The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Poverty is created by barriers; we have to get around or break down those barriers to deliver solutions. But that’s not all. The more I saw our work in the field, the more I realized that delivery needs to shape strategy. The challenge of delivery reveals the causes of poverty. You learn why people are poor. You don’t have to guess what the barrier

The judge who convicted Margaret Sanger said that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Really? Why? That judge, who sentenced Sanger to thirty days in a workhouse, was expressing the widespread view that a woman’s sexual activity was immoral if it was separated from her fu

When social norms help everyone prosper, they have natural support because they’re in people’s self-interest. But when norms protect the power of certain groups or forbid or deny things that are a natural part of human experience, the norms can’t stand on their own; they have to be enforced by some sanction or stigma.

That’s what it means to be poor. They’re on the margins. They’re not getting the benefit of what human beings know how to do for each other.

Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality.

To fight poverty, we have to see and study the barriers and figure out if they’re cultural, or social, or economic, or geographic, or political, and then go around them or through them so the poor aren’t cut off from benefits others enjoy.

Vishwajeet told me, “Their cup is not empty; you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.” If you don’t understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community’s practices, you won’t present your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won’t hear you.

When any community pushes any group out, especially its women, it’s creating a crisis that can only be reversed by bringing the outsiders back in. This is the core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill—including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.

What do I mean by a “delivery system”? Getting tools to people who need them in ways that encourage people to use them—that is a delivery system.