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Most Recent JANUARY 15, 2021 DEVELOPMENT, GIVING & PHILANTHROPY, RESEARCH

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Transforming Extreme Poverty
Suffering Well When
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We must begin by understanding what holds people back—and what gives them true hope.
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W
What Rachel and Leah
Can Teach Us About hat is the role of hope in escaping poverty? A quick glance at the
Rivalries in Leadership historical approach of the aid and development industry might suggest
that internal factors such as hope, aspirations, and identity play only
minor roles. Development practice and research has traditionally
focused on what economists call “external constraints,” the lack of a tangible resource
needed to foster economic prosperity among the poor. If a region lacks infrastructure, we
build roads. If people lack education, we build schools. If microenterprises lack credit, we
provide microfinance loans. Economic development has oriented itself around releasing
external constraints.

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problem with this approach is that
Why Hope real to Transforming Extreme Poverty
Is Essential
human beings don’t act just like the rational Books & Resources SUBSCRIBE

automatons depicted in economics textbooks.

Indeed, this has been the motivation for the
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behavioral economics revolution, the subject of a
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recent Nobel Prize. People are not just economic
creatures,
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faith-based worldview—spiritual creatures. And
what this implies is that it is important to human
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development to address not only external
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constraints, but internal constraints as well.
Newly-Revised
Spiritual First You Welcomed
Understanding Poverty Traps Aid Certificate Me: Loving
Course Refugees and
The table below puts poverty traps into
Immigrants
dimensions. The columns distinguish poverty Because God
traps by whether they are individual or collective First Loved Us
—whether the actions of others in the community
have a strong influence on the actions of the VIEW MORE
individual. For example, consider a Category II
trap related to schooling: studies have found that
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Classification of Development Traps

Trap: Individual Collective

Constraint:

External I. II.

Savings, Credit, Schooling,

Nutrition Investment,
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Internal IV.

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The rows in the table distinguish poverty traps between whether they involve external or
internal constraints. In a classic Category I trap, micro-businesses are unable to grow
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because all of their profit is used to meet a family’s basic subsistence needs. Access to
credit
PRINT could alleviate the external working capital constraint, but because the household has
few assets to use as collateral, it is constrained from financing enterprise growth through
credit as well as savings.

But there are many contexts today across the developing world in which opportunities like
microcredit, or even enterprise grants, are available. However, many households still remain
in poverty. Often the poor are not only encumbered by external constraints, but by internal
constraints as well. These include feelings of hopelessness, low aspirations, or a lack of
agency (feeling that they have little control over their situation). In such circumstances,
removing the external constraints may have little effect: the internal constraints continue to
bind.

In Category III traps, the internal constraint is individualized, as for example may be true
with many homeless people in high-income countries. But in Category IV traps, constraint
becomes collectivized across an entire community. This occurs when a general feeling of
hopelessness emerges in an area, continually communicating that “nothing good ever
happens here.” It may also manifest in negative stereotypes or social limits placed across
caste, class, race, or gender that operate against the dreams, aspirations, and general
flourishing of particular groups in the community.

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Two Kinds of Hope

Different spiritual worldviews, even within Christianity itself, can impact economic
development and human flourishing. Biblical Christianity balances teaching that affirms the
sovereign will of God with human responsibility, accountability, and agency. In many places
in the developing world, the former is emphasized to such an extent relative to the latter
that it can produce a sense of fatalism. In my work in Latin America, I have often heard the
common expression “si Dios quiere,” meaning “if God wills it” (it will happen). But because
this phrase has been employed as a substitute for personal responsibility, many evangelicals
have turned the expression to “sí, Dios quiere,” meaning “yes, God wills it” (and you should
do it), emphasizing our human agency to follow God’s revealed will through taking
responsible actions that foster positive outcomes.

These Spanish sayings reflect two kinds of hope, one a “wishful hope” in which we hope—
and possibly pray—for something to come to pass that is outside of our scope of influence.
Wishful hope is often a very good thing, especially if it is nested in a kind of over-arching
hope that is able to see the good in all things. This kind of hope gives us the strength to
persevere during circumstances that are out of our control. Christians are called throughout

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Scripture to place our ultimate hope

Why Hope in the love
Is Essential of God. The Extreme
to Transforming second type of hope,
Poverty
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“aspirational hope,” emphasizes human agency. While the wishful hope of a peasant farmer
might say, “I hope that it rains tomorrow,” aspirational hope says ,“I hope to fix my irrigation
well tomorrow.” Both kinds of hope—“hope that” and “hope to”—are important, the latter
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providing motivation and the former providing resilience.
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Creating Hope that Transforms

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It’s important for Christians working among the poor to understand the importance of
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internal constraints and to teach and model a version of hope that is both developmentally
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and Biblically balanced. In terms of implications for how we engage global and domestic
poverty, I want to emphasize three points:

First, as we seek to relieve external constraints, we need to consider when and where
internal constraints may linger even when external ones have been released. A veritable
mountain of new research has shown that providing added interventions that target internal
constraints to flourishing. Interventions such as life coaches, counselors, cognitive
behavioral therapy, Christian kindergarten for low-income children, the spiritual nurturing of
children and teenagers, and adult Christian discipleship programming can strongly
complement other aspects of programming or programs themselves that are focused on
external constraints like education, enterprise development, or even cash transfers.

Second, most of the research I have both read and carried out with my research partners in
this area suggests that interventions emphasizing hope are most effective on those who
have tangible opportunities, but who initially rank low on the hope scale. For example, in
our hope intervention carried out among microfinance borrowers in Oaxaca, Mexico, we
found positive impacts after one year from our inspirational film and curriculum-based
intervention on both hopefulness and business performance, but these impacts were
strongest among the women with the lowest baseline levels of hope. In general, these are

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the SECTIONS
kinds of people who are
Whymost
Hopelikely to benefit
Is Essential from mentoring,
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encouraging.

Lastly, practitioners must root programs that nurture aspirational hope in a tangible reality.
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Encouraging the poor to develop aspirations for goals that common sense suggests are out
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of reach is not helpful, and may be damaging. Aspirational hope interventions should focus
on
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release or minimize external constraints that present obstacles.

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These steps, when taken sequentially over time, guided by aspirational hope, and sustained
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by a broader overarching hope, provide the greatest scope for transformational economic
development. Any approach to lifting individuals out of extreme poverty must begin with
this deeper understanding of what holds people back—and what gives them true hope.

Bruce Wydick is Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a frequent writer for CT, and
author of Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics and the Road to Loving our Global Neighbor (Thomas
Nelson/HarperCollins).

The Better Samaritan is a part of CT's Blog Forum. Support the work of CT. Subscribe and get one year free.
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TAGS: Economics | Hope | Poverty

POSTED: January 15 , 2021

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