Aquila Network Blog

What you see above is the daily budget for over a billion people across the developing world.

(I will refrain from inserting a guilt inducing comparison between that dollar and the amount we spend on coffee/music/junk/etc… We all know we over-consume)

Tim Harford, writing for Slate.com, gives us insight into the lives of these people living in extreme poverty and how they make purchasing decisions. Even though these individuals have such limited resources, they are still “consumers” and think through their purchases in the same framework as those in the developed world.

The very poor even seem to have some consumer power. For example, in the countries where free public schools are especially bad, some parents scrape together the resources to send the children to private schools. The teachers may be largely unskilled themselves, but at least they show up.

The same is true for health care. A pair of World Bank economists, Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer, examined the quality of public and private health care in Delhi, India. They found that while publicly employed doctors tended to be far better qualified than the private doctors, the private doctors tried much harder, spending more time, asking more questions, and examining patients more carefully. Competition works even for the poor.

In the conclusion to the article, Harford talks about the roll entrepreneurship plays in eradicating poverty. Microcredit and business coaching play a huge role in helping these individuals scale their meager business and increase the economic status of both their families and surrounding area.

Business has, and will continue to, play major part in fight to end poverty. There is truly a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid“.
The Body of Christ already has the resources necessary to make a serious difference in the developing world by harnessing the power of business. The resources are sitting, latently, in the pews each Sunday.

We need to start thinking strategically about mobilizing the gifted individuals in the church towards this end.