A few months ago, I read Dr. Sach's book, The End of Poverty. Whereas, I was quite taken by the beauty of the idea that the world has enough resources to end extreme poverty, I could never imagine it succeeding on a global scale. I've worked in international development for over 20 years, much of that spent in Africa and Haiti. Although I agree with Dr. Sach's that the assistance has always been extremely limited, I don't agree that money alone could solve the problem.
But what if we didn't focus on the whole world, but just the Caribbean? Poverty is a serious problem--extremely so for Haiti, but a problem for every country. However, the region itself isn't poor. There is a lot of money here in the Caribbean, lots of people love the region, and there are lots of great people and great organizations working towards eliminating poverty.
What would happen if we all got together and fought for this goal? Could we generate enough noise to attract enough people, resources, and political will to eliminate extreme poverty from this corner of the world?
Postscript:
I started this blog as to document my investigation into this question. Although I later decided that ending poverty (versus alleviating poverty) was not possible, I found that I liked blogging and decided to keep going with this blog. I changed the focus from just ending poverty in the Caribbean to an investigation of development issues in general. Please let me know what you think.
