United Nations set a target to bring the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to half its 1990 level by 2015 ... Economic growth did nearly all the work. A booming China accounted for about two-thirds of the decline
That's one way to put it. Another way is that China set out to intentionally raise 800M people out of extreme poverty as a decades-long, multi-faceted priority and policy goal of the CCP. According to the World Bank [1]:
> China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition.
Or, as The Economist put it, "economic growth". None of this is new. Another oft-cited example is Brazil's Bolsa Familia [2].
Back to The Economist:
> None of this is insurmountable, though. As Alfred Marshall, a founding figure of modern economics, once observed, eradicating poverty is less a quandary for economics than for the “moral and political capabilities of human nature”.
That's so weird. We apparently can't blame income and wealth inequality on economics. No, it's a moral and political failure.
[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
[2]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/05/27/br-bols...
Most third world dictatorships survive by suppressing citizens' rights to defend themselves to enforce order of just law.
The second amendment is not protecting you against an army with tanks, jets, bombs etc
Or perhaps it's effective altruism?
Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
> Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
Not limiting yourself to an ideological bubble is actually a good thing, regardless of what website you're on.
I didn't know that "giving capital and opportunity" to people is inherent to capitalism. My understanding of capitalism is, that if people have money, they can "use their own money to further their own life", but capitalists avoid giving money to other people unless the return on investment is greater than 1.
marojejian•2h ago
>it would cost $318bn a year to reduce the global poverty rate to 1% at the $2.15-a-day line—roughly 0.3% of global GDP— with imperfect, real-world information.
>around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty.
While in reality I'm sure this would be much harder than the article suggests, I buy the direction of the key points:
1) it costs a feasible amount, 2) there is strong support to do it. 3) creative approaches might be effective.
Note: I kept the title I found in the print Economist version, since it is more informative.
datadrivenangel•1h ago
But also we need to do more for ending poverty!
WillAdams•1h ago
https://www.heifer.org/
which focus on providing folks with the means to raise their own food and be self-sufficient are the key.
darth_avocado•1h ago
It’s not even that malicious, bureaucracy takes over and more money is spent on the middle men than the recipients. In the US we already spend about $600B in charitable giving, yet most of the problems still remain.
Even if you fix the distributional challenge, the second order effects of how the modern economy is setup ensure that extreme poverty will always exist. If the poverty line is $10k and you give every single person $10k, the corporations and rent seekers will adjust the cost of living so that the new poverty line is now $20K and extreme poverty still exists.
WJW•1h ago
In Africa it is quite common to kill foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking has nothing to do with it, it's just child soldiers being brainwashed to kill their enemies at any price.
darth_avocado•1h ago
And hunger isn’t that uncommon in the US, where a extreme poverty rate is still 4-5% of the population.
philipallstar•39m ago
cogman10•1h ago
Where in Africa is this common?
mathgeek•46m ago
cogman10•40m ago
That's bad, but it doesn't seem incredibly common.
The rest of africa looks to be pretty tame by comparison.
philipallstar•35m ago
cogman10•28m ago
The number of killed is 12 according to this report. I should also mention the fact that these aren't killing "foreign aid workers in order to deny food aid to the enemy". Instead the report calls out just general crime being the primary reason for the deaths.
> Nigeria saw a significant increase in all victim types (killed, injured, kidnapped) from 2023 to 2024, with fatalities up to 12 from just 2 the previous year. Ongoing insurgency and criminal activity made road ambushes the most common attack location, with small arms fire and assaults both rising as types of violence. More kidnappings and violent robberies occurred at personal residences across several regions than in previous years, highlighting the increasing risks of targeted attacks.
cortesoft•45m ago
WJW•40m ago
pbhjpbhj•1h ago
I've checked it when giving funds to new charities.
Oxfam, for example, are quite inefficient - https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/ch...
hansvm•42m ago
anonym29•1h ago
If they really were, they already be doing it, and it would be a solved issue. For many folks, it's a lot easier to say 'yes' to a survey about whether you would give your own money to the poor than it is to actually give your own money the poor.
tgsovlerkhgsel•1h ago
There seems to be some kind of international target of 0.7% of GNI (~GDP) for developmental aid already, which governments often don't meet fully but come close to (e.g. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...), so the 0.5% would probably be viable in tax form.
JKCalhoun•1h ago
That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
bombcar•1h ago
Teever•1h ago
Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.
AlexandrB•1h ago
tempestn•59m ago
jl6•1h ago
Ray20•13m ago
Poverty is a relative concept. Even among billionaires, there are poor billionaires that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
hansvm•35m ago
Mind you, they still think poverty is bad, but they'd object to something like paying for basic infrastructure and be happy to create the modern-day equivalent of CCC camps to pay the poor people to build that infrastructure. That sort of thing.
dalmo3•1h ago
darth_avocado•1h ago
singpolyma3•1h ago
loeg•37m ago
No. The median American household net worth is $193k, and of that, $8k in checkings/savings accounts. 54% of adults have cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses (this excludes non-cash savings, and obviously an even greater percentage have cash savings that would cover 1-2 months of expenses, which is still not paycheck-to-paycheck).
hansvm•13m ago
- Median net worth is $193k, of which $185k is in their home. Suppose a $10k emergency crops up. Well...you're fucked. If you're lucky you can take out a loan against the accrued value relatively quickly, but otherwise you're taking a 10% haircut having to sell quickly, another 10% in transaction fees, and another $10k in the sudden move/storage/renting/loss-of-work/etc situation you found yourself in liquidating your home to cover an extortionist colonoscopy+lawyer pricing or something. You're _fine_, but when minor road bumps can cause $45k setbacks ($55k if we count the $10k expense this depended on) you're not not living paycheck to paycheck.
- You can't compare the median savings to the median net worth. They're not the same person, and the cross-terms can take almost any distribution.
- The 54% stat is based on self-reported vibes and is pretty blatantly wrong. The median household also has $5200 in unavoidable (without delinquency, losing your home, etc) expenses, which doesn't jive very well with $8k in savings somehow lasting 3 months (assuming the cross terms I complained about aren't too terribly distributed). You would expect 2+ paychecks of stability (which, incidentally, is also the usual prompt for "paycheck-to-paycheck" stability -- not whether it takes one paycheck to be screwed but two), but then you're hosed.
And so on.
You're _right_; the median US household won't go broke missing a paycheck; but 2-3 paychecks is enough to cause major problems at the 50th percentile, give or take friends and family stepping in to soften the blow.
IshKebab•49m ago
throwup238•48m ago
Based on stats from IFAD [1]:
> There are some 500 million smallholder farms worldwide; more than 2 billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. These small farms produce about 80 per cent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Estimates are hard to come by, but a significant fraction of those (>750 million) are subsistence farmers with zero market access beyond their nearest village or town. That not only means thy can’t effectively sell their produce but they can’t easily afford or have access to basic technologies and resources to improve their yields enough to get out of subsistence farming. Even metal tools are difficult to come by in many places, let alone a consistent supply of fertilizer.
Mobile phones have had an outsized impact on these communities because they allowed farmers to get market data even if it was just a village away. Roads, irrigation, sanitation, and a whole host of other infrastructure we take for granted would have an even bigger impact, and these aren’t temporary solutions like food aid, which just distorts markts even further.
That said, there are huge long standing systemic problems (some violent) that make these kinds of investments hard to justify politically and create a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.
[1] https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...