Pippa MyringSpeaking at TED, founder and leader of Acumend Fund, a nonprofit business that improves the lives of the poor, Jacqueline Novogratz gave a talk about escaping poverty. In todays’s TED A Days she discusses her experience visiting a Nairobi slum and the people she met there.
Despite having worked on issues of poverty for over two decades, Jacqueline discusses her struggle to define the word poverty. She states that although income is a part of what defines poverty, choice and lack of freedom also come into it.
Recounting her visit to Mathare Valley, a mile long slum three miles from Nairobi, which houses over half a million people in tiny tin shacks, she explains the conditions people are forced to live in.
Families rent shacks, often 8 to 10 people living in one room, and the slum is rife with prostitution, violence and drugs, and raw sewage and garbage fills the streets. However, she also comments on the humanity which she witnessed there, the aspirations, ambitions, and relationships of the people in such an environment. For example, a woman who keeps her children in school, providing them with greater opportunities for their future, by selling water, soap and bread.
Key to Jacqueline’s talk is the story of Jane. She shared he dreams of becoming a doctor and marrying a good man. Unfortunately, her mother couldn’t afford school fees, and although she married and had two children, her husband left her at the age of 20. She is also HIV positive.
To make a life for herself and to support her family, Jane turned to prostitution. Heartbreakingly, she tells Jacqueline, “You know, the poverty wasn’t so bad. It was the humiliation and the embarrassment of it all”.
However, in 2001, through loans provided by Jamii Bora which are equal to a persons savings, Jane bought a sewing machine and begun tailoring and remaking old ball gowns, creating a successful business.
Although, by many definitions, no longer poor thanks to her business, Jane still lived in the slum. However, thanks to Jamii Bora building a new housing development (supported by Acumend) in which residents pay 10% of their mortgage, and match mortgages to what residents paid for their shantys, Jane is moving.
Jaqueline’s talk makes the important distinction between determining poverty as purely economic. Through a legitimate job, her family, her ability to help others, her dignity and agency, Jane doesn’t consider herself poor. In today’s economic climate, we can all take something from her hope, determination and self sacrifice.
