It might be the closet sociologist in me, but I have always enjoyed billboards.  I figure that you can learn a lot about a society’s values by what people post on billboards.  I still remember Coca Cola billboards from thirty years back with only a logo and four words, “It’s the real thing”.  More recently, the City Bank billboard in Dhaka: “Money never starts an idea.  It is always the idea with starts the money”.  Or the Airtel India ad: “Go wherever.  Do whatever”.  Or the LG (Life’s Good) ad promoting their LCD TV as “The ultimate seduction.”  Or the Kenya ad promoting a well known whiskey with just two words, “Keep walking.”

Billboards are not always stationary.  The outer walls of buses and trucks make great rolling buses.  “India is great”.  “Horn please”.  “Is prosperity the will of God?”  I liked the truck in South Dakota, “Delivering supply chain solutions to the food industry.”  Nobody has time to read a book on a billboard, whether rolling or not, so the phrases go to be short.

My interest in these writings on the wall has also morphed into a quite a collection of graffiti – sometimes defacing in net impact, sometimes amazingly artistic but mostly always, an expression of something.  Wish I read could these wall art expressions better.

So whether I am on Facebook or roaming rural areas of Africa, I am always on the lookout for what the wall messages are.  Driving by a Ethiopian farmsite, I see a large area of red chili peppers drying for further processing, and on the house, some amazing folk art – a flower, the “lion of Judah”, a coffee pot, a horse and a covered house.  I am pretty sure that hungry people do not have time for art work on their houses, and to me it was a little indication that the occupants at least had the resources to adequately feed themselves.  Food secure, in other words.

When I am invited, I also like to visit the interiors of people’s homes because what they post internally also has clues of their aspirations, celebrations and values.  On a wall inside another Ethiopian home, extremely sparse in terms of possessions, utensils and furniture, the chalked words in Amharic (which I couldn’t read) and some in English which I could, “Without God and life” – almost certainly an expression of basic desires.

In another rural Ethiopian home, a larger drawing of a school child – partially colored in.  Family members dressed in a more modern style.  The “lion of Judah” as the symbol of faith.  A corn stalk with leaves and developing cobs, and carefully colored in, the important wicker basket with the characteristic lid designed to host the daily bread – the enjera.  Give us our daily bread.

So I see lots of stuff on billboards and on wall postings and on signboards and on rolling vehicles.  People are not one-dimensional in terms of their values and expressions and things to say.  Still, I am struck by how often, especially in less well to do communities, I see expressions of hope and desire to be food secure – to daily have the means to access the food we need to survive and prosper.  So it feels good to be working for IDE, an organization dedicated to providing income opportunities for the poor – income opportunities which provide access to the food desired and required.

Al Doerksen
August 2010

In 2006, the World Food Program distributed 4 million metric tons of food to 87.8 million poor people in 78 countries. Consider the carbon footprint of growing 4 million tons of food, transporting it to 78 countries, and transporting, housing and feeding the army of experts who supervise its distribution. Now add the carbon footprint required to regularly distribute food and water to regions in chronic deficit, like China’s Yellow River Basin and India’s Deccan Plateau. In Mumbai alone, 79 water tankers made 222 trips daily this year to deliver water to poor people during the dry season. Add to this the carbon footprint of the $100 billion we spend each year in futile massive development projects, and a picture begins to emerge on the impact of poverty on carbon emissions and climate change.

But the impact of poverty on the environment goes far beyond climate change.

Continue reading here for further interesting, and perhaps contentious, connections Paul makes between poverty and “green.”

Priming a treadle pump in Copperbelt, Zambia



It seems self-evident that we should care about helping 2.4 billion people raise themselves out of poverty. But really, why should we? Most of us working in the field of development fall into that fortunate few: the richest 10 percent of people in the world. Is it altruism alone that motivates us to care about the fates of billions of individuals whose lives we know relatively little about? For some of us, perhaps. But for most, recent history has made it painfully evident that the fates of all nations are connected. As economic institutions and markets have become ever more globally linked, the peace and security of our nation and of all nations are inextricably interwoven. And the widening gaps between the “haves”and the “have nots” are not simply morally questionable—they also lead to greater violence and instability and further economic stagnation. As President Barack Obama cautioned the world in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo, Norway,“Security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive.”

As we slowly recover from the worst economic downturn in nearly a century, we would be wise not to ignore the spectacular opportunities to create jobs and profits and to spur more rapid economic growth by giving birth to dozens of Henry Ford sized new markets that serve 90 percent of the world’s customers. By investing in income-generating enterprises that provide access to basic human needs, we are investing not only in prosperity but also in education, health, and greater global security.

The strategies to get there are surprisingly simple. We need to start by recognizing the enormous market opportunity to create products and services that 90 percent of the world will pay for instead of limiting ourselves to 10 percent of the world’s customers. We need to start treating the poorest of the poor as customers, not as charity cases. We need to listen to those customers to understand their biggest, most pressing needs and build simple, affordable solutions; ones that can be easily maintained and which create profitable businesses for local entrepreneurs. And we need to do so by relying on business models that offer attractive profits to companies and commercial rates of return to investors. Most importantly, we need to galvanize and embrace the self-interest and enterprising spirit inherent in all of us—companies, investors, and poor people.

The most effective way to reach the world’s poorest people and to give them the chance to generate wealth and lift themselves out of poverty is to energize market forces, those same forces that have fueled enormous wealth creation in developed nations for generations.

The time to begin is now.

– Paul Polak, Peggy Reid, and Amy Schefer

Having worked in the food aid “industry” for some years, and having written extensively on “food security,” I am interested in what is really being said.

The report did not say one billion people are malnourished, although undernourishment can certainly lead to that. The report also did not say one billion people are starving — in technical terms, an acute form of hunger in which the body begins to actually feed on itself for nourishment. Thankfully, the report did not suggest that lack of food production or availability was the issue, although it was observed that “domestic staple foods still cost on average 24 percent more in real terms than two years back. The report did speak to a spike in food insecurity.

My favorite definition for food security is “access at all times to enough food to live an active healthy life.” FAO gets it right when they observe that the poor are less able to purchase (ie, access) food especially where domestic markets are still stubbornly high….”the incidence of both lower incomes due to the economic crisis and persisting higher food prices has proved to be a devastating combination.

So fundamentally IDE is a food security enterprise. Why is this true? Because of our focus on incomes (which provide access to food supplies/markets) and on agricultural production (which either increases direct access to food for consumption, or which increases local supply, which on a larger scale brings down prices).

In the report, several factors contributing to the widespread decrease in food security are listed, in particular those related to the global economic crisis:

• A 32 percent decline in foreign direct investment in developing countries
• A 5–8 percent decline in foreign remittances by foreign migrant workers
• A reduction of about 25 percent in official development assistance (ODA)
• Increases in risk premiums for lending money to developing countries
• Decrease of 5–9 percent in international trade (depending on whether you ask IMF or WTO)

Some of the countries mentioned in the report include Bangladesh, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Zambia, all countries in which IDE has a presence. See the full news bulletin here.

— Al Doerksen, CEO of IDE