Give the man the damn pole...

They say give a man a fish an he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish an he’ll eat for a lifetime- but what if he doesn’t have a pole, or net or boat or crumbs from his table to use as bait – what good is a skill or has knowledge if you don’t have the capital to put it into practice? I think I came here expecting to do a skills transfer of sorts. Even in training when dealing with income generating activities they were sometimes discussed as though we would train the community how to do a certain activity that would earn them some income. But I imagine that many people have the skills, its just a matter of getting started.

So I have been thinking about these issues all week, what it is going to take on my part and what these communities have/need. The past few days I have also been finishing up Muhammad Yunus’ book Banker to the Poor on microcredit (talk about timing!!). He articulates a point that I imagine many of us have thought about, and provides a constructive solution. Yunus states that the main reason why the poor are poor is not because they do not have the knowledge or skills to earn a living, but more that they are stuck in this system where they cannot get the money to start up business on their own. Essentially, the poor become trapped in a cycle where they are beholden to those middlemen who exploit this problem, by lending out money or supplies in the morning and expecting to receive it back in the afternoon tenfold, forcing people to give up any real profit they make and just barely keeping them from starvation so they keep coming back the next day. Yunus clearly illustrates throughout the book that it is not the skills that are needed, but the startup cost for a small business, and nobody had been willing to lend to them.

I have studied many aspects of micro credit and have really heard all this before, but it takes on a new level of magnitude living in the community I am in. So here I am, in Kenya, in a community with thousands unemployed-trapped in this cycle of poverty. We have some lending institutions in place that might lend to some of these people granted they present their ideas and projects appropriately. Hopefully that is where I can help, help people take their ideas and make them reality, help people get that fishing pole. We shall see. Ive got a lot of learning ahead of me.