Poverty is Evil

Making people suffer and forcing them to struggle to stay alive — which is what poverty does — is evil. It’s immoral to turn a blind eye at the social and institutional maltreatment of approximately half of humanity, and to deprive fellow beings of the means to have an even halfway decent life. It’s evil.

Poverty results from collective behavior, from the way societies organize themselves. The way we produce and distribute goods and services incentivizes dumping or ejecting the unwanted, with costly consequences in the form of social disruption and ultimately destruction.
What we do to people, we do to the environment as well. And here is how: Entrepreneurs create products and services to make money, which usually creates jobs and helps people to make a living. Our legal, social and economic systems are geared to optimize this way of doing things. Societies incentivize financial profits for shareholders over creating value for stakeholders, which happens to include the social and natural environment. Personal gain is set up so that it’s everyone else’s loss. Profit over value, power and control over participation and care. That’s how the twin evils of poverty and the environmental destruction are created. And its unintended; it’s nobody’s fault, although sociopaths thrive in this system. It’s more like a disease, a cancer, and it’s lethal to 22,000 children each and every day.

The poor have no future. What could have been their future has already been privatized by more powerful planners, financiers and enterprises. To create a future when the system you live in is stacked against you is very, very hard. Like overcoming cancer, you need support by people who know about remission and how to give it a chance. You need people that want to create a future that works for everybody, including the planet. People that have developed an immunity against the “couldn’t care less” cancer, the “nothing to be done” virus, the “not my fault” depression. Healing requires acknowledgement, it requires that we face these evils. Evil requires our compassionate presence.

The poor are treated as if they had no dignity. Plans and solutions are drafted and set into motion without them. It seems evident to most well-meaning helpers that the poor have no clue what to do, or they wouldn’t be poor, would they? Programs to alleviate poverty are often just an incarnation of the helper’s ideology or religion chipping away at some symptom. They do good, no question about it. Which greatly matters to the people that leave poverty behind because of it! And I am happy for them. Better to chip away at a symptom than to do nothing. It just doesn’t address the root causes of this evil.

Escaping poverty is hard work. Eradicating poverty requires to “do no evil” by creating a different way of doing things, a culture of human dignity and an economy that works for everyone. That’s what our company Jala is all about, to preserve, protect, and enhance community for all through equitable access to identity, capital and real estate. We are not for profit, although we’ll hopefully make some, to reinvest in what we’re doing. We’re working at the root causes of poverty — indecent living spaces, no ID, no social, institutional and financial credit. We do have some proposals but not the solutions. That’s what we work on with all stakeholders as proposals are presented, plans are drafted, ideas are explored, opportunities gauged. Lean participatory development needs data, facts, and passion to make it work for everyone. And it needs a culture where “we’re in this together.”

We have already started this work with communities in the slums of Sinagtala and Payatas, and soon Sitio Militar. We’ve started to explore the possibilities of jump-starting an equitable economy by building “vertical villages.” In the first quarter of 2020 we hope to expand these initiatives in several directions, and conversations with stakeholders have already begun. We’re willing to experiment, to consider weird and conservative ideas alike. We are inspired by the serendipity that guides us on this journey. We’re excited about the support we’re getting from all sides: informal settlers, missionaries, micro-entrepreneurs, government, businesses, investors, and many private persons who are inspired by our fresh approach.

Get in touch and tell us how you would like to participate.

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