Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1610390938
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Collaborate or Perish!: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World
village, including a government school and a few private schools. Those two children had been enrolled at the government school, but they had both run away countless times before their mother abandoned any hope of being able to make them attend. The ten-year-old boy, who was with his mother when we interviewed her, mumbled something about school being boring. Schools are available. In most countries, they are free, at least at the primary level. Most children are enrolled. And yet in the various
letters (in contrast, only 40 percent of those in the comparison villages could read letters by the end of the year). Those who could read only letters at the beginning were 26 percent more likely, by the end, to be able to read a short story if they had participated than if they had not.24 More recently, Pratham has shifted its focus to working with the government school system. In Bihar, India’s poorest state and the state with the highest measured teacher absentee rate, Pratham organized a set
sterilized. People traveling by train without a ticket— a widely accepted practice among the poor until then—were handed heavy fines unless they chose sterilization. Not surprisingly, the pressure occasionally went much further. In Uttawar, a Muslim village near the capital city of Delhi, all male villagers were rounded up one night by the police, sent to the police stations on bogus charges, and sent from there to be sterilized. The policy appears to have achieved its immediate target, although
they have the number of boys they want. This means that girls will tend to grow up in larger families, — 121 — 1586487980-text_Layout 1 2/22/11 9:52 AM Page 122 PO OR ECONOMIC S and many of the girls will be born in a family that really wanted boys. In India, girl babies stop getting breast-fed earlier than boys, which means that they start drinking water earlier and have accelerated exposure to waterborne life-threatening diseases like diarrhea.35 This is mostly the unintended consequence
bank manages to get its money back, things can backfire: Banks do not like headlines associating them with “farmer suicides.” And to cap it all off, when elections are around the corner, governments love to write off outstanding loans. Given all this, it is no surprise that banks find it easier to stay away from lending to the poor altogether, leaving the field to moneylenders. However, although the moneylenders have an advantage in getting their money back, they have to pay a lot more for the