Serving the poor has been, from the very beginning, a central part of God's intention for his people. In contrast to the way many of us are inclined to think, perhaps because we live in nations where extreme poverty is unknown, helping the poor is a non-negotiable aspect of all Christian ministry, rather than the preserve of a handful of zealots who sit on the periphery of church (or, as the case may be, parachurch) life.
One of the challenges of serving the poor, however, is the difficulty of knowing how best to go about it. It’s one thing to “feed the hungry” if you have a person who has no access to meals in front of you, asking for bread. It’s quite another to know what to do when the nation you live in has welfare, shelters, hostels and meals available, and almost all of the world’s extremely poor live thousands of miles away, in nations often blighted by structural or governmental failures which make effective aid much more difficult (and sometimes, as exuberant righties never tire of telling us, counterproductive). The result, in my experience, is that many of us are bamboozled by the complexities of the situation, and unwittingly but noticeably deprioritise the poor as a result.
All of which makes Bruce Wydick’s award-winning 2012 article for Christianity Today an extremely helpful and important read. A professor of economics and a Christian, Wydick explains why so many intuitively obvious ways of assessing the effectiveness of poverty relief do not actually work: comparative studies are flawed, controlling samples is extremely difficult, self-assessment is biased, public awareness often reflects photogenia or marketability rather than usefulness, and so on. (One factor Wydick doesn’t mention, but which I suspect is rife, is the preference for proximity: the idea that people we know are more likely to do aid well than people we don’t. This is similarly problematic). But - and this is where the article becomes incredibly helpful - he both presents an alternative way of assessing the effectiveness of different forms of poverty relief, based on discussions with a wide range of development economists, and then applies it to ten popular schemes that most of us have heard of, giving each of them a score out of ten. Interestingly, he says that he found a substantial consensus amongst those he surveyed: the effective methods were always given high scores, and the ineffective ones were always given low scores. In ascending order of usefulness, here’s how the ten projects fared.
10. Providing children with laptops (1.8 out of 10). Giving computers to children sounds great, but is extremely expensive (for the price of one laptop, you could get clean water to twenty people or de-worm a school of 400 kids for a year). It also makes less difference to learning outcomes than you might think.
9. Drinking Fairtrade coffee (1.9 out of 10). This hugely well-known programme is probably also hugely overrated. The most recent rigorous academic study finds zero average impact on coffee grower incomes over 13 years of participation in a fair-trade coffee network. Wydick’s explanation of why this is true is fascinating in itself.
8. Donating farm animals (3.8 out of 10). Photogenic and tangible, but fairly costly, the donation of farm animals also suffers from the fact that the people who most need animals are less able to care for them, whereas those who already own animals (and probably look after them best) are unlikely to need more.
7. Funding reparative surgery (3.9 out of 10). The repair of cleft palates, cataracts and other visible impairments is undeniably high impact, although compared to many other types of poverty relief, it is relatively expensive.
6. Giving microfinance loans (4.2 out of 10). An extremely popular and well-known approach, but “not the magic bullet many once believed it to be.”
5. Providing wood-burning stoves (6.0 out of 10). This one is counterintuitive, but the supply of wood-burning stoves, which burn wood much more efficiently than open fires, both limits deforestation and significantly reduces indoor air pollution, which kills 1.6 million people per year.
4. Sponsoring a child (6.9 out of 10). Funding a child’s education, through school fees, uniforms and materials, has a substantial impact on both the child and the community. A recent quantitative study demonstrates this with reference to Compassion International, and suggests that the success of the approach has a lot to do with providing hope.
3. Providing mosquito nets (7.3 out of 10). Bed nets cost between $5 and $10, and reduce instances of malaria - which kills someone every forty-five seconds - by 50%.
2. De-worming children (7.8 out of 10). Intestinal worms affect one in four people, causing listlessness and learning problems, and can be prevented by 50c per year per child. Not sexy, but very effective.
1. Getting clean water to rural villages (8.3 out of 10). It costs an average of $10 per person per year to fund clean water to a village, and it reduces childhood mortality by between 35 and 50%. This makes it both a wonderfully effective and a wonderfully cost-effective way of tackling poverty.
So there you go. Obviously, the lower scores above do not indicate that the programmes don’t do any good, merely that (in the views of many development economists) they don’t do as much good, relatively, as other methods. But considering how central the mandate to care for the poor is to New Testament Christianity, and considering how committed the first generation of Christian leaders were to relieving poverty when they encountered it, it is well worth knowing which approaches to poverty make the most difference. Water pipes and worm medicine might not be quite what we want to hear, but it does sound like they work.
