Making the rural poor richer is hard. As they get more and more of their needs met by the market they are competing with people thousands of times richer than t

Making the rural poor richer is hard. As they get more and more of their needs met by the market they are competing with people thousands of times richer than they are. Simply increasing their incomes is not necessarily an answer, although it is part of the puzzle. The real key is how can they turn what they have (land, sunlight, sometimes water) into what they need (everything else) _without_ having to go to buy things when they need essential needs met. It's not as simple as self-reliance, but admitting that the poor are poor and making them a little richer is not going to stop them being poor. So most of the problems of the poor are basic infrastructure - contaminated water supply and cooking over open fires are huge issues. Both of those are tech-fix issues: cheap, reliable water filters and efficient cook stoves exist. They're coming down in price and improving. Toilets are another huge win, although the technology is less ready. One Acre Fund has a programme which doubles farm yields; they've done tens of thousands of farms in Africa already with excellent results and are scaling fast. If you're interested in software, three areas: medical expert systems, farming expert systems, and basic education services from primary level up. If we could just get that set done, we'd have roughly doubled their standard of living without having put them into direct economic competition with the rich for more of their basic needs. This is not a common perspective, but it actually makes sense. The conventional development agendas do not really consider increased economic competition in their models at any deep level, resulting in very poor results so far. Hope that's helpful. http://hexayurt.com http://hexayurt.com