"How do we work together on the wicked problem of extreme poverty?" by Kevin Jones

It’s the halfway mark in the 15 year drive toward the Millennium Development Goals and it doesn’t look likely that sub Saharan Africa will meet any of the eight goals, from cutting poverty by half to empowering women, by 2015.

The UN progress report that offered that gloomy prognosis has been criticized, of course. A completely opposite view grabbed the cover of a recent Business Week magazine, under the headline: Can Greed Save Africa? The subhead declared : Fearless investing is succeeding where aid often hasn't.

Look at Africa, and the picture changes depending on your point of view, how you define your terms, what your goals are, who you listen to and which groups never make the cut to be included in your view. Those are characteristics typical of wicked problems, which wikipedia defines as “problems with incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements; where solutions are often difficult to recognize because of complex interdependencies."

As I look at my own involvement in working on the MDG’s, I began with my own ambitious but naïve malaria Anglican malaria project in Mozambique and Swaziland, encountering corruption in the church and the government. Now I’m helping social entrepreneurs like my friend Jay Kimmelman who is creating a for-profit franchise model of independent private schools in Kenya affordable for people who make $2 per day. I find greater comfort with initiatives where the accountability of the market system can be brought to bear on the problem and funding can be sustainable without endless fund drives.

Yet when I look back on my work on the EGR board, to trying to understand Sabina Alkire’s academic research at Oxford, to being associated with our denomination’s development arm, ERD, to creating a site where churches can tell their own stories of involvement in working on the MDG’s (supported by both the Diocese of California and EGR) for the most part I see well meaning groups who don’t speak the same language, who don’t understand what each other are doing or how they are all working on different aspects of the same problem.

That, too, is true of wicked problems, where “solutions require large groups of individuals to change their mindsets and behaviors.” What I really want is some kind of translation facility, a Rosetta Stone where people of good will can learn to cooperate at a higher level.

One problem is that church people, like most individual donors, prefer stories of individual impact, what happened in a particular village or parish to a particular person.

Development professionals, meanwhile are system thinkers, but often only see grassroots involvement as amateurs more likely to get in the way than be helpful. Both are doing good things, but the blinders of their particular definitions prevent them from seeing the good created by other group with another approach. Academics involved in pure research look down on entrepreneurs as people doing only short term helping initiatives.

How to get over ourselves and our own particular blinders, our limitations on the extent of the problem or the value of another group’s approach? I confess, this is a problem I think a lot about and am only stumbling toward.

In my own world of social enterprise we are putting on event in the fall that will bring people with three siloed perspectives together (base of the pyramid, digital inclusion and fair trade/social enterprise together, along with the new investors and foundations that are funding this work. How to do it in the church is not something I understand, but something similar should be done, I think. Some kind of convening aimed at translation for all the groups working on these areas.

Kevin Jones is a serial entrepreneur and clergy spouse. Kevin was the editor of the Every Voice daily newspaper at the 2003 General Convention of the Episcopal Church and has worked on global poverty issues for several years, through on the ground projects in sub-Saharan Africa (such as the Anglican Malaria Project), technology infrastructure to make it simpler for people to care about the people effected by the Millennium Development Goals, and events. He is also active in investing for good.