Teach a Man to Fish

In 2007 we visited Heifer International's demonstration
farm (now closed) near Modesto.

Heifer International is one of our favorite charities. For the expenditure of a few hundred dollars a donor can buy a farm animal such as a goat or a water buffalo for a family in the Third World. Per Heifer's website:

our approach is more than just giving them a handout....Our animals provide partners with both food and reliable income, as agricultural products such as milk, eggs and honey can be traded or sold at market.

The core of our model is Passing on the Gift. This means families share the training they receive, and pass on the first female offspring of their livestock to another family. This extends the impact of the original gift, allowing a once impoverished family to become donors and full participants in improving their communities.

One of the thorniest problems in philanthropy is finding "investments" that lift people out of poverty permanently without making them dependent on continued funding. It turns out that a modification to Heifer's approach has been supported by MIT researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who found [bold added]

an anti-poverty strategy that works consistently, based on a seven-year, six-country study of more than 10,000 poor households. The secret, the economists argue, is to hand out assets, followed by several months of cash transfers, followed by as much as two years of training and encouragement. That formula seems to have made a lasting difference to the lives of the very poorest in countries as different as Ghana, Pakistan and Peru.

The short-term cash transfers help the recipients resist the temptation to consume the farm animals they have been given.

Perhaps most important, when the researchers went back and surveyed households a year after the programme had ended, they found that people were still working, earning and eating more.

The good can be made better.