We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it ca

We don’t even have to get creative! Building out infrastructure is enough to get most people out of extreme poverty and it doesn’t have to be sold as aid, it can be sold as expanding markets. 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-can-feed-the-world_e-pdf https://www.ifad.org/documents/d/new-ifad.org/smallholders-c...