Open Enterprise Solutions to Poverty Request for Proposals April 3, 2010

I have just been reading the Third Annual Open Enterprise Solutions to Poverty Request for Proposals. It looks to me like a good opportunity for collaboration between our academic research contacts in UK and our entrepreneurial contacts is Nigeria. I see it as win-win.

• Academics get good focus for research and funding to do the research.
  
• Entrepreneurs get good visibility (and hopefully easier financial support in future as a result of the research findings ).
  
• Dadamac gets an opportunity to get hired to help things go smoothly (no hard feelings if you prefer to carry on without us - but we can make it all much easier for you - which means that including us is a cost effective option).

Key points:

• Will award up to two (2) research grants of no more than $100,000 each.
• Focus on “Enterprise-based Solutions to Poverty” - I'm thinking of options from Fantsuam Foundation SME work; Zittnet; other business interests we connect with in Nigeria
• Letters of Interest due October 15, 2010

Background

Foreign economic aid and government programs have spent billions of dollars during the past five decades to alleviate the high number of people living in poverty. No country has been lifted out of poverty as a result of these efforts, but the mindset remains the same: aid programs are the key to poverty alleviation.

Entrepreneurship, as a solution to eradicate poverty (i.e. a focus on wealth creation rather than poverty reduction via re-distribution), remains controversial because it goes against the prevailing mindset that solutions to public problems are created by the government, rather than from the private sector. The notion of creating wealth is often stigmatized, and businesspeople in developing nations are sometimes regarded as too self-interested to be a force for positive social change.

There are efforts by international organizations and personalities that aim to correct this, but these efforts often turn into “top-down” and “social engineering” solutions, or into calls for philanthropic donations and handouts, rather than focusing on economic integration, improved productivity, and growth. The prevalent mindset in trying to “solve” the problem of poverty focuses too little on the opportunity these new, vast markets represent as a way to create producers and consumers, and to connect all people to networks of productivity and exchange.

At the core of the approach to poverty alleviation is the basic question: Are individual persons, no matter where they live, able to determine their own future? Does positive change come from the ingenuity of the individual or does a group of us (well-educated Westerners, primarily) have to tell the rest what to do? The answer to these questions goes to the core of our view of how we see the person, as fatalistic or self-determined and it determines whether our proposed solution to an issue like poverty involves a “top-down” approach or a “bottom-up” solution. Indeed, to what extent do we rest the locus of responsibility for a person’s future on him or her or on others, out of their beneficence?

The aim of SEVEN Fund sponsored research is to challenge the prevailing state of mind in this field.  (snip)

The prevailing approach is to focus on top-down projects with government-led conceptual frameworks, rather than on the less defined and often interdisciplinary methods required to develop and encourage entrepreneurial approaches to wealth creation and poverty reduction. (snip)

SEVEN encourages rigorous researchers to tackle the questions and the potential of enterprise-based solutions to poverty head-on and we are committed to promoting and diffusing the answers found.

Website http://www.sevenfund.org/enterprise-solutions-poverty/index.php

Let me know what you think

Pamela