A former Member of the UK Parliament and UK Secretary of State for International Development, Rory Stewart has made a name for himself in British politics — and in many other corners of the globe.
Following his many roles in public service — and his notable walk across Afghanistan in 2002 — he now presents one of the UK’s leading podcasts “The Rest is Politics,” and is a professor at Yale University, where he teaches in the School of Global Affairs.
With a long list of published works, and his hand in founding and leading NGOs like the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, and GiveDirectly, he uses his platform to speak about the work to empower people living in extreme poverty across the planet.
Stewart, who is known for his anti-Boris Johnson stance in the UK, changed his affiliation with the country’s conservative party to ‘Independent’ in 2019.
Using his history of bridging divides and seeking solutions, he presented what he believes to be the solution to ending global poverty at TED 2024 in Vancouver, BC.
The issues with our current approach to eradicating poverty
Outside organizations use their funds poorly.
Extreme poverty is a problem that plagues many parts of the world. The World Bank and UN define the International Poverty Line as earning less than $2.15 per day — a threshold approximately 712 million people around the globe exist under.
While the percentage of those living in extreme poverty has declined in recent years, Stewart said, the absolute number of people still facing this problem is on the rise.
“We feel, often, that all we can do is hope that some new magical, technological solution will emerge, or that extreme poverty around the world is somehow disappearing by itself, or that somehow, if we just give money to the experts, to the agencies, to the governments, they’re going to be able to solve extreme poverty,” Stewart said in his TED Talk.
“I went through this. I was, in a sense, one of those experts.”
He went on to detail his nearly three decades in international development, where he saw billions of dollars allocated for projects that made virtually no improvements to the lives of people living in poverty.
“If you talk to any locals in developing countries who’ve seen their projects, their basic reaction is one of disappointment, if not horror,” Stewart said.
One example he shared was a project designed to improve sanitation and resources for young menstruating women in East Africa.
He said he had received a hundred-page document full of “all the smart stuff that we thought we were doing,” featuring “needs assessments, community consultations, engineering diagrams, logical frameworks, theories of change.”
But when he actually visited the project, he saw a devastating result: Two holes in the ground, surrounded by brick walls, and five plastic buckets. The project had cost $40,000 — and it had an estimated $2,000 maximum impact.
When he asked the organization why they didn’t just give the community money to create their own facilities, they explained they were worried that locals would “steal” the money.
“My response was: ‘We stole the money,’” Stewart said.
The mental model for ending poverty is patronizing.
Stewart went on to say that much of the reasoning behind these irresponsible financial decisions among development groups comes from a mindset problem.
He referred to the classic quote: “Give someone a fish, they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, they eat for a lifetime.”
The quote, he said, posits that ending poverty requires organizations to “teach” low-income communities some miraculous skill that will save them from poverty.
“This phrase, although incredibly appealing, is actually leading to very ineffective, very patronizing programming,” Stewart said, “Programming that often achieves exactly the opposite of what it claims to do.”
It wasn’t until he encountered a project at the Rwanda-Burundi border that Stewart completely shifted his own mindset.
Rory Stewart’s solution to ending extreme poverty
Give people lump sums of cash.
In Rwanda, Stewart said he saw an NGO handing out $900 in a lump sum of cash to people in the community — no strings attached.
“The results were absolutely staggering,” he said.
Within a few weeks, the village had completely transformed, with improved electricity, new roofing on their homes, and increases in health insurance. Stewart said 100% of people got latrines, and there were increases in the number of children in school.
“The whole place just felt better, happier. I’d never seen anything like it, honestly, in my entire life in international development.”
A decade later, random control studies found that this improvement was not a fluke.
“In hundreds of studies in many countries in the world… consistently, unconditional cash was leading to a real reduction in things like child mortality and depression, and fantastic increases consistently in education, in health, in businesses, in savings, in income, in investment,” Stewart explained.
“More than that, it was actually leading to a multiplier effect. For every dollar delivered into a community, there was $2.50 of benefit for the surrounding villages. It was a fiscal stimulus.”
While universal income programs are spreading near and far, this one-time lump-sum payment model has proven to be effective in highly impoverished communities, prompting people to use it to make meaningful investments that are unique to their needs.
Stewart rattled off examples of how this money might be used: “Jean needs to open a grocery shop. Seraphine wants to get her children into school. Esperance wants to access health care. Téléphore wants to get a cow so that he can have milk and yogurt to sell. Marie may want to set up a tailoring business. Demassine may want to get a motorbike taxi.”
And in all of these instances, people don’t need to learn how to start a business or feed their children; they need capital.
Embrace new technologies for more efficient donations.
Stewart was clear that part of the appeal of lump-sum investments in these communities is because it is efficient. Cutting out some red tape from the equation gets people what they need in their hands more quickly.
This has also been aided by technological advancements.
“We are now at a moment where I believe unconditional cash transfers could unlock the secret of addressing extreme poverty worldwide,” Stewart said.
People in extreme poverty can now access cheap cell phones, on which they can get wire transfers of funds delivered to them in minutes. AI is also an asset here, Stewart said, as it can help organizations target and collect more meaningful data about those they are serving — even in anticipation of a crisis.
“In the past, cash assistance arrived after the flood had hit. Now, AI is allowing us to predict far better than before when the extreme weather event would occur,” Stewart explained.
This would “allow us to get the cash to people to move their livestock, move their families before the flood arrives.”
Allow communities to participate in their own development.
Of course, cash is not the answer to everything. But Stewart said these efforts make it possible for people to participate in their own community’s development.
From sharing their insights about improved infrastructure to participating in democracy, having access to much-needed funds gives people a reason to want to build and strengthen their homes.
“We need to build roads, need to build bridges, need to build dams, and need to improve the quality of education in schools. These are all things that need to happen,” he said.
“But what cash does for the extreme poor is it allows the extreme poor to participate in that development story.”
In other words, it allows folks to have a reason to use a road to get to work or to find customers who can buy from their stores.
Encourage philanthropists to scale this approach.
From the TED stage, Stewart ended with a call to action: Everyone can send funds directly to someone living in extreme poverty.
And for the wealthier audience members, he encouraged them to donate millions of dollars to “demonstrate that this can be done at a national scale.”
While the cash initiatives he’s seen have led to major improvements in villages and communities, what needs to happen next is proving that this solution can be used to lift an entire country out of poverty.
“We spend almost twice as much annually on international development as it would take to lift everybody in the world out of extreme poverty [with cash],” Stewart said.
“There is a moral dimension here because it respects people’s choice. At an age that’s worried about patronizing and colonial aid, [this approach] doesn’t just consult them or listen to them. It puts them in charge. It literally lets them make the choice. It respects their equality and it respects their dignity.”
Persuade governments to change their global development efforts.
By donating, philanthropists can make a difference to help governments and foreign agencies more effectively work to end poverty.
If donation efforts are funneled into a country facing extreme poverty, Stewart said, it gives governments a reason to shift their efforts to a new model — one where cash infusions can clearly and effectively reach the people who need it most.
“If you could demonstrate that, you could then come back to someone like me, working in government as a Secretary of State for International Development, and say, ‘for your $20 billion a year budget, you could be doing 20 of these countries a year,’” Stewart explained.
“It’s about scale, and it’s about the way in which private money taking risk can show the path for governments.”
TED Talks are presented at TED’s annual week-long conference in Vancouver for an audience of approximately 2000 attendees. The Talks are later published on the TED website, YouTube, and TED podcasts — with some Talks being published within days or weeks and others being published months later. It is not clear when Rory Stewart’s Talk will become available to the public.
