Poverty and the Ideas Gap

For starters, it got me way more attention than I am comfortable with. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good compliment and I understand the value of being noticed. But I hate it when people’s appreciation is based on potential and possibility rather than tangible achievement. My goal had always been to help people get out of poverty, and while TEDxKibera was an important milestone, it was nowhere near transforming the lives of the poor.

Thanks to hosting TEDxKibera, I was among a small group of lucky TEDx organizers to be invited to a TED conference in Oxford. Given the popularity of TED Talks, most people were more interested in my experience of attending a real TED conference. Almost no one was curious about what got me there in the first place.

TEDxKibera was a manifestation of what I had begun calling the “ideas” gap that I had witnessed while working with impoverished communities in India, and Kenya.

Living in poverty means experiencing income and resource gaps. But I was surprised to find that many of the poor were not aware of the ideas that could help them out of poverty. Most of the poor people I met were well versed in the problems around them. Most of the social sector professionals I met, at least the good ones, had useful solutions to these problems. These solutions seemed to travel between social sector professionals and funders rather than reaching the very people who stood to benefit the most from them.

My journey into the world of social entrepreneurship began in mid-2005. By December that year, I had quit my job as a programmer to go and apprentice with a well-regarded social entrepreneur. This stint took me across rural India and within two years I had more questions on the efficiency and effectiveness of the non-profit model. Pursuing this line of questioning, I discovered the Acumen Fund (which re-branded to Acumen over a decade ago), a social venture fund that claimed to improve efficiency by investing in social enterprises and the Poverty Action Lab, that claimed to identify effective solutions by bringing the rigour of Randomised Controlled Trials to the evaluations of poverty alleviation programs. I made it to the Acumen Fellows Program and arrived in Nairobi in late 2008. By the time I reached Nairobi, I had a decent grasp on the challenges of poverty and the multiple approaches to solving it.

The social sector in Nairobi surprised me in many ways but the one that stood out for me was how articulate people from low-income households were about the problems they faced. This was very different from my experiences in poor regions in urban and rural India. In hindsight, and with the benefit of experience, the presence of NGOs and do-gooders in Africa had created perverse incentives including making great story tellers out of the average poor who was well versed in local problems.

My day job was at Ecotact, a social enterprise that built public toilets branded Ikotoilets, and in my role as their operations manager, I was tasked to streamline operations at the four public toilet facilities in the Central Business District of Nairobi. Most of the staff came from poor backgrounds. Like others with similar backgrounds, they were all familiar with the problems of poverty, but I wondered how many of them knew of any or many of the ideas and organizations that could help them get out of poverty.

Take microfinance for example. It was very much in vogue because Mohammed Yunus had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Everyone I knew socially knew about microfinance though none of them would probably ever take out a microfinance loan. But neither the staff at Ecotact, nor many of youth I met in the slums of Nairobi knew about this idea.

I was having lots of conversations but my ideas were not getting through. I even tried to explain how Acumen Fund worked, but my attempts were futile. Around this time, Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder & CEO of Acumen, released her book, The Blue Sweater. I had just finished reading it and I had a copy in my bag when I visited one of the Ikotoilets next to Uhuru Park. On a whim, I asked the cashier, Ann, if she liked to read books. She said yes, and I asked her if she would like to read a memoir of the founder of the company that had invested money in Ecotact. I added that Jacqueline had walked by Uhuru park on her first day in Kenya too. She responded in the positive and I handed her my copy not really knowing what to expect.

A week later, I received a message from Ann. She was enjoying the book and was looking forward to meet and discuss. In the meanwhile, I also pitched the book to Kevin, who was interested in Leadership. Thankfully, a colleague at Acumen lent me her copy which I could share with Kevin. He was so inspired that he wrote a review of the book which Jacqueline treasures to this day.

Emboldened, I started asking some of the youth I knew and they all were interested. They had to wait their turn since I had only two copies. I counted this waitlist as interest in new ideas that could help them with their lives. While everyone was curious about new ideas, these conversations also revealed a global issue – not everyone liked to read.

At this point, I was reminded of the CD (yes, you read that correctly) of TED talks that Chris Anderson himself had handed to my cohort of Fellows when he spoke to us in New York. Chris Anderson had made me a fan for life with his talk - I was blown away by his passion and in his belief in Ideas worth Sharing.

I invited a bunch of these guys to my house for a viewing of TED Talks. They loved it. At the end of the evening I asked them for ideas on how to spread new ideas among their peers who just might act on some of them. They all felt we should show these videos in Kibera.

As I tried to figure out how to create an event where we showed these TED talks, I discovered TEDx (Google tells me that it launched on June 15th 2009) – maybe a random search or maybe I got an announcement email from TED. Either ways I decided to sign up. I applied with great fear because the requirements were very stringent, especially with branding, and I knew I was going to be found at fault for flouting almost every one of those guidelines.

The event was a success for me because we made it happen. It also was successful in conventional terms because it got the ears of TED itself – instead of any censure in spite of plenty of photographic evidence of how I had flouted the branding guidelines, I only got praise and opportunities.

A lot happened in the following years. I co-hosted multiple TEDxs in multiple slums in Kenya. Learning about the resource constraints, TED launched a TEDx in a Box project with IDEO. TED was also generous enough to come up with simpler guidelines to host an event to make it even easier for people from low-income areas to host a TEDx. After a while, Kevin took the lead in hosting these events.

I was preoccupied with another challenge I had uncovered – the ugly reality of the resource gap that faced every individual that left our event motivated to act on ideas that gave them a new vision for their future. Ideas can change how a person sees the world, but resources determine whether they can change their place in it. The TEDx events we hosted were having the same effect that the TED conference has on its attendees but unlike the average TEDster, our audience didn’t have the resources to act on their visions. And as some wise person once said, any vision without execution is a hallucination. Unless, I could figure out a way to support the motivated ones to cross this formidable barrier, they would be stuck in poverty.

Much of my work since then has been about trying to build bridges across both these gaps — first ideas, and then resources. But that is a story for another post.