The Shell Foundation has issued a new report titled Enterprise Solutions to Poverty: Opportunities and Challenges for the International Development Community and Big Business in which they argue that simply dumping aid into developing countries is an ineffective strategy to combat poverty. It is a strategy that does very little to improve conditions over the long term. They also assert that there could never be enough funding to “make an appreciable dent on the scale of poverty that still exists.”
They argue that the money that is available should be targeted toward initiatives that stimulate local economic development that relies on developing local entrepreneurs. And in addition to funding, business know-how should also be provided to assure long term success. They call on large corporations and their foundations to support these efforts to generate entrepreneurial economies all over the world.
While philosophically I agree http://laparkan.com/buy-tadalafil/ with the premise of this report, I do have some worry of their intended strategy. They link their proposal explicitly to the UN’s Millennium Project, which will do little more that create another huge rat hole that we pour well-intended money into with little chances of it really doing much good.
We don’t need this money to go into national governmental agencies, or even worse a new UN agency, that will apply very little of the funding to its intended purposes of spurring entrepreneurship as a tool to reduce poverty. Such agencies create a huge bureaucratic overhead that does no direct good for the poor. As any bootstrapping entrepreneur will tell you, overhead is money that does nothing to produce product or provide a service for the customer.
(The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship provided the link to the Shell Foundation report).
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