Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS, an international citizens’ lobby to create political momentum to end poverty and the Microcredit Summit Campaign which brings small loans and other financial services to those most in need, spoke at a July 2010 TEDx Event about the driving principles and events that lead him to dedicate his life to the alleviation of hunger and poverty. He also discussed what he calls the “pitfall” of his own greatest success story, as well as its redemption.
In 2007, the Microcredit Summit Campaign surpassed its own goal of reaching 100 million of the poorest families in the world and helping to lift them out of poverty. Daley-Harris considered himself a proud advocate of the power of microfinance to alleviate poverty and hungry.
But in contrast to Daley-Harris’ success story, several other micro-financing organizations have been criticized for charging high interest rates. These organizations offer loans and other financial services to the poor, but end up making huge profits that outweigh the benefits seen by the families these companies purport to be helping. “We’ve been so successful that the whole thing is out of control now,” Daley-Harris said. “The profit maximizers have entered the field.”
But Daley-Harris still sees hope in microfinance. He tells a story of a gang leader who was paid by a small grassroots micro-finance organization in Kenya to rebuild a market that his gang had destroyed in an act of vandalism during the post-election violence in 2007. The organization paid the gang members to build the market during the day and to guard the building materials at night. And once the market was complete the organization provided the gang leader and about a third of the gang with a loan to create a business.
The gang now produce small metal cases for children’s school supplies and last year, said Daley-Harris, the gang leader approached the micro-finance organization to let them know that he had returned to his home town for the first time in 13 years. Before starting his own business he had been ashamed to face his mother but now she proudly welcomed him to his childhood home.
Instead of microfinance for profit, this is what Daley-Harris calls “microfinance for redemption.” It’s also what he hopes the future of microfinance will be.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
