Doing Development Differently: Economic Rights for the Poor

Estefanía Campos  | 21 de marzo de 2018  | Vistas: 77

Brad Lips, CEO of Atlas Network shares the ideas behind the project Doing Development Differently, that works to accelerate the pace of poverty alleviation with locally grown solutions aimed at transforming the institutional environment in favor of market growth, primarily through securing economic rights for the poor.

He shares Adam Smith’s ideas exposed in “The Wealth of Nations” on the topic, because according to him

It's wealth that needs to be caused, not poverty”.

The common reasons people attribute to poverty are lack of education, family structure and social conflicts, but in his opinion, we need to study the causes of “the biggest enrichment”, that started a few decades ago and could give us better solutions to the matter.

We started from this idea that the vast majority of people who are in poverty are fully capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if the public policy environment protected their economic rights”.

In this lecture he explains what are “Economic Rights for the Poor” and why is it their focus, how can we help to establish these rights, what outcomes flow from projects that establish economic rights for the poor and finally shares his conclusions about the possibility to scale this up.

Finally he talks about the specific actions that should be done to work to promote development, such as focusing on specific problems in a particular local context, Identifying motivational problems, promote property rights, foster active, ongoing experimental iterations with new ideas to allow solutions to emerge and engaging broad sets of qualified agents to ensure the reforms are viable, legitimate and relevant.