poverty: n. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.

Rich or poor, first world or third, everyone wants to better their lives.

In Parvathagiri - a village in Andhra Pradesh, India - many women seek to better their lives by sending their children away: educate them in far-away schools and send them to far-away cities for far-away jobs. Of the women my colleagues and I have worked with over the past year in Parvathagiri, some have been successful with that dream and some have not. Some children turned down opportunities to leave because their families couldn’t afford the loss of labor, others because their parents decided that a local marriage was a better option, and others still who were just afraid of leaving what they knew. In one case a daughter refused to go to an elite boarding school in distant Chennai because she didn’t want to leave her best friend. “Maybe you can take my daughter with you when you go to America,” requested one mother. When we replied that America was far away and that perhaps she would miss her daughter, she answered quickly, “No, I wouldn’t miss her”. However the subsequent look that mother and daughter exchanged said that the answer wasn’t so clear.

In Born into Brothels, an Oscar winning documentary about American photographer Zana Briski’s work with the children of Calcutta’s commercial sex workers, we are pulled along by the film’s central question, “Can a dedicated and resourceful outsider help eight children escape Calcutta’s Red Light district?” That question holds the plot together and moves the film along: scenes of Briski teaching the children how to photograph their world are interspersed with scenes of Briski trying to get them out of it. Yet like the children in Parvathagiri, Briski’s protégés are held in place by community bonds that aren’t easy to untangle and her extraordinary efforts to enroll the children in boarding schools eventually fly in the face of family or personal choices to stay in the brothels. I found her failure so poignant that it overshadowed the most compelling element of the film: she had taught the children a new way to view both the beauty and the ugliness that make up their lives and their community.

I remember a particular conversation with my colleagues in Parvathagiri, discussing the idea that there are really two ways to better your life: you can try to go to better places – e.g. the women sending their children away - or you can try to better the place you are already in. We hypothesized that the former might better individual lives but the latter bettered the whole community and, more interestingly, the ones improving the community were often the people who couldn’t leave the community. So why all this emphasis on the ones who could get out? “Finding a better place seems easier” my colleague Padma finally summarized, “and lifting yourself up seems a lot easier than lifting your whole community up.”

That point is true even for resourceful outsiders like us or Briski because lifting up a community is hard, often imperceptible work. Instead we might focus on helping a few worthy prospects, finding the communities best and brightest (or at least the most committed) and then helping them to improve their current lives. However even when we do that well, what happens if the culture they are embedded in hasn’t changed? One of the youths we worked with in Kenya was attacked and robbed last summer in his own home. “We know you have money,” demanded his attackers, “because we know who you work with!” Perhaps his assailants didn’t understand that the youths’ new business would be good for everybody, cleaning up the community and making it a better place to live. Probably it didn’t matter, they just viewed him as a person who now had money..

Like all the above stories, the lives of the people we have met or experienced in villages and slums are often a mixture of good parts and bad parts, with the good and bad so intertwined they seem impossible to pull apart. In Kenya, the very community in which our youth partner was attacked is the same community that values him for what he is doing. In Calcutta, Briski’s film draw us in because the children’s lives and what they photograph appear as a tangle of dreams and nightmares, their beauty even more compelling because of their context. In Parvathagiri, children who could leave for better opportunities stay behind because of good things in their community or sometimes they stay for things we outsiders would consider bad. All of them live in poverty as we define it, a scarcity of material income and opportunities, but does living in poverty mean their lives are a 100% bad?

For me the word “poverty” has always been a very negative noun, and being so negative I believed we needed equally negative verbs to act on it: we need to help people escape poverty, we need to eradicate poverty, or we need to make poverty history. Yet both our own work with the Base of the Pyramid Protocol1 and the film Born into Brothels raise very difficult issues for me about our choice of words - and ultimately our choice of actions - in engaging poverty. Is “How can we help someone escape poverty?” the right question if it means asking that person to leave a place she doesn’t want to leave? Is “eradicating poverty” a simple and benign action if poverty is interwoven into the whole world someone knows and – at least in part - loves? And what about all those others who are left behind when we help the community’s best and brightest “escape”? Are we just promoting a village-level brain drain? How can we reduce all this bad without wiping out all the good?

The answer, I believe, is to start engaging poverty differently: first accepting that poverty is more than a lack of material income and opportunities - that it is also a web of relationships, power structures, and traditions - and then seeking to change poverty as if it were a complex and flawed culture rather than seeking to destroy it as an unqualified evil. We need to change the language, the very verbs and actions, we use to talk about poverty. Instead of escaping poverty can we embrace it? Instead of eradicating poverty can we evolve it? And instead of making poverty history, can we make poverty our partner? Even just writing that sentence feels wrong at first: the phrase “partnering with poverty” brings to mind images of sweatshops and exploitation, the rich taking advantage of the weaknesses of the poor. As long as poverty is a negative word, partnering with it can only be viewed as an exploitative act. “But poverty can be a tremendous resource,” my colleague Ravi Chandra reminded me one day, meaning that poverty is more than just lacking something, it is also about having something: a strong drive to improve deep social connections, local knowledge, skills and more. We have learned that the difference between the sweatshop vision and Ravi’s vision is created not in just choosing to partner with poverty, but in ensuring that you begin and continue to act as a good partner.

In one of our daylong entrepreneurship workshops in Parvathagiri we led an exercise with community members to collectively define what made a good partnership between a community and a multinational company (MNC). The necessity of the exercise had become apparent after hearing the extremes in which some community members had envisioned a potential partnership: e.g. either the MNC would take everything from them or the MNC would give everything to them. Through the day’s discussion six broad aspects of successful partnerships eventually arose: unity & commitment, trust, communication & transparency, mutual respect, equality & fairness, and interdependence. Of those six partnership aspects, the one that seemed most absent from the community’s experience with outsiders was “interdependence”: that an outside business or organization would rely on the community as much as the community would rely on them. “What could they possibly need from us?” is the most common sentiment we hear from the communities we work with.

Yet embracing the concept of interdependence is critical in changing how we engage poverty and how we build innovative and long-lasting businesses in the BoP; without it how can we ensure that our solutions are relevant and renewable for all stakeholders, that there is a common passion and will driving the vision? In our work in the BoP, interdependence has become a critical standard for evaluation: sustainable ventures must rely on the strengths of the communities and the strengths of the MNC, while also looking at what both partners lack and what both partners need. After all, being a good partner involves more than just telling people what they need to do, more than treating them as a cheap source of labor or as new customers for your products, and more than just promoting them as new producers of things you might buy.

Partnering means stepping into people’s lives and helping them step into yours – it’s about co-creation, co-benefit, co-dependency. And ultimately it’s about bringing real empathy back into business and development – a challenge since solutions and services now span the globe. Doing all that takes time, patience and practice, a difficult lesson we first learned living and working in the slums of Kenya:

A novice dancer needs to mouth steps as he goes, “step, step, rock step, turn” and is easily frustrated by a partner who refuses to move as she is supposed to, losing patience when she wants to create her own steps, her own path. Yet the best dancers I know understand that you need to begin up close, body to body, skin to skin, tying your motion to her motion, feeling the rhythm of the world around you, until… flip, you shift, you turn, you twirl, your energy and her energy flow together to create something unique, something that is both of you yet not either one of you.2

I find it easy to imagine ballroom dancing when I’m working with communities and companies in the BoP. That’s because like our work, dancing involves getting up close and personal, sometimes with people we don’t know all that well and often with people who move very differently than we do. With the BoP Protocol we create partnerships between companies and communities - building relationships between two worlds previously unconnected - and we focus on the positive aspects of each partner and what new ventures we could do by working together. We teach these “dancers” to be good partners without the preconception of who knows the best dance - everybody is an expert and no one is, everybody has good qualities, everybody has not-so-good qualities. And yes, like learning to dance with someone new, building partnerships isn’t easy and it isn’t quick. No, more frequently we fall down and step on each other’s toes, but eventually we teach each other new ways to move. And although we can read about it, talk about it, and practice it in a mirror, the only real way to learn or teach dancing is to take a partner’s hand and get out on the dance floor. We learn to dance by dancing and - as my colleagues and I have learned now working in both Kenya and India, in villages and in slums - every place, every partner will be different.

And every partner has the potential to dance beautifully.

Patrick Donohue is a Senior Consultant for Enterprise for a Sustainable World and a Field Director of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol. Patrick’s work in the BoP has taken him deep into low-income communities in Kenya, India and Brazil, and he is the founder of BRINQ, an initiative to promote innovation in poorer communities in Latin America. A business strategist, entrepreneur, technologist, professional houseguest and writer, Patrick lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“Kibera Nights”, August 2005, a story about my experiences living in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Africa.

1 The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol is a process of collective entrepreneurship that enables MNCs to forge lasting partnerships with income-poor communities in order to co-innovate, co-develop, and co-benefit from new businesses in the communities. We are currently guiding BoP Protocol projects in Kenya and in India.

See BOP Protocol for more information.

2 “Kibera Nights”, August 2005, a story about my experiences living in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Africa.